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

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.