Profane Fire at the Altar of the Lord

Profane Fire at the Altar of the Lord

A novel

Dennis Maley

Jublio

Oklahoma City, OK

Copyright © 2018 by Dennis Maley

All rights reserved. Published 2018.

Jublio

Oklahoma City, OK

jubliobooks.com

Editor: Kristin Thiel

Cover artist: Streetlight Graphics

Book Designer: Jennifer Omner

PUBLISHER’S CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Names: Maley, Dennis.

Title: Profane fire at the altar of the Lord / Dennis Maley.

Description: Oklahoma City : Jublio, 2018.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017906097 | ISBN 978-0-9861158-4-4 (pbk.) | ISBN 978-0-9861158-5-1 (ePub ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Europe—History—Fiction. | Deception—Fiction. | Messiah—Fiction. | Rome (Italy)—History—Siege, 1527—Fiction. | Historical fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Historical. | FICTION / Humorous / General. | GSAFD: Historical fiction. | Humorous fiction.

Classification: LCC PS3613.A4354 P76 2018 (print) | LCC PS3613.A4354 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23.

Fire is never a gentle master.

—Proverb

CHAPTER 1

Near Munchen, Bayern (Bavaria), anno Domini 1515

David had never faced a swindler as unprincipled as Beza. The devious impresario was a purse-thresher without equal. David idolized him.

I pay two groats a day and I will make you famous, the burly showman crowed. His name was Beza. Grand, flamboyant, he could hold a legion of peasants in thrall. You will be the most famous fool in Bayern.

The little man studied the face of the paunchy impresario, his leering grin, looking beyond his jowly features, deeper, into his mind. David often saw truth as something real, as if he were peering through a window. Beza’s soul was open, nothing was hidden from the little man, all was revealed. The showman was eager to hire this dwarf David for his troupe of entertainers. Greed feasted in his heart. He had a single-minded lust for money. He was weak.

David waited, held his tongue, his patience learned alongside his father, long ago, near the fire. The snare was set. Beza was overeager, as ruttish as a bridegroom. He will bargain against himself, David thought.

Beza licked his lips and wrung his hands. The little man was silent. Now the showman turned away as if to reject any more bargaining, all the while his mind churned. This dwarf was special. He could read minds. The opportunity was too great. Beza twisted on his heel and punched his finger in David’s nose. No. Not you. You are the clever one. You will never be the fool. You want to earn. That’s what you want. Yes. Then so be it. You will work on shares. Half for me. I will teach you to earn so you can make me rich.

We will both be rich, David told himself.

Beza was right about David Reuveni. The dwarf could never play the fool.

Beza’s troupe of actors, jugglers and sword swallowers journeyed in colorful wagons over the rough and rutted roads of the German states, the heart of the ancient and decaying Holy Roman Empire, a confusion of fiefdoms, cantons and duchies reigned over by warlords, dukes, counts, landgraves and mongrel strongmen. Their travels took them from vulgar town to smoky village, over rushing streams and through dark forests teeming with wild boars, bison, stags, wolves, bears, and lions with no tails.

The troupe followed a regular, annual circuit. Each town feted the arrival of Beza’s company with festivals. The locals clogged to the celebrations in square-toed wood or thick leather shoes, the men in hosen with bulging codpieces, the bare-armed frauen in linen smocks under fitted dresses that strained to contain copious breasts. The troupe performed theaters staged on rickety platforms that the locals erected on the edge of their towns. People came to see magicians, fire eaters, and dancing bears. But most wanted to lay eyes on the newest oddity, the dwarf that the showmaster Beza exhibited, a desert chieftain in flowing robes, a sheik of Araby. On holy days, he became a prince from a lost tribe of Israel.

Not a single German, whether peasant or freeman, churchman or noble, no one doubted the showman’s claim as to the dwarf’s heritage. David set himself to learning the Oberdeutch tongue. He trained himself in show skills. He juggled, he performed magic tricks using the cups and balls and sleight-of-hand. And when he dressed as a desert chieftain, he told fortunes and destinies.

He only had to pretend to be heavy of tongue. The pin. I see…a woman? Just as Beza couldn’t hide his greed, the peasants and freemen were powerless to contain their private pain. They told him what they wanted to hear. A mother, a sister, a lost love. If the fortune David told them was fanciful enough, they paid extra. Cabbageheads, David thought.

