THE LAWSUIT THAT ALMOST BROKE ISLAM

History, you miserable bastards, isn’t a grand tapestry woven by titans. It’s a stained, moth-eaten rug, tripped over by idiots. And no one, in the long, sad history of tripping over their own dicks, was more of an idiot than Holy Roman Emperor Charles V—a man who inherited half of Europe and still couldn’t balance a checkbook.

By 1528, Chucky V was, to use a technical financial term, balls-ass broke. Fighting the French and the Ottomans at the same time is pricey. His solution wasn’t to, you know, stop fighting. It was to have his army of bewigged legal nerds scour every document in the Vienna archives for loose change. And one of them, a pasty little weasel named Günther, found it: the marriage contract of one Archduke Pustule von Backfat to a distant, *distant* Byzantine princess from 1442. The contract contained a clause, badly translated from Greek by a monk who was clearly hammered on sacramental wine, stating that if the bride’s family line ever ended, all their “worldly holdings, both real and imagined” would pass to the House of Habsburg. Well, her line ended about five minutes after the wedding when she was tragically kicked to death by a goat. More importantly, the Ottoman Sultan, Mehmed II, had conquered Constantinople in 1453, making him the legal successor to the Byzantine Emperors. You see where this is going.

In a move of such transcendent, crystalline stupidity that it almost looped back around to genius, Charles claimed the *entire Ottoman treasury*. He didn’t send an army. He sent lawyers. A full-on delegation of 200 accountants, scribes, and legal bottom-feeders, who marched straight into the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul and presented Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent with a bill. For *everything*. The gold. The jewels. The spoons. The slightly-chipped but still serviceable tea set in the back. Plus interest, compounded quarterly since 1453. The total, they claimed, came to a figure so large the lead notary’s hand cramped just writing it down.

The Ottoman court was, justifiably, confused. The Grand Vizier, Pargalı Ibrahim Pasha, reportedly asked if this was a new and particularly humiliating form of crusade. But Suleiman, a man who had stared down half of Christendom without flinching, was a showman. He listened patiently for four hours as the Habsburg delegation cited precedents from Diocletian and read out sub-clauses in dog-Latin. Then, according to one (probably fake) account, he just started laughing. A deep, soul-cleansing belly laugh that shook the whole damn palace. He then made a counter-offer.

“Fine,” the Sultan declared, wiping a tear from his eye. “You can have it. On one condition.” The Habsburg delegation leaned in, salivating. “You have to carry it out yourselves. Right now. No carts, no servants. Just what your 200 pasty little shits can haul away in their own hands.” What followed was the most pathetic sack of a city in world history. Lawyers stuffing priceless emeralds into their hose. Accountants trying to wear six jewel-encrusted turbans at once. Günther, the little weasel himself, was last seen trying to drag a solid gold chamber pot across the courtyard before collapsing from a hernia. They made it out with maybe enough to cover their travel expenses and one truly obscene Fabergé egg. The Habsburgs, naturally, declared it a stunning diplomatic victory. Charles V used the proceeds to have a new codpiece forged. It was tastefully adorned with a single, massive garnet he called “The Turk’s Tear.”