Edward VIII, A Soap Opera of a Reign 17/11/2009

Portrait of King Edward VIII, 1936

Edward VIII was on the throne for less than a year. It was all he needed to undermine the prestige of the Victorian monarchy. He abdicated right before World War II in favour of a sadomasochist relationship. His father, George V, had already predicted it: ‘After I am dead, the boy will ruin himself within 12 months’^[1]. He happened to be wrong, for Edward managed to do so in only eleven months. Nevertheless, nobody could imagine, back on the 28^th of January 1936, that George V ‘s burial would be the last splendorous occasion of the British Empire.

Back then, England was indisputably the world’s first nation, her immense empire spawning half of the planet. Its monarchy was universally respected and admired. But as the cortège in the procession to George’s Lying in State in Westminster Hall turned into New Palace Yard, the diamond cross on the Imperial State Crown fell from on top of the coffin, landing in the gutter.

Although the English are not particularly superstitious, it was impossible not to see it as a bad omen. If we think about it, World War II was just a few years away, which saw England losing both its spot as a top nation and its Empire. As far as the prestige of the British monarchy, it wouldn’t last as long. As George V had foreseen, Edward would destroy it in less than a year.

His funeral proceedings were surrounded by the majesty that the Royal family projected. The widow, Queen Mary, dignity flowing from her rigorous black figure; the monarch’s four dashing sons escorting the casket, impeccable in their military uniforms… They were, despite everything, like sinister characters of a Shakespearean drama: their presence can only end up in tragedy. Queen Mary, first of all, so imposing… too imposing. They say that she had never kissed her children, perhaps resenting the fact that her marriage had been a ‘hand-me-down’ affair. She had been engaged to George’s eldest brother, but when her fiancée died from syphilis, he was substituted by George.

The affection deficit in which the Royal children grew up goes far to explain their sickly character. The first born suffered from a clear sexual sadomasochist deviation, which turned him into a slave of the first woman who abused him. Bertie, who would succeed Edward as George VI, was pathologically shy, so much so that he couldn’t help stuttering every time he faced an audience. He chain-smoked and would die from lung cancer aged 56. With regards to the youngest one, Prince George, Duke of Kent, he was simply fascinated by brown shirts and swastikas; he would perish in 1942 during a mysterious flight. Rumour has it that he was headed for Sweden in order to break a deal with Hitler.

There is a last macabre detail surrounding the funeral of the virtuous, dutiful King. His death after a long-lasting illness, on the 20^th of January, had been caused by a lethal injection, an overdose of cocaine and morphine administered -supposedly, on Queen Mary’s authorisation- by the Royal doctor, Lord Dawson of Penn. It was not a case of euthanasia in order to ease a dying man’s suffering so much as the need of controlling the time of his demise: in order to be able to be announced by The Times, the respectable newspaper, it had to take place before midnight. Otherwise it would only make it on the evening newspapers, of a more yellow journalism. Reasons of state went above everything, right up to the end.

We can nowadays interpret all those circumstances as bad omens, but 30 years ago public opinion received the new reign with optimism. Edward was the image of the ‘modern’ monarch, somebody who would bring in fresh air. Aside from the small circle of people who knew him well –back then the royals’ private lives were not under the press’ scrutiny–, it made sense the British public thought that way. Edward, who was really known as David, had been a perfect Prince of Wales. Handsome, kind, lacking the stiffness of the Victorian Royalty but always dressed extremely elegantly, showing off like nobody else his military uniform or the suits which were designed for him –the Prince of Wales check– he had benefited from the development of the press: he was one of those people the camera falls in love with.

He was the most photographed person in the world, and he always came out well in pictures. Despite the fact that television did not exist yet, he appeared constantly in cinematographic news clips attending official events, competing in several sports, enjoying  himself in happy parties… He always conveyed friendliness, charisma and savoir faire. Chroniclers referred to as the man every man wanted to be and whom every woman wanted to marry, the pre-war David Beckham. One of his charms was his boyish face: he looked younger than he was. Perhaps that was the reason why the nation was unaware of the new King’s serious flaw.

He was already 42 and hadn’t married yet. The first dynastic obligation of a monarch is to ensure legitimate descendants. At the time of accessing the throne Edward should have already been married for 20 years and fathered several children. But the Prince of Wales had expressed himself as opposed to the marriage institution as in favour of enjoying the company of married women. At 23 he had taken his first official lover, Freda Birkin^[2], wife of the Right Honorable William Dudley Ward and later of the Spanish Pedro José Isidro Manuel Ricardo Mones, Marqués de Casa Maury. It was a long-lasting relationship, which started as lovers and evolved to confidantes.

In the letters the Prince used to write to Freda, which have been published, one can already detect disturbing character traits. Many of them are written in a grotesque style imitating the half-language of small children, but what their content is tremendous. The Prince of Wales wishes to die young, is afraid of going crazy and suffers from anorexia. His next adulterous relationship tied him to Lady Thelma Furness, an American socialite, amongst whose lovers was the Aga Khan. Through her he met the woman which would destroy his career, Wallis Simpson, an adventurer whose first husband had sexually educated her in a Chinese brothel. Wallis realised at first sight that the Prince was an eager masochist; she abused him and turned him into her puppet. The public was completely unaware of this. When a palace servant found Edward on his knees varnishing Wallis’ toes as if he was her lady-in-waiting, he didn’t sell the exclusive story to the tabloids, as he would nowadays. Instead he requested a leave of absence, because he couldn’t stand seeing his sovereign posing as a sexual slave. The King George V, though, was totally aware of what was going on, since he had ordered the secret service to keep an eye on Wallis.

Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson

‘I pray to God my eldest son will never marry and have children’^[1], George V even went to say, foreseeing what was to come. He turned out to be right, as Edward’s project was to marry Wallis Simpson as soon as she could divorce her second husband. The political cataclysm caused by the intentions of the new King was enormous. What Edward VIII pretended was utterly inconceivable in the British reality of the time. According to dynastic law, the simple fact of not having royal blood invalidated Wallis to marry the King. On top of that she was divorced, which automatically meant Anglican Church veto, of which Edward himself was the head. To make matters worse, she had a terrible social record.

The country’s forces, headed by Stanley Baldwin, the Prime Minister, opposed to the royal whim. It was fine if the King wanted to keep her as a lover -after all almost all were so inclined. But in order to allow the wedding to take place the King would have to give up his crown. All of this took place under secret cover, since the British press at the time had a sense of national responsibility which did not allow to publish anything like that, such was the discredit for the Crown.

On the other hand, U.S. newspapers had zoned in on what an American journalist called ‘the best story since Jesus Christ’s resurrection’. But the world was not globalised yet: the U.S. belonged to suburbia, while the British nation was blissfully oblivious. Finally, on the 3^rd of December 1936, when the abdication was clearly inevitable, the British press published the constitutional scandal. On the 11^th of December, in a castle called Fort York King Edward VIII met with his three brothers in order to resign. They signed all the necessary documents for his abdication and transfer of the Crown to poor Bertie, from then onwards George VI. After that, His Royal Highness –he was no longer His Royal Majesty– read a message to the nation through the microphones of the BBC, explaining his reasons for such an embarrassing retirement. The discourse had been written for him by Churchill, who, just for the sake of going against the grain, had supported Edward VIII. It had been 10 months and 21 days of the time period forecasted by George VI for his son to ruin his life.

'London Herald': Edward VIII Abdicates

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[1] Ziegler, Philip (1990), King Edward VIII: The Official Biography, London: Collins, p. 199, ISBN 0-002-15741-1 (Translator’s note).

[2] Born Winifred May, she was universally known by her first married name as Freda Dudley Ward. (T.’s note).

Translated from “Eduardo VIII, un reinado de culebrón”, by Luis Reyes. Published by ‘Tiempo’ on 30.01.2006. Available in http://www.historiarte.net/articulos/art021.html (last accessed 10.11.2009).

Mao’s Ugliest Face 10/05/2009

The effigy of Mao, the People’s Republic’s founder, still presides Tiananmen Square in Beijing, but its myth staggers everyone both inside and outside China. A biography carried out by the linguist Jung Chang and her husband, the historian Jon Halliday, shows the hidden side of the Great Helmsman 30 years after his death.

“Mao Tse-tung, who for decades held absolute power over the lives of one-quarter of the world’s population, was responsible for well over 70 million deaths in peacetime, more than any other twentieth century leader.” Not even Hitler or Stalin reached such savagery. That’s how the book Mao: The Unknown Story starts, written by the Chinese linguist Jung Chang, Yibin, 1952), in collaboration with her husband, the British historian and Soviet Union expert, Jon Halliday.

Cover of Book by Jung Chang & Jon Halliday

It is the result of 10 years of research based on over 300 interviews, almost half of them of people in Mao’s circle; among them his daughter and his eldest son’s widow, as well as Gerald Ford, George Bush Sr, Edward Heath, Santiago Carrillo, the Dalai Lama and Henry Kissinger –who incidentally did not like the final result for being too harsh with the Great Helmsman; and also of material extracted from Soviet, Alban and Bulgarian archives. They could not interview Richard Nixon, the US President who in 1973 established diplomatic relations with China, for he died shortly before they could arrange a meeting. From her address in London’s elegant Notting Hill neighbourhood, Jung states that when they started their study in the early 90s they were in a good position. The country had gone through a decade of economic development and people were ready to talk to them and help them and, at the same time, many of Mao’s contemporaries were still alive. Thus they had unprecedented access to his circle and some documents. They believe they have been able to deconstruct many myths.

The book came out in England last spring. For a month it was the number one in the bestselling lists. It has already been translated in Germany, Japan, Holland, Denmark, Norway and Portugal; it is expected to be translated in 20 more countries and it comes out this month in Spain. In the US, where it came out at the beginning of the year, it has had among its admirers the President George W. Bush. It has been banned in China. Nevertheless, Jung Chang has just given the finishing touches to a Mandarin version, which will be released in Taiwan in mid April and which will also be distributed in Hong Kong.

