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Pizarro’s few warhorses charged into the Incas, who did not fight back. Seven thousand were slaughtered. Atahualpa was arrested. Pizarro demanded a vast ransom of gold. Offering a military alliance to the victor, Atahualpa gave his fifteen-year-old half-sister Quispe Sisa to Pizarro. She was first baptized as Inés Yupanqui and then seduced by the grizzled Pizarro, who nicknamed her Pispita after a beautiful Spanish bird. While in custody Atahualpa, still fighting his civil war, ordered his brother’s murder – ‘How shall my brother get so much gold and silver for himself? I would give twice as much as he can, if they would kill him and leave me as lord.’ He ordered gold from Cuzco for Pizarro. Six tons of gold and five of silver were melted down, but as the Inca’s generals raised new armies to attack the Spanish, Pizarro panicked and decided to kill the monarch, accusing him of idolatry and murdering his brother. He then sentenced him to burn, an unbearable fate for an Inca. Pizarro’s friar offered Atahualpa strangulation if he converted, so he took the name Francisco after his killer and was then garrotted.

Now a young Inca, Manco Yupanqui, another son of Huáscar who had survived Atahualpa’s massacre of the family, offered Pizarro an alliance, believing he could re-establish the Four Parts with Spanish help. In Cuzco, the Pizarro brothers installed Manco as Inca, watched by his regal mummified ancestors.

The capital was dazzling. ‘This city is the greatest and the finest ever seen in this country or anywhere in the Indies,’ Pizarro wrote to Charles. ‘We can assure your Majesty that it is so beautiful and has such fine buildings that it would be remarkable even in Spain.’ Pizarro presided over the looting of the Coricancha, Temple of the Sun, its gold and silver walls, its garden of golden plants, sacrificial altar and image of the sun and the many golden statues of early Inca rulers, all of it melted down. Pizarro sent his brother Hernando homewards with the emperor’s first share.

Charles dominated Italy. In Rome, Leo X excommunicated Luther, who fulminated about ‘how openly and shamelessly the pope … practises sodomy’. After Leo’s death and a short-lived successor, Charles backed the election of another Medici, Giulio, who became Clement VII. Genial and cultivated, Clement commissioned Michelangelo, whom he had known since they were young, to finish the family chapel in Florence, telling him, ‘Think only of work’ and ‘Spare no expense.’ Michelangelo celebrated. ‘Medici is pope. Which will cheer the whole world,’ he told his quarryman. ‘With regards to art, many things will be accomplished.’ Instead Rome was to be sacked in an orgy of violence and rapine.

THE BLACK DUKE, MICHELANGELO AND THE SACK OF ROME

Pope Clement betrayed Charles and allied with François. Charles was incensed: ‘You must know the part we played in your election.’ His army, unpaid and roiling, marched on Rome. Clement prepared to fight, but he had grossly miscalculated. In early May, the imperialists stormed Rome, slaughtering Clement’s Swiss Guards on the steps of St Peter’s. Clement fled to the Castel Sant’Angelo, where he melted down jewellery to plan his escape. Outside the Hadrianic fortress, Charles’s Landsknechte – many of them Protestants – went wild, raping nuns, defacing Raphael’s paintings in the Vatican with the graffito ‘luther’ and killing 10,000 Romans – until the plague culled the Landsknechte themselves. The catastrophe that befell Clement led to a revolution against the Medici in Florence. These apocalyptic scenes helped inspire Michelangelo’s vision of hell in the Last Judgment and intensified Catholic–Protestant hatred. ‘Christ reigns in such a way that the emperor who persecutes Luther for the pope,’ gloated Luther, ‘is forced to destroy the pope for Luther.’

On 6 June, Clement, terrified of Charles, surrendered, promising a ransom. He escaped to the countryside, where he received English envoys seeking permission for Henry VIII to annul his marriage to Catherine of Aragon, Charles’s aunt, and marry a feisty paramour, Anne Boleyn. At any other time, such a request would have been fixable, but politics, like love, is all about timing: Clement could not risk offending Charles. Henry, who started as a slim, genial, gingery charmer and developed into a vicious, narcissistic, semi-impotent bloviator, desperate to produce a son for his parvenu dynasty and in love with Boleyn, was a religious conservative. But his talented Protestant minister Thomas Cromwell was a religious radical who orchestrated divorce from Catherine, marriage to Boleyn, schism with Rome and a step towards a Reformist England. Clement’s decision to refuse justified Henry’s move against European interference that both formed and reflected England’s autonomous instincts.