Titans of History

by Simon Sebag Montefiore

  In 1721, he finally won his peace with Sweden and with it more territories around the Baltic. Peter was declared emperor of Russia, the first Russian monarch to add this title alongside the traditional honorific of tsar. Yet his murder of his son and his failure to appoint a male heir left an uncertain legacy. He was first succeeded by his peasant-born empress, who ruled as Catherine I, backed by Peter’s friend Prince Menshikov. But her death brought Peter’s young grandson, a child controlled by Muscovite conservatives, to the throne as Peter II. The unstable succession led to decades of palace coups and female rulers such as his daughter Elizaveta and, later, the wife of his grandson, Catherine the Great.

  Probably Russia’s greatest tsar, and the prototype of the ruthless yet revolutionary Russian ruler whose divergent characteristics could inspire figures as diverse as Catherine the Great, Stalin and Vladimir Putin, this remarkable life force died in 1725, at only fifty-two years old.

  NADER SHAH

  1688–1747

  Nader of Isfahan invaded [the Mughal Empire] with his troops resembling the waves of the sea, and put all the natives of the provinces of Kabul, the Punjab and Delhi at once to the sword.

  Muhammad Muhsin Sadiki, Jewel of Samsam (c. 1739)

  Nader Shah of Iran was the self-made empire-builder who dominated his native country, defeated the Mughal emperors and Ottoman sultans, conquered vast new territories, stole the Peacock Throne for himself, and overthrew the Safavid dynasty to raise himself from enslaved orphan and freebooting bandit to the throne of King of Kings. But he sank into paranoid brutality, frenzied killing and finally the insanity that led to his murder. Known as the Second Alexander, he was the tragic and murderous Napoleon of Iran.

  Nader was a member of a Turkmen tribe that inhabited a northern area of Iran. He began life in obscurity. His father died when he was young, and Nader and his mother were subsequently abducted and pressed into slavery by a band of raiding tribesmen. Nader, though, soon escaped and entered the military service of a local chieftain, a position in which he distinguished himself and rose rapidly through the ranks. But in due course the headstrong Nader abandoned the chieftain and embarked on a life of banditry. By the mid-1720s he could count on some 5000 followers.

  This flouting of central authority was scarcely surprising; this was, after all, a time of deep unrest within Persia. Nader’s home tribe had always given fealty to the Safavid shahs who had ruled the country for the previous two hundred years. Yet, by the early 18th century, the Safavid empire was in terminal decline. In 1719 it had been challenged by its former Afghan subjects who had invaded Persia proper, and within three years the shah, Soltan Hossein, had been deposed. In response, Nader had initially yielded to the Afghan conquerors, but he later opted for rebellion. He now allied himself with Tahmasp, the son of Soltan Hossein, who was attempting to regain his father’s throne. Nader’s military capabilities were soon recognized, and in 1726 he was appointed supreme commander of Tahmasp’s forces.

  By 1729 Nader had decisively defeated the Afghans and restored Tahmasp to the throne. He proceeded to attack the Ottoman Turks and reconquer the territory they had seized from Persia in Azerbaijan and Mesopotamia. Yet he was diverted by a domestic rebellion, and while he dealt with this, Shah Tahmasp attempted to bolster his own military credentials by launching a new assault on the Ottoman empire. It proved to be a disastrous move, and most of Nader’s work was now undone. Incandescent with rage at Tahmasp’s incompetence, in 1732 Nader deposed him and replaced him with his infant son, Abbas III—although Nader, as regent, wielded the real power.

  By 1735 Nader had once more regained the territory lost to the Ottomans. But such battlefield accomplishments were no longer enough for Nader. In January 1736 he convened an assembly of Persia’s most prominent political and religious figures and “suggested” that the youthful shah be deposed and he, Nader, be appointed in his place. Unsurprisingly, the assembled notables gave their consent.

  Nader now embarked on a spree of conquest that would earn him the epithet the Second Alexander. In 1738 he attacked Kandahar, the last redoubt of the Afghans. The city was leveled and a new town, Naderabad, named after the new shah, was built in its place. Nader also sent his navy across the Persian Gulf, where he subjugated Bahrain and Oman. Then in 1739 he launched the campaign for which he would become most infamous: his assault on the Mughal empire in India.

