Titans of History

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  Inquisitors would arrive in a town and convene a special Mass, which all were obliged to attend. There they would preach a sermon before calling on those guilty of heresy to come forward and confess. Suspected transgressors were given a period of thirty to forty days to turn themselves in. Those who complied were liable to be “rewarded” with a less severe penalty than those who proved recalcitrant. Nevertheless, all who did confess were also required to identify other heretics who had not complied. Denunciation was thus as integral to the working of the inquisition as confession. In consequence, the inquisition quickly became an opportunity to settle old scores.

  The accused were arrested and thrown into prison, and their property, and that of their family, was confiscated. Interrogation then followed, the inquisitors being instructed to apply torture according to their “conscience and will.” A suspect could have water forced down his throat, be stretched on the rack, or hung with his hands tied behind his back—whatever was deemed necessary to extract a confession. Many were maimed in the process; countless others died. And for those who broke under the pressure, there was only one outcome: death by burning. Before being burned alive at the euphemistically named auto da fé (act of faith), the victim had two choices. They could repent and kiss the cross, or remain defiant. In the former case they were granted the mercy of being garroted prior to the flames being lit; otherwise, a protracted and hideously painful death was sure to follow.

  In 1482 Torquemada was appointed as one of the inquisitors, and shortly afterward he became inquisitor general, the most senior position in the entire organization.

  Torquemada was now almost as powerful as Ferdinand and Isabella themselves; certainly, he was more feared than the temporal authorities. Under his guiding hand the inquisition hit new heights of activity. In 1484 he oversaw the proclamation of twenty-eight articles, listing the sins that the inquisition was attempting to expose and purge. They ranged from apostasy and blasphemy to sodomy and sorcery—though many were focused on identifying and exposing Jews. During the course of their investigations, inquisitors were empowered to use all means necessary to discover the truth—a ruling that de facto legitimized torture in pursuit of a forced confession.

  The result was a policy of violent persecution. In the month of February 1484 alone, thirty people in the city of Ciudad Real were found guilty of an assortment of “crimes” and burned alive. Between 1485 and 1501, 250 were burned in Toledo; and on one occasion in 1492, in Torquemada’s home town of Valladolid, thirty-two people were burned in one inferno.

  Arguing that the soul of Spain was in jeopardy, Torquemada declared that the Jews, in particular, were a mortal threat, and in 1492 Ferdinand and Isabella decreed that all Jews who had not accepted the truth of the Christian revelation were to be expelled from Spain. Some 30–80,000 left the country—many of them rescued and given sanctuary by the tolerant Islamic Ottomans in Istanbul, Izmir and Salonika (modern Thessaloniki in Greece).

  Torquemada still did not deem his work done, and even refused the bishopric of Seville to continue in his role. In so doing, he found that the rewards of his exertions were not solely spiritual; indeed, he amassed a large personal fortune from the confiscated wealth of those whom the Inquisition had found guilty of heresy. Wherever he traveled, he was accompanied by fifty mounted men and 250 foot soldiers, a force that reflected his growing unpopularity, but which also added to the terror and awe inspired when he arrived in a new town to root out its heretics.

  Ultimately, only death removed Torquemada from office. Over the previous two decades his relentless zeal had led to as many as two thousand people meeting a hideous end in the flames. Torquemada will forever be remembered as religious bigotry personified—the living incarnation of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor who seeks to burn Jesus Christ himself for the sake of his beloved Catholic Church, but who ends up in a spiritual abyss.

  VLAD THE IMPALER

  1431–76

  His way of life was as evil as his name.

  Late-15th-century Russian manuscript

  Vlad III, hospodar (prince) of Wallachia, claimed he was saving his Christian people from the Muslim Ottomans, but he was more interested in wielding his personal power in the treacherous intrigues of local dynastic and imperial politics. He was a degenerate, murderous sadist who displayed a cruelty so savage that he inspired the legend of Dracula. Yet the story of Dracula is tame compared with the reality. Murdering tens of thousands of people—from crippled peasants and vagrants to nobles and foreign ambassadors—he became known as the Impaler Prince: his favorite method of execution was to impale his victims on sharpened wooden stakes, oiled at the tip and inserted into their intestines. Vlad was most likely born in a military fortress, the citadel of Sighisoara, Transylvania (part of today’s Romania) in 1431. His family name was Dracul, meaning dragon, handed down through his father, who had been a member of the Order of the Dragon—which Vlad also joined at the age of five—a secret organization created by the holy Roman emperor to uphold Christianity and resist Muslim Ottoman incursions into Europe. His mother was a Moldavian princess and his father Vlad II, a former prince of Wallachia, exiled in Transylvania.