Jung misses her country. Her mother still lives there, and daughter travels periodically to visit her. She does not have, in theory, any problem. In 1978 she was awarded a scholarship to study in England, where she completed a PhD in Linguistics by the University of York after suffering the rigours of the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). She was a young Red Guard for a while and she worked as barefoot doctor[1], metallurgic and electrician while she studied English language. She hit fame with her autobiography Wild Swans (10 million copies translated into 30 languages; in Spain it was published by Circe Editorial in 1993), a saga about the ups and downs of her grandmother, her mother and herself, the daughter of an ex-high-ranking Communist Party official who suffered retaliations. Her father’s purge and her mother’s professional marginalization took place when she was 14; it left a deep impression in her, to the point of making her write a small piece of perplexity on Maoism. “I started to have doubts in 1966, but I could not translate them into words, I only knew that I did not like all that, but I was not questioning Mao. And that went on for eight years, until somebody told me who Mao was. Back then in China we did not have any information and we lived terrified, and the combination of both things meant that it was extremely difficult to defy Mao explicitly.”

Mao: The Unknown Story de-constructs completely any hagiography about his humanistic and idealistic figure, that of somebody concerned about the peasantry as portrayed by the American Edgar Snow in 1938. “He did not care for peasants, he despised them”, tells Jung. So far it is the biographic work ever published on the Chinese leader, and without a doubt, the most controversial too. Jung explains that when they started their investigation, she started from the basis that, Mao coming from a family of farmers, he did care about farmers. But once she started reading his writings, she realized that he did not show any compassion at all for them. The book describes a tyrannical and cruel character –he viciously delayed President Liu Shaoqi’s execution so he would suffer longer; the Prime Minister Zhou Enlai was no exception, having his cancer operation delayed, and he abandoned his second wife and children before the Long March (1934-1935). He was selfish, lacked scruples, distrustful to the extreme of always having a secret door wherever he was for fear of being murdered, he had no other ideology than keeping the power, without allies, even refusing to designate his successor (he died utterly ignorant of what was going on around him, manipulated by his fourth wife, Jiang Qing, whom he could not stand, and by The Gang of Four[2]); against the barest minimum of personal hygiene standards and obsessed with sex with young girls, as commented by his personal physician Zhisui Lui ( in The Private Life of Mao, Chatto & Windus, 1994). The authors take importance away from the Long March (they basically deny the main battle ever having taken place), sustaining that its success was mainly due to Chiang Kaichek’s condescendence, the then nationalist dictator, so that he could obtain his own son’s freedom, kidnapped by Stalin; they state that Mao did nothing to address the Japanese occupation of his country and worsened the famine by exporting food to the Soviet Union in exchange of nuclear material and industrial equipment. As Jung puts it, it was absolutely immoral. He started to say unacceptable things when he was 24, things that could have been expressed by a selfish maniac. In 1927, when he was 34, he started to carry out true atrocities and he liked them.

Picture of Mao as a Young Man

 

 

The founder of the People’s Republic behaved like a despot. During the Long March he used carriers; he loved servants to rub his back with hot towels while he read poetry books. The Great Helmsman was a Chinese literature lover. During his sexual orgies he joked and talked to his lovers about Chinese opera, which was forbidden and of which he was a fanatic. Jung states that Mao never drew inspiration from any Chinese emperor, but from Stalin. Mao himself confessed that he was his mentor. In fact, he had more things in common with the totalitarian leaders of the 20^th century than with the Chinese emperors. The latter were terrible, but also benevolent. It was not Mao’s case, who would have been the worst emperor, for according to Confucius[3], whom Mao despised, the people have to obey the emperor, but in turn the latter has to be concerned about his subjects too.

Mao did not feel like a Communist, and he identified even less with Marxism. Jung adds that he declared his lack of belief in the October Revolution, the Soviet Revolution. He converted to Communism in 1920, when he was almost 27 and was given the appropriate job, which was as a sales man in a Communist literature bookshop. He was poor, wanted the job and liked reading.

To the question of whether she believes Mao was not an idealist, Jung Chang answers she does not. Already in 1930 he denied the concept of equality. Nevertheless while in the Communist Party he worked with Stalinism, since 1927. During the time when Stalin sent people to China in order to lead the Chinese Communist Party, Mao realized that Stalinism was his thing, he liked it. The Russians ordered Communist Chinese to burn and burn; to burn cities, to burn houses, to burn peasants and their farms, and also to kill, kill and kill. Those were the orders.

Efigies of Communist Leaders

 

Was that the reason Mao liked Stalin?

Chang specifies that Mao liked Stalinism only because it was a good thing for him and it befitted his character.

The question is then whether Mao and Stalin were alike, and at this point Chang lets Jon, her husband, answer, for he knows more about Stalin and his character. In his words, Mao and Stalin had a lot in common in terms of character. Although it would be a mistake to think they were the same type of person. Stalin was not an idealist, but in a way believed in Communism; Mao did not. And of course there is also the national factor, which is quite a relevant trait. Mao had read quite a lot of Chinese literature and history, but in a global sense he had not read much. Nevertheless, both believed that the secret of the Communist system was based on their own talent and both of them were extremely good at manipulating secretly small groups of people. None of them had the talent of a public democratic politician; they were not that good at giving speeches and winning people over that way. But they were good with the mechanisms which are key to Communism; Mao was probably better with propaganda than Stalin. And of course both could be charming whenever they wanted to be so, both of them were good at dealing with foreign leaders, which is strange if we take into account that they worked in extremely secretive systems.

It is surprising that it has taken 30 years to be able to demystify Mao’s figure in the West; it did not take as long to do so with Hitler and Stalin.

According to Halliday there has always been a kind of reverential attitude towards Mao, from the very moment he died. Many State leaders, especially those who got to know him, showed a deep respect whenever they spoke about him, and some of them still do. He thinks it took some time and a new approach in order to realize that it is important not to be so respectful with certain people. The generation of politicians like Nixon, Mitterrand and others who had to deal with him, who travelled to China, who saw him. They did it in order to validate their foreign policies, and most of them were of the opinion he was a good person to make agreements.

But what about the left’s conduct, of the romanticism that Mao generated among the European youth of the 60s and 70s? Were they completely unaware of what was going on? At this point Halliday concedes that without a doubt such lack of knowledge was part of it. People of her generation used to see Communism and some of them really thought that Mao was going to free Communism somehow. Of all the people he know, none of them knew what was going on in China, but they did not make any effort to find out either, nor did they ask themselves how many people had been murdered or sent to the Gulags[4]. Some of those things were not easy to find out about, but nobody made any effort to do so despite the fact that there were a few good sources, there were books written by Chinese people, there were people who studied the oppression in China during the 60s and 70s. But people did not know much and they did not pay much attention either, and some thought that Mao represented something in reality he did not.

On her part, Chang believes that Mao was extremely good at presenting a good image. He had been a journalist in his earlier times, and he knew how to manipulate the press, especially the international press. He spent at least two hours a day reading international affairs and was well informed and knew how to create a good image. Moreover, two of the Gang of Four members were basically writers, and their main work resided in presenting Mao’s actions with an ideological vision. And Mao noticed them and promoted them because they had that fantastic cover of ideology, which tricked many people. People thought that Mao was doing really good things and sometimes did not understand the reasons behind some things of Communist propaganda actions, but they assumed that there would always be a part of big ideas which could not be understood. People let themselves be cheated by Mao.

Chang agrees that, logically, in China it was worse. People were less informed. The ones who saw things differently were those who had access to external information, like herself. She was born in 1952 and grew up in Maoist China. Mao was their God, he was adored; such was the brainwash they had suffered. After that the Cultural Revolution took place, and a lot of terrible things started happening, which was when she first started to question the regime. She used to wonder that if that was paradise, what hell could be. But despite that, she could still not question Mao. Towards the last part of the Cultural Revolution she even blamed his wife (Jiang Qing) and the people who were around him. And she could have never questioned Mao until 1974, eight years after the Cultural Revolution had started and eight years after her faith in him had begun to fade. She found a copy of Newsweek in English, where there were small pictures of Mao and his wife. The photo caption said that Mrs. Mao was his eyes, ears and mouth. That opened her mind, and she started to realize that, obviously, he was responsible of all the terrible things that took place during the Cultural Revolution; that his wife was not guilty in the least, for she was purely his instrument.

Later on during our conversation, the author states that Mao was so terrified of being overthrown and assassinated that he offered a deal to the opposition led by Deng Xiaoping and told them that he knew to what extent they hated Jiang Qing, for he was aware that she was full of venom. She carried out terrible things on his behalf during the Cultural Revolution, so everybody hated her. Thus Mao simply told the generals that they could do anything they wanted with her as long as they let him die in his bed. That alone shows how scared he was for his life. Jung Chang holds a good concept of Deng Xiaoping, despite him being directly responsible for the harsh repression of the student demonstrations in Tiananmen in 1989. She states, nevertheless, that the reformist leader did not dare in the end to proceed to the country’s de-Maoisation. In her words, when Mao died and the Cultural Revolution came to an end, towards the late 70s and early 80s, there was a golden opportunity to put an end to Maoism. There was an entire country which wanted to free itself from his legacy and the Communist mandate and to lead the country in a totally different way.

The regime still refuses to make a critical revision of the events which took place in Tiananmen, though, and in Chang’s words, without a doubt the government needs to get to that. Nevertheless, in her opinion it is more important to revision Mao, for what happened in Tiananmen was a residue of Mao’s mandate. The day when Mao’s portrait is taken down from Tiananmen Square will be the day when China will start truly changing.

What is then left of Maoism in today’s China? For how long can the dictatorship last?

