The World полностью

The vaunted Enlightenment was actually the intellectual movement of a feverishly interconnected European elite close to a nervous breakdown and identity crisis, still honeycombed with snobbery, bigotry, conspiracy theories and magical hucksterism. It was an era of disguise and reinvention, a time of sociability, travel, individuality and sexual freedom personified by a writer named Giacomo Casanova. After a famous escape from a Venetian prison, Casanova travelled through Europe, habitually cursed with indebtedness, religious persecution and venereal disease, studying science and alchemy, seeking aristocratic patronage, proposing financial schemes, adopting false names and titles, losing money in faro games and meeting emperors and philosophes. All the while he was relishing sexual encounters with women high and low, young and old, some romantic, some adventurous (a threesome with nuns) and others predatory, rapey and even paedophilic.

When he retired to be the librarian of a Bohemian count, he recounted it all in memoirs that were the expression of the new sensibility of self amid a new consciousness of community. ‘I pride myself,’ wrote Diderot, ‘on being a citizen of that great city, the world.’ The spirit was expressed in letter writing: educated people from Massachusetts to Moscow stayed up late by candlelight manically writing letters that they often expected their friends to copy and share with cognoscenti around the world.

In 1736, one of the best letter writers, Prince Frederick, wrote a letter to another virtuoso epistolarian, Voltaire, who recognized his correspondent’s rare character but also like all writers lost his mind as soon as he was flattered by a leader. Frederick was secretly rebelling against his father, growing his hair long, dressing in scarlet brocaded dressing gowns. He despised Christianity, Germanic philistinism and martial machismo; he worshipped everything French, sending Voltaire his poetry and philosophical writings. But at the same time he mulled over the Habsburg succession: he considered marrying Maria Theresa until his father forced him to marry a German princess who his sister said smelled so foul that ‘she must have a dozen anal fistulas’. ‘Thank God that’s over,’ Frederick told his sister after the wedding night, callously ignoring his wife for the rest of their marriage. During this time, his father let him accompany the ageing Prince Eugen on campaign, enabling Frederick to study the brilliant old man – waspish, cultured, homosexual: ‘If I understand anything of my trade I owe it to Prince Eugen.’ Although attracted to the Enlightenment, writing an attack on Machiavelli, Frederick planned a Machiavellian gambit that would shock Europe.

As Frederick dreamed of a bold conquest, another upstart prince, another exceptional ruler, Iran’s Nader Shah, planned his own invasion. The target was India. In 1738, Nader seized Kandahar and Kabul, then Lahore. Then the greatest conqueror of the century and the last of the tribal marauders emulated his heroes Genghis and Tamerlane and advanced on Delhi.

On 24 February 1739, the Mughal emperor Muhammad Shah, great-grandson of Alamgir, who wrote poetry as Sada Rangila (Eternal Playboy), made his stand at Karnal. Rangila was a connoisseur of the music of Sadarang, the painting of Nidha Mal and the singing of the tawaifs, courtesans, led by Nur Bai, gap-toothed singer-poetess, ‘bulbul-voiced and houri-like in beauty’, who was richly paid by the line of the ghazals she sang. A regular paramour of Rangila, Nur Bai enjoyed tormenting his official wife, Qudsia Begum, herself an ex-singer, but she was more interested in a colossal diamond he kept in his turban. While the elephants of potentates queued up outside her mansion, Nur Bai herself paraded around Delhi on her own bejewelled elephant. After the atrocious murders of his predecessors, it was no wonder Rangila devoted himself to love and music. Playboy’s court artists portrayed him penetrating dancing girls with an invincible phallus, but this was no use against Nader.