  The main Mughal armies were obliterated at the Battle of Karnal in February 1739, leaving the way open to Delhi, the Mughal capital. On arriving at the city, Nader ordered a massacre of its inhabitants, resulting in the deaths in a single day of between 20,000 and 30,000 people. The city was then ransacked and all manner of treasures carried back to Persia—including the Peacock Throne, which would thereafter symbolize the shah’s authority. But Nader’s appetite for conquest was not yet satiated, and, as he pushed into central Asia, he took on Ottomans, Russians and Uzbeks.

  In 1741 Nader survived an assassination attempt, after which he became ever more paranoid. Convinced that his eldest son, Reza Qoli Mirza, had been involved in the attempt on his life, he had him blinded, while the alleged fellow-conspirators were put to death. The growing severity of Nader’s rule, far from crushing dissent, served only to provoke fresh bouts of unrest. These uprisings were met with ever more ferocious reprisals, and Nader was reputed to have had towers of skulls constructed as a demonstration of the price of disloyalty. At the same time, the ruthless discipline he imposed on his own soldiers grew increasingly harsh. This inclination toward cruelty was ultimately to prove fatal, for in 1747, while on his way to confront yet another rebellion, Nader was murdered by disgruntled troops.

  Thousands died at his hands; his taxes and wars had ruined his own people and at his death, his empire fell to pieces. Yet his was an astonishing achievement. He was as brilliant as he was brutal: centuries later, Stalin studied Nader Shah as a man to admire for his flawed but pitiless grandeur.

  VOLTAIRE

  1694–1778

  As long as people believe in absurdities, they will continue to commit atrocities.

  Voltaire

  The writer, philosopher, literary celebrity and friend of kings, François-Marie Arouet, better known by his pen name Voltaire, was the star of the Age of Enlightenment, one of the most influential men in Europe—and also one of the richest. His ridicule of the absurdities and atrocities of 18th-century Europe helped to give birth to the modern world—a world in which science and reason replaced superstition. Thanks to his indignation and energy, freedom of speech and of belief, and the even-handed administration of justice, came to be regarded as inalienable human rights.

  Voltaire was famed even in his own time as a tireless multi-talented genius. He excelled as a playwright, a poet, a novelist, a satirist, a polemicist, a historian, a philosopher, a financial investor and a (sometimes sycophantic) courtier. Of his prodigious output of over 350 works, it is the slim satire Candide (1759) that most completely encapsulates his brilliance. Published, like most of Voltaire’s work, to instant popular acclaim, it follows the hapless eponymous hero through a series of grim adventures as he clings to the conventional religio-philosophical piety that “All is for the best in the best of all possible worlds”—despite increasingly conclusive evidence, as horror piles on horror, to the contrary. A devastatingly witty attack on everything from slavery to the professions, Candide exemplifies the power of Voltaire’s razor-sharp pen to deflate pretension and hypocrisy.

  Wiry, mischievous and wickedly brilliant, Voltaire was the changeling in an otherwise entirely conventional wealthy bourgeois family. He personally encouraged the rumors that his paternity lay elsewhere. By his late teens his acid wit—he once remarked of a rival poet’s “Ode to Posterity” that “I fear it will not reach its mark”—had made him the pet of aristocratic society. Voltaire, the financial wizard, made a fortune from canny manipulation of the Paris lottery. Cirey, the Lorraine estate on which Voltaire spent ten years with his great love, the married and be
autiful mathematics scholar the Marquise de Châtelet in the 1730s and 1740s, became a hothouse of intellectual debate and social mischief.

  Voltaire’s campaign against the monarchy’s arbitrary practices was informed by firsthand experience: as a youth, his satirical pen had briefly landed him in the Bastille. A subsequent exile in London (1726–9) alerted Voltaire to the contrast between England’s intellectual openness and the oppressive censorship of France. In his Philosophical Letters, published on his return to France in 1729, Voltaire embarked on a lifelong attack on the injustice and intolerance fostered by the Catholic Church and France’s absolute monarchy. Thereafter, Voltaire and the French authorities existed in an uneasy truce. He briefly held a court appointment as royal historiographer in the 1740s, although his rooms—“the most stinking shit hole in Versailles”—disappointed him. But having come to the conclusion that “I am very fond of the truth, but not at all of martyrdom,” he spent most of his life away from the center.

