* The negotiations reveal the real power matrix between Europeans and the Asian empires. It is easy to exaggerate the span and power of the EIC and its Dutch rival, the VOC: they could defeat local potentates; they could hold fortresses; but the European companies were not strong enough to conquer broad territories or challenge great monarchies. In 1623, when the VOC seized the Penghu islands, its troops were defeated by a Chinese fleet and not for the last time. In Japan, Tokugawa and sons banned Europeans. The Dutch and English had to negotiate cringingly with Ming or Mughals, Vijayanagarans or Safavis. It was only later when these kingdoms disintegrated that the VOC and EIC shapeshifted into empire-building company states.
* The Habashi play a major but often neglected part in Indian history. They were often freed after a few years of service, but even when they were enslaved, many were promoted as courtiers and generals – and sometimes they seized power for themselves. In Bengal in 1487, Barbak Shahzad, chief of the black palace guards, had assassinated the Bengali sultan and ruled until he was killed by another Abyssinian.
* Traditionally eunuchs had been white slaves from Russia/Ukraine and the Caucasus who, following Byzantine practice, lost only their testicles, but now African children, captured in Ethiopia and Darfur by Arab slavers, were traded to Coptic priests who subjected them to Mamluk castration, chaining them to a table and cutting off their penises as well as their testicles. Given fragrant names such as Hyacinth, in adulthood they were either very fat or very thin, suffered osteoporosis, skeletal abnormalities including elongated fingers, and premature wrinkling. The chief eunuch –
* Rudolf’s collapse was exacerbated by the crimes of his eldest son, Don Julius Caesar. That year, Rudolf bought him Castle Krumlov, where the diabolic boy, twenty-one years old, hunted girls in the villages until he found a barber’s daughter, Markéta Pichlerová. He became obsessed with her and took to torturing her, until finally he stabbed her and threw her out of a window. But she landed on a rubbish heap and survived. Julius Caesar begged the parents to send her back to him. They resisted until he threatened to kill the family and then arrested the father. The Bluebeardian monstrum finally had Markéta back in his clutches. He tortured her for days. He was found naked and covered in excrement embracing her headless, dismembered body, ears cut off, eyes gouged out. A month later, the horrified emperor imprisoned the monstrum.
* After the death of Brahe, Rudolf’s astronomer Kepler finished the Rudolfine Tables and charted planetary motion, but placed God at the centre of the universe. Three emperors, Rudolf, his brother Matthias and later Ferdinand, consulted the Protestant Kepler’s readings: astronomy and astrology were seen as scientific studies. Kepler also invented a new genre, science fiction, writing an autobiographical story
* James’s Spanish detente had already cost Walter Raleigh his life. In 1616, he persuaded James to release him and send him to find Eldorado in Guiana, provided that he did not attack Spanish interests. But Raleigh lost control of his officers, attacked the Spanish – his son was killed in the fighting – and found no gold. On his return, the Spanish ambassador demanded Raleigh’s head as the price for the treaty. James agreed. Raleigh gave a virtuoso performance on the gallows, inspecting the axe, ‘This is a sharp medicine, but a physician for all diseases and miseries,’ then telling the executioner, ‘What dost thou fear? Strike, man, strike!’ The execution was widely regarded as a disgrace – and Raleigh never finished his world history.
