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anal fistula,
between raids into India, Babur enjoyed booze and drugs. ‘There was much disgusting uproar,’ he reminisced. Once, ‘We rode off, we got on a boat and drank spirits, left the boat roaring drunk and mounting our horses let the horse gallop free-reined. I must have been really drunk.’ He was the only psychedelic conqueror: ‘How strange the fields of flowers appeared under its influence,’ he raved about narcotics. ‘Nothing but purple flowers, sometimes yellow and purple together with gold flecks.’
Coffles of enchained slaves were marched across the steppe to Crimea where the slave market of Kaffa, seized from Genoa, provided the biggest component of Ottoman income – an empire funded by slavery. So important was it that Suleiman’s first assignment was to govern Kaffa, accompanied by his mother Hafsa, who herself had been seized on a slave raid. The first slave raid by the Girays in 1468 captured 18,000, but the raids kept getting bigger – one in 1498 was said to have taken 100,000. The number captured in this way is incalculable: one historian guesses ten million between 1450 and 1650,
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pathologic mandibular prognathism
Plus Ultra – Further Beyond.
François I
Charlemagne’s
Fugger the Rich,
Alcázar de Colón
Maroons from the Spanish for wild cattle, cimarrón.[*10]
They then led the Spaniards into the unforgettable city of gleaming temples, multicoloured houses, canals and squares, watched by crowds from rooftops and canoes. Some Spaniards thought they were dreaming, others that it resembled Venice. Cortés was settled in a royal palace, where Motecuhzoma visited him. The Spaniards in turn visited the Supreme Speaker’s palace, where they were dazzled by its facilities including baths (the Mexica, unlike the grubby Spaniards, washed daily and changed clothes regularly), sated by the dishes – roast turkey and quail, tortillas – and impressed by a cocoa
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Before permitting more expeditions, Emperor Charles ordered that indigenous peoples ‘must be allowed to live in liberty’, but Cortés was already forcing them to work to death in encomiendas, while spasms of epidemic – measles, smallpox, mumps, haemorrhagic fevers, – were killing large numbers of them: by 1580, some 88 per cent of the people of the Valley of Mexico had died.
Outside the Hadrianic fortress, Charles’s Landsknechte – many of them Protestants – went wild, raping nuns, defacing Raphael’s paintings in the Vatican with the graffito ‘luther’ and killing 10,000 Romans – until the plague culled the Landsknechte themselves.
Alessandro Medici
the Campidoglio,
‘For a reliable guide in my vocation, beauty was set before me as a birthright, a mirror and a lamp for art.’
Ibrahim Pasha,
enslaved
The brothers captured African ports, first Oran then Algiers and Bougie, where Oruç lost his arm. When he replaced it with a silver prosthetic, Turks called him Silver Arm.
shows her haughty good looks: she had become
The predicament of prodigious power is that it exceeds a single human’s ability to wield it.
He decided everything. Autocracy grants the consistency that democracy lacks but replaces it with rigidity petrified by delusion and drowned in detail.
autos-da-fé.
Philip ordered mass deportations. ‘The saddest sight in the world,’ wrote Juan. ‘There was so much rain, wind and snow the poor people clung together lamenting. One cannot deny the spectacle of depopulation of a kingdom is most pitiful.’ Some 90,000 died; Philip planned to expel the remaining Moriscos – a tragic solution carried out by his son, Philip III.
sometimes becalmed, but always enraptured by a messianic crusading mission. Sebastian’s very existence was regarded as
The corridors of Prague Castle were stalked by Rudolf’s bizarre cast of necromancers, magi, scientists, artists and rabbis, along with a gold-nosed Danish astrologer, a swinging English hierophant, an earless Irish devil-worshipper, an Italian mistress, a converted Jewish lover, a psychotic son named Julius Caesar – and uncaged pet lions.
Giuseppe Arcimboldo, who painted faces using natural objects: in his Seasons, Rudolf,
bear-baiting.
In the days after the show, James secretly observed the trial of the Catholic conspirators. On 30 January, eight of them were dragged backwards in wicker baskets to the gallows where they were half hanged, their genitals cut off and burned, their bowels and hearts cut out, before they were decapitated, a process designed to put them ‘halfway between heaven and earth as unworthy of both’.
Blue Mosque,
Anne of Austria. At court, he met one of
Jamestown had almost withered away: 3,000 out of the 3,600 settlers sent out between 1619 and 1622 had perished. But now Englishmen of different stamps sought a new life in America, not so much freedom for all as freedom for themselves from others.
The indentured labourers, often boys, who formed 70–85 per cent of settlers, worked for around seven years before being freed.
Whatever European maps might show, the continent would remain the realm of the many indigenous nations for centuries to come.
From the start, the settlers fought Native American ferocity with their own savagery, paying bounties for scalps.[*20]
xwetanu at which 500 and sometimes as many as 4,000 slaves were decapitated, often by female bodyguards, as offerings to
Traders no longer just sold to people they knew at nearby markets but also did business with strangers, which meant they had to cultivate fairness, politeness and trust, alongside the ruthless avarice necessary to make profits: the conundrum of capitalism.
Andries de Graeff
‘Alliances are good but one’s own forces are better,’
His debts were so great that Parliament had to grant him immunity from arrest and agree his pension. There is only one thing more contemptible than a competent dictatorship and that is an incompetent one.
‘Mon Dieu’
wondered why anyone would allow those with money to establish authority over them and regarded the Jesus story (‘the life and death of the son of the Great Spirit’) as preposterous
though he pragmatically converted later. ‘To imagine one can live in a country of money,’ he said, ‘and preserve one’s soul is like imagining one could preserve one’s life at the bottom of a lake.’ In 1703, when Lahontan published his conversation with Kandiaronk, entitled Curious Dialogues with a Savage of Good Sense Who has Travelled, it inspired a new generation to question European authority and the origins of civilization.
ensorcelled Carlos, brother-in-law of Louis, was
He was gifted with the three essentials that every politician requires to achieve anything: VAR – vision, acumen and resources – as well an invincible constitution and a taste for wild wassailing that involved lethal alcoholic consumption, dwarves jumping out of cakes and naked girls, and fistfights.
termagant
but to help her conceive a son doctors had prescribed a calorific diet lubricated with liquor that so bloated her she ultimately had to be conveyed in a mechanical chair.
‘The most beautiful girl or woman in the world would be a matter of indifference to me,’ he said, ‘but tall soldiers – they are my weakness.’
wish to suffer everything patiently,’
‘Écrasez l’infâme’.
