Move through the centuries and meet the lives lived in each.

Cleopatra

30 BCE - Alexandria

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Performance, ruin, and the politics of being seen.

The last pharaoh of Egypt watches her kingdom dissolve, and sets down what Rome will never understand about power.

Augustus

13 - Rome

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Succession, design, and the politics of making peace look natural.

At Rome, with his body failing faster than his patience, the first emperor sets down the cost of manufacturing peace.

Marcus Aurelius

180 - Vindobona

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Philosophy under bodily failure, succession anxiety, and the cost of discipline.

On the Danube frontier, a philosopher-emperor writes the private thoughts his public philosophy never permitted.

Charlemagne

813 - Aachen

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Travel, coercion, ageing authority, and posterity softening necessity.

In Aachen, an emperor who built Europe from conquest confronts the bishops already softening his legacy into legend.

William the Conqueror

1087 - Rouen

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Rot, succession, and clerical editing pressing in on conquest.

In Rouen, while he still can speak, the man who conquered England sets down what the chroniclers were paid to omit.

Saladin

1193 - Damascus

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In Damascus, as his body begins to fail, the sultan who retook Jerusalem sets down the private cost of holy war.

Eleanor of Aquitaine

1199 - Fontevraud Abbey

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Endurance, bereavement, and the refusal of power to stay buried.

At Fontevraud Abbey, the most powerful woman of the medieval world confronts the wreckage left by her own sons.

Richard I (Lionheart)

1199 - Chalus

Wound, succession, and legend arriving too early.

Laid up near Châlus with a crossbow wound that will kill him, a crusader king dictates the truth about holy war.

Edward I of England

1307 - Burgh by Sands

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Physical failure, unfinished conquest, and will resisting its last limit.

Carried rather than riding toward the Scottish border, a king whose will outlasted his body reflects on what conquest requires.

Marco Polo

1323 - Venice

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In Venice, as his body thins, the traveller who connected East and West sets down what he saw that no one in Europe was prepared to believe.

Ibn Battuta

1355 - Fez

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In Fez, with his travelling finished, the most widely journeyed man of the medieval world sets down what movement taught him that stillness never could.

Zheng He

1433 - Nanjing

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In the southern provinces of the Ming Empire, the admiral who commanded the greatest fleet in history reflects on why the emperor ordered the ships burned.

Johann Gutenberg

1465 - Mainz

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In Mainz, no longer master of the press that bears no name of his, the man who made the modern world possible reflects on invention, debt, and erasure.

Leonardo da Vinci

1519 - Château du Clos Lucé, Amboise

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The right hand has ceased from certain offices, not from the design entire, and I begin there because it is necessary to place the matter correctly from the first line.

Raphael

1520 - Rome

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I am thirty-seven years old and something is wrong with my body.

Ferdinand Magellan

1521 - Cebu

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Having carried Castile across the ocean he named, a navigator feels command slipping and writes what the voyage actually cost.

Vasco da Gama

1524 - Cochin

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Broken by fever in Cochin, the man who found the sea route to India confronts what the Estado became in other men's hands.

Niccolò Machiavelli

1526 - Outside Florence

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At his farm outside Florence, where exile has thinned his patience, the author of The Prince writes what power actually looks like when you no longer have any.

Albrecht Dürer

1528 - Nuremberg

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I am fifty-six years old and the body has been in decline since Zeeland, since the marsh air and the whale I did not properly see and the fever or corruption I brought back with me as if a journey could not be counted complete without some residue clinging to it.

Anne Boleyn

1536 - Tower of London

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Humiliation, surveillance, and spectacle turning against its former master.

In the Tower of London, waiting for a verdict she already knows, a queen sets down what Henry will never allow to be read.

Henry VIII

1546 - Whitehall

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Bodily decline, succession, and the court smelling weakness.

A king whose body is failing faster than his grip on power dictates a version of events no courtier would dare to write.

Michelangelo

1564 - Rome

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I am still at the marble.