Titans of History

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  Although Henry is sometimes credited with England’s Protestant Reformation, doctrinally he remained a Catholic conservative. Nonetheless, his political revolution made a Protestant England possible. His lucrative dissolution of the monasteries—an act of vandalism on a massive scale—funded his reign and marked his new absolutism. Anne Boleyn delivered a child to Henry in 1533, but it was a girl, the future Elizabeth I. Henry turned against her, ordering Cromwell to concoct charges of adultery, incest and witchcraft, evidenced by her “third nipple” used for suckling the Devil—actually a mole on her neck. Five men, including Boleyn’s brother, were framed and executed. Anne was beheaded on May 19, 1536. Ten days later Henry married Jane Seymour, who delivered a son, the future Edward VI, but died in childbirth—the only wife Henry ever grieved for.

  Cromwell, pushing a Protestant foreign policy and promoted to earl of Essex, persuaded Henry to marry Anne of Cleves. But Henry, himself now fat and prone to suppurating sores, was repelled by this “Flanders Mare.” Cromwell was framed and executed in 1540, the very day Henry married the pretty Catherine Howard, just sixteen years old. Henry ordered that Cromwell’s beheading should be carried out by an inexperienced youth. The head was severed on the third attempt.

  Each of the English wives was backed by an ambitious political-religious family faction. The Howards were pro-Catholic, but their teenage queen was a reckless and naïve flirt whose past mischief and present adulterous adventures allowed the Protestant faction to exploit the king’s fragile sexual pride. In 1542, at age eighteen, she was beheaded. His sensible last wife, Catherine Parr, outlived him.

  Henry determined to marry his young son Edward to the infant Mary Queen of Scots. But Scottish intractability was unmoved by the so-called Rough Wooing, during which Henry sent his armies over the Border to put “man, woman and child to fire and sword without exception.” One of England’s most majestic and formidable kings, yet a flawed tyrant and a statesman of very mixed achievements, Henry was both hero and monster, brutal egotist and effective politician. As the duke of Norfolk understood: “The consequence of royal anger is death.” In 1544, he laid out the succession: the Protestant Edward, then Catholic Mary, followed by Protestant Elizabeth. Henry VIII was followed on the throne by his son, the fervent reformer Edward VI. He moved swiftly to firm up Protestantism’s hold on England, outlawing the Latin mass and clerical celibacy and demanding that services be carried out in English. But he was sickly, and died at fifteen. His sister Mary I reversed Edward’s reforms, fiercely enforcing Rome’s return to English religious life. Many hundreds died at the stake, but despite her marriage to Philip II of Spain she remained childless and this bitter and increasingly deranged figure could not prevent the crown from passing to her sister, Elizabeth, after her early death.

  SULEIMAN THE MAGNIFICENT

  1494–1566

  I who am the sultan of sultans, the sovereign of sovereigns, the shadow of God on earth, sultan and emperor of the White Sea [Mediterranean] and the Black Sea …

  Suleiman the Magnificent writing to the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V (1547)

  Under the rule of Suleiman the Magnificent, the Ottoman empire, which stretched from the Middle East to North Africa, the Balkans and central Europe, reached its glorious peak. He expanded its borders, rooted out corruption, overhauled the laws, ruled with tolerance, patronized the arts and wrote fine poetry. His legacy was a vast, well-governed, culturally flourishing empire, which continued to thrive for a century after his death.

  When Suleiman came to power as Ottoman sultan or padishah (emperor) in 1520, at age twenty-six, succeeding his father Selim the Grim, he inherited an empire centered on Turkey, which had been strengthened by his father’s acquisitions of Syria, Palestine and Egypt, as well as the two holiest Islamic cities, Medina and Mecca. Suleiman saw himself as the universal emperor, successor to the Roman emperors but also as “the second Solomon,” his namesake—he determined to expand this empire in every direction.

  His first target was Belgrade. In the summer of 1521 Suleiman captured the Serbian city from the king of Hungary, striking a heavy blow against Christendom and opening the path for further expansion into Europe. By 1526 Hungary had more or less succumbed to the Ottomans, and though it took another fifteen years for a formal partition of the kingdom to be realized, Suleiman now had a springboard from which to attack Vienna. The high-water mark of Suleiman’s advance on central Europe came in 1529, when he tried unsuccessfully to capture Vienna. This failure contributed to establishing the limits of Ottoman hegemony in the 16th century. The struggle for Vienna was one of the most notable of those battles that saved Christian Europe from invaders—going all the way back to the defeat of Attila’s Huns at Châlons in 451, the Frankish victory over the Moors at Tours in 732, and the repulsion of the Magyars by the Germans at Lechfeld in 955.

