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The House of Hohenzollern, led by Elector Frederick William, had converted its impoverished sandpit of fiefdoms, built around Brandenburg and Prussia, into a north German power. The Great Elector saw his lands destroyed in the war – Berlin had just 6,000 inhabitants by 1648. Nonetheless, convinced that ‘Alliances are good but one’s own forces are better,’ he forged his Junker nobility into a warrior class, exploiting the war to break the representative Estates and impose the autocracy that would last until 1918.^*

The Elector was duke of Prussia, which was part of the huge Commonwealth Poland–Lithuania: in its southern provinces, Cossacks, free people, often petty nobles, burghers and escaped peasants and soldiers, founded a republic, ruled by elected hetmans, on the Sech islands beyond the Dnieper rapids. They and the peasants, who spoke Ukrainian, suffered the dominance of Polish Catholic lords. A series of Orthodox Cossack rebellions against the Catholic Polish kings had sought recognition for their noble status. In the spring of 1648, the year the Muscovites reached the Pacific, a nobleman and Cossack officer, Bohdan Khmelnytsky, who had long served the king against the Ottomans and been captured and enslaved for two years, feuded with a Polish grandee over land and the Pole’s beautiful Cossack wife – known as Helen of the Steppes. Khmelnytsky, elected hetman of the Cossacks, launched a rebellion that spread across Ukraine. In May, his Cossacks, in alliance with the Nogai cavalry sent by the Crimean Giray khans, defeated the Poles, and in Kyiv that December he declared himself hetman, prince of Ruthenia and the Sole Autocrat of Rus. His Cossack armies, joined by some rebel burgers and Ukrainian-speaking peasants, slaughtered Polish nobles and priests, and, in 1648 alone, 60,000 Jews who had lived safely there for centuries but were trapped between Catholic masters and Orthodox Cossacks.

Khmelnytsky’s independent hetmanate scarcely lasted five years: Khmelnytsky needed a patron to protect his realm. Betrayed by the Crimean khan, he offered submission to the Ottoman sultan, who abandoned the hetman to the Tatars, forcing him to turn to Moscow.

In January 1654, the hetman swore allegiance to the Muscovite tsar Alexei, who along with his successors into modern times regarded Ukraine as a province – Little Russia – forever united with its fraternal Great Russia.^* The Ottomans were not interested, because Constantinople was embroiled in its own crisis. There, the mad sultan’s Magnificent Mother, Kösem, was facing a dilemma.

Could a mother kill her own son?

At first, Crazy Ibrahim, now thirty-three, was content to let his mother rule for him. Initially uninterested in women, possibly impotent, he turned to a charlatan spiritualist, Cinci Hoca, who prescribed aphrodisiacs and pornography. Ibrahim became priapic. When his mother was presented with an enslaved Russian girl called Turhan, Kösem gave her to the sultan, who quickly made her pregnant. But his depravities were expanding as the empire shrivelled: he favoured gigantic women and furs, preferably at the same time. He could only perform in a room full of sable, but he was so priapic that he tried to confine himself to one new girl a week on Fridays. Orders were sent out around the empire to find the biggest women. Then in 1644 the padishah started to assert himself, promoting to positions of power Cinci Hoca and his covin of bunglers, as well as a harem manageress.

He dispatched the cast of a cow’s udders and vagina around the provinces in order to find a woman who matched. A sixteen-year-old Armenian girl, Maria, whom he nicknamed Sugar Cube, was extremely fat. In addition to the Russian-born Turhan, he now appointed another seven hasekis (consorts), including Sugar Cube, whom he renamed Sivekar Sultan, granting them the revenues of his richest provinces, Damascus and Egypt – a grave error.

Sugar Cube supposedly told Ibrahim that one of the concubines had been unfaithful. On hearing this he had 280 odalisques sewn into sacks and drowned in the Bosphoros; for this, Kösem invited Sugar Cube to dinner and secretly poisoned her.

The padishah’s next error was catastrophic. Infuriated by Maltese pirates who had attacked a boat carrying Muslim pilgrims, Ibrahim ordered the navy to seize Crete, a Venetian province. The Venetians declared war, raided Ottoman Greece and blockaded the Bosphoros, causing food shortages and riots in Constantinople. The grand vizier and Kösem discussed deposing Ibrahim, who struck back, executing the vizier and banning his mother and his sisters from the harem. He was planning her murder, Nero-style.