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In 1530, Charles arrived in Bologna to receive his reward from Clement: a papal coronation, which proved to be the last. In return Clement asked for the Medici to be restored in Florence, where Michelangelo, despite his relationship with the family, backed the republic, serving as anti-Medici governor-general of fortifications. But his battlements were of no avail: Charles restored the Medici.

Clement, like Henry, had no legitimate heirs. Only two young bastards were left, but one of them was probably his own son by a black slave. The illegitimate Alessandro Medici had grown up in obscurity, his mother described as a ‘slave’, ‘Moorish’ and ‘half-Negro’. But now family necessity trumped racial prejudice. Alessandro enjoyed an astonishing reversal of fortune, first tutored and trained, then unveiled as duke of Florence and betrothed to Charles’s illegitimate daughter Margarita. Nicknamed Il Moro – the Black – Alessandro, the first and only European ruler of colour, proved adept at murderous Florentine politics, poisoning his cousin Cardinal Ippolito Medici and possibly having his own African mother murdered to avoid social embarrassment. Spending extravagantly on his superb clothes and exquisitely engraved pistols, the Black Duke was now an Italian magnifico. If Charles was impressed, Michelangelo was not: when he refused to design a fortress for Alessandro, the duke ordered his assassination. Fortunately, ‘someone spoke in my ear that I shouldn’t stay there any longer if I wanted to save my life’ and the artist escaped to Rome, where Clement^* forgave him.

Yet Clement was still playing Habsburgs against Valois, marrying the other Medici heiress, the fourteen-year-old Catherine, nicknamed Duchessina, to François’s second son Henri. While it seemed unlikely Henri would ever be king, Catherine would dominate France for forty years.

MICHELANGELO’S LAST JUDGMENT AND THE FALL OF THE BLACK DUKE

As Clement was dying, he commissioned Michelangelo to paint the back wall of the Sistine Chapel. Yet the death of Michelangelo’s generous patron led to the election of an even better one. Paul III, the former Alessandro Farnesse,^* urbane, astute and sometimes murderous, summoned Michelangelo, aged sixty, who insisted he was too tired and overstretched to accept more work. ‘I’ve nursed this ambition for thirty years and now I’m pope I won’t be dissatisfied. I’m determined to have you in my service,’ insisted Paul.

Michelangelo duly painted The Last Judgment, a fresco of the dead awakening at Judgement Day and the second coming of Christ. Then Paul commissioned him to design a piazza on the Capitoline Hill, the Campidoglio, where he placed Marcus Aurelius’ statue, then appointed him overseer of St Peter’s. Paul and Michelangelo became friends.

The artist now thrived in Rome, sending money to his feckless family to relaunch them as nobility while presiding over his brood of protégés and enjoying friendships high and low. He sent love letters and drawings to a young nobleman, Tommaso dei Cavalieri, but it was to his dear friend Princess Vittoria Colonna that he wrote most intimately about art: ‘For a reliable guide in my vocation, beauty was set before me as a birthright, a mirror and a lamp for art.’ He tempered his curmudgeonliness with laughter and wit, mocking his ageing bladder: ‘Urine! How well I know it – drippy duct, compelling me to awake too early, when dawn plays at peekaboo, then yonder – yuk!’ He was getting older, and at one point he fell off the scaffold in the Sistine.^*

In Florence, Alessandro Medici had only just married Charles V’s daughter, the fourteen-year-old Margarita of Austria, but his cut-throat swagger and enthusiastic seductions attracted bitter envy, particularly in his penniless cousin and companion Lorenzaccio. So often in politics the greatest peril lies within not without, and nothing surpasses the intimate loathings of family.

Lorenzaccio decided to kill the Black Duke. In 1536, he offered the duke every womanizer’s dream: the seduction of a wholesome wife. Luring him to the assignation, he burst in on the sleeping Alessandro with a hitman. As Lorenzaccio stabbed him in the stomach, Alessandro fought back, almost biting off the killer’s finger until the hitman slashed his throat.^*

Charles was the universal emperor of Christendom, his armour engraved ‘Charles the Divine’. But his enemy Suleiman regarded himself not just as sultan, khan and padishah but as the real Caesar. Disdaining Charles as mere ‘king of Spain’, he advanced on Vienna.

SULEIMAN’S FAVOURITES: ROXELANA AND IBRAHIM

‘The king of Spain,’ Suleiman told a French envoy, ‘has proclaimed he wants to act against the Turks and now I am advancing against him. If the man has balls and courage, let him come.’