The World полностью

* Nor did Grant learn from his presidency: in his retirement, humiliated by his own lack of capital, he lent his name and prestige to an outrageous fraudster who bankrupted him. Dying of cancer, Grant was forced to write his memoirs, and was rescued by Mark Twain, who turned publisher for the deal. Dictated tirelessly by the old general, the memoirs proved both a classic and a bestseller.

* The ceremony was attended by the strapping Prussian officer Paul von Hindenburg. La Débâcle in Paris also united Italy: as French troops withdrew from Rome, the Eternal City fell to the Savoyard king, Victor Emmanuel. Italy, now a constitutional kingdom, was united for the first time since Theodoric. Pope Pius IX refused to recognize Rome as Italian capital, launching a long papal sulk.

* Disraeli is the wittiest of British leaders: ‘There are three types of lies,’ he said. ‘Lies, damn lies and statistics.’ Joking that he was ‘the blank page between the Old and New Testaments’, he deflected antisemitic attacks in the House of Commons with biblical grandeur: ‘Yes, I am a Jew, and while the ancestors of the right honourable gentleman were brutal savages in an unknown island, mine were priests in the temple of Solomon.’ He remains an inspiration to all writers. ‘When I want to read a good book,’ he said, ‘I write one.’

* As Carol now became the Hohenzollern king of Romania, the creation of Bulgaria yielded the House of Saxe-Coburg its last throne: the etiolated Prince Ferdinand was chosen as Bulgaria’s king. The tiny ethnically Serbian Montenegro had been ruled under the Ottomans by a hereditary Petrović dynasty of vladikas or prince-bishops, inherited from uncle to nephew until the prince-bishop Danilo transformed himself into a married hereditary prince. When he was assassinated in 1860 his nephew, the giant Nikola, succeeded him; Nikola declared war on Constantinople in 1876 and then married two daughters to Romanov grand dukes, ensuring Russian protection.

ACT EIGHTEEN

1.3 BILLION

The Houses of Solomon and Asante, Habsburg and Saxe-Coburg

SALAMA, PRINCESS OF ZANZIBAR, AND KING CORPSES OF KATANGA

On 24 December 1871, at his Cairo opera house, Ismail the Magnificent presided over the premiere of the opera Aida for which he had paid Verdi 150,000 francs. Its story of an Ethiopian princess captured and enslaved by an Egyptian paladin was not completely fictional. Ismail was determined to conquer east Africa, starting with Ethiopia. The European scramble for Africa was in many ways kicked off by the ruler of Egypt.^* To win western support, he backed the anti-slavery crusade, sending armies southwards to seize Darfur (Sudan). Although Atlantic slavery had diminished, it was booming within Africa. African and Arab potentates and, so far, a motley scattering of Europeans, were all players in a tournament of power and resources. In the west of the continent, the caliphs and slave masters of Sokoto owned 2.5 million slaves – a quarter of the region’s population;^* in eastern Africa, the mayhem was intensifying.

On the death of the remarkable Omani sultan, Said, conqueror of an African–Arabian empire, in 1856, his sultanate of Zanzibar and Oman was split between two sons: one ruled Oman, while the other, Sultan Majid, backed by the British, took Zanzibar and much of Kenya and Tanzania, dispatching slave-hunting and ivory-collecting raids deep into the continent. East African slavery now reached its height. In the course of the nineteenth century, 1.6 million slaves, two-thirds of them women, were traded to Arab and Indian masters; 60,000 slaves annually were traded to the Mkunazini slave market in Zanzibar, confined in seventy-five hellish slave chambers.

In Zanzibar itself, where 100,000 slaves toiled, Majid enjoyed massive income from slaves, cloves and ivory, converting a Confederate warship, the Shenandoah, into a luxurious yacht, the Majid. But the sultan’s younger brother Bargush loathed the rising British influence and in 1859 planned a coup, assisted by his fifteen-year-old sister, Salama bint Said.^* This failed, but Bargush succeeded as sultan anyway; he bought steamships and founded his own shipping line between Africa and India. While he agreed to close the Mkunazini slave market, he secretly profited from the slave raiding and empire building of a fearsome phalanx of warlords, some African, some Arab, others European, all trading in slaves who were used to carry an even more valuable merchandise: ivory.^*