Titans of History Read online

  TITANS OF HISTORY

  SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE

  With John Bew, Martyn Frampton,

  Dan Jones and Claudia Renton

  New York • London

  © 2012 by Simon Sebag Montefiore

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  ISBN 978-1-62365-222-7

  Distributed in the United States and Canada by Random House Publisher Services

  c/o Random House, 1745 Broadway

  New York, NY 10019

  www.quercus.com

  Simon Sebag Montefiore was born in 1965 and read history at Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge University. Catherine the Great & Potemkin was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson, Duff Cooper and Marsh Biography Prizes. Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar won the History Book of the Year Prize at the British Book Awards. Young Stalin won the Costa Biography Award (UK), the LA Times Book Prize for Biography (US), Le Grand Prix de la Biographie Politique (France) and the Kreisky Prize for Political Literature (Austria). Montefiore’s books are published in 40 languages. His latest book is Jerusalem: The Biography. He is also the author of the novel Sashenka. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and Visiting Professor at Buckingham University, he lives in London with his wife, the novelist Santa Montefiore, and their two children. He is the presenter of the BBC TV series, Jerusalem: the Making of a Holy City. For more information or to contact the author, see www.simonsebagmontefiore.com or follow him on Twitter @simonmontefiore

  John Bew is Harris Fellow in Modern British History and Director of Studies at Peterhouse, Cambridge. His biography of Lord Castlereagh, Enlightenment, War and Tyranny, was published in 2011.

  Martyn Frampton is Lecturer in Modern/Contemporary History at Queen Mary, University of London. His publications include The Long March (2009) and Legion of the Rearguard (2010)

  Dan Jones is a journalist and historian. He is the author of Summer of Blood (2009) and The Plantagenets (2012).

  Claudia Renton is a writer and actress who has appeared on stage with the RSC and at the Royal National Theatre, and on television for the BBC and ITV.

