Durrani and the Afghans tried to rescue him, weeping when they found his headless corpse. They then looted the tent, seizing the Koh-i-Noor diamond off Nader’s arm and wrenching off his signet ring.
Then they galloped back to Kandahar.
* When the Jews were expelled from their suburb across the Danube, Im Werd, the Austrians celebrated by renaming it Leopoldstadt, but later this neighbourhood again became popular with Viennese Jews, their lives celebrated in Tom Stoppard’s play,
* Four centuries later, in 2001, an Islamic terrorist regarded 9/11 as the moment the righteous mission of Islam had been halted by Christendom: Osama bin Laden chose the date for his own attack on the leading Christian power, America.
* This included sacks of what the Poles initially thought were camel feed: coffee. Coffee houses were already popular in London – Pepys wrote, ‘Thence I to the coffee house where much good discourse’ – but Vienna did not yet have any. A legend claims that Sobieski gave the sacks to a Ukrainian soldier-spy Jerzy Franciszek Kulczycki, who founded the first Viennese café. The crescent shape and name of croissants was said to originate in this victory.
* The fantasist’s lies were initially exploited by the king’s own chief minister, Thomas Osbourne, earl of Danby, who hoped to purge the court of pro-Catholics, then by the ex-Cromwellian Antony Ashley, earl of Shaftesbury, who became a shameless inquisitor. Buckingham at times joined in. In 1774, the young Lord Shrewsbury, whose father had been killed by the duke, led an attack on Buckingham in Parliament that prompted his downfall and enforced separation from Anna Maria. Embittered, Buckingham joined the attacks on Charles II, who imprisoned him. The rake finally retired to his Yorkshire estates. After the government had orchestrated a case of sodomy against him, he went into a decline, reflecting, ‘O! what a prodigal I’ve been of that most valuable of all possessions – Time!’
* Said to wear green when genial, white when murderous, Ismail was always escorted by eighty African bodyguards, ‘his long face more black than white, a mulatto’, according to the French envoy. ‘One of his normal entertainments,’ reported a European, ‘was to draw his sword as he mounted his horse and decapitate the slave who held the stirrup.’ His chief wives were Zaydana, an enslaved African and ‘Mrs Shaw’, an enslaved Englishwoman whose respective sons, Zaydan and Muhammad, fought for the succession. Ismail had Zaydan’s hand and foot amputated as punishment and later had him murdered by his own concubines. There was no shortage of heirs: Ismail was the most prolific father in history. By now, in 1703, he had 868 children; by his death in 1727, the figure was 1,171 – so much of today’s Morocco is descended from him. He negotiated with Louis, demanding an illegitimate daughter as wife. When he died at eighty-one, he was planning an invasion of Spain. His family still rules Morocco today.
* Hugh was the great-nephew of the first Peter Chamberlen who had delivered James I’s children. The last of the dynasty, Hugh’s son (also Hugh) junior had no heirs, and allowed the forceps to become public knowledge; the device saved millions of lives.
* After handing over his naval papers to William, Pepys retired. He was an indefatigable state servant and incorrigible lover of life – ‘I think I may reckon myself as happy a man as any is in the world’ – but he was also a master storyteller, witness to the plague, the Fire, Medway and the Merry Monarch. His diary is a masterpiece, recording his marriage and rise at the Admiralty, his experiences of court politics and ‘towsing’ his girlfriends. Yet it covered only nine years of his successful career from election to Parliament and to presidency of the Royal Society. His zenith was his 1782 appointment by Charles as admiralty secretary, a post he held until 1688. During the insecure early months of William’s reign, one of those arrested as a suspected Jacobite was Pepys. He was released but, content with his well-born mistress, he retired to Clapham, dying in 1703.
* Combining the best parts of Oliver’s republic and Charles II’s monarchy, it delivered. Frequent parliaments, in which MPs could freely criticize government, would oversee royal finances. Sovereigns became paid presidents of the state but with enormous power, provided they had parliamentary majorities. This was not democracy, just the launch of a new oligarchy that endured for a century in which the monarchs ruled in a fluctuating partnership with a tiny coterie of landed magnates, squires and City merchants. These were divided into two factions: the supporters of the new settlement, known as Whigs, and its enemies, known as Tories. Its Toleration Act was the first of its kind in Europe, yet it was not particularly tolerant: Jews could neither vote nor own property nor enjoy office; Dissenters and Catholics were also excluded from office.