Halliday states that it can last 20 or 25 more years, he is not sure. In his opinion, Maoism’s main legacy is the monopoly of political power, which is a strong theme between Communism and Maoism: the fact that there cannot be an ethic, moral code independent to the one that the Party establishes. The Communist Party does not allow the existence of any other parties nor organizations which could compete for power and question the political approaches the Government follows and which are thought about secretly. He has a hope that such thing cannot last. He believes that what they are trying to do now is to build something like the PRI in Mexico, and in his view, they are achieving it[5].

The book’s epilogue ends thus: “’Mao’s portrait and his corpse still dominate Tiananmen Square in the heart of the Chinese capital. The communist regime declares itself to be Mao’s heir and perpetuates the myth of Mao”. Wild Swan’s author states that she wants to be optimistic, for sooner or later the Government will have to open up. Many other dictatorships, among them Indonesia, Taiwan, South Korea, have gone that way; therefore she believes that the same will take place in the future in her country.

Translated from “La peor cara de Mao”, by Bosco Esteruelas, published in “El País Semanal”, 29^th March 2006 (available in http://www.elpais.com/articulo/portada/peor/cara/Mao/elpeputec/20060329elpepspor_4/Tes)

 

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[1] A part-time peasant doctor (in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jung_Chang ) [Translator's Note.]

 

[2] Most powerful members of a radical political elite convicted for implementing the harsh policies of Mao Zedong during the Cultural Revolution. The four were Wang Hongwen, Zhang Chunqiao, Yao Wenyuan, and Mao’s third wife, Jiang Qing. Manipulating the youthful Red Guards, the Gang of Four controlled four areas: intellectual education, basic theories in science and technology, teacher-student relations and school discipline, and party policies regarding intellectuals. The turmoil of the Cultural Revolution subsided after 1969, but the Gang of Four maintained their power until Mao’s death in 1976, when they were imprisoned; they stood trial in 1980–81 ( in http://www.britannica.com/ebc/article-9365226?query=the%20gang%20of%20four&ct= ) [T’s n.]

[3] China’s most famous teacher, philosopher, and political theorist, whose ideas have influenced the civilization of East Asia. (in http://www.britannica.com/ebc/article-9361385?query=Confucius&ct= ) [T’s n.]

[4] System of Soviet labour camps and prisons that from the 1920s to the mid-1950s housed millions of political prisoners and criminals (in http://www.britannica.com/ebc/article-9366310?query=gulag&ct= ) [T’s n.]

[5] Institutional Revolutionary Party. Mexican political party that dominated the country’s political institutions from its founding in 1929 until the end of the 20th century. At the national level, the president, as leader of the party, typically selected the party’s next presidential candidate—thus effectively choosing his own successor (in http://www.britannica.com/ebc/article-9368022?query=PRI&ct= ) [T’s n.]

The Depraved Mystic 28/04/2009

At 12.30 am on the 16th of December 1916, Grigori Yefimomich Rasputin opened the door of his apartment on Gorojavaya St in Saint Petersburg on the way to his own death. The staircase of the building was dark, so he offered to guide his companion, Prince Felix Yusupov and Count Elston-Sumarokov, through the darkness. They went down the stairs holding each other by the arm. Rasputin knew the way by heart, but Yusupov thought to himself that the eyes of the peasant were capable of seeing. Everybody who had ever met him used to agree on the strange nature of his gaze, on its hypnotic power, on the disturbing depth of his sockets. In the pictures that have reached us he still looks at posterity with an outlandish look of diabolic madness. Nevertheless, misfortune’s gallows humour did not allow the clairvoyant, to whom many had attributed superhuman powers, to realise that he was beside his own murderer.

It was not too cold at that time (two or three degrees), and the snow was falling calmy, indifferently and quietly over the city. When they stepped out on the street the Prince’s car was already waiting for them, driven by Dr Lazavert disguised as a chauffeur –another person in the plot to put an end to the most influent Court advisor in the country, the man whom the Tsars considered holy and whom they received for hours both in the Winter Palace and their Tsarkoe Selo residence, the man they usually called Our Friend in the secret and affectionate way which the marriage of the Emperors of All the Russias was so fond of.

The domestic routine of Rasputin’s last night, together with a multitude of details related to his life in court and his activities, is known to us through the testimonies of his maid, his circle of followers and some politicians, who had to report to the authorities as a result of the later February Revolution. The reports were kept in the file of the Extraordinary Commission of Inquiry for the Investigation of Illegal Acts by Ministers and Other Responsible Persons of the Tsarist Regime, Instruction Section ^[1]. Such commission was abolished by the Bolsheviks in October 1917, and the file was not found until 1995 when the cello player Milan Rostropovich acquired it in a Sotheby’s auction, donating it afterwards to his writer friend Edvard Radzinsky, whose The Rasputin File constitutes one of the most important studies carried out on our character to date.

During that last night of his, Rasputin –also known as Grigori, Girshka, The Elder (in the traditional Russian sense of calling Elder to saints and wise men) and The Obscure One (as recorded in the police files from August 1914 onwards) received the visit of one of his frequent admirers. She was a chubby blonde of around 25, as per his niece’s, living at the time in the apartment, and the building caretaker’s report. She stayed with Rasputin in the famous sofa room, where damsels in distress, professional devout ladies and also curious women of doubtful reputation used to stop by every time they went to flutter around the enlightened man.

Alexander Protopopov, Home Secretary back then, an almost almighty position in 1916 Russia, showed up at the apartment at midnight. He stayed for ten minutes, but Grigori did not tell him he had planned to go out. Protopopov was one of the decisive pawns which fate used to direct Rasputin on the way to his own death. In the past the Secretary had ordered all daily surveillance over Rasputin ^[2] to be stopped from 10 pm onwards so that there would be no record of his frequent visits to the house in any official report. Rasputin was unaware of this, so when that night he went out to the street holding Felix Yusupov’s arm he was convinced that his guards would follow them closely. But the truth was that he was walking self-confidently and alone beside the person who had long ago organized a conspiracy to kill him.

The Yusupovs were the most important people in Russia after the Royal family, and as rich if not richer than the Emperors themselves. From the times of Ivan The Terrible they owned immense areas of land. They later went on to become great industrials. For 300 years the Yusupovs had become some sort of Royal shadow. Felix Yusupov was married to Tsar Alexander’s niece, the Great Duchess Irina. Although he carried the blood of the cruel and warlike Tatar people, Felix himself was more of a sissy. Curiously enough, he was denied to join the military service because he did not want to participate in any war that involved spilling blood. During his youth, long before his conspiring intrigues, he led a life of a well-off and dissolute pleasure taker. Together with his older brother Nicholas (killed on a duel by his lover’s husband later on) he enjoyed the voluptuous nightlife of Saint Petersburg and Paris, many times dressed like a woman, while he played with bi-sexuality, a hobby he kept for the rest of his life.

The night of the 16th of December the car driven by Dr Lazavert came to a halt at a lateral courtyard of the Yusupov Palace, on the Moïka canal. Felix and Irina inhabited one of the building’s wings, and they were refurbishing it to their taste. That rehabilitation included the basement where the murder of Rasputin was staged. It featured thick walls and small windows at ground level. (As Radzinsky indicates in his study, history mirrored that event with the location of the Ipatiev House where the Royal family was killed soon after, in the middle of the Yekaterinburg night, which was chillingly similar.) The basement had been re-decorated in the classic style of a Russian dining/living-room. We know the exact details of the scene, described in Felix’s memoirs many years later and published in Paris. The ceiling was vault-shaped and an arch divided the two sections of the basement: one of them had been turned into a small dining-room, and the other one into a small living-room. There were niches in the walls with housed Chinese porcelain vases. They had brought down from the attic  some old chairs of carved wood and leather upholstery, ivory chalices, a larder from the times of Catherine The Great with ebony inlays and a labyrinth of bronze and glass columns which hid small drawers. A Persian rug covered the floor, and in front of the larder an enormous Polar bear’s skin was spread. The guest dining-room table was in the centre of the room. A spiral staircase communicated the basement with Felix’s rooms. Half-way through the staircase there was a door that gave access to the courtyard, through which Felix and Rasputin entered the basement as soon as the car stopped.

The bait used to take Rasputin to that lair has never been precisely known. The most probable thing is that it was a mixture of several excuses. On the one hand, it was a flattering invitation, as it came from one of the most powerful persons in the country. On the other hand, as indicated by the close and astute witness the Great Duke Nikolai Mijailovich in his diary, Felix had used his erotic charms in that self-seeking friendship, and Rasputin was not alien to male love because it was easy for him to reconcile the basics of masculinity and femininity. And last, but not least, Rasputin longed to meet the beautiful Irina, used as bait by Felix, and for whom The Elder lusted for. The ruse required that Irina be treated from an illness of a supposedly spiritual origin. As we shall see, Rasputin often expelled the demons of lust through the use of lust itself, he internalized alien sin by committing the sin himself. That way the later repentance would free both healer and patient.  Everything seems to indicate that during the last days of the conspiracy Felix was being treated from the same condition. In theory, Irina had to be cured that night -saved from perdition by Grigory Yefimovich, the peasant who came from Siberia and who, back then and during the drunken stupor of 1916, had boasted of having Russia “in the palm of his hand”.

Nevertheless, that night Irina was not in the Yusupov palace. Eventhough she had initially agreed to take part on the conspiracy, she soon repented and on her letters to her husband she pleaded him to abandon the assassination plan. She stayed in her Crimea residence, suffering of a hyperaesthesia crisis which prostrated her in bed with a fever, surrounded by strange ill-fated premonitions which predicted war, blood and suffering for the country –as it eventually happened.

But when Rasputin walked down the stairs and entered the basement he was convinced that the niece of the Tsar Alexander II was at home, in the upstairs quarter, from where voices and gramophone music with the melody of the American song “Yankee Doodle” could be heard.  The music brought about a slight inappropriate frivolity to the events surrounding a crime.