  TO MY DARLING CHILDREN LILY AND SASHA

  Contents

  INTRODUCTION

  RAMESES THE GREAT

  DAVID & SOLOMON

  NEBUCHADNEZZAR II

  CYRUS THE GREAT

  THE BUDDHA

  CONFUCIUS

  SUN TZU

  LEONIDAS

  HERODOTUS

  ALCIBIADES

  PLATO

  ARISTOTLE

  ALEXANDER THE GREAT

  QIN SHI HUANGDI

  HANNIBAL

  JUDAH THE MACCABEE AND HIS BROTHERS

  CICERO

  CAESAR

  HEROD THE GREAT

  CLEOPATRA

  AUGUSTUS & LIVIA

  JESUS

  CALIGULA

  NERO

  MARCUS AURELIUS

  COMMODUS

  CONSTANTINE THE GREAT

  ATTILA THE HUN

  MUHAMMAD

  MUAWIYA & ABD AL-MALIK

  ZHAO WU

  CHARLEMAGNE

  HAROUN AL-RASHID

  MAROZIA AND THE PAPAL PORNOCRACY

  BASIL THE BULGAR SLAYER

  HASSAN AL-SABBAH AND THE ASSASSINS

  GODFREY OF BOUILLON & THE CRUSADER KINGS OF JERUSALEM

  ELEANOR OF AQUITAINE

  SALADIN

  RICHARD THE LIONHEART & JOHN SOFTSWORD

  GENGHIS KHAN

  FREDERICK II OF HOHENSTAUFEN

  ISABELLA & ROGER MORTIMER

  EDWARD III & THE BLACK PRINCE

  TAMERLANE

  RICHARD II

  HENRY V

  GILLES DE RAIS

  JOAN OF ARC

  TORQUEMADA

  VLAD THE IMPALER

  RICHARD III

  SAVONAROLA

  ISABELLA & FERDINAND

  COLUMBUS

  SELIM THE GRIM

  PIZARRO

  BARBAROSSA & SILVER ARM

  THE BORGIAS: POPE ALEXANDER VI AND HIS CHILDREN CESARE AND LUCREZIA

  MAGELLAN

  BABUR

  CORTÉS

  HENRY VIII

  SULEIMAN THE MAGNIFICENT

  IVAN THE TERRIBLE

  ELIZABETH I

  AKBAR THE GREAT

  TOKUGAWA IEYASU

  GALILEO

  SHAKESPEARE

  ABBAS THE GREAT

  WALLENSTEIN

  CROMWELL

  AURANGZEB

  PEPYS

  LOUIS XIV

  NEWTON

  MARLBOROUGH

  PETER THE GREAT

  NADER SHAH

  VOLTAIRE

  SAMUEL JOHNSON

  FREDERICK THE GREAT

  CASANOVA

  CAPTAIN COOK

  CATHERINE THE GREAT

  POTEMKIN

  WASHINGTON

  JEFFERSON

  TOUSSAINT LOUVERTURE

  TALLEYRAND

  MOZART

  ROBESPIERRE

  NELSON

  WELLINGTON

  NAPOLEON I

  BEETHOVEN

  JANE AUSTEN

  SHAKA

  BYRON

  BALZAC

  PUSHKIN

  ALEXANDRE DUMAS PÈRE & FILS

  DISRAELI

  GARIBALDI

  NAPOLEON III

  LINCOLN

  JACK THE RIPPER

  DARWIN

  DICKENS

  BISMARCK

  FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE

  PASTEUR

  FRANCISCO LÓPEZ & ELIZA LYNCH

  TOLSTOY

  CIXI

  LEOPOLD II

  TCHAIKOVSKY

  CLEMENCEAU

  SARAH BERNHARDT

  MAUPASSANT

  OSCAR WILDE

  WILHELM II

  LLOYD GEORGE

  TOULOUSE-LAUTREC

  RASPUTIN

  GANDHI

  TRUJILLO

  LENIN

  UNGERN VON STERNBERG

  PROUST

  SHACKLETON, SCOTT & AMUNSDEN

  CHURCHILL

  IBN SAUD

  VILLA & ZAPATA

  STALIN

  EINSTEIN

  ENVER, TALAT & JEMAL: THE THREE PASHAS

  ATATÜRK

  PICASSO

  ROOSEVELT

  MUSSOLINI

  TOJO

  BEN-GURION

  HITLER

  NEHRU

  BULGAKOV

  FRANCO

  MAO ZEDONG

  ISAAC BABEL

  YEZHOV

  ZHUKOV

  CAPONE

  BERIA

  HEMINGWAY

  HIMMLER & HEYDRICH

  KHOMEINI

  ORWELL

  DENG XIAOPING

  DUVALIER

  SCHINDLER

  HOXHA OF ALBANIA

  KIM IL SUNG & KIM JONG IL

  ODETTE SANSOM<
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  JFK

  NASSER, SADAT, MUBARAK

  THE CEAUŞESCUS OF ROMANIA

  MANDELA

  THE SHAH OF IRAN

  JOHN PAUL II

  SAKHAROV

  NGUEMA

  POL POT

  IDI AMIN

  THATCHER

  ANNE FRANK

  GORBACHEV & YELTSIN

  ELVIS

  SADDAM HUSSEIN

  KADAFFI

  MUHAMMAD ALI

  AUNG SAN SUU KYI

  ESCOBAR

  OSAMA BIN LADEN

  LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thank you to David North, Mark Smith, Patrick Carpenter and my editor, Josh Ireland, at Quercus; to my fellow contributors Dan Jones, Claudia Renton, John Bew and Martyn Frampton, all gifted historians; my agent Georgina Capel, Anthony Cheetham, Slav Todorov, Richard Milbank, Mark Hawkins-Dady; Professor F. M. Eloischari; Robert Hardman, Jonathan Foreman. And, above all, my darling children Lily and Sasha and my wife Santa.

  INTRODUCTION

  When I was a child, I read a short article—like one of those contained in this book—about the sinister world of Josef Stalin. It fascinated me enough to make me read more on the subject. Many years later, I found myself working in the Russian archives to research my first book on Stalin. My aim is that these short biographies will encourage and inspire readers to find out more about these extraordinary individuals—the men and women who created the world we live in today.

