The World полностью

Philip was already at war with France for control of Burgundy and Italy, a conflict that had lasted almost a century. He ordered an advance from the Netherlands into France. On 10 August – St Lawrence’s Day – 1557, at Saint-Quentin, his tercios defeated the French, a victory he celebrated by building the colossal palace-monastery-mausoleum of St Lawrence of Victory of El Escorial near Madrid that would reflect his grandiose messianic vision of sacred monarchy.

All victories were attributed to divine favour: ‘God did this.’ Philip collected a saintly reliquary of 12 bodies, 144 heads and 306 limbs, labelled by hand and regularly used to treat his family’s ailments. His mission in life was to fight the heresy of Protestantism while championing the Catholic counter-attack led by the papacy. He often told his ministers that being engaged in his service and in that of God ‘is the same thing’, a conviction that justified anything. All over Europe the clash between the two denominations intensified. Philip insisted, ‘Rather than suffer the least injury to religion and the service of God, I would lose all my states and a hundred lives if I had them for I don’t intend to rule over heretics.’ He attended many autos-da-fé. When one victim shouted at him, he answered, ‘I would carry the wood to burn my own son if he was as wicked as you.’ At a time when there was no division between secular and religious, Philip believed heresy and impurity by Protestants and crypto-Jewish Christians infiltrating God’s kingdom must be prosecuted, but there were no more executions than in most other European kingdoms. The hunt for crypto-Jews was linked to a certificate of racial purity – limpieza de sangre – that was usually easy to procure, and essential to hold any office, but it could be used against dubious conversos. Philip overlooked impurity when it suited him. He asserted royal power in the Americas, crushing the insubordinate Cortés family and encouraging young Spaniards to settle there.^*

A typical recruit was a young Basque, Simón Bolívar, who thrived in Caracas, developing plantations, copper mines and a port, importing enslaved Africans and then founding schools and seminaries. He also served as Philip’s procurator. Around 5,000 Spaniards now ruled 10,000 Africans and 350,000 Amerindians. Bolívar personified the white mantuanos elite who revelled in their racial separation while actually interbreeding with Amerindians and Africans, to create a new world of mixed-raced peoples.^*

In 1557, after Philip, king of England, visited Mary, now forty-one, she again thought herself pregnant, but tragically both her false pregnancies were probably early symptoms of the uterine cancer that killed her in November of the following year. She was succeeded by her Protestant half-sister, Elizabeth, daughter of the executed Boleyn.

Philip mourned Mary ‘as you might well understand’, and missed his English kingdom. He proposed marriage to Elizabeth. The intellectual, masterful and single-minded queen rejected him and restored Protestantism to her realm. Philip and Elizabeth both saw religion as essential to their mission. His crown was forged by holy war; she had to be more pragmatic to survive – she had ‘no desire to make windows into men’s souls’. She once provocatively said, ‘There’s only one faith; all else is a dispute over trifles,’ but both monarchs were willing to kill for those trifles. Elizabeth executed almost 200 Catholics in her small kingdom. Yet, tempered by her dangerous trajectory from princess to bastard to prisoner and sovereign, she was a master of political theatre, of opacity and trimming. But now she defied Philip so successfully that he decided on more drastic action.

As Philip took the helm, a young Rurikovich was imposing himself on Muscovy. They were opposites: one was a definition of control, the other of frenzy. Philip called himself El Prudente; Ivan became Grozny: the Terrible.

HOYDA! BLOODTHIRSTY WILD BEAST

On 2 October 1552, the twenty-two-year-old Ivan IV knelt in prayer as his army – traditional horse archers and his new streltsy musketeers and 150 cannon – stormed Kazan on the Volga, the capital of a khanate, and slaughtered its Muslim inhabitants, liberating thousands of Christian slaves. On his way back from Kazan, his beloved wife Anastasia gave birth to the first of three sons.

The Christian conqueror celebrated in Moscow, building the garish nine-domed St Basil’s in Red Square. In just a few years this energetic young autocrat had expanded his kingdom, modernized the army, promulgated a new legal code and guaranteed the dynasty. But a sickness and then a death would destabilize him, unleashing his peculiar mix of sacred charisma, keening energy and demented sadism.