* Smallpox killed 400,000 Europeans annually during the eighteenth century. Yet variolation – the introduction of the antigen – from a smallpox scab, long practised from Africa to China, was about to change this. In 1706, an Akan slave given to an American Protestant minister, Cotton Mather, who named him Onesimus, explained the procedure to him. ‘Enquiring of my Negro-man Onesimus, who is a pretty Intelligent Fellow,’ Mather told the Royal Society of London, ‘whether he ever had the Small-Pox; he answered, both, Yes, and No; and then told me, that he had undergone an Operation, which had given him something of the Small-Pox, and would forever preserve him from it, adding that it was often used among the Guramantese … and showed me in his Arm the Scar.’ Despite resistance by those who did not believe Africans could be more advanced than Europeans, Mather used variolation to mitigate a smallpox epidemic in Boston. In 1715, the British duke’s daughter and wife of the British ambassador to Istanbul, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, her beauty spoiled by smallpox, returned to London with an Ottoman version. Her variolation of her own children persuaded Princess Caroline, wife of the future George II, to inoculate her children. It is worth pointing out that it was not doctors who recognized the possibilities of inoculation but intelligent amateurs. Among those inoculated in childhood was Edward Jenner, who later improved this method.
* Walpole never called himself prime minister. The top office was lord treasurer, last held by the Duke of Shrewsbury, who lived an extraordinary life. In 1668, he was the child whose father was killed by his mother’s lover, Buckingham, whom he in turn later destroyed. Twice he was the helmsman who steered Britain in dynastic crisis: in 1688, he invited William III to invade; rewarded with a dukedom and regarded as the noblest patrician of his time, even William called him ‘king of hearts’; in 1714, he ruled as all-powerful lord treasurer when the last Stuart, Queen Anne, died, ensuring the Hanoverian succession. Since 1715, the treasury has been ‘in commission’ under the first lord of the treasury, increasingly known as prime minister. In 1732, George II gave a townhouse to Walpole, who accepted it as a residence for the first lord: Ten Downing Street.
* Before his death in 1725, Peter had tortured his own son, Alexei, to death for fleeing to Austria. He left the throne to his wife, Catherine, a former Lithuanian laundress and camp follower – a rise unique in European history and the first of a line of female Russian autocrats.
* Aurora was the daughter of a Swedish-German general; it was her brother Philipp who was murdered by George I of Britain for adultery with his wife.
* Scottish and Irish officers – usually Jacobite exiles after 1688 – now filled the armies of the Hohenzollerns, Habsburgs, Bourbons and Romanovs. They were known as the Wild Geese.
* Even if they did not yet understand the practicality of their discoveries, Daniel Fahrenheit invented the thermometer in 1714, Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier discovered the nature of oxygen and its role in burning, while Alessandro Volta invented the electric battery, though electricity was seen as entertainment rather than useful.
* ‘During this night, satisfying his fierce desires, / Algarotti swam in a sea of pleasure … / Our happy lovers, in their extreme delirium, / In the fury of their love, they know only each other; / Fucking [
Durranis and Saids, Hemingses and Toussaints
AFGHAN CONQUERORS AND ARABIAN KINGS: DURRANIS, SAUDIS AND OMANIS
Nader’s head was sent to Ali Qoli, who declared himself Shah Adil and then hunted down his uncle’s sons and grandsons, not only killing them all, even two-year-olds, but also eviscerating Nader’s pregnant concubines. When the Qajar tribe bid for power, Adil killed their chieftain but castrated his four-year-old son, Agha Muhammad Khan, who decades later would avenge himself on all, restore Iran and become that rare thing, a eunuch who founded a dynasty. The atrocious Adil was himself assassinated and Shahrukh, Nader’s surviving grandson, was blinded, launching decades of turmoil – though out of the flames his bodyguard Durrani thrived while his Arabian allies shook off Iranian power.