Once he parked the car, Dr Lazavert got rid of his chauffeur disguise and joined the rest of conspirators in the first floor rooms. Vladimir Purishkevich was also there, a monarchical and anti-semitic politician, member of the Duma ^[3] and who had already delivered controversial speeches against both Rasputin and the Tsarina Alexandra Fiodorovna, calling her a German in Russia’s throne, alien to the country and its people. Together with Purishkevich were the lieutenant Sujotin (a young officer who was in [Yevgeni] Preobrazhensky’s regiment) and the Grand Duke Dimitri Pavlovich, cousin of Tsar Nicholas II and another character to play a main role in the conspiracy.

Dimitri was a tall, hefty and handsome Imperial Guard officer. An athlete who took part in the Olympic Games, he was a scrounger and a member of the exclusive Yacht Club -back in those days a main place where seditious conspiracies were forged under the country’s growing instability. Without a shadow of a doubt he was Nicholas’ favourite, who probably saw and admired in his libertine relative everything that fate had denied him, making him first a hypochondriac with an extreme lack of will power and then loading him with duties in a time of serious internal and international conflicts. Dimitri had been engaged to Grand Duchess Olga Nikolaevna, the Tsar’s eldest daughter, but the engagement had been called off at the Tsarina’s and Rasputin’s urges. Tsarina Alexandra was aware of the fact that Nicholas’ cousin despised The Elder, so she uncovered the scandal of Dimitri’s homosexual indiscretions with Felix Yusupov. She also reported his hardened drinker’s temper, him being a duel provoker hooked on never-ending wild parties. Rasputin predicted that Dimitri would soon contract a skin condition as a result of his licentious life, and thus Coco Chanel’s lover saw himself being put aside from his grand wedding, already announced in society.

Thus, the four conspirators were listening by the staircase on the first floor to Rasputin and Felix’s voices coming from the basement. Down there they were sitting facing each other, talking lively by the fireplace. Grigori had walked the blurred, enigmatic and almost always inexplicable path of his own life and had ended up in that basement.

He was born in the village of Pokrovskoye, Tyumen (a district in the Tobolsk province), on the 10th of January 1869, St Gregory’s day. We know very little of his early years, apart from the fact that his life initially looked like one most of Siberian peasants were destined to: the routine of a drunken man. That was until he converted through pain and humiliation. His Dostoyevskian-type ecstasy was inflicted to him by a neighbour, who caught him stealing in his fields and thrashed him. From then onwards, he became a begging pilgrim with a strange nervous system. Some witnesses of the time recall that he looked like a retard, always fighting his inner demon. The origin of the legend that he had predictive powers, that he could make prophesies (some having to do with the fall of the Romanovs, others about the end of disastrous draughts), comes from this pre-history of his.

Rasputin was doubtless linked throughout his life to the teachings of the heretic Khlysty, flagellators who became living christs during delirious ceremonies of sexual promiscuity, which they called joys. The Khlysty used to practice a spiritual training which required three compulsory steps: sin, repentance and purification. Without this mystic heretic background Rasputin’s future behaviour towards matters of the flesh could never be understood.

The Tsars must have met him in November 1905, although introduced them remains unknown. The temper of the Tsars is as mysterious to us as Rasputin’s, for at the end of the day it was the Tsars themselves the ones to decide to believe in him –against the warnings of the rest of the Romanov family, the high aristocracy, the political class and other commoner witnesses. Nicholas, who had been born surrounded by blood –as was his dynasty’s story, was a taciturn and superstitious human being. Alexandra, despite her firm character and her interfering intents to become a great statistician was prone to all sorts of mysticisms. Apparently they took Rasputin as the reincarnation of a deceased old spiritual adviser, Monsieur Philippe, a French magician who had a therapeutical reputation. In their first meeting Rasputin showed to have the intuition of a cheat. He asked to see Alexei, the Tsarevich, whose ill health, caused by haemophilic crisis, had the Royal family upside down, which had desperately looked for an heir after the birth of four Grand Duchesses. Rasputin put his hands on him, stared at him, prayed out loud and the kid felt relieved instantly. Ever since then he became indispensable to the Tsars. Nobody ever found out whether Alexei’s improvements were more related to the old man’s hypnotic powers or to his knowledge of ancient pagan healing secrets, but the bottom line is that the improvements did take place.

In the meantime, Grigori Yefimovich, settling down in St Petersburg, started to climb up within the Palace’s hierarchy and winning the Royal Family’s trust completely. By 1910 he already allowed himself to deal with politics. He influenced Russia’s recognition of both the annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina on the part of Austria-Hungary and in the Tsars’ warlike neutrality (interpreted by many as a betrayal to Serbian Orthodox brothers). Moreover, Rasputin treated the Head of the Holy Synod, Sabler, in order to earn himself a follower in the Tsarina’s clique. From then onwards Alexandra and Rasputin managed to reciprocally wish for the same: The Elder corroborated with God all the Empress’ political maneuvers.

At the same time, Rasputin’s circle of devoted admirers was growing. They were idle members of society, bourgeois ladies who had religious pretensions, but also simple commoners. They looked after him as devouts would have dotted over scarlet cardinals. Countesses and Duchesses used to visit him, kissed his hand, kneeled in front of him, showered him with gifts and, before they left, requested, as the highest favour, to be able to take his dirty clothes, with sweat if possible, in order to wash them.

The sexual favours he received from women were already legendary back then. He went to bath houses surrounded by devout ladies, he administered his disciples –his fools, in the mystic sense of kind purity, private healings from the devil of lubricity in his office’s sofa, and he chased any stranger who crossed his way. In the police reports of those years, policemen recorded his visits to brothels, which took place several times a day. Sometimes he fell into a fit, kidnapped a street prostitute, disappeared into an apartment and came out shortly after, talking loudly and making strange gestures. The rumour in the capital was that his cock was as big as a horse’s. The Tsarevic’s nanny, Mary Vishnyakova, accused him of having thrown himself on her and stealing her virginity in a joyful ritual.

In those days Rasputin had also accomplished a sociological kind of feat: he managed to unite everybody in the common task of loathing him. The [political] left took him for a reactionary and anti-Semitic person; the right and the Monarchy feared his preferences towards characters they detested; the Court despised him as a peasant; the Orthodox Church was suspicious of his airs of heretic Khlysty; the Prime Minister back then, Stolypin, did not understand the power Rasputin had over the Tsars; the Romanovs were scandalized by his influence; the military high command complained about his opposition to war. All things considered, what is it surprising is not that there was a conspiracy against his life but that dozens of them had not been carried out already.

In much the same way, it is nothing but a mystery the fact that the Tsars not only turned a deaf ear to all the accusations that reached them –which came from their family circle, from the members of the Duma and from the regime’s secret police informants, but that they systematically went on destituting and putting aside any person who tried to set them against The Elder.

The only likely explanation lies once again in the Emperors’ extraordinary supersticious religiousness: it is not that they were blind but that they were convinced they could see the hereafter. They believed they could see what others were incapable to understand. Alexandra and Nicholas thought Rasputin had the gift of the iurodstvo, the holy foolishness ^[4] . In the Russian mystic tradition, mad saints have a great historical importance. St Basil’s Cathedral in Moscow’s Red Square is devoted to one of them. They were usually beggars who went around naked and weighed themselves down with chains, screaming oracles and prophecies. They pretended they were mad in order to suffer humiliations and to experiment pain and prosecution, like Christ. They mocked conventions and wordly vices as a way to become mirrors for hypocritical sinners. They harassed women, fornicated in public. Such were the exploits of the iurodstvo.

Alexandra’s private library contained the volume Holy Fools of the Russian Church, with margin notes, including a chapter on the sexual libertinage of ascetics. That is why the Tsars knew how to interpret Rasputin’s behaviour like nobody else.

Before the beginning of The Great War, an unknown woman inspired by Iliodor –a religious enemy of The Elder stabs Rasputin in Pokrovskoye. For days, Grigory is on the brink of dying. When he returns to St Petersburg he is another man: he drinks desperately, dances in circles kicking his boots for hours without feeling dizzy, and he turns more prone to obscure predictions: Angels in the ranks of our warriors, the salvation of our fearless heroes with delight and victory…Nevertheless, whenever he was called to Tsarkoe Selo in the middle of his drinking binges in order to treat Alexei he surprisingly managed to clear up and became suddenly sober.

When the war begins to go astray Nicholas dismisses the Grand Duke Nicholas Nikolaievich Romanov ^[5] as Commander in Chief of the Russian Army. At Alexandra and Rasputin’s request the Tsar himself takes charge of military operations. The Tsarina then takes charge of the Government and organizes a true coup d’état with the help of her main advisers: Anna Vyrubova and Grigori Yefimovich. The Home Secretary, the Holy Synod’s General Agent and the Head of Police are also dismissed and substituted by more trusted people. The indignation felt towards the role of the Tsarina could not be greater. She was thought to have bewitched Nicholas, to be hastening the fall of the Monarchy and to be secretly working in the signing (after ordering the dissolution of the Duma) of a unilateral peace treaty with her country of origin, Germany, which would be considered as a national embarrassment.

When Felix Yusupov heard about such rumours he decided he had to kill Rasputin at any cost and as soon as possible.   All the Elder’s steps had taken since his early wandering times around Siberia like a feverish visionary brought him to that basement in the Moïka canal. Thus, when Prince Yusupov had him sitting in front of him, he offered him a few pink creamy tea cakes poisoned with potassium cyanide crystals.

According to the legend, Rasputin refused them together with the Madeira wine, also laced with cyanide. When Felix Yusupov started to run out of conversation topics and suspect signs of his victim’s premonitions, Grigori decided to eat and drink. Felix later wrote that that night The Dark One drank enough glasses of Madeira wine and tea cakes to kill a regiment of Cossacks, but that he did not show any symptom of poisoning, apart from an incresase in salivation and a constant yawning. Desperate, he left the basement, checked with the rest of conspirators and asked Dimitri Pavlovich his regulation weapon. He went back to where Rasputin was with the gun behind his back and shot him in the chest. The mythological tale states that he fell on the polar bear’s skin, and that the rest hurried to move him so as to avoid it to get soaked with blood.

