It was not easy to be Ivan the Terrible’s son and heir. Ivan Ivanovich was in his prime, while his father was crippled by arthritis, barely able to move, according to an examination of his skeleton: there is nothing more dangerous than a lame tiger. His father had twice chosen wives for him, then dismissed them. Finally, young Ivan married a third for love. In November 1782, the older Ivan, hobbling on his sharp metal tsar’s staff, saw his pregnant daughter-in-law wearing only one robe instead of the traditional three and slapped her.
‘You thrust my first wife into a nunnery,’ shouted his son, ‘then my second. Now you hit my third.’ The tsar stabbed him in the head with his staff. The tsarevich died soon afterwards. The daughter-in-law miscarried. Ivan grieved madly, scratching the walls. ‘Alas for me a sinner,’ he wrote in a typical lucubration, ‘I, a stinking hound … always wallowing in drunkenness, fornication, adultery, filth, murders, rapine, despoliation, hatred and all sorts of evildoing.’ He listed his victims killed unshriven, ordering prayers for their souls. Ivan had lost a war and a son – just as he gained a new empire.
In September 1582, his conquistadors, the Stroganovs, harassed by Kuchum, khan of Sibir, hired a Cossack captain Yermak to attack the khanate. Yermak and 840 freebooters and slaves, armed with muskets and a couple of cannon, crossed the Urals, allied with some of the indigenous animist Khanty peoples who resented the Tatar Muslims, and defeated Kuchum, seizing Qashliq, the Mongol capital. Accepting the title offered by Yermak, tsar of Siberia, Ivan was exultant, ordering bells rung and sending gifts to Yermak plus a unit of musketeers.
In March 1584, Ivan, fifty-four but ailing, told the English ambassador, ‘I’m poisoned with disease.’ He was playing with turquoise stones. ‘You see? The change of pure colour into pall heralds my death.’ It was said that the colour of turquoises changed in the presence of poison.
THE BATTLE OF THREE DEAD KINGS: SEBASTIAN THE ASLEEP AND MANSUR THE GOLDEN
That afternoon, the Terrible bathed and sang hymns loudly, and then, while playing chess, was felled by a stroke.
As Ivan died, Yermak was in desperate straits in Qashliq, besieged by Tatars and Ostiaks, whom he managed to repel, but he was isolated and almost out of gunpowder. On 5 August 1585, the conquistador was ambushed by Kuchum, his men slaughtered, and he himself, escaping by river, drowned under the weight of the Terrible’s armour.
Yermak’s Cossacks panicked and abandoned Qashliq. But in 1598 they encountered reinforcements and returned, founding the first European city in Siberia, Tobolsk. The conquest and settlement of Siberia, much neglected by historians, was similar to that of north America two centuries later: the colonizers crushed indigenous resistance by Tungus and Buriat peoples, burning villages, raping and enslaving women and bringing catastrophic diseases, particularly smallpox; some indigenous tribes killed themselves en masse.*
It would take the Russians just forty years to reach the Pacific Ocean, where the Spanish had seized the Philippines, originally named for Philip II who then ordered its conquest.* Anything now seemed possible to El Prudente, who ordered the conquest of China, a plan diverted by challenges closer to home.
While enjoying this streak of successes, Philip struggled to control his flamboyant half-brother Don Juan, whom he decided to send to Holland as governor-general to negotiate a permanent peace. He dangled an amazing prize: Don Juan was also to command the ‘Enterprise of England’, destroy Elizabeth, marry Mary of Scots and become king. Abetted by two of Philip’s secretaries, Juan disobeyed Philip and bungled the Dutch negotiations. Philip probably had Juan’s secretary assassinated in the back streets of Madrid.
Philip was simultaneously trying to restrain his Portuguese nephew King Sebastian, another strange child of consanguinity, sometimes hyperactive, sometimes becalmed, but always enraptured by a messianic crusading mission.
Sebastian’s very existence was regarded as miraculous: his family had almost died out when in 1554 the king’s only son died of consumption, leaving a pregnant wife Juana, daughter of Charles V. But eighteen days later she gave birth to Sebastian O Desejado – the Desired. Sebastian, relishing the company of young monks and avoiding female company, presided over further imperial expansion: off China, Macau was secured, while in south-east Africa, he founded the fortress of São Sebastião (Mozambique) and, in the west, built a new slaving port, Luanda (Angola), and expanded into the kingdom of Ndongo – making the Portuguese so far the only Europeans to build a territorial, rather than coastal, empire in Africa. Nearer home, Sebastian aspired to become ‘emperor of Morocco’, exploiting a fissure in the ruling Saadi dynasty, backing a pretender against his pro-Ottoman uncle, the sultan.
