The World полностью

‘I pardon you for your grey beard,’ replied Nader, stopping the cull. Then, leaving the bodies in the streets, he started to gather his spoils, both humans and gems. A great-granddaughter of Alamgir was married to his son Nasrullah, joining upstart Afsharis to Tamerlanians. When courtiers charted the traditional seven generations of the groom’s genealogy, Nader just replied, ‘Tell them he is the son of Nader Shah, son of the sword, grandson of the sword and so on for seventy generations.’

The Nizam noticed Nader’s bodyguard, the Afghan Durrani. ‘He will be a king,’ he said. Nader called in Durrani, drew his dagger and clipped his ears.

‘When you’re a king,’ he said, ‘this will remind you of me.’ Later he called Durrani forward. ‘Come near. Remember you’ll be a king one day.’

‘Execute me if you wish, Majesty. There’s no truth in these words.’

‘Treat the descendants of Nader kindly,’ said Nader.

Enjoying the blood-spattered calm, Nader invited the courtesan Nur Bai to perform a ghazal. ‘What have you left of my heart,’ she sang – she told him about a mega-diamond hidden in Playboy’s turban. Nader decided to seduce the famous tawaif and take her home. She pretended to fall ill and vanished: sleeping with Nader, she said, ‘I’d feel as if my body itself was guilty of a massacre.’

Nader recrowned Emperor Rangila, with the jiqe, the imperial aigrette attached to the royal turban, restoring power to ‘the illustrious family of Gurkan’ (one of Tamerlane’s titles), and added, ‘Don’t forget, I’m not far away.’ Nader loaded 30,000 camels and 20,000 mules with plunder, including the Peacock Throne, which became the symbol of Iranian royalty, and Rangila handed over the 105.6-carat diamond that the shah compared to a ‘mountain of light’ (Koh-i-Noor). The journey of this bauble would chart the trajectory of south Asian power, passing through the treasure houses of Iranian, Afghan and Sikh monarchs to end up in the British crown. Nader had shattered the fragile prestige of the Mughals: their delicate, delicious symbol, Nur Bai, suspected of collaboration, died in poverty; voracious Mughal governors and Rajput rajas vied for the prizes, now joined by equally voracious foreigners. Nader planned to send back his son Nasrullah, married into the Tamerlane family, to rule India.

Watching the predations of Nader from Petersburg, the new empress of Russia, Elizaveta (Peter’s daughter), compared him with horror to Europe’s own version, Frederick the Great.

In May 1740, an attack of porphyria killed the ogre Frederick William, liberating his twenty-eight-year-old son Frederick, brilliant, reckless, neurotic. He came out in glorious fashion, creating a homoerotic court that would have driven his father crazy. His greatest love was a bisexual Venetian aesthete, Francesco Algarotti, and the new king celebrated their coup de foudre with a poem ‘The Orgasm’, sent to Voltaire and addressed to ‘Algarotti, Swan of Padua’. It reveals a very different Frederick.^*

Now he could put Voltaire’s ideas into practice, calling himself ‘the first servant of the state’: ‘My principal occupation is to combat ignorance and prejudice, enlighten minds and make people happy.’ Voltaire hailed him as a ‘philosopher-king’. Frederick invited him to visit Berlin.

Yet Frederick was also his father’s son – a micromanaging dictator whose malice, not just about his rivals but about his siblings and ordinary people, was ferocious. He bullied his brothers, sneered at everyone and hated most women, once shouting at ladies-in-waiting, ‘You can smell these horrible cows ten miles away.’ The only woman he loved was his sister Wilhelmine. While parading philosophical virtues, he was cynical: ‘If anything is to be gained by honesty, then we’ll be honest; if deceit is called for, let’s be knaves.’ He dismissed his father’s Giants, but, encouraged by his 80,000 troops and full treasury, he saw an opportunity: France, now under the self-indulgent Louis XV and his shrewd mistress Madame de Pompadour (‘a wretched whore’, said Frederick), struggled to defend its pre-eminence; Russia was often paralysed by murderous Romanov intrigues; and Britain tried to avoid European entanglements. Then in October the Habsburg Karl VI died after what Voltaire called ‘a pot of mushrooms that changed the course of history’. Maria Theresa, aged twenty-three, found herself archduchess of Austria, queen of Hungary and Bohemia, but she could not become empress. Frederick was ready to exploit the felicitous conjunction, writing, ‘I am the luckiest child of nature.’

STOP MAKING THE QUEEN WRETCHED: MARIA THERESA – MOTHER, EMPRESS, WARLADY