The World полностью

* The word Cossack derived from the Turkic kozak, meaning a freebooter. These ferocious frontiersmen thrived in the borderlands between Muscovy and the Mongol khanates and Poland–Lithuania, adopting by land the cavalry tactics of Mongol fighters, by sea the raiding tactics of Viking forefathers. Composed of runaway Ukrainian peasants, Muscovite deserters and Mongol renegades, their twenty or so communities developed an idiosyncratic Orthodox and meritocratic culture, each voysko (warband), translated into English as ‘host’, elected their own headmen – ataman or hetman. They were not yet cavalry but infantry who often used longboats, known as chaiki (seagulls) for their raids – even, in 1614, attacking Constantinople. The Hosts maintained independence, fighting sometimes for the tsars, at other times for the kings of Poland, their leaders trying to win nobility. Only in the eighteenth century did the Russian tsars transform them into cavalry units.

* The bones of the daughter and mother, tested in the 1960s, reveal arsenic levels of 12.9 for the mother, 8.1 for the child: lethal doses.

* Joseph won Selim’s support for Jews to return to Israel, a Jewish dream since AD 70. As Ottomans protected the holy cities including Jerusalem, Joseph restored the mystical town of Safed (Galilee) and when Pope Pius V expelled Jews from his states, Joseph settled them there.

* A lady-in-waiting who accompanied her to Madrid was one of the first signed female painters, Sofonisba Anguissola.

Valois and Saadis, Habsburgs and Rurikovichi

LA SERPENTE: A MEDICI QUEEN IN FRANCE

On 10 July 1559, celebrating their daughter’s wedding on the Place des Vosges, Catherine watched her husband Henri II, son of Le Grand Nez, seated on his horse Unhappy and wearing the colours of his long-time mistress Diane de Poitiers, snap his vizor shut and lower his lance. Catherine asked him not to continue but he shouted back, ‘It’s precisely for you that I fight.’ The two riders, wearing full armour, galloped towards each other.

Jousting was built into their marriage: the erotomane King François was said to have monitored their wedding night. ‘Both,’ he adjudicated, ‘showed valour in the joust.’ But the death of her uncle, Pope Clement, cancelled the dowry. Worthless to France, regarded as a scheming Italian from a family of traders, Catherine, ‘her mouth too large and eyes too prominent and colourless for beauty but a very distinguished woman with a shapely figure’, watched her husband fall in love with Diane de Poitiers, nineteen years older than her; Medici called her the Old Lady. Henri talked of repudiating Catherine when no pregnancy ensued, though Diane encouraged Henri to visit his wife. Catherine drank mule’s urine to guard against sterility, painted her ‘source of life’ with poultices of ground stags’ antlers and cow dung embellished with crushed periwinkle and mares’ milk – hardly the perfumes to encourage lovemaking.

Finally a sensible doctor examined the couple and discovered slight abnormalities of their sexes that he managed to correct. Catherine became pregnant, surviving nine births. Six children lived to adulthood, four sons and two daughters, including Isabel, high-spirited queen of Spain. Three sons became kings, all sickly and unbalanced, perhaps from inherited Medici syphilis, but their births gave Catherine prestige. When Henri succeeded his father, Catherine had to please his mistress Diane, remembering later, ‘It was the king I was really entertaining, acting sorely against the grain, for never did a woman who loved her husband succeed in loving his whore.’ But she tolerated it because ‘I loved him so much.’

The jousters clashed with the horrendous crack of splintered lance. Catherine screamed; the crowd gasped; Henri tottered; his vizor gaped open, blood gushing from splinters sticking out of his eye and from his temple. Wife, mistress and son all fainted. Philip’s doctor Vesalius^* was summoned; Henri howled as doctors tried to remove the splinters. It was a dangerous moment for a divided France: 10 per cent of the population were Huguenots – as French Protestants were known – led by Queen Jeanne of Navarre and Admiral Coligny of the Montmorency family, and Henri was determined to exterminate the ‘Protestant vermin’.

Catherine rushed to her weakling son, François. ‘My God, how can I live,’ he sobbed, ‘if my father dies?’ Septicaemia set in. The new king, François II, was married to the sixteen-year-old Mary, the diminutive, impulsive, half-French Scottish queen, descended from Henry VIII’s sister, and handed power to her ultra-Catholic uncles, the Guise brothers, who were determined to destroy the Huguenots.