  But history is not just the drama of the terrible and thrilling events of times gone by: we must understand our past to understand our present and future. “Who controls the past controls the future,” wrote George Orwell, author of 1984, and, “Who controls the present controls the past.” Karl Marx joked about Napoleon and his nephew Napoleon III that “all historical facts and and personages appear twice—the first time as a tragedy, the second time as farce.” Marx was wrong about this—as he was about much else: history does not repeat itself but it contains many warnings and lessons. Great men and women have rightly studied history to help them steer the present. For example three of the 20th century’s most homicidal monsters, Hitler, Stalin and Mao—all of whom appear in this book—were history buffs who spent much of both their misspent youths and their years in power reading about their own historical heroes.

  At the time that Hitler came to order the slaughter of European Jewry in the Holocaust, he was encouraged by the Ottoman massacres of the Armenians during the First World War: “Who now remembers the Armenians?” he mused. The Armenian massacres feature in this book. When Stalin ordered the Great Terror, he looked back to the atrocities of his hero, Ivan the Terrible: “Who now remembers the nobles killed by Ivan the Terrible?” he asked his henchmen. Ivan the Terrible too is in this book. And Mao Zedong, as he unleashed waves of mass killings on China, was inspired by the First Emperor, another character who can be found in this book’s pages.

  This is a collection of biographies of individuals who have each somehow changed the course of world events. This list can never be either complete or quite satisfactory: I have chosen the names; thus the list is totally subjective. There may be names you think are missing and others whose very inclusion you question: that is the fun and frustration of lists. You will find familiar names here—Elvis Presley, Jack Kennedy, Jesus Christ, Bismarck and Winston Churchill for example—but also many you may not know. Our modern world is dominated by the Near and Far East so that in this book you will not just find “traditional” leaders such as Henry VIII or George Washington but also the creators of the rising powers of today: Ayatollah Khomeini, Supreme Leader of Islamic Iran, Deng, who forged modern China, King Ibn Saud, founder of Saudi Arabia.

  When I started this project, I tried to divide these characters into good and bad, but I realized that this was futile because many of the greatest—Napoleon, Cromwell, Genghis Khan, Peter the Great, to name just a few—combined the heroic with the monstrous. In this book, I leave it to you to make such judgments. We can go further still: the political and artistic genius of even the most admirable of these characters requires ambition, insensitivity, egocentricity, ruthlessness, even madness, as much it demands decency and heroism. “Reasonable people,” said George Bernard Shaw, “adapt themselves to the world. Unreasonable people adapt the world to themselves. Therefore change is only possible through unreasonable people.” Greatness needs courage (above all) and willpower, charisma, intelligence and creativity but it also demands characteristics that we often associate with the least admirable people: reckless risk-taking, brutal determination, sexual thrill-seeking, brazen showmanship, obsession close to fixation and something approaching insanity. In other words, the qualities required for greatness and wickedness, for heroism and monstrosity, for brilliant, decent philanthropy and brutal dystopian murderousness are not too far distant from each other. The Norwegians alone have a word for this: stormannsgalskap—the madness of great men.

  In the last half-century, many history teachers seemed to enjoy making history as boring as possible, reducing it to the dreariness of mortality rates, tons of coal consumed per household and other economic statistics, but the study of any period in detail shows that the influence of character on events is paramount, whether we are looking at the autocrats of the ancient world or the modern democratic politicians of our own day. In the 21st century, no one who looks at world history after 9/11 would now claim that the character of US President George W Bush was not decisive in its contribution to the momentous decisions that were taken during this period. Plutarch, the inventor of biographical history, puts this best in his introduction to his portraits of Alexander and Caesar: “It is not histories I am writing, but lives; and in the most glorious deeds, there is not always an indication of virtue, of vice; indeed a small thing like a phrase or a jest often makes a greater revelation of a character than battles where thousands die.”

  SIMON SEBAG MONTEFIORE

  RAMESES THE GREAT

  c. 1302–1213 BC

  His majesty slaughtered them all; they fell before his horse, and his majesty was alone, none with him.