  When Vlad was a child, his father, under threat of attack from the Ottoman sultan, had been forced to reassure the Turks of his obedience by sending two of his sons, including Vlad, into Ottoman custody in 1444. The experience, lasting four years, in which he was beaten and whipped for his insolence and fiery character, left Vlad with a hatred of the Turks.

  Wallachia (also in modern-day Romania) was not a traditional hereditary monarchy and although Vlad had a claim to the throne, his father’s exile put him in a weak position. His elder brother, Mircea II, ruled briefly in 1442, but was forced into hiding the following year and eventually captured by his enemies in 1447, who burned out his eyes and buried him alive. Wallachian politics were duplicitous and brutal: Vlad’s young brother, Radu the Handsome, later enlisted the help of the Ottoman sultan Mehmet II to oust his brother.

  In 1447, the same year Mircea was killed, boyars (regional noble families) loyal to John Hunyadi, the White Knight of Hungary, also captured and murdered Vlad’s father, claiming he was too dependent on the Ottomans. The Ottomans invaded shortly afterward to assert their control in the region and installed the seventeen-year-old Vlad as a puppet prince in 1448, only for Hunyadi to intervene again and force him to flee to Moldavia. Vlad subsequently took the bold step of traveling to Hungary—with which Wallachia had repeatedly been at war. Impressing Hunyadi with his anti-Ottoman credentials, he eventually became Hungary’s preferred candidate for the Wallachian throne.

  In 1456, as the Hungarians attacked the Ottomans in Serbia, Vlad used the opportunity to invade and take control of Wallachia, killing his rival Vladislav II from the Danesti clan, and taking the throne back for the Draculs. On Easter Sunday, he invited the leading boyars to a banquet, killing the oldest and enslaving those who were still young enough to work. Many died working on new fortifications for Vlad’s castles in conditions so severe that their noble finery disintegrated, leaving them naked.

  Establishing Tirgoviste as his capital, Vlad was determined to make Wallachia a great kingdom, with a prosperous and healthy people. To him, however, that meant eradicating the nobility, as well as anyone else perceived as a drain on the country’s resources. Among his targets were the poorest and most vulnerable—vagrants, the disabled and the mentally ill—thousands of whom he invited to a feast in Tirgoviste, only to lock them in the hall and burn them alive as soon as they had finished eating. (It was dangerous to accept an invitation from Vlad, but even more dangerous to refuse.) Vlad also persecuted women accused of immoral acts such as adultery—their breasts were cut off, and they were then skinned or boiled alive, and their bodies put on public display. German merchants living in Transylvania, whom he regarded as foreign parasites, were also the object of the wrath of Vlad. On St. Bartholomew’s Day, 1459 he ordered the execution of 30,000 merchants and boyars from the city o
f Brasov—10,000 more followed in Sibiu the following year.

  Usually his victims were impaled. Death was excruciating and could take hours, as the stake eventually made its way through the guts and out of the mouth. Executing thousands at the same time, he would organize the stakes in concentric circles round his castles, and forbid anyone to remove the victim, often dining in the presence of rotting flesh—the higher the rank, the longer the stake reserved for them. Other methods of execution included skinning and boiling, and he once hammered nails into the heads of foreign ambassadors who refused to remove their hats at his court. Such was his bloodthirstiness that it was also rumored he drank the blood of his victims and feasted on their flesh.

  In the winter of 1461–2, he crossed the Danube and pillaged the Ottoman-controlled area between Serbia and the Black Sea, killing 20,000 people. As Sultan Mehmet II gathered tens of thousands of troops for a revenge mission, they arrived on the banks of the Danube to see 20,000 Turkish prisoners whom Vlad’s armies had impaled, creating a forest of bodies on stakes.

