Cortés was now super-rich, but denunciations by his enemies, led by Diego Columbus, flooded in to Charles V, though he gladly received the first 60,000 gold pesos from his ‘gold-bearing lands’. The emperor took control, chairing a Council of the Indies in the Alhambra Palace, Granada, and confiscating some of Cortés’s sultanic holdings. In 1528, Cortés, fulminating against ‘powerful rivals and enemies’ who have ‘obscured the eyes of Your Majesty’, sailed home to face the emperor.
Although Charles disliked the coarse conquistador who had so enriched his empire, he created him captain-general of the South Sea and marquess of the Valley of Oaxaca, granted him 23,000 vassals and pardoned his insubordination. Cortés celebrated by marrying a noblewoman with whom he had a legitimate son, Don Martín. Cortés returned to New Spain, living in splendour at his palace (the first Spanish building on the mainland that still stands at Cuernavaca).
As Charles took control of New Spain, he received Cortés’s cousin Francisco Pizarro, who asked the emperor’s support for an expedition to conquer another fabulous auric kingdom – Piru. As long-serving mayor of Panama City, Pizarro had been exploring down the Pacific coast, gathering intelligence. Charles agreed. When his men grumbled about the hardships, Pizarro shouted, ‘There lies Piru with its riches; here, Panama and its poverty. Choose, each man, what best becomes a brave Castilian. For my part, I go to the south.’
As ever Charles was desperate for cash, personally exhausted, mentally stressed and politically overextended – and he needed a companion if not a wife.
* The descendants of Tamerlane were entitled amir-mirza; the descendants of Genghis were entitled khan.
* Once in power, he promoted himself from mirza to padishah – emperor in Persian – styling his first wife Maham and his sister Khanzada as begum-padishahs or lady empresses. Babur and his successors called his dynasty the Gurkanis, after Tamerlane’s title gürkan meaning imperial son-in-law, or House of Timur. Their enemies denigrated them as Mongols. The British, attracted to the dynasty in which they saw parallels to their own empire, called them the Mughals.
* The Rajputs were Hindu princely dynasties descended from kshatriya warlords.
* Babur was buried in his beloved gardens in Kabul where his tomb still stands, originally inscribed: ‘If there’s paradise on earth, it is this, it is this!’
* The special executioners were the Tongueless or
* Safi al-Din’s fanatical followers – Twelver Shiites – believed that, after the first ten imams, the eleventh had been murdered by the Sunni caliph in 874 and his son the twelfth imam vanished, occulted or hidden, poised to re-emerge as the Mahdi at the day of judgement. Ismail went even further. ‘My name is Shah Ismail,’ the boy told his followers. ‘I am God’s mystery. I am the leader of all the ghazis [warriors]. My mother is Fatima, my father is Ali; I am the sacred master of the Twelve Imams … I am the living Khidr [heroic saint of Islamic theology] and Jesus, son of Mary. I am the Alexander of my contemporaries.’ Ismail’s blondness reflected his descent from the Komnenoi dynasty of Constantinople: in 1439, Emperor John IV of Trebizond married his daughter Theodora to Ismail’s other grandfather Uzun Hasa, khan of the Ak Koyunlu.
* Arab potentates rushed to pay court: Selim received Abu Numeiri, the young amir of Mecca, who offered the keys of Mecca and Medina on behalf of his father Barakat, the Hashemite sharif descended from Qatada. Selim reappointed them amirs of Mecca. Selim himself commandeered the titles Shadow of God, Messiah of the Last Age and Renewer of the Religion.
* Still in the Ottoman archives, the map’s eastern half including China is missing; the western half shows not just the Mediterranean but the discoveries of ‘Colon-bo’ – Colombus. America was labelled ‘Vilayet Antilia’: Antilia was the legendary island of the Atlantic;