  He based himself at Geneva from 1755, then, in 1759, settled at nearby Ferney in French territory, whose proximity to the Swiss border afforded him luxurious safety to exercise his pen. The pseudonyms he used were flimsy to say the least: he favored the Archbishop of Paris for his most virulent attacks on the church. But they allowed him to disavow authorship, with wide-eyed innocence, while the outraged authorities banned and burned his books.

  Voltaire’s outstanding achievement was his campaign for civil rights, waged under his motto “Écrasez l’infâme” (“Crush the infamy”). His calls for religious freedom and judicial fairness ushered in a new era. Leg braces, thumbscrews, the rack, sleep deprivation, pouring water on rags stuffed into the victim’s throat to induce the sensation of drowning, hanging a victim by their arms with weights attached to their ankles—these were just some of the methods used in prisons across Europe in Voltaire’s time to extract confessions from the “guilty.”

  Punishment could be still more gruesome. The execution in Paris, in 1757, of Robert Damiens, the man who tried to stab Louis XV, was incomparably grisly. First of all, as decreed by France’s Parlement, the hand that had wielded the knife was burned. The executioner then used pincers to tear away chunks of flesh, filling the wounds with molten lead. For over quarter of an hour, four horses, pulling in different directions, tried to dismember Damiens’ broken body until finally his thighs and arms were severed with a knife. It was said that the would-be regicide was still just alive when his dismembered trunk was thrown on the fire.

  Until the 18th century, torture was an accepted part of the judicial system. It was a means of wrenching the truth from the recalcitrant human will, a way of punishing the guilty in the most heinous way possible. The thinkers of the Enlightenment saw it otherwise—as a barbaric practice that had nothing to do with justice, one that risked punishing the innocent as well as the guilty.

  Inflicting such intense pain on a man, argued the Italian Cesare Beccaria in 1764, in one of the age’s most influential tracts, would only compel the victim to “accuse himself of crimes of which he is innocent.” Hearing of the case of Jean Calas, a Huguenot (French Protestant) from Toulouse who in 1762 was accused of murdering his son, then tortured to obtain a confession and finally broken on the wheel, Voltaire raged against the superstitious barbarism of the Catholic Church and its excessive judicial influence.

  During the latter half of the 18th century, Prussia, Sweden, France, Austria and Tuscany all abolished judicial torture. In 1801, under Tsar Paul, Russia decreed that “the very name of torture, bringing shame and reproach on mankind, should be forever erased from the public memory.”

  It was far from a distant memory; but now torture was a shameful secret rather than a commendable practice. And while the bloodbath of France’s Terror has totally sullied its name, Dr. Joseph-Ignace Guillotin’s invention for swiftly and painlessly beheading the condemned was meant to be a step away from the savage methods of the past. The deist Voltaire’s Treatise on Tolerance (1763) expanded on his belief that reason should be government’s abiding principle, and his assertion that religious freedom was not harmful to the state’s well-being has become a fundamental principle of modern government. “The right to persecute,” he declared, “is absurd and barbaric.”

  By now Voltaire’s fame had spread across Europe: Frederick the Great and Catherine the Great, with whom he enjoyed a prolific correspondence, basked in his reflected glory, projecting themselves as adherents of “enlightened absolutism.” Both repeatedly invited him to visit and he duly stayed with Frederick (1750–53), but the realities of the Prussian court soured Voltaire’s rapport with the man he now described as a “likable whore,” and who once described him as a “monkey.” He resisted Catherine’s invitations, but it was he who flattered her by dubbing her “the Great.” Luminaries from across the continent flocked to see Voltaire, and at Ferney he became the self-described “innkeeper of Europe.” The brilliant schoolboy, described by his father-confessor as being “devoured by a thirst for celebrity,” had become “King Voltaire,” revered and reviled in equal measure across Europe as the scourge of authority, injustice and hypocrisy. As he lay dying in Paris in 1778, his rooms were crammed with crowds of people, all determined to catch a last glimpse of a legendary man.

  The shrine to Voltaire erected by the French revolutionaries in the Panthéon acknowledges their debt to him. It bears the inscription: “He taught us how to be free.” Voltaire had begun the process of translating the ideals of the Enlightenment into reality, and his words became the first bomb thrown against the ancien régime. He once told a friend, “I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: ‘O Lord, make my enemies ridiculous.’ And God granted it.”