  In 1526 Suleiman had defeated Louis II of Hungary at the Battle of Mohács, giving rise to a dispute over the Hungarian crown between the archduke of Austria, Ferdinand I, and Suleiman’s own choice, the subservient Transylvanian noble John Zápolya.

  Ferdinand was married to Louis II’s sister and heiress, and he was also a member of the powerful Habsburg dynasty, headed by the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, ruler of Austria, Germany, the Low Countries and Spain. The battle for Hungary was thus a clash of two empires.

  In spring 1529 Suleiman gathered an army of 120,000 men and marched them through Bulgaria. Bad weather caused the loss of numerous camels and bogged down the heavy cannon, but Suleiman managed to meet up with Zápolya and recapture several Hungarian fortresses, including the important city of Buda, before marching on Vienna.

  Without support from Charles V, the archduke feared the worst. He left Vienna in the hands of the seventy-year-old Niklas Count Salm and fled to Bohemia. Salm, an experienced veteran, shored up the Viennese defenses around St. Stephen’s Cathedral and waited.

  When they arrived, Suleiman’s troops tried to bombard the city’s defenses into submission. But the earthen reinforcements held firm. The Ottomans switched tactics and began digging trenches and mines to weaken the city walls. This, too, failed, and as a wet autumn approached, they attempted one final push.

  Despite their superior numbers, the Ottoman besiegers were beaten back by the pikes of the Austrian defenders. Giving up hope, the Ottomans killed their prisoners and set off for home on October 14, having to endure heavy snowfalls and skirmishing all the way.

  Suleiman had missed his chance to advance into the heart of Europe. Charles V reinforced Vienna with 80,000 troops, and Suleiman had to be content with consolidating his territory in Hungary.

  Meanwhile, in the Islamic world, Suleiman set his sights on the western frontiers of the Persian empire. The shah avoided a pitched battle, and in 1535 Suleiman entered Baghdad. The capture of the city, along with lower Mesopotamia and much territory around the Euphrates and Tigris rivers, meant that by the time a treaty was signed with the shah in 1554, Suleiman was indisputably the dominant force in the Near East.

  The final thrust of Ottoman expansion under Suleiman secured Tripolitania (part of modern Libya), Tunisia and Algeria, a vast territorial gain that secured for the Ottomans a brief period of naval dominance in the western Mediterranean. Suleiman was now a key player in the battles between the kings Francis I of France and Charles V, the Habsburg emperor and king of Spain.

  But territorial expansion was only one of Suleiman’s ambitions. In the Muslim world his legal reforms earned him the title Suleiman the Lawgiver. In particular, he concentrated on the Sultanic kanun—a system of rules in cases that fall outside Islamic Shari’ah.

  As well as being an energetic reformer, Suleiman was also known as a scrupulously fair and even-handed ruler. He promoted his servants on the basis on their abilities, rather than of their personal wealth, their family background or their general popularity. He promoted tolerance of both Jews and Christians. He welcomed the wealthy, entrepreneurial and cultured Jews who had been expelled from Spain
by Ferdinand and Isabella. Meanwhile he continued the policy of promoting Balkan Christian slave-boys, converted to Islam, to high positions.

  Suleiman was devoted to the arts. Not only was he himself a talented poet (many of his own aphorisms have become Turkish proverbs), but he also enthusiastically promoted artistic societies within the empire. Artists and craftsmen were given career paths, leading from apprenticeship to official rank, with quarterly pay, and Istanbul became a center of artistic excellence. Among the many fine mosques and other buildings commissioned by Suleiman is the Süleymaniye Mosque in Istanbul, which is Suleiman’s final resting place. During his reign, numerous bridges were built throughout the empire, such as the Danube Bridge, the Bridge of Buda, and the great aqueducts that solved Istanbul’s water shortage.

  In Jerusalem, this “Second Solomon” rebuilt the walls, creating famed gates such as the Damascus and Jaffa Gates, and embellished the Dome of the Rock. But he ruled with brutal inscrutability: like his father who had murdered his brothers and his other sons. Suleiman attended the strangulation of his own son and heir, Mustapha, and ordered the killing of his long-serving vizier and friend Ibrahim Pasha.

