Titans of History (27 page)

Moctezuma believed Cortés to be the incarnation of the Aztec god Quetzalcoatl (the Feathered Serpent), and, having heard of the military superiority of the intruders, was anxious to avoid direct confrontation. For his part, Cortés was determined to receive the submission of the Aztec emperor to the Spanish king, and to this end he took Moctezuma prisoner.

Back in Cuba, meanwhile, Velázquez had grown jealous of Cortés' success, and in 1520 he sent a force under Pánfilo de Narváez to retrieve the insubordinate conquistador. Despite the numerical inferiority of his troops compared to those of Narváez, Cortés defeated the challenge. However, during his absence from Tenochtitlán, the man he had left in charge had slaughtered many of the city's leading figures and provoked an uprising, during which Moctezuma was killed. After attempting to re-enter Tenochtitlán, Cortés was forced to abandon it and only just avoided defeat at the hands of pursuing Aztec forces.

Having regrouped in the lands of his allies, the Tlaxcala, he returned in late 1520, intent on recapturing the city. In the war that followed, the Spaniard sought to break the Aztec resistance through a strategy of attrition. Tenochtitlán was isolated, and resistance eventually crushed. The fall of the city effectively marked the end of the Aztec empire. Cortés was now the undisputed master of the territory, which he renamed the New Spain of the Ocean Sea.

As governor of the new colony from 1521 to 1524, Cortés oversaw the destruction of many artifacts of Aztec culture. The indigenous people were forced into a system of forced labor, under which they were ruthlessly exploited for centuries to come. All the while, the principal concern of the Spanish conqueror was personal aggrandizement. Those who suffered under Cortés' yoke were finally relieved of their burden when he was dismissed from his post by the Spanish king, who had received various reports of his viceroy's misrule. In 1528 Cortés returned to Spain to plead his case, but despite being made marques del Valle de Oaxaca, Cortés was not convinced he had won the king's support. Charles V never forgave him for his insubordination to royal officials and would never let him command in Europe.

The final two decades of Cortés' life saw the increasingly embittered conquistador journeying back and forth between Spain and
his estates in the New World, and attempting to counter what he felt were the lies of his “various and powerful rivals and enemies.” Vastly rich, perhaps the most titanic European of his time, the marquis of the Valley died in 1547, en route to South America.

1491–1547

He never spared a man in his anger, nor a woman in his lust
.

Sir Robert Naunton,
Fragmenta Regalia
, 1641

Henry VIII was a golden and gifted boy who grew up to become a forceful, energetic and ambitious ruler—he was a majestic and ruthless monarch who created an “imperial” monarchy by asserting English independence, defying Rome, breaking up the monasteries, promoting his realm's military and naval power and his own autocracy, all ultimately enabling the triumph of Protestantism. Yet he became a bloated, thin-skinned tyrant who ordered the killing—on faked evidence—of many, including two of his wives, because of his own wounded pride. He was, in his paranoid cruelty, the English Stalin.

Henry was second son of the shrewd, mean and pragmatic Henry VII who, as Henry Tudor, had seized the throne in 1485, reconciling the York and Lancaster factions after the Wars of the Roses, and established a new dynasty. The early death of his heir, Prince Arthur, in 1502, shortly after marrying Catherine of Aragon, highlighted the fragility of the parvenu Tudors, which explains much of Henry VIII's ruthlessness over the succession.
Henry succeeded to the throne in 1509 and married his late brother's Spanish widow. He was handsome, strapping and vigorous but also highly educated: courtiers hailed the dawning of a golden age. He promoted his glory with the macho sporting entertainments of a Renaissance prince—hunting, jousting, dancing, feasting—and won popularity by executing his father's hated tax collectors, Empson and Dudley, on spurious charges. It set the pattern for how Henry would dispose of his ministers when expedient.

Henry longed to test his vigor in the lists of Europe, where Francis I of France and the Habsburg emperor, Charles V, were vying for dominance. He started to build a navy, including his huge battleship the
Mary Rose
(which later sank). At first, he backed the emperor against the French, leading an army to France and winning the Battle of Spurs in 1513, while defeating a Scottish invasion at Flodden. He made peace with France, meeting Francis at a magnificent summit, the Field of the Cloth of Gold, stage-managed by his able and hugely rich minister Cardinal Thomas Wolsey—a butcher's son who had risen to the scarlet—but after Francis was captured at Pavia in 1525, Henry again changed sides, aspiring to hold the balance of power in Europe.

Henry's queen, Catherine of Aragon, Emperor Charles V's aunt, had provided him with a girl, the future Queen Mary, rather than a male heir—an affront to Henry's pride and dynastic sensitivity, so he sought, via Wolsey, to have the marriage to his brother's widow annulled. The pope, under the influence of Emperor Charles, would not permit Catherine to be cast aside. “The king's great matter” was not just a matter of personality but of Henry's insistence that his crown was “imperial”—not subordinate to the pope or any other power. This became even more important when he fell in love with Anne Boleyn, one of Catherine's ladies-in-waiting, who—flirtatious, intelligent and ambitious—withheld her favors
before marriage. The pope remained intransigent, so Henry turned on Wolsey. The cardinal would have faced the ax but died on his way to face charges of treason.

Henry now decided on a radical course, and in his Act of Supremacy and Treason Act of 1534 declared himself head of the Church in England and independent of the pope. At last Henry's marriage to Catherine could be annulled, and in 1533 he married Anne Boleyn.

Henry, backed by his rising minister Thomas Cromwell, repressed anyone who questioned his religious policies: his former chancellor, Thomas More, was executed. A rebellion in the north, the Pilgrimage of Grace (1536), was defeated, then dispersed on Henry's word of honor, which he then broke, executing the rebels ruthlessly. Throughout his reign, Henry was pitiless in killing anyone who opposed him: after Dudley and Empson he went on to execute Edmund de la Pole, earl of Suffolk, in 1513, Edward Stafford, duke of Buckingham, in 1521, all the way to the young poet Henry Howard, earl of Surrey, in the last days of his life. His number of victims is hard to calculate—the historian Holinshed absurdly claimed 72,000—but there were many.

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.

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.