The World полностью

* Such views were not new: Copernicus had presented his heliocentricity to Clement VII but what was regarded as fascinating eccentricity in 1533 was dangerous during the Catholic revival of 1600. Bruno foolishly returned to Venice whence he was extradited to Rome, where Pope Clement VIII supervised his trial, accused of contradicting Catholic dogma. He refused to renounce the plurality of worlds. Sentenced to death in 1600, he supposedly replied, ‘Maybe you give this sentence with more fear than I receive it.’ With his tongue ‘imprisoned for his evil words’, he was hung upside down naked and burned alive.

* On his accession, Mehmed ordered the strangling of nineteen of his young brothers – they kissed his hand, were circumcised and then snuffed out with one saying pluckily, ‘Let me eat my chestnuts and strangle me afterwards.’ Crowds wept as they watched the tiny coffins wend their way to Hagia Sophia, where their miniature tombs remain poignant. Mehmed was directed by his Bosnian-born mother Safiye, who relied on her Italian-Jewish kira, Esperanza Malchi. Her Jewishness proved a lightning rod for discontent. In 1600, unpaid troops rioted, demanding her head. Mehmed and Safiye sacrificed her: Esperanza was led on a packhorse to the hippodrome where the mob ‘cut off the accursed one’s hand and cut out her vulva, nailing them to the doors of conceited ones who obtained their posts by bribing that woman’. Her ‘shameful part’ was then paraded through Constantinople. ‘If her execution was necessary, why like this?’ the valide sultan asked the sultan. ‘She could have been thrown into the sea. Such an execution of a woman so closely connected is damaging to imperial authority.’ From now on, Jews no longer held high office and were forced to wear caps and insignia to mark their inferiority.

ACT TWELVE

545 MILLION

Dahomeans, Stuarts and Villiers, Tamerlanians and Ottomans

KING OF WITCHES – JAMES IN LOVE, SHAKESPEARE AT COURT

The play the court was watching was King Lear, a dark drama of senescent power, paternal folly, political division and filial ingratitude, ending in mayhem and tragedy. But it scarcely seemed out of place in the unstable and unsettling new union of England and Scotland, where the last six years had seen abortive coups against the old Queen Elizabeth and the new James, as well as a Catholic conspiracy to murder the entire royal family and ruling class.

James had been a king since he was one year old; both his parents died violently and he was raised within a court of murderous grandees and religious zealots in a kingdom dominated by a Protestant sect, the Presbyterians, who rejected priests and bishops. The king was a boozy and blowsy pedant who moistly lectured courtiers on witchcraft and theology from sap-dripping lips: some English observers claimed he had an oversized tongue, but this was just a slur on his thick Scottish accent. Brought up as a Presbyterian, he emerged intelligent and curious, but unsurprisingly hungry for love – and a believer in the maleficent power of witches.

The need to explain the streak of disasters – religious wars, pandemics and bad harvests – along with a fear of unconventional women and the popularity of printed works on witchcraft, had unleashed a spate of witchcraft trials. At Trier in the 1580s an archbishop orchestrated attacks on Protestants, Jews and witches that led to the burning of 386 people. In 1589, at the height of this lurid hysteria, James married Anne of Denmark by proxy, but her voyage to Scotland was abandoned due to storms. James set off to collect her – a rare moment of heterosexual romance – but he was sure the storms were the work of witches and on his return encouraged a case in North Berwick that led to many being tortured and burned. James would be Britain’s only intellectual monarch: he wrote first on witchcraft, Daemonologie, then a tract extolling the divine right of kings.

As Elizabeth aged, James had secretly negotiated with her courtiers: Essex was in a rush to accelerate James’s succession. But Elizabeth had lost patience with Essex’s tantrums. In February 1601, the narcissistic jackanapes launched a coup, hiring Shakespeare’s theatrical company to perform his play Richard II as a signal to destroy the tyrant and deliver England to James. ‘I am Richard II,’ said Elizabeth ruefully afterwards. Essex was beheaded. Shakespeare was probably interrogated; it was a close call, but he survived. On her death in 1603, Elizabeth’s trusted minister Robert Cecil facilitated the succession of the king of Scots.^*