They left him in the basement, in the dark, on the naked floor, and went upstairs. In his memoirs Felix recounted that shortly after he could not resist the need to see the corpse again. They went back to the crime scene, shook the body and felt it was still warm. Suddenly, Rasputin opened his eyes and stared at his assassin’s face. Next he stood up and grabbed Felix powerfully by the neck. When the Prince managed to let go, Rasputin, who was repeating Felix’s name without stopping, escaped towards the garden through the staircase. Purishkevich caught up with him in the backyard and shot him four times with his Savage revolver in two rounds of shots. He missed the first two. The third one, he later wrote, hit Rasputin in the back as he was running, and the fourth one hit him in the head. The servants in the Yusupov Palace dragged the corpse back into the house through the snow. Once there Felix suffered a hysteria crisis and started to hit Rasputin’s head with an iron bar covered with rubber until he fell exhausted, drenched by the splattered blood.

Just then two police officers on duty in the Moïka canal precinct knocked on the Palace’s doors. They thought they had heard some shooting. The nervous Purishkevich identified himself as a member of the Duma, confessed to the murder and appealed to the policemen’s patriotism in order to keep silent –for Mother Russia’s benefit. Nevertherless, early next morning St Petersburg’s Mayor Alexander Balk reported to Protopov –Minister of Home Affairs the unbelievable conversation that had taken place between one of the murderers and the two accidental witnesses of the shooting. The rumour of Rasputin’s murder spread all over the city until it reached the Tsarkoe Selo and the Tsars’ ears.

Although we will never know exactly what happened in that basement, Radzinsky’s doubt on both Yusupov’s and Purishkevich’s written accounts do make sense. Rasputin’s amazing resistance to arsenic can be explained by two reasons. First, the wine’s dissolution was not appropriate and the arsenic dose was insufficient. As far as the tea cakes, Rasputin did not eat them: he never skipped his diet, which prescribed to abstain from meat and sweets because they darkened one’s halo. The most probable explanation is that Felix, who hated weapons and was of an apprehensive nature, wounded him only slightly. Thus his resurrection. As far as Purishkevich is concerned, it is not credible that a civilian missed the first two shots and then managed to hit him later, when he was further away, with two precise shots in the back and head. The Duma’s member took some trouble during the following days in trying to acquit Dimitri Pavlovich in as far as possible. He said many times that the Royal hands were not blood-stained. But it had to be Dimitri, a courageous soldier and elite shooter the one to strike Rasputin in the yard. The second round, the mortal shots, came from the Tsar’s cousin’s pistol. That is why Nicholas imposed Dimitri, his favourite, the most severe punishment and sent him to the front in Persia. He did not have any doubt about who had taken Rasputin down.

The floating corpse showed up in the freezing waters of the Neva River with a naked torso on the morning of the 19^th of December. The face was disfigured; there were bullet holes in the thorax, back and head. It was strange: its arms were up. According to the doctors in their autopsy report, Rasputin was still alive and trying to break his ties when he was thrown by his murderers into a hole dug in the ice under the Great Petrovsky Bridge.

Soon after that Nicholas would abdicate and a cloud of blood would rain over Russia.

Translated from “El místico depravado”, by Carlos Marzal in El País Semanal, published on the 12^th February 2006 (available in http://www.elpais.com/articulo/portada/mistico/depravado/elpeputec/20060212elpepspor_8/Tes)

by CARLOS MARZAL

EL PAIS SEMANAL – 12-02-2006

Lord and Master of the Congo 27/04/2009

King Leopold II of Belgium finished off greatly his dirty tricks. He made everybody, from explorers to state leaders, believe that his interest for Africa was only motivated by humanitarian causes, and he made the Congo his own property in order to exploit its population unscrupulously. His ‘whims’ cost five million lives.

From 1885 to 1906 the blue flag with a solitary star, representing what was euphemistically and cruelly called the Congo Free State, fluttered over a good part of Central Africa. In reality, what such sinister flag stood for was an immense concentration camp –or something most similar to one, founded by Leopold II, King of the Belgians, whose greed, slyness and lack of scruples was astonishing and only comparable to other big tyrants like Hitler, Kim Il Sung or Stalin. How could he, the monarch of a small and peaceful European kingdom, obtain a territory of 2.5 million km² –almost half of Europe- and run it with an iron fist, as if it were his personal property, without anybody stopping him? What’s more, how could he do it without even setting a foot on that territory? It is hard to understand, as it is always the case when the world finds out about a social nightmare of colossal proportions. Nevertheless, in order to try to find an answer to what happened in Leopold’s Congo it is necessary to understand its context. It was mid-19^th century, not only an era in dire need of heroes, but also convoluted times, hardened and worn out by the sudden changes that the industrial revolution brought about. It was indeed a world whose geographical limits seemed completely explored, in a historic moment in which the Western man was proud to be able to see the reflection of his own proud creation.

The atrocities committed during those terrible barbaric years in the Congo were described by Joseph Conrad in the magnificent and harrowing novel that is Heart of Darkness. Even if many posterior readings have insisted on the mostly allegoric character of the book, immersing yourself in the Congo of that time makes you realize that Conrad did little more than transcribe his tireless trip across the African hell and the absolute evil of such men who made possible this story of never-ending violations.

During more than 20 years, and ever since Leopold II put into place the ambitious plan of achieving the world’s recognition of the African territory to be his, both good old Europe and the USA kept on looking the other way, oscillating between the indifference they felt for whatever activity the Belgian King was undertaking in such a remote region of Equatorial Africa and the sudden economic interests arising from the news reaching them; news that spoke about eventual riches from which both continents could obtain a juicy participation. They also had the benefit of a perfect alibi: as the King of the Belgians himself had insisted over and over again, it was a case of humanitarian and religious work. Leopold had been wise enough to insist on the cruelty of Muslim slavery, an activity that any well-meaning European community looked upon with a scandalised horror –a community that forgot about the years when it was precisely Europeans the ones to fill harbours with the spilled blood and terror of hundreds of thousands of African slaves.

The world was, therefore, a territory economically and culturally ready for something of such magnitude to take place. But in order for such a savage machinery to be put in motion, in such a cruel and in such a large scale, both a diabolically inspired orchestration and apt henchmen were required, as is common in circumstances like these. To Leopold’s harmful talent was added the greed and cruelty of two characters as important in this story –at least at the beginning: the explorer Henry Morton Stanley and Henry Shelton Sanford, a rich aristocrat from Connecticut who put all his trickery to the Belgian monarch’s service in order to get the US and President Chester Arthur’s Government to accept Leopold’s pretensions over the Congo. It was the last roll of the dice for the Congo.

Leopold II of Belgium had, even since before inheriting the throne of his small kingdom, one and only ambition, which made him live almost giving his back to his country, his family and anything that went on in his immediate surroundings: becoming the lord and master of a colony. Apparently, it was not a question of it being the excessive ambition of a head of state nor a delusion of grandeur belonging to a turn-of-the-century megalomaniac monarch either. It was, more than anything, a question of voracious greed, of a man wanting to become somebody powerful and rich enough to have an influence in the concert of nations on a personal level. “Petit pays, petit gens” ['Small country, small people'], he used to say when referring to Belgium, scorning his kingdom’s smallness, sandwiched between the energic German Empire and Napoleon III’s buoyant France. Much before ascending the throne, the King of the Belgians had glimpsed the possibility of getting a hold of a colony anywhere in the world. Before turning 20 he had already visited Constantinople, Egypt, the Balkans… He was obsessed with buying a territory with the excuse of catapulting Belgium to the club of the most powerful nations, taking control and owning the exploitation rights of a space which turned him in a fabulously rich and powerful monarch. First he expressed an interest on Abyssinia, then for the Dutch East Indies, and even on the Argentinian province of Entre Ríos and the Martín García Island, near the mouth of the Uruguay and Paraná rivers. Feverishly pensive, confined inside of the Laeken Palace, the young heir to the Belgian throne spent his time consumed by his colonialist obsessions without any short-term prospect. Nevertheless, that situation was about to change. Patient, stubborn and acting on a limitless ambition, the future King of the Belgians would soon find the opportunity he had been looking for years.

Such opportunity arrived in 1872 when the news that the explorer Henry M. Stanley had found Livingstone hit the world. The young monarch Leopold II, who had already been on the throne for seven years, saw the heavens open up before him: that was the providential opportunity he had been waiting for. Nevertheless, he did not rush. He was probably one of the persons to follow most attentively the adventurer’s chronicles, the same way he had followed –and had sometimes financed- Verney Lovett Cameron’s expeditions, who almost became the first European to cross Africa from East to West, noticing that the English paid little attention for such an immense territory, which nobody had cartographed accurately. Leopold took good stock of both Stanley and Livingstone’s stories about the ‘Arab slavery cruelty’ and how they alarmed the community of Western nations, understanding that his colonising pretensions had to acquire a humanitarian gloss: eradication of the commerce with slaves, the progress of science and a deep moral reform on those primitive societies. He concocted an intelligent plan in 1876 to convince and get together a group of geographer, explorers, humanitarian activists, military men and businessmen in a Geographic Conference in Brussels. There Leopold went to great lengths to talk about the ‘solely humanitarian’ interest he felt for the Congo and the need to bring civilisation where it still had not reached. Leopold dazzled his guests with his elegance and bonhomie, together with the luxurious greeting he gave them all and the extent of his altruistic concerns. Naturally, he was elected President of the newly created International African Association, with in time would become the Congo International Association –the similarity of names not being coincidence, and would finally change to the Free State of the Congo, an extremely vast agricultural, wood and mining exploitation in which almost 5 million people lost their lives.

When Henry M. Stanley gave signs of life in 1877 –after embarking in another expedition through Africa, the Belgian monarch made the right moves to contact him and make the next step. It was barely a year after the Geographical Conference in which his image of humanitarian king, concerned about the well-being of the poorest communities, captivated an important group of men.