He was scheming, shrewd, and caught every lie. No one could keep a secret from David Reuveni. In no time he made himself the best earner in the troupe. He gave Beza his share, and still his purse bulged.

After the plays, the German people lit candles, men, women, and children alike. Then they clomped their way back through the village gates and into town, singing hymns, shouting salutations to the magnificent troupe, thronging Beza, the dwarf in desert robes, and the other human oddities, who led them in a long, extravagant procession to the town’s cathedral.

Beza strutted before the splashy pageant like a grandee, carrying a scroll closed with seals of lead. It was a document called a papal bull, and he bore it on a cloth of gold and velvet. All the priests and monks of the town, the burghermeisters and the town councilors, the teachers and the street urchins, the freemen and the peasants, even those who had stayed inside the gates went out with banners to meet Beza’s spectacle.

Bells rang, church organs played, and the crowd, mobbing Beza, streamed into the town’s cathedral. The entourage marched through high-vaulted naves lit by stained-glass windows that seemed to rise to the heavens, past statues of angels, saints, and Judensau, grotesque depictions of Jews taking carnal pleasure with swine. Beyond the nave was the apse where, under David’s direction, the retainers erected a great red cross upon which, with much pomp and circumstance, Beza unfurled the banner of the Pope.

Then the selling and buying began.

Beza plumped down his bulk before the altar, atop a heavy money chest with iron straps and hinges. Behind him was a stack of indulgences—official church documents printed on parchment. Around him he exhibited his most venerated relics: the bones of saints preserved in silver and gold boxes, the body of an innocent baby killed by bloody King Herod, a feather plucked from the wing of St. Michael, a vial of milk from the breast of the Virgin Mary, and a shock of straw from the manger of Jesus.

Beza’s hands flew, rolling the documents into scrolls, sealing them with wax, and collecting coins from the supplicants. No one ever unfurled the scrolls—as they were written in Latin, only the priests read them. From the night’s haul, Beza would pay his troupe, himself and his expenses. The rest went on to Tetzel, the Dominican priest for whom Beza was chief lieutenant; then to bankers. The coins trickled up, all the way to the Pope in far-off Rome.

David’s lips moved nearly as fast as Beza’s hands. He beckoned them: See ancient relics. Never before exhibited. Here for your pleasure. Buy an indulgence. Escape purgatory. Complete absolution!

Beza smiled. His top moneymaker’s skill grew stronger at every village.

The peasants scrambled to buy the indulgences for every mortal and venial sin imaginable: murder, adultery, burglary, blasphemy and false witness. Beza exalted his wares to every peasant, no matter how low, and he exacted even higher tariffs from freemen. The cost of an indulgence depended on the buyer’s offense: five pfennigs for a peasant’s incest, six if it were known.

To David, the German peasants were muttonheads, just as gullible as the Christian traders he’d met in his homeland. Ignorance, he often muttered under his breath. How stupid can these peasants be?

David Reuveni first stepped foot on the continent of Europe in the Republic of Venice, Bride of the Sea. The little man possessed a hundred carpets woven in Asia, and a few red stones. Venice was a republic and had no king. Neighboring states looked to a great religious leader, Pope Leo X, as their monarch. Italian city-states further to the south venerated the Pope but accepted the King and Queen from faraway Castile and Aragon as sovereign. David stared in open-mouthed awe at these strange customs of the Europeans and saw no obstacles to keep him from becoming as rich as a Sahib.

After a week in Venice, still clothed in his desert robes, David set his mind to acquiring common language. His desire knew no bounds. A fire burned in his gut to become rich and comfortable. That opportunity presented itself largely because, to his great good fortune, he had foretold the destiny of a priest soon after his arrival. He was a squat, black-robed cleric who had been eying David’s goods.

Your sins will be pardoned; your soul will fly from hell, the little man told the priest.

The cleric had a round face that made him look like the man in the moon, and owing to his impressive girth, he waddled like a goose. He was a gastronome of prodigious proportion and could fart at will. He often punctuated his oratory with great zephyr blasts from his backside. The rug peddler told him what he wanted to hear and the priest was deliriously happy. He bought all of David’s carpets. The priest saw promise in David and his industrious nature.