  Suleiman was lean, slim and laconic, cultivating his own mystique. But he was capable of love. His favorite slave-girl was a Russian/Polish blond nicknamed Roxelana who became his dominant wife; he renamed her Blossom of the Sultan—Hurrem Sulton. When he was away at war she wrote him passionate love letters and he wrote her love poems. She was a wily politician who managed to win their eldest son Selim II the Drunkard the crown. By the time he died of a stroke at the Battle of Szigetvar in 1566, his conquests had united most of the Muslim world, with all the major Islamic cities west of Persia—Medina, Mecca, Jerusalem, Damascus and Baghdad—under the same ruler. Eastern Europe, the Balkans and the southern Mediterranean were also dominated by the Ottomans. There is no doubt that Suleiman fully deserved his Western nickname—the Magnificent.

  IVAN THE TERRIBLE

  1530–84

  You shut up the Kingdom of Russia … as in a fortress of hell.

  Prince Kurbsky, letter to Ivan IV

  Ivan IV of Russia, known as the Terrible, was a tragic but degenerate monster, terrorized and damaged as a child, who grew up to be a successful empire-builder and shrewd tyrant. Ultimately he deteriorated into a demented, homicidal sadist who killed many thousands in a frenzied terror, impaling and torturing his enemies personally. By murdering his son, he hastened the demise of his own dynasty.

  Ivan was declared the Grand Prince of Muscovy when he was just three years old, after the early death of his father. Five years later his mother too died. With both parents gone, the task of caring for Ivan fell to the boyar Shuisky family—members of whom also served as regents for the remainder of the prince’s minority. The boyars formed a closed aristocratic class of around 200 families; Ivan complained that they bullied him, terrorized him, neglected him and were attempting to usurp his birthright.

  Ivan’s coronation took place in January 1547, and the early years of his reign were characterized by reform and modernization. Changes to the law code were accompanied by the creation of a council of nobles and local-government reforms. Efforts were also made to open up Russia to European trade and commerce. Ivan oversaw the consolidation and expansion of Muscovite territory. In 1552 he defeated and annexed the Kazan khanate, and the storming of the city of Kazan itself was followed by the slaughter of over 100,000 defenders. More military successes followed, and further territories, including the Astrakhan khanate and parts of Siberia, were brought under Russian sway. He built the gaudy St. Basil’s Cathedral in Red Square to celebrate the conquest of Kazan.

  After a near-fatal illness in 1553, Ivan’s personality appeared to undergo a transformation, and from that point he became ever more erratic and prone to bouts of rage. In 1560 his wife, Anastasia Romanovna, died from an unknown disease, an event that appears to have caused Ivan to suffer a breakdown. He convinced himself that the boyars had conspired to poison him—and he may have been right. If so, the plot led to the death of his beloved wife. He decided that the boyars would have to be punished and their power eradicated. The defection of one of his grandees, Prince Kurbsky, intensified his insane paranoia.

  The result, on the one hand, was further administrative reform, aimed at augmenting the power of locally elected officials at the expense of the nobility. Such moves appeared to point the way toward a more rational and more competent form of government. Yet at the same time Ivan unleashed a vengeful terror against the unsuspecting boyars, and a wave of arrests and executions followed. Ivan devised peculiarly horrible deaths for some of them: Prince Boris Telupa was impaled upon a stake and took fifteen agonizing hours to die, while his mother, according to one chronicler, “was given to a hundred gunners, who defiled her to death.”

  Worse was to come. In 1565 Ivan designated an area of Russia—dubbed the Oprichnina (meaning apart from)—within which the lands were to be directly ruled by the tsar. Oprichniki squads crisscrossed the territory to implement Ivan’s will. Dressed in black cloaks that bore the insignia of a severed dog’s head and a broom (on account of their role in “sniffing out” treason and sweeping away Ivan’s enemies), the oprichniki set about crushing all alternative sources of authority. The boyars were singled out for especially harsh treatment.

  Ivan embarked on an orgy of sexual adventures—both heterosexual and homosexual—while destroying his imagined enemies. He personally killed and tortured many. Ivan’s savagery was shockingly varied in nature: ribs were torn out, people burned alive, impaled, beheaded, disemboweled, their genitals cut off. His “sadistic refinement” in a public bout of torturing in 1570 outdid all that went before and most of what came after.

