* When Fugger’s own interests were at stake, he was not shy in reminding Charles V: ‘It’s known that your imperial majesty could not have claimed the Roman crown without my help.’
* Columbus’ other son Fernando followed the opposite path: he retired to a Seville mansion, wrote his father’s biography and collected 15,000 manuscripts and printed books. When Diego Columbus died in 1526, his son Luis Columbus de Toledo inherited the titles admiral of the Indies, duke of Veragua and marquess of Jamaica. Jamaica, its Taínos almost extinct, now populated by African slaves, remained a vast personal estate – the last one – of the Columbus family, until 1655, when it was captured by the English. Today’s duke of Veragua is named Cristóbal Colón.
* The Portuguese had seized, raped or married African women, creating a new caste of mixed-raced Luso-Africans, who, until 1976, essentially ran their empire as enforcers and slave traders. African kings and traders brought them ivory, ebony and slaves, who were then marched back to the coast, often cruelly supervised by higher-status enslaved guards.
* Da Gama died in India. Like the Columbuses, the da Gamas became a colonial dynasty: his three sons governed Gold Coast in Africa, Malacca and the State of India in Asia while in 1540, one of them, Estauvo, fought Ottoman fleets and aided the Christian emperor of Ethiopia, raiding up the Red Sea to Sinai, at the height of Portuguese empire. Vasco’s grandson Joao da Gama was captain of Macau and then, in 1588, sailed across the entire Pacific exploring the north American coast before arriving at Acapulco to be arrested by the Spanish.
* In the Philippines they were intrigued by the tattoo-covered indigenous men who pierced their penises with studs which, they explained, initially discomfited their female partners but ultimately delivered a remarkable intensity of ‘lustful pleasure’.
* This was said to resemble the island kingdom of Calafia, queen of the black Amazons of California in the popular chivalrous novel
* Among them was Cabeza de Vaca, who wrote a chronicle of his adventures, and Mustafa, known as Estevanico, an enslaved African Muslim with a gift for languages – ‘the negro who talked to them’, in Vaca’s words. Mustafa, African explorer of the American west, was later killed in New Mexico acting as a guide for a return expedition.
* Pregnant, Isabel was quickly married to another Spaniard (she married six times in all), and then gave birth to a daughter, Leonor Cortés Montezuma. Altogether she had seven children by her two Spanish husbands and Cortés. Part pawn, part symbol, she became strong-minded, liberating her slaves during her lifetime and in her will: ‘I want, and I order, that all my slaves, Indian men and women, born from this land, shall be free of all servitude and captivity, and as free people they shall do as they will; so if they are [slaves] I will and command for them to be free.’ One son, Juan de Montezuma Cano, married the Castilian aristocrat Elvira de Toledo, building the Toledo-Montezuma Palace, still standing in Cáceres with its murals of Mexica Speakers and Spanish grandees; another son was progenitor of the counts of Miravalle, while the descendants of her brother Pedro (de) Montezuma Tlacahuepan, who accompanied Cortés back to Spain, became dukes of Montezuma.
Incas, Pizarros, Habsburgs and Medici
The emperor faced challenges on all fronts. In the east, Suleiman advanced; in the west, François of France, the personification of macho, lascivious yet cultured Renaissance monarch, known as