  Inscription on the temple walls of Luxor

  Rameses II was the most magnificent of the Egyptian pharaohs, whose long reign—over sixty years—saw both military successes and some of the most impressive building projects of the ancient world. He subdued the Hittites and the Libyans, and led Egypt into a period of creative prosperity but he was probably the villain of the Exodus.

  Some of the greatest wonders of the ancient world owe their existence to Rameses: he typifies the old-fashioned hero-king, admired for his conquests and monumental works, often won and built at a terrible human cost. His reign marks the high point of the Egypt of the pharaohs, in terms of both imperial power and artistic output.

  During the reign of Rameses’ father, Seti I, Egypt had been involved in struggles for control over Palestine and Syria with the Hittites of Anatolia (in modern Turkey). Despite some initial success, when Rameses inherited the throne in 1279 BC Hittite power extended as far south as Kadesh in Syria.

  Having been a ranking military officer, in title at least, since the age of ten, Rameses was keen to begin his reign with a victory. However, his first engagement with the Hittites, at the Battle of Kadesh in 1274, was a strategic failure. Despite winning the battle, Rameses could not consolidate his position and capture the actual city of Kadesh. In the eighth or ninth year of his reign he captured towns in Galilee and Amor, and shortly afterward he broke through the Hittite defenses, taking the Syrian towns of Katna and Tunip. No Egyptian ruler had been in Tunip for at least 120 years.

  Despite these successes, Rameses found his advances against the Hittite empire unsustainable, so in 1258 the two sides met at Kadesh and agreed the first recorded peace treaty in history. With typical ostentation, the treaty was inscribed not on lowly papyrus but on silver, in both Egyptian and Hittite. It went further than merely agreeing to end hostilities; it also est
ablished an alliance by which both sides agreed to help the other in the event of an attack from a third party. Refugees from the long years of conflict were given protection and the right to return to their homelands.

  The treaty ushered in a period of prosperity that lasted until the later years of Rameses’ reign. During that time the pharaoh indulged his ruling passion: building gargantuan monuments, many of which can still be seen in various parts of Egypt. The Ramesseum was a vast temple complex built near Kurna, which incorporated a school for scribes. It was decorated with pillars recording victories, such as the Battle of Kadesh, and featured statues of Rameses that stood 56ft (17m) tall and weighed more than 1000 tons. On an even bigger scale were the monuments built at the temple of Abu Simbel. Four colossal statues of Rameses, each more than 65ft (20m) high, dominate the vast façade of the temple, which also includes friezes and depictions of other Egyptian gods and pharaohs, and statues of Rameses’ favorites and family. Among these was his favorite wife Nefertari, who had her own, smaller temple built to the northeast. Her tomb in the Valley of the Queens features some of the most magnificent art of the entire ancient Egyptian period.

  These works are only a few of the vast architectural projects of Rameses’ reign. He completed the buildings of his father, finishing the hall at Karnak and the temple at Abydos, and in the east built the frontier city of Per-Atum. He inscribed his name and records of all his deeds on many of the monuments built by his predecessors. There is little of the surviving architecture of ancient Egypt that does not bear his mark.

  It is possible that Rameses was the pharaoh of the biblical book of Exodus, the ruler who cruelly enslaved the Israelites until God sent the ten plagues that persuaded the pharaoh to release the Chosen People: this miraculous escape is celebrated in the Jewish festival of Passover. They were led to freedom by an Israelite boy discovered abandoned in Nile bulrushes and raised as an Egyptian prince with the name Moses. As they wandered through Sinai, God granted Moses the Ten Commandments. If the Israelites obeyed them, God promised them the land of Canaan. When Moses asked the nature of this God, the answer came: “I am that I am.” But Moses died before he reached Canaan. It is highly likely that Rameses’s monuments were built by slave labor. Many Semites did settle in Egypt and Moses’ name is Egyptian, which suggests that he at least originated there. There is no reason to doubt that Moses, the first charismatic leader of the monotheistic religions, did receive a divine revelation after such an escape from slavery. Overall, the tradition of a Semitic people escaping captivity is plausible but defies dating.