  In 1570 the tsar’s agents perpetrated a frenzied massacre in the city of Novgorod, after Ivan suspected that its citizens were about to betray him to the Poles. Some 1500 nobles were murdered—many by being drowned in the River Volkhov—and an equal number of commoners were officially recorded as dead, though the death toll may have been far higher. The archbishop of Novgorod was sewn up in the skin of a bear, and a pack of hounds was set loose on him.

  As the harsh internal repression took its toll on Russia’s people, Ivan’s fortunes went into steep decline. During the 1570s the Tartars of the Crimean khanate devastated large tracts of Russia with seeming impunity—even managing to set fire to Moscow on one occasion. At the same time, the tsar’s attempts at westward expansion across the Baltic Sea succeeded only in embroiling the country in the Livonian War against a coalition that included Denmark, Poland, Sweden and Lithuania. The conflict dragged on for almost a quarter of a century, with little tangible gain. And all the while the oprichniki continued to engage in their wild bouts of killing and destruction; their area of operation, once the richest region of Russia, was reduced to one of the poorest and most unstable.

  In 1581 Ivan turned his destructive rage against his own family. Having previously assaulted his pregnant daughter-in-law, he got into an argument with his son and heir, also called Ivan, and killed him in a fit of blind rage. It was only after Ivan the Terrible’s own death—possibly from poisoning—that Russia was finally put out of its long agony.

  Ivan’s second son, Fyodor, proved far less talented than the original heir apparent. In 1598 a former adviser to Ivan, Boris Godunov, seized control, and Ivan’s bloodline was brought to an end.

  The oprichniki inspired a later Russian tyrant, Josef Stalin, and served as a prototype for his secret police, the NKVD. His own terror was based on that of Ivan, whom he often called “teacher.” “Who now remembers the boyars wiped out by Ivan the Terrible?” he once said. “His mistake was not to kill all the boyars.” Ultimately, Ivan the Terrible was mad as well as bad. As his best biographer, Isabel de Madariaga, wrote: “Ivan was not like God, he tried to be God. His reign is a tragedy of Shakespearean proportions. His cruelty served no purpose … He is Lucifer, the star of the morning who wanted to be God and was expell
ed from the Heavens.”

  ELIZABETH I

  1533–1603

  I thank God that I am endowed with such qualities that if I were turned out of my realm in my petticoat, I were able to live in any place in Christendom.

  Elizabeth I, addressing Parliament (November 5, 1566)

  Elizabeth I, known as Gloriana, was England’s greatest queen. During her reign England began to emerge as a modern nation and a seafaring power. She kept her country’s religious divides in check, presided over an unprecedented artistic flowering, and inspired her people to resist the aggression of England’s mightiest enemy, Catholic Spain. And it was under Elizabeth that England’s empire began to be built, with the New World’s Virginia being named after the redoubtable Virgin Queen.

  Elizabeth had a difficult childhood. Her mother, Anne Boleyn, had been sent to the executioner’s block by her father, Henry VIII, and she herself was declared a bastard. Henry had left the throne to his only son, Edward VI, a determined youth during whose short reign Protestantism was imposed on England. On Edward’s premature death, Elizabeth’s elder half-sister Mary took the throne, and with considerable bloodshed restored the Catholic faith and the pope’s authority. Although Elizabeth clung to her Protestant beliefs, she was careful to make a pretense of Catholic practice. In the face of investigations by Mary’s inquisitors, she learned the valuable political lesson of keeping her own counsel.

  When Elizabeth succeeded Mary as queen of England in 1558, she further showed her political good sense by making the extremely capable Sir William Cecil (later Lord Burghley) her chief minister, and he continued to serve her until his death in 1598. One of the first challenges Elizabeth faced as an attractive, young and highly eligible queen was whom she should marry. Through her reign she had a succession of male favorites, most notably Robert Dudley, earl of Leicester, but she never married. She herself claimed that she was wedded to her realm and could not give her love (or, indeed, obedience) to just one man. Whatever her inner feelings, it seems that she realized that marrying a foreign prince would threaten England with foreign domination, while marrying an English nobleman would sow dissension among the court factions and possibly plunge England back into the civil strife of the previous century, the time of the Wars of the Roses.