Читать книгу The Knights of Rhodes - Bo Giertz - Страница 7

Prologue

The year 1521 began a new era in a new world, with new nations, new continents, new knowledge, new thought, and new rulers. Never before had so much power been gathered in such young hands.

In France, His Most Christian Majesty, the twenty-six year old King Francis I ruled when he cared to rule, and not hunt, dance, and write love letters in poor verse to Madame de Chateaubriand. Spoiled, admired, successful, and self-centered, he could already look back on great successes. Counted among the greatest of his successes were that he beat the invincible Swiss at Marignano, and his cousin Henry in wrestling when they met the summer before at Camp du Drap d’Or, the Camp of the Golden Cloth, the boasting camp, a most absurd gala and spectacle of luxury.

Henry VIII, the vanquished, was the oldest among the youngsters, already filling out twenty-nine years. He too had thrown himself with an insatiable appetite on all the possibilities that the monarchy and a full treasury offered. He was an impressive athlete with a lust for life. He hunted, reveled, loved, drank, rode, danced, and shot to his heart’s desire. He left the detestable paper work to his Lord Chancellor. But he was also an educated man, a driven disputer and author, who just finished a polemical pamphlet against the heretic Luther. Over the last year he had begun to slowly pull in the reins. After all the magnificence of Camp du Drap d’Or and the spectacular fraternization with his cousin Francis, he had very calmly dealt with Emperor Carl in order to keep other opportunities open.

Emperor Carl was the youngest of the youngsters, still only twenty years old. That past October he had been crowned as Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire of the German nations. Commonly described as poorly gifted, a bungler when it came to foreign languages, ugly, serious, and reticent, he had inherited lands and crowns that his father and his grandfathers had brought together: the Burgundian and the Austrian land inheritances along with Spain and all its vassal lands in southern Italy, and beyond the sea where the empire continued to grow. Cortez completed the conquest of Mexico, and Magellan had rounded Cape Horn to cross the Pacific Ocean completing the first circumnavigation of the world. The foreign envoys that followed the youth cautiously watched the emperor during his trip through the Netherlands and Germany, reporting that he did not appear to be quite as incompetent as was thought.

In Germany, a man rode on winter roads to the diet in Worms. Curiosity had peaked before the meeting with the Emperor, and possibly even more at the prospect of seeing brother Martin from Wittenberg. He had received the Emperor’s safe-conduct, and everyone knew that he was thinking about coming. But what would happen if he did was anyone’s guess.

In Rome, Pope Leo X hurled the final condemnations against the rebellious monk on the third of January. At forty-five years old, Leo was already an old man, out of shape, fat, shortsighted, in debt up to his ears, and spoiled since his childhood when he began using church income for his own needs, made happy with an abbot’s diocese at eight years old, a bishopric at eleven, and an appointment to cardinal at thirteen. He was soon well positioned in the Holy City, but tragically incapable of understanding men who treated the question of their salvation with deathly seriousness.

That same January three men skied through the snow covered Swedish border forests on the way to Mora. Two of them had fetched the third, a twenty-six year old of the Vasa dynasty. None of them thought that that name would one day have the same fame as Valois, Tudor, Habsburg, and Medici.

Beyond the borders of Christendom, yet another youngster took the lead. At the same time as Carl V was crowned in Aachen, the tenth Sultan of the Ottomans ascended to his father’s throne. He too was twenty-six and was named Suleiman. Ruler of one of the world’s most powerful kingdoms, he was also an unknown quantity. In Rome, in Paris, and Madrid, people breathed a sigh of relief. Selim, his father, had been the old threat from the east, towering over them with the dreaded crescent moon. Now everyone hoped for breathing space, to plan their festivities, engage in intrigue, and cultivate old mutual grudges.