Soon afterwards the news arrived that Selim had taken Cyprus from Venice. Pius V invited Philip, whose commitments were eased by a truce with the Dutch, to join a Holy League against the Ottomans. Philip nominated the twenty-five-year-old Don Juan as commander of 208 galleys, 6 galliasses, 24 other warships and 60,000 men (including Miguel de Cervantes, future novelist) to fight an Ottoman fleet of 300 ships and around 100,000 men. The Ottoman galleys were more manoeuvrable; the Christians had better artillery. Overlooking Philip’s instructions to avoid military impetuosity as much as sexual incontinence, Juan was determined to fight, asking advice of experienced admirals in the fleet and repeatedly practising manoeuvres.
Dressed in gleaming armour, Juan toured the fleet in a frigate, addressing the sailors in different languages: ‘My children, we’re here to conquer or die!’ He ordered his galley slaves, mostly Muslims, to be double-shackled, while the Ottoman Capitan-Pasha Ali promised his Christian slaves, ‘If I win the battle, I promise you liberty.’
At Lepanto off the Greek coast, the Ottomans tried to wrap their crescent formation around the Holy Leaguers. The fighting was savage as Ottoman galleys were blasted out of the water by Don Juan’s cannonades; Don Juan, commanding at the prow of his
Philip, triumphant over Islam, now encouraged the death knell of heresy in France that was linked to his Dutch problems. In August 1572, Catherine de’ Medici was planning a magnificent Parisian wedding – and the slaughter of half her guests.
RED WEDDING: BRAT KING, CROCODILE QUEEN AND PSYCHOTIC TSAR
Once sceptical about Philip’s repression in Holland, Catherine now planned to destroy her own Protestants, who were recklessly supporting the Dutch against Spain.
She was negotiating the marriage between her daughter Margot and the Protestant prince Henri, eighteen-year-old son of Queen Jeanne of the little Pyrenean kingdom of Navarre and Antoine de Bourbon, duc de Vendôme, a cousin of the king by a junior branch of the Capet family. The marriage was designed to reunite the family across the religious divide. But when the Huguenots planned to kidnap Catherine herself, she started to consider combining the marriage with an extreme solution.
Margot, a dazzling brunette whose ‘lovely face shone with faultless white skin’, resisted the marriage. As they grew up, Catherine struggled to control her vicious children: Charles was spineless, devious and tubercular; Henri, duc d’Anjou, was artful and depraved, his looks spoiled by a seeping fistula between eye and nose. Anjou favoured wild transvestite orgies. Catherine tried to divert him by giving a party where the serving girls were naked, but, in between bouts of self-flagellation, prayer and fasting, Anjou preferred his male lover sieur de Lignerolles. Catherine had Lignerolles stabbed in an alleyway, and that was just the beginning.
The boys were locked in a sinister dance with their mother. ‘I’m not one of those mothers who love their children only for themselves,’ Catherine told Henri. ‘I love you because I see you foremost in greatness and reputation.’ They were attracted to their sister Margot. Now the brothers seduced or raped her: ‘It was you who first put my foot in the stirrup,’ she later told Anjou, trembling with secret excitement when he embraced her.
Margot was already in love with a non-royal cousin. When her mother and brother Charles discovered her flirtation, they awoke her in the night and punched her viciously, tearing her nightdress to shreds. She agreed to obey her mother: ‘I had no will nor choice but hers.’
As the guests arrived in Paris, Catherine met with her son Anjou. King Charles the Brat had a close, almost filial friendship with the Protestant leader, Gaspar de Coligny, so the mother and Anjou decided that since ‘the admiral [Coligny] had inspired His Majesty [Charles] with a bad and sinister opinion of the queen’, in Anjou’s account, ‘my mother and myself, we resolved to rid ourselves of him’.