The jovial Christian churchman was named Johann Tetzel and was fluent in David’s native languages, Hebrew and Aramaic. Tetzel was a Dominican. Like all the members of the Blackfriars, he specialized in preaching. He lived in grandiose style in Venice but kept richly appointed apartments in many cities, having earned the right to live like a pontiff in service to both Pope and Empire as the Grand Inquisitor of Poland and the German States, places beyond the boundaries of the Pope’s kingdom, north of the Alpine mountain range, in the realm of the Holy Roman Empire. But Tetzel loved Venice, and Venice is where his posterior took root. He refused to budge from La Serenissima, the Republic Most Serene, the City of Bridges, even if a cask of gunpowder exploded under his throne.

Tetzel’s chief lieutenant was the freeman Beza. He was neither a priest nor in the clergy and was not a noble, but nevertheless, he had risen to the post of principal agent in Tetzel’s organization. He was in charge of selling indulgences, and he wore out a lot of shoe leather. He was always on the road, and he went about his work as if he were killing rats.

The practice of issuing indulgences held the Roman Catholic Church in a stranglehold for three hundred years. In 1095, eager to beat back the advances of the followers of Mohammad, Pope Urban II promised complete and unlimited remission of all punishments—relief from the canonical penances—to any man who would serve in the military campaigns he organized. These were the crusades, Christian military ventures to Palestine that killed as many Jews as Turks and Arabs. Aragon and Castile, together known as España, had as recently as 1492 driven the Muslim invaders off the Iberian Peninsula—they called the Arabs Moors—and every Christian heart longed to restore Christian dominion to Jerusalem and the Holy Lands.

By the fourteenth century, popes were routinely heaping indulgences on the faithful in order to recruit their support for all sorts of Vatican-sponsored political and military maneuvers. Indulgences were granted to the religious orders as well—the black-capped Dominican preachers, the gray-capped Franciscans—which they could pass along as they saw fit to their members, or as rewards from the Order to the faithful.

The good friars and preachers bestowed indulgences on churches, hospitals, bridges, and collections of relics. Pilgrims received indulgences, and before long, clever lawyers found a way to give out indulgences to noble souls who were willing to cough up cash in lieu of participation in a pilgrimage or crusade. Dogma held that indulgences drew on a treasury of merit that had accumulated—somewhere in the firmament, the ether, or even farther above—out of the abundant sacrifice of Christ and the virtues and penances of the saints. The treasury was considered as boundless as Christ’s love.

Credit belonged to Tetzel for the design of the indulgences that came next: indulgences for the dead.

Church doctrine said that indulgences applied only to sins committed by those still living. Tetzel argued that since purgatory was not located in heaven, it must logically follow that a soul detained in purgatory was enduring a worldly punishment. It was just a matter of classification.

Tetzel preached that contrition and confession were not the exclusive ways to shorten penance in purgatory, not if the sinner had an indulgence issued by the Pope. Therefore, preached Tetzel, and his words were trumpeted by Beza, his chief lieutenant—nothing more than an offering of money was required to purchase an indulgence which would free a loved one’s soul from purgatory...an indulgence for the dead.

The Dominican also taught that an indulgence could apply to any given soul, to any sin, the mortal, unpardonable sins just as well as the venial, forgivable, worldly ones. Purchase of an indulgence by the most vile thief, murderer, or heretic resulted in an unfailing remission of sin, so said Tetzel. As he often told Beza, Wenn die Münze im Kästlein klingt, die Seele in den Himmel springt. As soon as a coin in the coffer rings, the soul from purgatory springs.

The Church never sanctioned Tetzel’s teachings but neither did it disavow them. The leaders considered his sales pitch harmless puffery and rewarded him for roping in more followers. Pope Leo X promoted Tetzel to the role of Commissioner of Indulgences of the German Provinces for outstanding service to the Holy See. The peasants were overjoyed to accept Tetzel’s assurances. As long as everyone agreed that the indulgence removed a mortal sin as well as its stain, for sinner and saint alike, everyone was happy. During Beza’s visit, the local cathedral coffers always swelled with donations for the consecration of bells, chapels, books, and cemeteries.

And a veritable torrent of cash streamed to Rome, managed by a German banking family, the Fuggers. The treasuries of the Church overflowed, so much so that Leo demolished the Colosseum, which itself had been built nearly fifteen hundred years earlier by Titus, the emperor of Rome, using treasure looted from Jerusalem. Pope Leo X laid foundation stones for the grandest cathedral in all of Christendom, St. Peter’s Basilica, to replace an ancient sanctuary over the grave of St. Peter. He earmarked proceeds from the sale of indulgences to its construction.

