And the Rest Is History (4 page)

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1607

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

T
he man who was renowned as king of the world achieved immortality not through empire, but rather through the monument he erected as an immortal tribute to the woman he loved.

The eastern fairy tale began in India with the birth of Prince Khurram Shihab-ud-din-Muhammad, the third and favorite son of Emperor Jahangir and his second wife. The name Khurram, Persian for “joyful,” was bestowed by his grandfather. As a youth he distinguished himself in martial arts, as a military commander, and in architecture. His destiny, Arjumand Banu Begum, was born in Agra, in what was then the Mogul Empire, which stretched from Russia to China and included modern India, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.

The first time Khurram met Arjumand was when the fifteen-year-old prince was strolling in the Meena Bazaar, the private market attached to the harem. Every female at the marketplace held a torch for the handsome, fabulously wealthy son of Emperor Jahangir. However, it wasn't until he passed an exquisitely beautiful girl whose stall was filled with silk and glass beads that his attention was caught. Khurram asked the girl the price of the largest of the trinkets, and, in the age-old language of flirtation, she replied it was a precious diamond, one he could not afford. He paid her the fantastic sum of ten thousand rupees and left carrying the glass bead, as well as the heart of the girl—Arjumand.

That evening he asked his father's permission to marry Arjumand, the daughter of the prime minister, and the emperor raised his right hand in assent, as his son was his favorite, and as he too was in awe of Arjumand's dazzling allure. However, the emperor declared that the marriage could not take place for five years, and that his son could not see his intended for that period and would have to first marry another wife, a Persian princess, for political reasons. The emperor's word was law, and the prince was obliged to wed two times and to carry out his conjugal duties with each one; his unions produced two children.

In 1612, the court astrologers agreed on an auspicious date for the royal union, and the couple, now nineteen and twenty, still madly in love, could finally be together. The emperor arranged for the wedding of the millennium, and he himself adorned his new daughter-in-law with a wedding wreath of pearls. He also changed her name to Mumtaz Mahal, meaning “ornament of the palace.” The couple headed the wedding procession, surrounded by the officials of state wearing robes of spun gold, slaves shooing off flies, servants carrying torches, and dervishes reciting from their prayer beads. Behind them followed musicians and dancers, acrobats, exotic animals in cages, slaves, and priests.

The ceremony was a fitting prelude for their gloriously happy union. During their years of marriage, Khurram built Mumtaz Mahal sumptuous palaces, showered her with jewels, ignored his polygamous rights with his two other wives, and even entrusted her with the royal seal. Full-time poets were employed at court to extol the beauty of the empress. However, all was not charmed.

In the Mogul Empire, the throne was not passed down through primogeniture; rather the royal inheritance dictated that the male heirs had to compete with one another for the scepter. This, of course, created fraternal ties similar to the ones shared by Cain and Abel. Upon Emperor Jahangir's death, a war of succession ignited among his five sons. After years of fighting, during which his brothers all died under highly suspicious circumstances, twenty-five-year-old Prince Khurram was victorious. He was crowned king and given the title Shah Jahan, which translates to “king of the world.”

Because of the shah's conquests, his empire grew in size, power, and opulence and was the superpower of its epoch. In true megalomaniac fashion, he built monuments to his power. Immediately following his coronation in 1628, he commissioned the creation of a gold-and-jewel-encrusted Peacock Throne. It took seven years to complete and had as its centerpiece the famous Koh-i-Noor diamond, once valued at half the wealth of India. Today, the fabled jewel is among the crown jewels of Queen Elizabeth. Inscribed on the arches of the ceremonial chair were the words
If there be paradise on earth, it is here
. However, for the shah, paradise did not come from his boundless wealth, but from the queen who was his ever-faithful companion, Mumtaz Mahal.

The shah and the empress loved each other to such an extent that throughout their twenty years of marriage they were inseparable. Not willing to be parted from her husband, she was always willing to forgo the pleasures of their palace for the rigors of his military campaigns. Tragically, on one of these, after giving birth to her fourteenth child in nineteen years, she became seriously ill from complications stemming from the delivery. On her deathbed, she asked her husband to erect a monument to their love.

The shah was consumed with grief at her death and went into a weeklong seclusion during which he refused all food. The only sound his ministers heard coming from the locked room was a low, continuous moan. When he emerged, he was a changed man: His black hair had turned white, his back was bent, and his spirit was gone. He ordered his empire to observe two years of mourning; all music, public amusements, perfumes, cosmetics, jewelry, and brightly colored clothes were forbidden. The “king of the world,” after all, was essentially just a man.

