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* Charles was joined by Titian, fifteen years after first sitting for him. The artist’s equestrian portrait of the kaiser in triumph after the battle of Mühlberg throbs with martial power, echoing the equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius that both had seen in Rome, but it also reveals the gruelling existence of an emperor. ‘My whole life was a journey,’ Charles said, and indeed he looks exhausted, frazzled, haggard.

* Suleiman was increasingly pious: after rebuilding the walls of Jerusalem (demolished by Saladin’s family three centuries earlier) and embellishing Mecca, in 1550 he ordered his court architect Sinan to design his own Suleimaniye Mosque in Constantinople. Sinan, one of the greatest architects in world history, designer also of the Selimiye Mosque in Edirne and creator of as many as 300 projects, was born a Christian, probably Armenian or Greek, named Joseph, who was enslaved and converted to Islam, later distinguishing himself as a military engineer on Suleiman’s campaigns from the Tigris to the Danube.

* Joseph was João Miques, Dom João Migas Mendes, Giuseppe Nasi and Yasef Nassi; she was Doña Gracia, Hannah, Beatrice de Luna and La Señora.

* A painting of Blond Selim shows him signalling to one of the Tongueless whose sign language he partly understood.

* Akbar organized his nobles strictly by the numerical mansab (rank) of 1,000, 5,000, 7,000 or 10,000 soldiers.

* Titian helped with the courtship: his gorgeous full-length painting of Philip II, handsome, slim, arrogant and sporting intricately gold-trimmed armour, was sent to Mary Tudor during their marriage negotiations. In London and Winchester, Philip was accompanied by among others Martin ‘El Mestizo’ Cortés.

* Consanguinity is best measured by an inbreeding coefficient. The breeding of parent and child or brother and sister is 0.25. Inbreeding was already high thanks to the repeated intermarriage between the Trastámara and the Aviz even before it became Habsburg policy. Carlos was great-grandson of Juana the Mad whose own grandmother had died as a crazed prisoner; his grandfather Charles and his father Philip had both married double cousins, raising his inbreeding coefficient to 0.211, close to pure incest. The Habsburg jaw was its least damaging symptom.

* In 1562, the three sons of the conquistador returned to Mexico bearing the body of their father. There they became embroiled in a conspiracy of Spanish encomienderos and Mexica nobility to hail Marques Martín Cortés as king of New Spain. The brothers were arrested; El Mestizo was waterboarded. Amid many executions, the Cortés were spared.

Philip encouraged conversos with impure (Jewish) blood to govern the Americas but also exported the Inquisition to Peru and New Spain. In 1579, he appointed a converso, Luis Carvajal, born in Portugal but returning to Spanish service, as captain-general of New Leon, with the mission to ‘discover, pacify and settle’ north-west Mexico and Texas. Carvajal’s rivals denounced him and his family to the Inquisition as relapsed Jews. Luis died in prison. On 8 December 1596, Luis’s sister and her teenaged daughters and son courageously declared their Judaism and were burned alive in the main square of Mexico City. But some of the family escaped to Italy where, settling at the Florentine port of Livorno – Medici territory – a Carvajal boy adopted the name of a Tuscan village, Montefiore – the ancestors of this author.

* The limpieza de sangre was required by the elite in South America but was hard to maintain. Even elite creoles who prided themselves on their whiteness were usually mixed-race, a fact that only encouraged a fixation with racial and racist categories from mestizo (Spanish-Amerindian), mulatto (African-European), sambo (African-Amerindian), pardo (triracial) and cuarterón (quadroon, with one African grandparent).

* This is according to the reconstruction by Gerasimov who, on Stalin’s orders, opened Ivan’s tomb in 1953 and based on the tsar’s skull crafted an artistic version of his face.