  Despite a daring attempt to infiltrate the enemy camp in disguise and kill the sultan, Vlad was overwhelmed by the scale of the Ottoman onslaught. As the Turks surrounded his castle in 1462, his wife jumped from the window, while Vlad fled, and the Ottomans installed his younger brother Radu on the throne. Captured by the Hungarians, Vlad spent the next ten years in custody, dreaming of regaining his throne while impaling mice and birds on miniature stakes. Somehow, he secured the backing of the Hungarians again, remarrying into the Hungarian royal family and winning support for his invasion of Wallachia in 1476, when he briefly deposed the new ruler, Basarab the Elder of the Danesti. Once again, however, he was no match for the invading Ottomans, and he was killed near Bucharest, perhaps even by his own men, his head removed and sent back to Constantinople, where it was displayed on a stick.

  RICHARD III

  1452–85

  And thus I clothe my naked villainy

  With old odd ends stolen out of holy writ,

  And seem a saint when most I play the devil.

  Richard III in William Shakespeare,

  Richard III, Act 1, scene 3

  Richard III was the hunchbacked usurper whose infamous murder of his own two nephews, one of them the rightful king of England, brought about his own destruction. Since he lost his throne to the Tudors, it was they who wrote the history of Richard III to assert the claim of their own dynasty, probably exaggerating his pitiless ambition and physical deformities.

  Richard was the second son of Richard, 3rd duke of York, and Cecily Neville, daughter of Ralph Neville, 1st earl of Westmorland and granddaughter of John of Gaunt. An ugly child with protruding teeth, he grew up during the War of the Roses, fought between the rival dynastic houses of Lancaster and York. After the triumph of the Yorkists in March 1461, in a struggle that saw his father killed in battle, Richard’s eldest brother became King Edward IV.

  From 1465 Richard was raised in the house of his cousin Richard Neville, later known as the Kingmaker, although there is no reason to believe that young Richard set his sights on the throne at this stage. He gave every sign of loyalty to his brother Edward, for which he was duly rewarded, gaining land and positions of influence. After the Lancastrians had briefly reinstated Henry VI as king in 1470, forcing the York brothers into exile in The Hague, Richard joined Edward on his campaign of 1471, in which Henry VI was deposed for a second time.

  An able general and skilled administrator, Richard was entrusted with control of the north of England during Edward’s reign, and earned a reputation for fairness and justice. He acquired a string of castles in Yorkshire, Durham and Cumbria during the Yorkist campaigns, but his loyalty—shown for example in a successful campaign that Richard waged on Edward’s behalf against the Scots in 1481—meant that the king tolerated his brother’s growing influence.

  In 1478, Richard may have allowed himself to dream of the crown for the first time when George, the middle York brother, was executed for treason, possibly at Richard’s behest, thus removing another potential obstacle to the throne. But it was when Edward IV died unexpectedly on April 9, 1483 that his ambitions were truly laid bare. Next in line to the throne was the twelve-year-old Edward V, followed by his nine-year-old brother, Richard of Shrewsbury, the two sons of the king’s beautiful wife, Elizabeth Woodville. As the lord protector of the late king’s will, Richard swore allegiance to his young nephew, but less than a month later he seized first Edward, then his younger brother, and imprisoned them both in the Tower of London.

  Richard initially claimed he had seized the two boys for their own protection, and, on specious charges of treason, ordered the execution of those previously entrusted with their care. Just two months later, however, he had an announcement made outside St. Paul’s Cathedral declaring Edward IV’s marriage to Elizabeth Woodville illegitimate since, according to the testimony of an unnamed bishop, Edward was already secretly married at the time to his mistress, Lady Eleanor Butler. Richard forced an act through Parliament to annul the marriage posthumously, simultaneously bastardizing his nephews and clearing his own way to the throne. After quashing a brief uprising against him, he was crowned Richard III at Westminster Abbey on July 6, 1483.