Tetzel’s scholarship, logic and reason, lubricated by the free flow of cash, lifted the scales of blindness from the eyes of the Pope. He annexed purgatory to the domain of the Church. Beza’s magnificence grew as more lost souls sprang from purgatory. The peasants paid Beza, Beza paid Tetzel, Tetzel paid the Fuggers, and the Fuggers paid the Pope.

Tetzel tendered payment in gold for the carpets. He asked David to help Beza, his chief lieutenant, transport a dozen of the rugs to another of the Dominican’s homes in Verona.

If the little man is worth his salt, Tetzel told Beza within David’s hearing, see if he can join you in the troupe. He might be a valuable asset in the indulgence trade.

David’s heart jumped in his chest. In his rocky homeland, a man might work a lifetime and never earn the trust of his master, certainly not a great man like Tetzel. Fortune, he felt, was smiling on him in Christendom. In his dreams, he could not have envisioned a more advantageous situation. Yet he held fast to that rule he had learned from his father: never accept a man’s first offer.

I need a suit of proper clothing.

Beza, if you let him go near a tailor, I’ll have you flogged. Tetzel let fly a fart. He’s dressed the way I want him dressed.

So David wore desert robes. One overcast day, as David ushered a drab rabble of German peasants in an orderly line down the central aisle of the cathedral, ahead the penitent wife of a shoemaker dropped a five kreuzer coin in Beza’s money chest. One indulgence, please, she said. Beza thrust a parchment roll into her fist. She crossed her bosom with the document and then kissed it, pressed it again to her breast, and turned her grateful, tear-filled eyes to the firmament above.

David was about press the shoemaker’s wife to hurry along, but as she turned, the poor soul was stricken by a fit of apoplexy. Her lifeless body hit the cold stone floor of the cathedral like a three-pound turd.

For once, even David was caught off guard. People shouted, one woman ran to the find the shoemaker. A curate scurried to tell the priest. David’s eyes searched the nave of the cathedral for a place to hide. A place to hide his fear. Townspeople lugged her dead corpse away without ceremony. Beza, callus to the loss of a customer, continued selling indulgences.

The man’s an inspiration, David told himself.

The priest met the shoemaker in the vestibule. His voice was stern. The custom is to pay for a mass to be said for the salvation of the deceased, he instructed the widower.

But she possessed an indulgence, the shoemaker said. She still has it in hand.

That night, the bishop met with his council in secret. After deliberation, their decision was firm. The shoemaker must pay for a mass for his wife’s salvation, the council decreed. The indulgence in her possession does not exempt her.

The cobbler refused. He complained to the burghers of the village, seeking relief from rigorous demands of the Church in the law of man. I am her husband, and I did not authorize her purchase, he said. If I must pay for a mass, I want my money back.

The bishop’s council instructed a curate to keep an eye on the shoemaker. He reported back to them. The husband has forsworn the mass. He’s telling all the peasants in the town square. Thereupon, the bishop charged the shoemaker with contempt of religion. His curate took him into custody, flogged him soundly, and dragged him before a magistrate.

In due course, the shoemaker presented the indulgence into evidence, the one his wife had purchased, torn from her dead hand. She bought it just before she drew her last breath, the widowed shoemaker plead through tears, his face caked with blood from the beating. She died with it pressed to her lips. If a mass is necessary, then my poor wife was deceived by the Pope.

Against all expectations, the magistrate acquitted the shoemaker’s charges. The law of man triumphed. Beza’s sales tripled.

The night of the acquittal, David and a drunken Beza played at dice in a tavern, gambling with pious peasants and freemen alike, using indulgences as currency instead of the coin of the realm. The wenches that served beer to the little man were friendly and generous with their favors. Addled with drink, Beza neither noticed nor cared.

Farmers and burghers awoke the next morning with pounding skulls. They found their purses empty, slit open as if by a tiny blade. No one suspected the little man who secreted a dagger in his sash.

After the acquittal of the shoemaker, Beza could reach beyond the heavens. He often paid for merchandise with indulgences, the number of souls who thus sprang from purgatory varied depending on the amount of consideration supplied by the vendor. Even innkeepers and carriers accepted indulgences in exchange for services rendered, and they in turn offered them to their own purveyors when they settled accounts.