Making use of an astonishing shrewdness, Leopold of Belgium managed to convince Stanley, already extremely famous and rich, to explore the territory he had crossed from coast to coast on an arduous and epic journey, bringing unbelievable stories of people and, moreover, of never-ending riches –both on his behalf and with his economic back up.

As Adam Hochschild tells in his wonderful book King Leopold’s Ghost, it even took Stanley –a fierce, cruel and ambitious man himself, some time before realizing that he had been trapped in the refined and educated monarch’s colonialist plans. He had been mesmerised by the deference and royal distinctions which fulfilled the explorer’s desire of recognition –as Leopold was quick to notice, resentful as he was by the lack of interest the British showed him towards the Congo, and especially towards his exploit of rescuing Livingstone.

Leopold was not in a hurry, though. He had only one worry: neither the French nor English could not find out about the immense cake that was at stake. That was the main reason for his concern over the sovereign nations of Europe to formally recognize the African Association of the Congo. For that purpose alone he could count on the priceless help of the man who had been the US Ambassador in Belgium, Henry Sheton Sanford, an American millionaire and aristocrat who was enthralled by European royalty and desperately sought a place in the small but opulent court Leopold presided over. Once the latter realized Sanford’s weaknesses, he managed to have him at his service without a moment of hesitation. Sanford centered his fight for the recognition of the African protectorate in two extremely attractive aspects for the US: the fight against Arab-led slavery in the region and the creation of something similar to the US in Africa. He managed to count on with the unexpected help of the Alabama Senator John Morgan, who saw in the great civilising work of the monarch a similar model –albeit more ambitious, to the one Americans themselves had made with the creation of Liberia, where a large colony of freed black people was sent in order for them to be able to found their nation in their own land.

What took place during the course of the following years has a perfect place in the blackest pages of contemporary history: the wheels of such savage mechanism set in motion years earlier by Leopold II finally started to reap benefits, and so that king without scruples, sly and ambitious became the lord and master of immensely vast and rich lands. He administered them making use of the brutality and cruel behaviour of civil servants, explorers and adventurers of all kinds who saw those Africans as people who were barely above animals.

From 1885 to 1906 there was never anything remotely close to commerce in the Congo, apart from the cheap necklaces and cotton T-shirts that Leopold’s civil servants used to exchange for fertile lands or years of work. That was in the best of cases, for most of the time there was only looting, exploitation, raping, burnt towns, brutal blackmailing and terrible punishments for those who would not cope with the terrifying working day that the monarch’s insatiable ambition demanded. Without a shadow of a doubt, states Hochschild in his book, Leopold II of Belgium was perfectly aware of what was going on in his private finca. Moreover, worried about the fact that his working squads were being decimated by the sheer physical effort, he even went as far as suggesting the implementation of teams of children in order to help with the work load. And how did they get such young labour? They simply took them away from their families, sending them to a definite death by making them carry loads of over ten kilos during working days that even the strongest men found exhausting. There was no way of opposing the power and brutality of the whites, who were better armed than the African natives, now turned into exhausted skeletons.

When the first news of what was really going on in the Congo started to reach Europe through missionaries and travellers horrified by what they saw, Leopold had already managed to establish an image of altruist and disinterested nature. He simply denied the reports and just explained, for instance, that the ivory commerce was used to alleviate the deficit incurred by his investments on those uncivilised aboriginals. Nevertheless, and partly due to the courage and stubbornness of some individuals, like the British vice-consul in the Congo Roger Casement, and Edmund Dene Morel, an employee of a naval company in Liverpool, the world started to find out little by little about the horrors Leopold had brought upon, from the peace and quiet of his palace in Brussels, that African land –which was for many hardly an immense spot in that continent’s map. Both flooded half of Europe’s governmental offices with letters, complaints and articles. They finally created the Association for the Reform of the Congo. Morel himself visited the North-American president Theodore Roosevelt in order to demand that his Government take action, he managed to persuade personalities like Anatole France or Canterbury’s Archbishop to demonstrate against those horrors, and in short managed to wake up the sleepy consciousness of the society of the time and make it confront the evil which for so long turned the Congo into a hell, shattering its future.

Perhaps the worst thing in this story is the impunity which time has given to it dissolving it in our memory in less than a century. Nowadays almost nobody remembers even hearing about the savage display of the levels greed can reach when combined with impunity. The equestrian statue of King Leopold II still rides on in the Laeken palace without anybody paying any particular attention to it, and without the five million corpses caused by that nightmarish moment in time being able to alter its safe hiding place in history.

Translated from “Amo y señor del Congo”, by Jorge Eduardo Benavides in El País Semanal, published on the 29^th January 2006 (available in http://www.elpais.com/solotexto/articulo.html?xref=20060129elpepspor_2&type=Tes&k=Amo/senor/Congo,

by JORGE EDUARDO BENAVIDES

EL PAIS SEMANAL – 29-01-2006

Belladona’s Poison 26/04/2009

Catherine was originally from Florence, a daughter of Lorenzo II. She entered history at 14 in 1533 when she married 15-year-old Henry, second son of King Francis I of France. She had been brought up quite strictly -they say that once, when she was six, she was forced to witness the agony of her dogs, which had been poisoned, as a punishment. After her wedding, and as per tradition, bride and groom were accompanied to the nuptial bed by several members of the Royal entourage (including the King and Pope Clement VII, a Medici himself and uncle and tutor of Catherine since her own father’s death years ago. They were the pleased to witness the sexual union between the two youngsters.

Problems between the couple arose soon after. The reason was the affair that Henry still had with his lover Diane of Poitiers, a courtesan 20 years older than him who had also been Henry’s father’s concubine, and who had him completely subdued. To make matters worse, Diane  was much more accepted both by the court and by the population than Catherine, a foreigner, something which could be seen in all protocol events, where the position and influence of the royal lover was much more relevant than that of the legitimate wife. All that placed Catherine in a significantly lower position, which became a constant source of public humiliations for years. Nevertheless, it was here where Catherine’s true character surfaced. Conscious as she was of the enormous power of her rival and her own weak position, Catherine never confronted Diane, pretending to accept the subordinate place in which her husband had placed her. In the meantime, she earned the trust of both her father-in-law and Diane herself, with whom she acted affectionately and submissively –Catherine wasn’t a consummated reader of  Machiavelli for nothing, stating frequently that one had but to smile to a rival. Thus, in the shadow, pretending to be friends with her rival and accept the ménage à trois, she earned a formidable influence that would give her later on the access to power.

Her precocious ability to scheme was one of the causes for everybody to suspect her when her brother-in-law the Dauphin Francis (the heir apparent to the throne of France) died. He had officially died after drinking a glass of iced water following a stifling ball game. But the fact that the person who served him the glass was an Italian waiter and that Catherine’s husband, Henry, automatically became the successor to the throne gave rise to the suspicion that he had been poisoned. Such rumor was not gratuitous. Catherine was extremely refined in many areas, and besides importing the fork from Italy (to which she added a long handle in case the fellow dinner wanted to use it to scratch his back) she had also introduced an Italian fashion for perfumes, which made many popular perfumists (like Renate of Florence) travel to France and open up a store in Paris. Back then the alchemy used to make good perfumes was extremely linked to the alchemy for making poisonous substances, and Catherine was known to profess a strange keenness towards both chemical practices.

Certainly, in 16^th century Europe poisonous substances were very fashionable, being used frequently in political murders due to the difficulty of proving their presence. Even Shakespeare makes references to poisonings in many of his works, which shows how commonly poison was used in certain circles. Specifically, the rumor around Catherine was that she had spread the use in France of the mysterious “poison of the Medici”.

But what is certain is that Catherine had imported from Italy the belladonna (beautiful woman in Italian), a plant that dilates pupils, making for a more attractive gaze, and which contains atropine, a drug that accelerates cardiac rhythm and which is fatal in high doses.

It was also known to the Court that Catherine was keen on trying out her potions, together with their possible antidotes, with those sentenced to death, carefully writing down their effects. Such eagerness to experiment was extended to a plant newly brought from America, the tobacco, which the French Ambassador in Lisbon, Jean Nicot, sent her in order to fight severe headaches. This way she transmitted the habit of smoking to the entire French Court. Tobacco was also called back then as “Nicot’s herbs”, and its main alkaloid was called “nicotine”, still its name nowadays.

Years went by without the Royal couple having children -Catherine running the risk of being repudiated. In order to solve this problem, she acted in two fronts. First of all, she made sure that the conjugal visits took place more often, and thus she looked after her beauty like never before: she plucked her eyebrows, she used belladonna to dilate her pupils, she applied rice powder on her face and she put on lipstick. She also devoted some time to spy on her husband’s sexual encounters with Diane in order to study her sexual techniques –which apparently made her so irresistible, and, pretending friendship, she even went as far as asking her for help so that, for the good of France, Diane pushed Henry to the marital bed. On the other hand, she turned to every doctor, magician and sorcerer, who provided her with all kinds of potions and recipies.

They finally had their first child in 1543, to whom another nine followed. Such miracle was attributed to doctor and futurologist Nostradamus, an astrologist and charlatan who Catherine incorporated into her closest circle, for she had realised that Nostradamus exerted a strong suggestion power over a large sector of the Court with his popular and ambiguous star sign predictions. Nevertheless, it is more likely that the actual source of her cure  was the surgeon Ambroise Paré, who operated her of a vaginal malformation. Catherine, needless to say, was extremely careful to place her children out of Diane’s influence, despite the latter’s appointment as “tutor of France’s children”.

Without a doubt, her capacity as instigator leaped forward when,in 1547 and following her father-in-law’s death, she became Queen of France. The truth is that Catherine had become a skilled politician, with a great capacity to dominate her husband and thus be able to control, largely, French politics –although all her actions were presided by a single obsession: to preserve the throne for her children.

