* The suit was crafted by the famous dynasty of armourers, the Helmschmieds of Augsburg. Maximilian eccentrically gave Henry VIII of England a helmet with a face, modelled on himself, with his long nose and spectacles, and topped off with a pair of ram’s horns. Yet armour was already an obsolete fashion: in battle, bullets could penetrate it.
* The monarchs in Europe used this story as a warning against excessive sex. In this macho environment, ejaculatory bombast was part of royal promotion: when Louis XII married Mary Tudor, eighteen-year-old sister of Henry VIII, he ‘boasted of having ejaculated five times in their first encounter’, at which a contemporary noted, ‘One must assume he has just dug five graves with his hoe.’ He did die after three months. Most of these sex deaths were actually of smallpox.
* There were now many enslaved Africans serving in the Portuguese and Spanish courts: each of Isabella’s children had Africans in their entourages. Juana’s sister Catherine arrived in London with John Blancke, who served Henry VIII as a trumpeter at the Tudor court.
* One of Julius’ first decisions was to allow the English prince, Henry, to marry his brother’s widow, Catherine of Aragon. The eighteen-year-old Catherine, princess of Wales, had been in limbo since the death of Prince Arthur in 1502. Ferdinand did not want to pay any more dowry; Henry VII, now in his late forties, did not want to repay it, so he decided to marry her himself, but finally both sides agreed another solution. This had its own problems. The Church banned marriage of sister-in-law and brother-in-law as part of its anti-incest, anti-kinship policy. Catherine could marry Henry only if the marriage with Arthur was unconsummated. Once this was agreed, the marriage could go ahead. In 1509, when Henry VII died, Henry VIII married her.
* Aretino was a cobbler’s son whose scathing verses made him a ‘scourge of princes’. During the reign of the next Medici pope Clement, Aretino intervened to rescue his friend Marcantonio Raimondi, who had produced the first printed book of erotica, engravings based on drawings by Giulio Romano entitled
* Manuel’s first wife, Isabella, princess of Asturias, had formerly been married to the Portuguese heir who was killed in a riding accident. She went home to her parents until Manuel requested her hand, her second Portuguese marriage. For a while she was heir to the Castilian throne. Manuel’s second wife Maria had ten children, inevitably dying in childbirth, after which he married Leonor, the eldest child of Juana and Philip and favourite sister of Charles V, who afterwards married François I of France. If this sounds tangled, it is: all three were highly consanguineous.
* European histories traditionally now claim that Portuguese imperialists dominated the Indian–Malay spice trade. Though they certainly heralded European power in the east, that is to exaggerate their power and neglect the local powers. Portuguese numbers were small, their strongholds few, the trade complex, and southern India was dominated by the all-conquering warrior king Krishnadevaraya, maharaja-dhiraja of the Hindu empire Vijayanagara, who himself defeated many of the Islamic sultanates; eastern India was ruled by the Gajapati kingdom; and the Ottomans were about to replace the Egyptians as masters of Arabia and Yemen. Malacca, which had only been Muslim for thirty years, had been a Chinese vassal ever since Zheng’s treasure fleets: the Ming emperor was furious.
ACT ELEVEN
425 MILLION
Tamerlanians and Mexica, Ottomans and Safavis
BABUR TAKES DELHI