Then everything changed.

On All Saints Eve, 1517, in the German town of Wittenberg, a friar, Martin Luther, nailed a parchment to the door of Castle Church. He was a professor, but unlike most scholars of the Bible, Luther had actually read the New Testament in Hebrew and Greek. He was enraged that pious Christians were paying for gifts that God gave freely. His document outlined ninety-five reasons to renounce the power of indulgences.

Luther’s parchment didn’t flap quietly on that church door. Gutenberg’s printing press let his supporters circulate three hundred thousand copies of his theses in the German states, where peasants were fast learning to read. His act of defiance struck the hearts of the German people as if it were a bolt of lightning. Popular opinion shifted. Beggars used Beza’s indulgences to wipe their asses.

By the following spring, Tetzel’s money machine had lurched to a halt. Beza and David found themselves, the troupe long ago scattered, riding a pair of ragged horses, alone on a lost and muddy road.

How much farther? David asked. He had allowed Beza to convince him that Portugal was the new place for them.

Two leagues, Beza said. Two horizons farther.

Even as Beza stood in the saddle, he could only see a short distance into the dark forest. Dismounting, he told David, I need to piss.

David dropped to the ground as well.

Our prospects are bright in Portugal, Beza said. The gold is abundant.

We will buy many camels, David said. I will teach you to ride.

Leaning on a forearm against his steed, Beza created a steaming puddle in the roadway that would rival that of a draft horse. With a healthy shake, Beza pushed his privates back into his codpiece. He stepped up and into his saddle and, without warning, snatched David’s horse’s rein into his beefy fist. He spurred his own horse to run and with a gregarious wave shouted back, That’s where you’ll find me, little friend, Portugal. That is where the money is. Look me up if you get there.

Gobs of mud thrown from the hooves of the horses splattered David. One hand pulled his turban down to shield his face; the other still gripped his pizzle. He squinted from behind the loose fabric to see Beza disappear into the forest at the next hilltop. Beza was gone and with him, both horses.

A year earlier, David had been rich and comfortable. He had a strongbox full of gold and silver coins, and his purse was always full. A moment ago, he had been lighthearted, afloat on a sea of promises of better days in Portugal. Now, he had even less to his name than when he escaped slavery in Arabia. He was on a forgotten road, his hopes dashed, his hand dripping piss. He was cold, hungry, alone, afraid. And ashamed of his fear—he should have anticipated that his mentor would bolt. Beza’s shrewdness was what David had admired.

The pain of his failure with Beza was excruciating, ashamed that he was unable to prevent it. Even before his servitude, because of his stature, he had often been the object of scorn or ridicule. David had experienced this feeling before, the sense that he was disappearing, unconnected to the road, to the forest, to life. Beza must love me, it cannot be the money.

He trusted this lie he told himself, as barefaced and shameless as it was. He would never have bought the bargain Beza loves me if someone else was peddling it. He was fearful of the feelings that he knew would wash over him if he allowed himself to think about Beza’s scorn, that his friend had forsaken him. He hid for a time in a copse of brush in the deep, black forest. The thicket shut out sunlight from every direction and calmed his disquieted mind. Solitude helped him think, helped him push down the fear.

He worshiped Beza. So he reasoned that Beza must have been driven to leave him behind by some force outside either man’s control. He would will himself to have hope, hope that he could make his way to Portugal, hope that Beza would welcome him back, hope that together they could restore order. I will go to Portugal and, together, Beza and I will again be in business. He had no choice.

David was broke.

CHAPTER 2

Lisbon, Portugal

The woman’s cries of pain could mean only one thing. Childbirth. It was the year 1500, anno Domini, and she was no longer in the flower of her youth, too old to be bearing her first child, especially one without a father, one she could scarcely support.

Diogo, my sweet child, she said.

Her midwife told her, People will be drawn to your son; he will be a great leader, a friend to all.

In her weary state, the woman couldn’t tell. Was the midwife offering comfort? Or was she mocking her?

Diogo Pires and his mother lived in Lisbon, Rainha do Mar, the Queen of the Sea, a city that spills down a castle-topped hill, across an ancient Arabic quarter to the River Targus. Farther into the setting sun than even the capital cities of England or Ireland, Lisbon might have been the most exciting place on the face of the planet—colorful, vivid, vibrant, alive, and vital.

