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* The Taj Mahal was built in a Persianate design that owed something to the simplicity of Tamerlane’s tomb in Samarkand and Humayoun’s in Delhi but was vast in scale and blazing pristine whiteness. It took sixteen years to build. But it was only a part of his dedication to sacred monarchy; he also moved the capital from Agra to Shahjahanabad at Delhi built around a new palace, the Red Fort, itself centred around the emperor’s diwan-i-khas (audience hall) where he held court on a Peacock Throne and appeared daily on the marble balcony for his jharokha darshan – the rituals that defined House Tamerlane. The Mughals had become gradually Indian thanks to their Rajput wives, who brought their culture to the central Asian harem. Shahjahan, whose mother was a daughter of the raja of Jodhpur, was three-quarters Indian, only a quarter Tamerlanian, but their style was Persianate; his vizier and queen Mumtaz were Persian; and he preferred Persian to the Turkish of Tamerlane and Babur.

* ‘My son leaves in the morning and comes back at night. I never see him. I’m distraught … He won’t stay out of the cold and he’ll get sick again. I tell you, this worrying is destroying me. Talk to him.’ Kösem trusted the vizier, offering, as was the tradition, one of her daughters as wife: ‘Whenever you’re ready let me know … We’ll take care of you immediately. I have a princess ready.’ The Armenian-born Halil married one of the daughters, becoming a damad – imperial son-in-law – quite a rise from enslavement.

* The slaves embraced a secret culture of their own, publicly worshipping Catholicism but cultivating music, dancing and religions, vodun (Fon people), santería and candomblé, brought by Yorubas, which fused African gods, orishas, with Catholic saints. Vodun became voodoo.

* One of Gustavus’ favourite commanders at Lützen was Alexander Leslie, an illegitimate Scottish nobleman, promoted to field marshal in 1636, who would later, as earl of Leven, command troops at the battle of Marston Moor against Charles I.

* Victory had almost bankrupted Ferdinand, who turned for troops and money to Wallenstein, imperial generalissimus and admiral of the North and Baltic Seas, granting him a personal kingdom of the dukedoms of Friedland, Sagan and Mecklenburg. Wallenstein now planned to negotiate a European peace, betraying the Habsburgs. Ferdinand, fearing that Wallenstein aspired to seize the empire, ordered his assassination. In February 1634, in Cheb, Bohemia, three Irish and Scottish officers slaughtered his retinue then, awakening him in his bedroom, speared him to death – the definition of Icaran downfall.

Zumbas and Oranges, Cromwells and Villiers

I’LL BE THE WHORE OF THE RABBLE: THE NINETEEN GENTLEMEN OF AMSTERDAM AND THE PIRATE PRINCE OF NEW AMSTERDAM

On 7 September 1628, a Dutch admiral, the fifty-year-old Piet Heyn,^* attacked a Habsburg treasure fleet off Cuba and grabbed the greatest prize in the history of naval pillage: sixteen galleons worth so much – eleven million guilders – that the silver market crashed, throwing the Habsburgs into a financial crisis. The silver paid for a Dutch offensive: the Groot Desseyn.

In 1621, at the start of the war, the States-General had awarded a western monopoly to the Nineteen Gentlemen who floated the new West India Company (GWC) to dominate the Atlantic sugar world. Sugar meant slaves. The Dutch were not new to the slave trade: since Charles V, Flemish and Dutch merchants had supplied slaves. Now in 1624 the Dutch tried to seize Luanda and Elmina, but failed; in 1627 they grabbed Gorée (Dakar, Senegal). Nor were they the only Europeans interested in sugar: in 1627, English merchants were planting sugar cane on their newly secured Caribbean island, Barbados; in 1635 the French planted Martinique. But the Dutch were playing on a different scale.