He declared his life's mission: to create the most magnificent structure in the world to immortalize his lost love. The shah placed all his resources into his passion to leave a monument fitting for Mumtaz Mahal. Because Islamic belief forbids graphic representations of the divine, his vision of eternity had to be symbolized: His wife's mausoleum was to be one of divine geometry, symmetry, and grace. From the four corners of his far-flung empire, transported on the backs of a thousand elephants, came priceless treasures of marble, gold, and jewels. A labor force of twenty thousand men toiled on erecting the tomb for twenty years. The finished mausoleum combined Hindu, Persian, Turkish, and Buddhist elements so that its design was entirely unique. The marble building clad in white was covered with designs, each inlaid with precious jewels created by the greatest artisans of the day. The entire edifice was reflected in a pool so its beauty could be seen on a shimmering surface. The crowning touch of the structure is its dome, reminiscent of a giant pearl floating above the building's four minarets, recalling the prophet Muhammad's vision of the throne of God as a pearl surrounded by four pillars. It was the shah's most fervent prayer that one day he would stand before this throne, where God would usher him into paradise, to a reunion with Mumtaz.

In a story that may be urban legend, the shah ordered the blinding of his chief architect so he would never again be able to create such magnificence. Another tale is that during the rainy season, only one droplet of rain falls on the queen's tomb, which is why the poet Rabindranath Tagore described it as “one tear-drop ... upon the cheek of time.”

Soon after the mausoleum was completed, Shah Jahan was to receive another sword in his already broken heart. Seeing their father's weakened state, his children began fighting in a vicious power struggle for the Peacock Throne. Eventually his son Aurangzeb proved himself the most skilled in fratricide, after which he deposed the king. He imprisoned the shah in his own palace, the Red Fort, which became his cell. He was allowed every luxury except freedom. In contrast to his son's perfidy, his daughter, Jahanara, volunteered to remain at his side for his remaining years, although that too made her a virtual prisoner.

For most of the eight years he was under palace arrest, Shah Jahan gazed out the window at the building he had created, inspired by the woman he had treasured beyond all else. To those who see with their eyes, the emperor was merely indulging in vanity, reflecting that he had given birth to something immortal. However, to those who see with their hearts, he was merely looking at the place where his wife waited for him to lie by her side once more.

In 1666, Khurram fell ill with dysentery; after reciting verses from the Qur'an, he slipped from this world to the next. The embodiment of an emperor's devotion for his “ornament of the palace” was the Taj Mahal—the jewel in the crown of world architecture, rendered more beautiful when one knows that within its depths lie entombed those whose love story caused its creation.

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1795

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I
t is common knowledge that France's most acclaimed general possessed the ambition of the Scottish general Macbeth. What is less well known is that Bonaparte also possessed the romance of a Romeo and the jealousy of an Othello. These latter characteristics became manifest when he fell in love with the Rose of Martinique.

Napoleone di Buonaparte was born in Corsica (which had recently come under the dominion of France) in 1759, the second of eight children. At age sixteen he was sent to the elite École Militaire in Paris, where he trained to become an artillery officer. The British general Wellington, when asked who was the greatest general of his day answered, “In this age, in past ages, in any age, Napoleon.”

Napoleon's destiny, Marie Josephe Rose Tascher de la Pagerie, proves that one can never foretell where the spotlight of fame will cast its beam. The girl from a sugar plantation in Martinique was to one day stand on the center stage of her epoch.

When hurricanes destroyed his crop, Marie's financially strapped father arranged an advantageous marriage between his sixteen-year-old daughter (then called Rose) and Viscount Alexandre de Beauharnais. Upon meeting her fiancé, she was ecstatic; he was young, wealthy, well connected at court, and reputed to be one of the best dancers in Paris. On the other hand, she was provincial and barely literate. Another legacy of her birthplace was rotting and blackened teeth, a direct result of the sugar-saturated cuisine of her childhood. Self-conscious, she tried her best to keep from smiling. Rose and Alexandre had two children, Hortense and Eugene, whom he left to court glory in the American War of Independence. However, renown was not all he courted. The ever-energetic Alexandre left a number of mistresses and illegitimate children in his wake.

The young viscount's enthusiasm was finally halted during the Reign of Terror, when he was guillotined. As a nobleman's spouse, Rose was similarly incarcerated, and she shared a cell with Marie Grosholtz. Both women had their heads shaved, awaiting their appointment with the guillotine. The latter was to survive and achieve fame as Madame Tussaud; the former was to achieve fame in a far different fashion.

Following an outbreak of violence, a law was passed in France forbidding any citizen to possess weapons. Eugene de Beauharnais, unwilling to surrender his father's sword, beseeched General Bonaparte to let him keep his precious memento. He acceded to the child's request, and the rest was history.

The first time Napoleon met Josephine was on October 14, when Rose went to thank the general for his kindness. He was instantly smitten and remarked to a friend, “She had that certain something that was irresistible. She was a woman to her very fingertips.” The only quality he disliked was her name, and, in the spirit of “a rose by any other name would smell as sweet” (or in this case, sweeter), he called her Josephine. Napoleon was brought to his knees.