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The headstrong young padishah planned to force Poland–Lithuania to back the underdog Protestants against the all-conquering Habsburgs, and to centralize power in Istanbul. Osman was friendly with Kösem but lacked a valide sultan of his own to manage the Topkapı Palace. He ceded Georgia to Shah Abbas, and then (after having his brother strangled) led his army into Poland. But across Eurasia a change in climate, dubbed the little ice age, destabilized societies, contributing to turbulence from Constantinople to China, from Ukraine to Paris: it was so cold that the Bosphoros froze, people starved, Janissaries grumbled and, at the front, Osman’s huge army was halted by the Poles.

On his return to Istanbul in May 1622, just as Ferdinand devised his Theatre of Blood in Prague, Osman’s plan to demote the Janissaries and create an army similar to that of Abbas sparked a coup in which Janissaries descended from the palace roof on ropes and arrested the sultan. Imprisoned in the Yedikule Fortress, Osman was too forceful to accept dethronement. He resisted strangling so energetically that a strapping wrestler killed him by compression of the testicles – a respectful method in that it did not shed royal blood, but it certainly signalled the anger Osman inspired. It was the first Ottoman regicide, soon to be followed by an English version, marking a retreat from boundless monarchy.

Out of the chaos, Kösem finessed the accession of her boisterous eleven-year-old son, Murad IV. Now in close alliance with the grand vizier and the kizlar aga, she returned to power, seeking to protect Murad and her two surviving sons. In her frank letters to the grand vizier, Kösem – admired by the crowds as Valide-i Muazzama, the Magnificent Mother – was a master of business. ‘How are you getting along with salary payments? Is there much left?’, tolerating no nonsense and giving firm orders: ‘You can say attention should be paid to provisions for the war. If it were up to me it would have been taken care of earlier, it’s no fault of me or my son.’ She had a sense of humour too: ‘You really give me a headache, but I give you an awful headache too. How many times have I asked myself, “I wonder if he’s getting sick of me,” but what can else can I do?’

Growing up amid Janissary conspiracies and mob lynchings of his ministers, Murad would emerge as the greatest padishah since Suleiman. But, for now, a child sultan was too good a chance for Shah Abbas to miss. When Baghdad rebelled against the Ottomans, Abbas broke the peace and seized Iraq. That was not all: he also grabbed Bahrain from the Habsburgs and coveted their fortress at Hormuz that dominated the Persian Gulf. He lacked ships, but the English EIC was trying to negotiate trading concessions with Persia, so in 1622 he borrowed a flotilla of four – and stormed Hormuz.

The new king of Spain and Portugal, Philip IV, eighteen-year-old grandson of the Prudent King, was concerned less with Persia and more with two mysterious Englishmen named Smith who had unexpectedly arrived in Madrid.

THE SMITHS, THE PLANET KING AND TWO ARTISTS

On 7 March 1623, Philip was amazed to learn that Thomas and John Smith were in fact Charles, prince of Wales, aged twenty-three, and the thirty-one-year-old marquess of Buckingham, who had enjoyed a thrilling trip across Europe. James bemoaned the antics of ‘my babies’ but called them his ‘venturesome knights’ and promoted Buckingham to duke to help with the negotiations.

James was pursuing a Spanish match with the Infanta María, Philip’s sister, to keep England out of the war, to win back his son-in-law’s Palatinate and to obtain a useful dowry payment.^* Charles had convinced himself that he was in love with María. Buckingham, keen to deliver the alliance to James but also to bind himself to the heir, encouraged a risky plan that appealed to the prince’s sense of romance. The duke should have known better. Ignoring the complexity of religion, the pair galloped for Paris where they admired the green-eyed Habsburg queen of France, Anne of Austria, Philip IV’s sister, whom Charles called the ‘handsomest’; he scarcely noticed her sister-in-law Henrietta Maria.

The Smiths galloped on towards Madrid. Their arrival embarrassed and fascinated Philip, who welcomed the ‘Smiths’ to the Alcázar Palace. A child of first cousins, his mother being Emperor Ferdinand’s sister, Philip had inherited the Spanish–Portuguese empires stretching across five continents but also the Habsburg jaw and the sacred formality of Spanish kingship. He was the centrepiece of the court’s ‘theatre of grandeur’, hailed as El Rey Planeta – the Planet King (the sun was then regarded as the fourth of the planetary hierarchy) – who at meals was served by courtiers on their knees. Philip moved slowly and unsmilingly like a ghostly human galleon; it was joked that he only laughed thrice in his long reign.