While her husband lived Catherine played an active role in foreign affairs, which was centered especicially in the wars against [Spains' King] Charles V and later against Philip II, even sending the latter Nostradamus’ star sign prediction, which the Spanish King rightly burnt before opening. Nevertheless, everything changed after the Peace of Cateau-Cambrésis, which established, among other things, the wedding between Philip II (by then already widower of Mary Tudor) and the eldest daughter of the Kings of France, Elizabeth of Valois. During the cellebrations Henry II suffered a fatal accident: a spear broke and a piece went through his helmet, lodging itself in the King’s brain. Catherine took charge of the situation quickly. After the emergency cure, the King’s health did not improve, and it was established that a splinter had stayed in his head. Not knowing how to proceed, Catherine ordered for the wound to be replicated in 10 convicts sentenced to death, to whom a splinter was inserted into an eye. Doctors treated them, albeit unsuccessfully. When they all died soon after, they were decapitated in order to study them and try to find a solution, but to no avail. Henry died in 1559 at 52. The only consolation for Catherine, in mourning clothes for life, was that a few days later she could perpetrate her much-longed-for revenge: after her husband’s death, Diane of Poitiers was made to return all the jewels that both Catherine’s father-in-law and her husband had given her, and was forever confined to the countryside, far away from the Court.

Catherine’s son Frances ascended the throne at 16. He was sickly and weak, for which his mother, her mind made up to keep the throne for him, took the reins of government. Back then France was threatened by the tensions between the Catholics, headed by the Duke of Guise, and the Huguenots, whose leader was Gaspard of Coligny. Both were more powerful than the King, and they aspired to control and manipulate him. Catherine understood that the only thing that could save the throne for her son was the balance between both sides, and in order not to fall under the influence of Catholics, who were initially more powerful, she gave more power to Protestants, which gave rise to the religious division of the country, and with it, civil war.

But Francis II died in December 1560, amid powerful earaches apparently caused by tuberculous meningitis. His brother Charles IX became his successor, barely 10, and given his young age, Catherine officially took up the Regency. In order keep a tight hold on power se reverted to what she knew best: espionage and intrigue. She established a network of spies and informers in which many ladies in waiting had prominent places, who became lovers of potential adversaries. They duly informed Catherine of all their lovers’ plans. She did not hesitate to even make two nobles share the same courtesan, seeking confrontation. Word has it that her circle of young ladies grew to as many as 150, and the worst rumor suggests that even the Regent herself participated many a time in lesbic sexual encounters with her own pupils.

Although she managed to keep the throne for her son, her ploys could not prevent the violent outburst of a civil war, plunging France into social chaos and bankruptcy. During the war Catherine saw how the Huguenot leader Coligny dangerously increased his influence over her son the King. When the latter became of age, the Protestant leader proposed him to restart an aggressive political attitude towards Spain, something that Catherine perceived as a suicide action, given the ruinous situation of the kingdom. Getting rid of the Huguenots became a matter of urgency for her.

She found the opportunity in August 1572, when Paris welcomed the thousands that were going to attend the wedding of Henry of Navarre with Marguerite, daughter of Catherine and the King. Days earlier Coligny had been slightly wounded in an assassination attempt also instigated by the Queen Mother. Without letting herself to be discouraged by the failure, she convinced her son of the existence of a conspiracy on the part of Huguenots to avenge the Coligny’s assassination attempt, which would come in the shape of an uprising that would kill the King after the wedding. Thus, she suggested her son the need to advance themselves, eliminating the main leaders. Accordingly, and with the support of Charles IX, right after the bell tolls of Saint-Germain’s Church the new Duke of Guise, Henry the   Scarred, headed the mob, which killed 4,000 Protestants in Paris. Coligny was taken in bed, and after being speared he was thrown to the backyard through the window, where de Guise cut him up. Henry, Catherine’s new son-in-law, saved his life by suddenly converting to Catholicism. The massacre extended to other French cities with similar results. They say that Philip II, back then also a son-in-law of the instigating French Queen Mother, broke out in laughter when he found out about the massacre, while in the Vatican Pope Gregory XIII ordered to conduct a Te Deum [Latin hymn to God], make a commemorative coin and have the painter Giorgio Vasari paint several massacre scenes for his own personal delight.

Catherine had thus managed to expunge the threat posed by the Huguenots, but her son the King was still incapable of producing an heir. That is the reason why she assigned him a lover –to awaken the sexual appetite necessary to procreate, which he apparently lacked. Despite all these efforts, though, Charles IX died childless at 24. He officially died of tuberculosis, but many chronicles insist on stating that he was poisoned. The perpetrator would not have been any other than his own mother, who had seemingly impregnated a falconry book with poison. The book was destined to her son-in-law Henry, who she feared could end up occupying the throne in detriment of her sons (as it did happen in the end) and who was extremely fond of such books. Nevertheless, the one to accidentally take the book and leaf through was it her son Charles, who perished a few days later. Catherine’s possible responsibility is well founded, for it was well-known that she still used her poisoning skills against her rivals, like she did with Joan Queen of Navarre –Henry’s mother and therefore Catherine’s sister-in-law, a Huguenot fan who mysteriously found death after receiving a present from Catherine, a pair of beautiful perfumed gloves, made by a prestigious Italian artisan. The official statement was that the demise had been caused by a deadly pleurisy.

In order to succeed to Charles IX, Catherine ordered the return of his eccentric son from Poland, who would reign as Henry III. He was her favourite –she usually referred to him as “the apple of my eye”. Nevertheless, his openly homosexual behavior would soon make her realise that she could not obtain offspring from him either. All her attempts to separate him from his male friends and to tempt him with young girls were in vain. Moreover, it was established that the King had caught syphilis, which made a possible paternity even more difficult. To top it all, Henry’s almost absolute lack of interest on government tasks made his mother to keep the reigns of power. In the meantime, another of her sons also died in a militar incursion.

During the last years of Catherine’s life, France got involved in the War of the Three Henrys, which confronted the King, the Duke Henry of Guise and Henry of Navarre. When Henry III managed to kill his rival the Duke he euphorically ran towards his dying mother’s bed to give her the news. Catherine, sceptical and let down, replied: ‘It is not all about cutting, my son, it is also necessary to sew’. Finally, Catherine died in early 1589, and only three months later the King was murdered.

It was obvious that her efforts to keep the throne for her sons had been in vain. She was a King’s wife and mother of three Kings, but none of them had produced heirs. Moreover, she saw all of them die except Henry. It was as if fate had mocked her: not only her manoeuvres, spionage and schemes had been useless, but the problems she once had to conceive had been passed on to her own offspring like a witch’s curse. To top it all, the one she had tried to eliminate, Henry of Navarre, was made heir to the throne after the death and lack of offspring of all her male children. Henry of Navarre would become the future Henry IV. Without a doubt it was a cruel mock of destiny, the perfect punishment for a cold and calculating woman who had not hesitated to use the most criminal means in order to achieve her goals –but who in the end could not prevent the extinction of the House of Valois.

Translated from “El veneno de la Belladonna”, by Juan Carlos Losada in El País Semanal, published on the 27^th November 2005 ( available in http://www.elpais.com/articulo/portada/veneno/Belladona/elpeputec/20051127elpepspor_16/Tes)

By JUAN CARLOS LOSADA

EL PAÍS SEMANAL – 27-11-2005

The Cruel Sultan 26/04/2009

The Turkish sultan Mehmet II, or Mahomet, seventh Ottoman sultan, was born in 1432. That year the Ottomans had already deeply penetrated Europe and had almost crushed the whole of the Byzantine Empire, which they had almost reduced to the city of Constantinople. His parents were Murat II and one of his seven wives, Huma Atún, a beautiful Albanese slave. Mehmet was the third male son of the sultan, which meant that he had few chances of ascending to the throne unless something happened to his older brothers. Due to this, and according to chronicles of the time, his was a sad and lonely childhood, full of perils. A childhood were punishments and ill-treatments abounded -his mere existence provoked mistrust on the part of his stepmothers and some of the members of the court. He was, without a doubt, a potential rival in the fight for power. Moreover, having reserved the throne for Mehmet’s older brothers, Murat II almost abandoned Mehmet to his own luck, without showing him any affection, while his mother could hardly protect him either, herself a slave until she became a mother due to her inferior rank as compared to the rest of the sultan’s wives.

Thus the prince was brought up with the knowledge of having been made an outcast by his own father and with the suspicion that anybody in the royal palaces could be an enemy, waiting for the right moment to kill him. This way, amid harassment and neglect, fighting for survival and for not being pushed aside from the spheres of power, he forged a cruel, sly, distrustful, ambitious and taciturn behaviour that made him trust nobody and therefore, not have any friends. So well-known was to be his mistrust that years later, and referring to how secret his plans were, he was famous for having said if such plans were to be known by even a hair from his beard, he would tear it off and burn it on the spot.

Events took an unexpected turn at his eldest stepbrother’s death, when Mehmet was only seven. Shortly after, his second septbrother died too, a 13 year-old boy. He was found strangled in his bedroom, and Mehmet was always suspected to have been involved in the crime, at only ten years of age. The truth was never known, but if the events were to be so, it would not be something strange in a court whose princes were in constant power battles. In fact, it would have only meant a continuation of a tradition established by Mehmet’s grandfather, Mehmet I, in which, at reaching the throne, he ordered all his little stepbrothers to be strangled with silk strings so that they could not participate one day in a posterior conspiration and throw him off the throne. If the suspicion had been true, Mehmet II would have only been advancing himself, becoming the one to eliminate the rival before him in the succession line. Evidently, such fratricides were encouraged by the respective mothers and collaborators of the royal successors, for they knew that their destiny was secure only if their child became the sultan. If he didn’t, their fate was to be forgotten, even killed.