  To secure his position, Richard seized and brutally murdered several barons who might oppose his accession. He was acutely aware, however, that, as long as they lived, his two nephews would pose a serious threat to his rule, so it must have surprised no one when, in the summer of 1483, both boys were declared missing. By autumn, it was widely assumed they were dead and nobody doubted their uncle was responsible. According to Sir Thomas More, writing some years afterward, the two boys were smothered on the king’s orders as they slept. It was not until 1647, when the skeletons of two children were discovered under a staircase in the Tower, that they were finally buried in Westminster Abbey.

  That Richard had murdered the princes was accepted as true during his reign and regarded with horror even in those brutal times. For contemporary chroniclers, deformity was sign of an evil character and Richard’s actions in 1483 evoked the image of the startlingly ugly creature they described: buck teeth, excessive body hair from birth, a crooked back, withered arm and haggard face. According to one chronicler, he was tight-lipped and fidgety, “ever with his right hand pulling out of the sheath to the middle, and putting in again, the dagger which he did always wear.” Some historians believe that the chroniclers—serving as Tudor propagandists—may have exaggerated Richard’s deformities, but it says much about his reputation that it is the nervy and sinister hunchback portrayed in William Shakespeare’s Richard III that subsequent generations have come to know, “so lamely and unfashionable/That dogs bark at me as I halt by them.”

  His chief Lancastrian rival, Henry Tudor—who later launched an organized campaign to blacken Richard’s name and present him as a monster—collected an army on the continent and invaded England in a campaign that reached a climax at the Battle of Bosworth Field on August 22, 1485. The turning point of the encounter came when Henry Percy, the earl of Northumberland, refused to throw his reserves into the battle, while Richard’s ostensible allies, Thomas Stanley, afterward the earl of Derby, and his brother, Sir William—who had been waiting to see which way the battle turned—intervened on the side of Henry. Though Richard continued to fight on bravely, hacking his way through the opposing army and very nearly reaching Henry himself, he was eventually encircled and killed by the poleaxe of a Welshman. The last Plantagenet king of England, Richard had reigned for just two years. Henry Tudor became Henry VII, his dynasty ruling until the death of Elizabeth I in 1603.

  SAVONAROLA

  1452–98

  The first city to be renewed will be Florence … as God elected the people of Israel to be led by Moses through tribulation to felicity … so now the people of Florence have been called to a similar role led by a prophetic man, their new Moses [Savonarola himself] … In the Sabbath Age men will rejoice in the New Church and
there will be one flock and one shepherd.

  Girolamo Savonarola’s “Sermon on the New Age,” 1490s

  The Italian Dominican friar Girolamo Savonarola was a reactionary zealot and bigoted theocrat who vehemently opposed the humanism of the Florentine Renaissance. His “Bonfire of the Vanities” burned books and art he deemed immoral. Savonarola’s “Christian and religious republic” was an intolerant, sanctimonious and murderous reign of terror.

  Born and raised in the city of Ferrara (then the capital of an independent duchy), Savonarola received his first education from his paternal grandfather, Michele Savonarola, before moving on to university. His earliest writings already exhibited the mixture of pessimism and moralizing for which he would become notorious; the poems “De Ruina Mundi” (“On the Downfall of the World”) and “De Ruina Ecclesiae” (“On the Downfall of the Church”) are exemplary in this regard.

  In 1475 Savonarola entered the Dominican order at the convent of San Domenico in Bologna. Four years later he transferred back to the convent of Santa Maria degli Angeli in his native Ferrara, before finally becoming the prior of the convent at San Marco in Florence. It was here that he would earn his place in history.

  From the outset, Savonarola denounced the political and religious corruption he believed to have permeated society. His Lent sermons of 1485–6 were especially vehement, and it was during those addresses that he began to call for the cleansing of the Church as a prelude to its reform.

  In 1487 Savonarola left Florence for a time to return to Bologna as “master of studies,” but in 1490 he returned on the encouragement of the humanist philosopher Count Pico della Mirandola and with the patronage of Lorenzo de Medici, the ruler of Florence. Once back in Florence, Savonarola soon set about excoriating the very government that had made his return possible. In florid language, Savonarola heralded the approaching “end of days” and claimed to be in direct contact with God and the saints. He condemned the alleged tyranny of the Medicis, and prophesied the impending doom of Florence, unless the city changed its ways.