above people are all found in the sources of the time with exception of those who are preceded by an asterisk. The asterisk within parentheses means that the person is found in passing, but not given a name.
Prologue
The year 1521 began a new era in a new world, with new nations, new continents, new knowledge, new thought, and new rulers. Never before had so much power been gathered in such young hands.
In France, His Most Christian Majesty, the twenty-six year old King Francis I ruled when he cared to rule, and not hunt, dance, and write love letters in poor verse to Madame de Chateaubriand. Spoiled, admired, successful, and self-centered, he could already look back on great successes. Counted among the greatest of his successes were that he beat the invincible Swiss at Marignano, and his cousin Henry in wrestling when they met the summer before at Camp du Drap d’Or, the Camp of the Golden Cloth, the boasting camp, a most absurd gala and spectacle of luxury.
Henry VIII, the vanquished, was the oldest among the youngsters, already filling out twenty-nine years. He too had thrown himself with an insatiable appetite on all the possibilities that the monarchy and a full treasury offered. He was an impressive athlete with a lust for life. He hunted, reveled, loved, drank, rode, danced, and shot to his heart’s desire. He left the detestable paper work to his Lord Chancellor. But he was also an educated man, a driven disputer and author, who just finished a polemical pamphlet against the heretic Luther. Over the last year he had begun to slowly pull in the reins. After all the magnificence of Camp du Drap d’Or and the spectacular fraternization with his cousin Francis, he had very calmly dealt with Emperor Carl in order to keep other opportunities open.
Emperor Carl was the youngest of the youngsters, still only twenty years old. That past October he had been crowned as Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire of the German nations. Commonly described as poorly gifted, a bungler when it came to foreign languages, ugly, serious, and reticent, he had inherited lands and crowns that his father and his grandfathers had brought together: the Burgundian and the Austrian land inheritances along with Spain and all its vassal lands in southern Italy, and beyond the sea where the empire continued to grow. Cortez completed the conquest of Mexico, and Magellan had rounded Cape Horn to cross the Pacific Ocean completing the first circumnavigation of the world. The foreign envoys that followed the youth cautiously watched the emperor during his trip through the Netherlands and Germany, reporting that he did not appear to be quite as incompetent as was thought.
In Germany, a man rode on winter roads to the diet in Worms. Curiosity had peaked before the meeting with the Emperor, and possibly even more at the prospect of seeing brother Martin from Wittenberg. He had received the Emperor’s safe-conduct, and everyone knew that he was thinking about coming. But what would happen if he did was anyone’s guess.
In Rome, Pope Leo X hurled the final condemnations against the rebellious monk on the third of January. At forty-five years old, Leo was already an old man, out of shape, fat, shortsighted, in debt up to his ears, and spoiled since his childhood when he began using church income for his own needs, made happy with an abbot’s diocese at eight years old, a bishopric at eleven, and an appointment to cardinal at thirteen. He was soon well positioned in the Holy City, but tragically incapable of understanding men who treated the question of their salvation with deathly seriousness.
That same January three men skied through the snow covered Swedish border forests on the way to Mora. Two of them had fetched the third, a twenty-six year old of the Vasa dynasty. None of them thought that that name would one day have the same fame as Valois, Tudor, Habsburg, and Medici.
Beyond the borders of Christendom, yet another youngster took the lead. At the same time as Carl V was crowned in Aachen, the tenth Sultan of the Ottomans ascended to his father’s throne. He too was twenty-six and was named Suleiman. Ruler of one of the world’s most powerful kingdoms, he was also an unknown quantity. In Rome, in Paris, and Madrid, people breathed a sigh of relief. Selim, his father, had been the old threat from the east, towering over them with the dreaded crescent moon. Now everyone hoped for breathing space, to plan their festivities, engage in intrigue, and cultivate old mutual grudges.
On Rhodes
On Rhodes, the Grand Master, the old Frabrizio del Carretto, lay dying.
He breathed heavily behind the curtains in the great bed of carved Cypress wood. It was dark in the room and cold. The wood shutters in the window squeaked and creaked in the wind; one could hear the rain patter on the windy side.
On the second day of the year, the Grand Master began to have the shivers. It was now the seventh day, the fever only climbed, and he began to realize that he would never again go down the great stone stairway to the fortress garden. He had selected his successor as the rules prescribed, the Chancellor d’ Amaral. And now he lay there feverish, coughing and wheezing, while memories passed by in the border between delirium and consciousness.
Where was he now, really? Certainly, he was on San Nicolò, the night of the great year 1480, when everything hung by a thread. There he lay now, among the stone blocks, commander of the little battered fort that could not be allowed to fall. Day and night the Turks’ frightful bombards belched out their fire over the bay, out of mouths so great that one could crawl into them. They came dangerously, howling and roaring like hounds from the abyss, these stone balls so huge that a grown man could just barely get his arms around them. They crashed into the gathered piles of broken stone. Far away, on the other side, the impact felt like a punch in the chest. Everything lay in ruins, but in the middle of the ruins they gathered the splintered blocks with their chafed and broken hands making new walls. There they hid, just a handful of knights and about two hundred slaves, who would do the impossible. He would do it. He, Fabrizio del Carretto, had received the honor of leading the command in the hold that could not fall in this final trial of strength with the Grand Turk.
It was quiet in the night, for three days and three nights the stone balls had mercilessly plowed their furrows in the stacks of ruins. Now the cannons were quiet over there on the other side of the Mandraki’s black water. He knew what this meant, and he waited. It was a July night, warm and humid with a wind from the sea that made everything wet and gave no relief. He had not been out of his armor for many days. The sweat ran in small rivulets down his legs. It burned and itched under the back plate. The stones under him were hot like an oven.
The Grand Master tossed and turned under his wet sheets, one leg burning the other . . . May they come soon.
And here they come! Long black bodies against the cape, rowing with cautiously dipped oars. One, two, four, six . . . There was no point counting: the whole surface of the sea was covered with galleys. They were spread evenly, gliding each in their own place into the Mandraki and across to the pier on the other side. They came in a great pincer maneuver, like a dragon opening his black mouth. His teeth were ships.
No alarm was needed, only a whisper that went from man to man among the heaps of stone. The matches were already glowing red behind the blocks. All orders were given. No shot would be fired before La Bella Batteria, the thick German cannon sitting here next to his side, opened fire.
Now the time had come. He only needed to give Master Gerhard a glance and lift his forefinger. Then flames would spew out of the cannon’s wide mouth. Then all hell would break loose with fire out of every black hole in the blood-drenched piles of stone. The black smoke was colored red with new flashes. Salvo after salvo broke out from the French wall far behind them. The black water heaved with jetsam and flotsam. The boats lifted, rolled and sank. But they still came on, perpetual new rows of oars glittering in the cannon flash. As a powerful swell, the Janissaries rolled in over the block in the beach line, a crest that broke and sank only to come again.
And now it was hand-to-hand combat. Hacking and slashing with the heavy two-handed swords that cleaved the Turkish mail with