In this city of possibility, providence smiled on young Diogo Pires and his mother. She found a husband. Diogo’s new stepfather was a bookseller named Costa. Publishing flourished in Lisbon. Sixty years before, Gutenberg, a German printer, had invented movable type. With his discovery, the age known as the Renaissance exploded as if it were a volcano. Literacy spread among the nobles and peasants alike, even in backward England, where Le Morte d’Arthur, an eight-volume history penned by an imprisoned knight, Sir Thomas Mallory, jumped off the booksellers’ shelves. Books ceased to be luxuries. Art and science blossomed.

Costa cornered the Portuguese market on Latin and Greek editions of the New Testament, penned by a Dutchman named Erasmus.

I fear I spend too freely, Señora Costa told her husband.

Estou-me nas tintas, Costa replied. I’m in the inks. I’m rich. Your wish is law to me.

When the Señora engaged a tutor for her son, she believed that her midwife’s prophesy was fulfilled. My best and brightest, the teacher told his mother.

She embellished the teacher’s praise when she boasted to other women at the market, His tutor says he’s the smartest in all of Portugal.

The best and brightest evaluation said more about his tutor’s small number of students than Diogo’s aptitude. But he was definitely a charming fellow. Lord above, the child grew to become a handsome thing. He approached manhood like a paladin, armed with a ready smile and an eagerness to show off his bright, snapping eyes and his curly black locks. Nimble and athletic, he moved in a look at me way that commanded attention of admirers and detractors as well.

Like many Jews, Diogo’s parents converted to Christianity when Portugal expelled the last Jews and Muslims from the Iberian Peninsula in the decade before Diogo’s birth. The Portuguese called them Conversos to be civil, but more often, by the epithet Marrano. Never did a day pass when someone on the street did not call young Diogo filthy Marrano or dirty Marrano. He was ten when he learned that filthy Marrano was two words.

He acted as though his mother were the true sun around which the world revolved. She bent to his will when he was attentive to her. She returned his love tenfold. She smothered him in affection, she doted on him, she overfed him. But she was overbearing, and demanded constant recognition for her boundless self-sacrifice. Who bathed you when you fouled yourself?!

A mere eight years before Diogo’s birth, an Italian sea captain completed a voyage to the Indies. He sailed under a Spanish flag, Portugal’s rival, but his financial backer was Isaac Abravanel, an influential Jewish banker from Lisbon. The sailor was a Marrano from the Italian city of Genoa whose given name was Cristoforo Colombo.

Colombo thought his discovery had laid claim to the East Indies for Ferdinand, the King of Aragon, and Isabella, his wife, the Queen of Castile. Across the continent, people called the king Ferdinand the Catholic to avoid confusion. He was Ferdinand II in Aragon, Ferdinand III in Naples, and Ferdinand V in his capacity as King Consort to Isabella, a woman that was shrewd in a bargain. Terms of her pre-nuptial agreement mandated a co-regency with Ferdinand. Retaining divided thrones, their subjects called the shared dominion España.

The Spaniards called Colombo’s discovery the West Indies since later ventures showed that Colombo had found neither India nor China. After the navigator’s death, when Diogo was the tender age of six, Colombo’s admirers Latinized his name into Christophorus Columbus. How better to preserve a man’s accomplishment than to give him a name in a dead language? Another Italian explorer, Giovanni Caboto, sailing for the scapegrace crown of England, could do no better than get his name altered to John Cabot in the underbred English tongue.

Diogo acted in the street theaters when he could slip away from his post in the Ministry of Trade, a job he despised. He chaffed in his post, his influence was limited.

Portugal’s obsession with exploration and maritime trade had begun with King Henry the Navigator, who never spent a day at sea. Mamluk Turkmen had wrested control of Egypt and the Red Sea led by their warrior king, Timur the Lame, Tamerlane. In a class by himself, the campaigns of this man, the cruelest conqueror in recorded history, killed more than seventeen million of his enemies. After years of conflict between the rival Turkmen, the Ottomans wrested control of the trade route from the Mamluks. Any tyrant worth his salt would do what the Ottomans did next. They upped the tariffs, exacting outrageous duties from the European fortune seekers for access