  SAMUEL JOHNSON

  1709–1784

  Here lies Sam Johnson:—Reader, have a care,

  Tread lightly, lest you wake a sleeping bear:

  Religious, moral, generous, and humane

  He was: but self-sufficient, proud, and vain,

  Fond of, and overbearing in dispute,

  A Christian and a scholar—but a brute.

  Soame Jenyns, suggested epitaph for Dr. Johnson (1784)

  Samuel Johnson was one of the most versatile, erudite and accomplished writers in the history of English literature. In addition to his remarkable and ground-breaking Dictionary, he also wrote copiously in a wide range of other genres: essays, literary criticism, travel writing, political sketches and satires, a tragedy, biography, poetry, translations, sermons, diaries, letters and pamphlets. He was a master conversationalist and a spiky, magnetic and brilliant figure in London society. Through the biography written by his disciple James Boswell, we can still appreciate one of the reigning personalities of literary history as though he were alive today.

  Johnson’s early years did not show much promise. As a child he suffered from both scrofula (tuberculosis of the lymph glands), which affected his sight, and smallpox, which disfigured his face, making him at best peculiar to look at. Throughout his life he was also prone to depression and had all manner of odd tics and twitches that now suggest Tourette’s syndrome. Despite these disadvantages, the young Samuel was a bright boy and grew up in a family of booksellers in Lichfield. But poverty obliged him to leave Pembroke College, Oxford, after only a year, without taking a degree.

  In 1735 he married Elizabeth Porter, a local widow twenty years his senior. Failing to obtain a teaching post, Johnson decamped to London in 1737 and began working for the Gentleman’s Magazine, for which he wrote parliamentary sketches. He had already written a stage tragedy, Irene, and worked on satirical poems, biographies such as The Life of Mr. Richard Savage, and a catalog of the Harley collection of books and manuscripts.

  It was in 1746 that Johnson began his magnum opus. He was commissioned to write a new English dictionary, and the project dominated the next nine years of his life. Nothing on such a scale had previously been undertaken, and the Dictionary proved to be a masterpiece of scholarship. It broke new ground in le
xicography, encompassing a vast array of words from a gigantic pool of source material, and even made a good stab at discovering the etymology of many of the words that were included. The Dictionary was also a demonstration of Johnson’s pithy and precise style. In a characteristic flash of witty self-deprecation, Johnson defines a lexicographer as “a writer of dictionaries, a harmless drudge.”

  The Dictionary, published in 1755, was immediately recognized as a work of brilliance, and Johnson was awarded with an honorary MA from Oxford before the book was even finished. In the meantime he had continued to write copiously in other genres. His essays in The Rambler dealt with matters as varied as capital punishment, good parenting and the emergence of the novel, and are replete with eminently quotable epigrams—such as “No man is much pleased with a companion, who does not increase, in some respect, his fondness for himself.” Johnson had the same gift as Oscar Wilde for pointing out, with razor-like wit, the contradictions inherent in human nature.

  Johnson lost his wife in 1752. He never married again, but his house was a refuge to friends from a variety of odd backgrounds. Ex-prostitutes, indebted unlicensed surgeons, female writers—a particular favorite with Johnson—all stayed under his roof. But Johnson was just as popular in the higher strata of society, receiving patronage from the Treasury and conversing with men like the American founding father, philosopher and inventor Benjamin Franklin. In 1763 Johnson met the young Boswell in a bookshop and took him on as a protégé. Boswell was a devoted fan, and his biography tells us much about Johnson’s life and scintillating conversation which otherwise might have been lost.

  As his fame grew Johnson turned out another pair of fine works: an admired edition of Shakespeare’s plays in 1765 and The Lives of the Poets, which came out between 1779 and 1781. Johnson was often tart, if not harsh, on his contemporaries—when asked to pick the better of the two minor poets Smart and Derrick, he replied that there was “no settling the point of precedency between a louse and a flea.” But despite this gruffness, he had a warm heart and a fond regard for his friends. He died in 1784 and was buried in Westminster Abbey, a sign of the esteem in which he was held by his contemporaries—an esteem that has not diminished over the succeeding centuries. “I hate a fellow whom pride or cowardice or laziness drives into a corner, and who does nothing when he is there but sit and growl,” he once said. “Let him come out as I do, and bark.”