Whether he participated or not in the crime, the bottom line is that Mehmet became the first in the succession line, and so his father could not help but pay him more attention. He ordered Mehmet to be given a proper education which, among other areas, made him fluent in Greek, Latin, Persian, Hebrew and Arab, apart from Turkish. After two years, when he was only 12, his father abdicated in his favour, believing that he was ready to reign. It proved to be a huge mistake, for shortly after Mehmet and his tutors started a disagreement with the Prime Minister Jalil Bajá, and, to top it off, a Hungarian invasion descended from the North, posing a threat to all Balcan territories occupied by the Otomans –which, in turn, generated such mass killings of Othrodox Christians that caused a real danger of these rising up in arms. Murat the sultan had to come back from his early retirement in 1444, beat the Hungarians and re-establish order in his kingdom. After reproaching Mehmet his impulsiveness and carelessness, Murat gave him a second chance and handed him over the power, warning him, though, to always follow his Prime Minister’s advice.

Nevertheless, the young Mehmet had not learnt the lesson. Once free from his father’s tutelage, Mehmet’s personality, distrustful and cruel, showed up again. He did not follow anyone’s advice and whoever dared question his orders was executed immediately. The Prime Minister complained again and this time Murat took the power definitively, sending his son and tutors to deep Anatolia, with the objective of teaching him the tasks of ruling and for him to learn to restrain his impulsive behaviour. Mehmet finally ascended to the sultanate definitively in 1451 after his father’s death. He was only 19. His dream had finally become true and he would soon take revenge in all of those who had wanted him away from the throne.

But his own experience of reaching the throne by (possibly) killing his brother made him fear that others would do the same to him. He still had a brother left, a child. Following the family tradition, and while the child’s mother congratulated him on his ascendancy to the power, the young Sultan ordered the child to be drowned in the perfumed waters of his bath; he had no rivals left. In order to erase any traces he ordered the execution of his young sibling’s killer, and, next, he married the mother of the child to a slave. After this, and being coherent with such a fratricide behaviour, he passed a bill in which what before had been family treason became law. The new legislation established that every new Sultan had to kill his male brothers when ascending to the throne, with the noble end of avoiding insurrections and civil wars. In order to overcome the religious prohibition of manslaughter, he made clear that the Sultan could not participate directly in the execution. The custom survived almost all the history of the Empire, even performed centuries after, although many of his descendants softened the norm, substituting the execution with outlawing or imprisonment.

Upon inheriting the Crown, he decided that Constantinople had to be, as the Coran promised, taken for good from the unfaithful. In those days, Mehmet had already toughened his external appearance, wearing a long mustache that covered his thick red lips, which, together with his eagle nose, gave him a most sinister look.

In 1453, 80,000 men, brainwashed by Muslim monks, sieged the city. Bizance’s capital had less than 9,000 men to defend it, and its total population did not reach 50,000 souls. Still, Constantinople’s magnificent walls were a problem, and in two earlier occasions the Otoman army had already failed to break through them. Nevertheless, now a new weapon was to be put in place: artillery. Hungarian and German renegades had built huge pieces of great calibre. Being so heavy and in order to solve the issue of transporting them, the pieces were put together there and then, in the same spot from which the more than 400 kilos artillery pieces were to be shot, breaking the walls of the city apart. Simultaneously, Mehmet managed to successfully transport 70 ships on land, making them slide over sheets of metal covered with ox grease. They were transported to the deep entrance to the sea, the so-called Golden Horn located North of Constantinople, tightening the circle even more and being able to attack the city from every angle.

Meanwhile, showing the distrust for which he was known, Mehmet used to dress up and mix among his own soldiers in order to listen to their conversations; beware whoever was surprised criticizing him or his orders! He also applied such intolerance to his generals. In one occasion, one of his almirals was made responsible of the escape of a Bizantine ship. He was sentenced to be impaled, but since the rest of his generals pleaded vehemently for Mehmet to reconsider such sentence, he decided instead to whip him personally while four slaves held his naked bloody body until almost killing him.\n

Meanwhile, showing the distrust for which he was known, Mehmet used to dress up and mix among his own soldiers in order to listen to their conversations; beware whoever was surprised criticizing him or his orders! He also applied such intolerance to his generals. In one occasion, one of his almirals was made responsible of the escape of a Bizantine ship. He was sentenced to be impaled, but since the rest of his generals pleaded vehemently for Mehmet to reconsider such sentence, he decided instead to whip him personally while four slaves held his naked bloody body until almost killing him.

Finally, after 53 days of siege, an opening was made in the San Romano of Constantinople door. It was possibly due to the fact that 50 Otoman warriors, who had been able to infiltrate themselves through the poorly defended city walls, helped the invasion army to break through in. Nothing came out of the heroic resistance of Constantine XI, the last Emperor of Constantinople, nor of his men. For days the city was looted. 5,000 citizens of all social conditions were killed and the rest of the population, almost 50,000 people, were turned into slaves. Mehmet, in order to have some fun, bought the Bizantine noble men (who had not been able to escape) off his own army and ordered them to be executed in front of him. After that, he ordered the heads to be put on display on a table so that they could be publicly scorned. Constantinople became Istanbul, and from then on, the sultan was called Hunkar, which means “blood drinker”.

He soon honored his newly given nickname, making clear that he was going to rule as an absolute autocrat. First, he ordered the Prime Minister to be killed, for he had been extremely annoying in telling everything to Mehmet’s father. Although there was no need of big betrayals in order to provoke Mehmet’s wrath. Any small thing could unleash it. One of the sultan’s hobbies was to grown sweet melons in his orchyard, but one day one of his servants stole four pieces. Indignant about it, Mehmet asked around who had it been, and since fear silenced the guilty servant, Mehmet ordered all his servants to be slashed open until the rests of the melon showed in the guilty servant’s stomach. In the end they were found inside the fourteenth servant, for the relief of the servants that followed him in line in such a savage dissection.

Nevertheless, Mehmet’s cruelty did not prevent him from acquiring a cultivated refinement. One of his hobbies was gardening, devoting himself passionately especially to roses –he always wore a rose pinned to his clothing. He was also extremely fond of poetry, architecture, theology being, as the skilled politician he was, able to be tolerant with both Christians and Jews, as long as, of course, they submitted themselves without questioning. He also used to love fine wines and cats. His female white angora cat, Zita, was extremely famous. She was the only female to enjoy the priviledge of sleeping in his bed every night, for Mehmet was sexually promiscuous and did not hesitate to have over his bed several young men and women alike.

The glory of having been able to take over Constantinople went to his head, and he started thinking of his own person as the greater conqueror of all times. According to this idea, he decided to keep on with his expansion, both over Asia Minor and the Balcans. He was the instigator of 25 military campaigns in both continents, winning almost all of them, which gave him the absolute control all of the East. In his advance towards the North he challenged the Hungarian monarch Juan Hunyadi, who was still living in Belgrad. In 1459 he defeated the last Serbian insurrection, in 1463 he conquered Bosnia (killing its king) and in 1468 he crushed the rebellion of the legendary Albanian hero Jorge Kastriotis, known as Skandersberg.

Curiously enough, in 1464 one of his hardest battles was against one of the cruelest human beings in history too, the King Vlad of Valakia, called “The Impaler” by the Turkish and known by his as “Drakul” (devil), and who has been incorporated in the Dracula legend. They say that, before defeating and overthrowing him, Mehmet found funny the following incident: a few of Mehmets emissaries had been punished to have their turbans literally stuck to their heads after refusing to uncover their heads in front of the monarch of Valakia. Shortly after that, when Vlad challenged him once again by impaling thousands of Turkish prisoners, Mehmet complimented such murderous act, stating that a human being capable of such actions would be hard to defeat. Nevertheless, said admiration for Vlad’s cruel behaviour did not save him of being execued when he fell in Mehmet’s hands in the process of adding the whole of Valakia to the Otoman Empire.

After his victorious campaigns in the Balcans, Mehmet occupied the Adriatic coast, expelling the Venecians. He also took over Crimea and sent his own Tartar general as Governor of Albania and also expelled the Genoese off the Black Sea. On the North front, only the anguished Hungary (where the King Mattias Corvino ruled) and Tansylvania resisted Mehmet’s troops momentarily. Luck was also on Turkish’ side on the sea front. A good part of the islands in the Egean Sea fell under Turkish offensivesm and in order for Venice to be able to keep some of its strategic trading stronglholds, it had to pay Mehmet an annual tax equivalent to 10,000 pieces of gold.  Only the island of Rhodes, defended by St. John’s Knights, resisted the assault. Mehmet’s expansion seemed not to have limits. In 1480 Turkish forces took over the city of Otranto, located on the heel of Italy, exterminating all its inhabitants and taking, the whole of Christianity being taken over by a panic attack.

Without a doubt, such conquests were possible, besides Mehmet’s skillful military direction, thanks to the quality of the Otoman troops. Among them the section of the Jannissaries occupied an important place, for they were in those days the most effective and combative infantry in the world, and which also fed the sultan’s personal guard. The Jannissaries was made up by 7 to 12 year-old Christian children who had been singled out by their intelligence and strength. They were recruited by force in territories under Turkish rule and converted to Islam by Muslim monks. They were completely uprooted from their affective environment and were toughly trained in an environment of strict discipline and many deprivations. They were not allowed to marry, have any money nor enjoy any luxury, and they had to live communally, which made them some sort of warrior monks, who were given a pension once they retired.

Finally, and fortunately for his enemies, Mehmet II died in 1481, although nobody knows whether his death was caused by a gout crisis or due to poisoning. He had become a hero for the Otoman Empire, but a true devil for Christianity and all those who dared oppose him. With his death, the rest of Christian kingdoms and the Pope gave a sigh of relief, although the fall of Constantinople was engraved in their memory, like an affront impossible to erase.

Translated from “El sultán cruel”, by Juan Carlos Losada, published in El País Semanal, on the 20^th January, 2006 (in http://www.elpais.es/solotexto/articulo.html?xref=20051106elpepspor_5&type=Tes&ed=diario)

By JUAN CARLOS LOSADA

EL PAIS SEMANAL – 06-11-2005