* Ivan was succeeded by his son, Fyodor, known as the Bell-ringer for his simple piety. The Bell-ringer died without children, the throne seized by the Terrible’s last favourite, Boris Godunov, who was married to his sister. Boris was accused of the murder of Dmitri, last son of Ivan the Terrible. Once in power, he promoted the colonization of Siberia and contributed to the tightening of controls over Russian peasants. But Boris failed to win the glory or enjoy the longevity necessary to found a dynasty, his death unleashing a decade of war and invasion by Poles, Swedes and Tatars, exacerbated by three impostors, the False Dmitris – who claimed to be the Terrible’s murdered son – that almost destroyed Muscovy. The Poles captured Moscow, a trauma that engendered a fear of a resurgent Poland that lasts to this day. Out of this mire, a sickly teenager, stammering and lame, Michael Romanov, the great-nephew of the Terrible’s first beloved wife, Anastasia, and first cousin of Tsar Fyodor, reluctantly emerged as the tsar of a new Romanov dynasty. His survival looked unlikely, but his commanders drove the invaders back. But the wars had impoverished the peasantry, who often escaped to the borderlands: Michael’s son Alexei enforced stability by allowing the nobility total control of their peasants, who became serfs, no longer allowed to leave their estates. Serfdom was similar but not the same as chattel slavery: serfs owed service to their masters and could be punished, raped and killed, but they also farmed for themselves, paid taxes and often served in the army. Later they could be sold like slaves and were often transferred with their estates.
* A fleet of five galleons and 500 soldiers, more than half of them Inca and Mexica, had crossed the Pacific, under Miguel López de Legazpi. The Philippines were the outer rim of the Indic world, Polynesian peoples ruled by Hindu rajas as well as Islamic amirs under the loose rule of Brunei, whose sultan Bolkiah had conquered an empire in the 1490s that was now ended by the Spanish. In 1570, Legazpi, now capitán-general, defeated Ache, raja of the Maynila kingdom on Luzon, and built his capital Manila, seat of the Spanish rulers until 1898. Philip’s treasure fleets now sailed across the Pacific to China, usually manned by Spanish officers and often Mexica or Amerindian troops.
* The most pre-eminent was Sir Thomas ‘Lusty’ Stuckley, sixty years old, son of a Devon knight, who commanded the Portuguese centre. Stuckley had fought all over Europe: he served Mary I but as a recusant Catholic he defied Elizabeth, about whom he boasted he ‘didn’t give a fart’ and whom he impertinently told he would found his own kingdom before escaping to serve Philip and Don Juan of Austria in plots to invade England and Ireland. The Mediterranean was a small world: Stuckley had fought for Don Juan at Lepanto while the Moroccan sultanic brothers Abd al-Malik and Ahmed had fought for the Ottomans at the same battle.
* In Marrakesh, he built a fantastical palace, al-Badi – the Marvellous – embellished with marble columns from Italy; some of it still stands. The labourers were white slaves, Portuguese prisoners, treated abysmally.
* The French had been ahead of the English but no more fortunate: in 1534, François I had dispatched his own conquistador Jacques Cartier to north America where he founded various settlements in Quebec, the start of New France. But the settlements were wiped out by disease and Native American attacks.
* In 1584, William was the first national leader to be assassinated using a handgun, but his killing changed nothing: his son Maurice replaced him as stadtholder. His assassin did not collect the prize, being captured and subjected to one of the most gruesome executions: the right hand that had pulled the trigger was burned off, his flesh cut and torn from his bones in six places; he was then burned with bacon fat, dismembered then disembowelled alive, before his heart was cut out of his chest and tossed in his face before his head was cut off. But Philip did ennoble his family and give them estates.
* Born in 1559, Nurhaci started as a soldier in the armies of the Ming, learning Chinese by reading
