Monarchies par excellence?

SOMEONE JESTED with me one day, that if he and I were born destined to be monarchs, we wouldn't need to struggle the way we ordinarily do to get where we want to be, or secure our daily bread.

In some parts of the world, you would earn the equivalent of GH¢100,000 every month as a Prince (a little bit less, as a princess), the moment you yelled the very first sound (sign of life at birth).

As if that would not be enough, there would be adjustments as you grew older, and the world's economic order began to show signs of unstableness. Your Education, “if need be”, is hermetically planned, and hermetically too buoyed away from the possible rough seas of life.

Your trouble though may crop up if you may have to vie for supremacy among siblings. If you manage to be King yourself, then you set all the rules, and you may even do away with siblings, and not even the skies may be the limit.

The wealth of the nation, and your own wealth as an individual supreme, could be made to get inextricably linked. Just imagine! We don't want to claim, (you my honored readers, and I the writer), that we are historians.

But for those of you who might have dozed off, because the meal was over-sumptuous, preceding the lecture on Taj Mahal, the Emperor, Shah Jahan, lost his lovely Princess, Muntaz Mahal, during the delivery of her twelfth son (a contemporary version registers, it was the 14th son).

It is believed she died of what is known in Obstetrics as post partum hemorrhage.

The whole story of the monumental Taj Mahal, in the part of India called Agra, revolves around this birth, which ended in disaster for the princess, but an immortal narrative attracting hundreds of thousands of tourists every year to India.

The Mogul King desired to erect to the memory of his beloved and unforgettable queen, a “Super Mosque” whose Centrum would carry the sarcophagus bearing the mortal remains of his wife in symmetrical structures.

Four minarets stand as if animate in vigil. Twenty thousand artisans of the finest kind, most of them Persians, the most famous among them, the indescribable Caligrapher, Amanat Khan, then from Turkey, the master dome-constructor, Ismail Khan, and from Bagdad, the master-mason, whose name remains withheld until today.

A pinnacle-maker was contracted from Lahor (present day Pakistan), and an Engineer from Samarkand. Work started in 1632, and it took twenty-thousand workers, working continuously for twenty years, to complete one of the world's most remarkable wonders, in snow-white marble, with a gold-inlaid dome.

The marble pieces seem seamlessly apposed one to another. The gruesome part of the saga, aiming at establishing that the Emperor, when the job was completed, had the artisans blinded so as to prevent them from replicating the structure anywhere else, seems unsubstantiated.

But, the juicy drama would yet reach the semi-climax, when the young Prince, whose birth initiated the immortal saga, had meanwhile reached the age of twenty. His hunger to be king could not be written in words, He brutally eliminated all his eleven (or thirteen) brothers, in the process, and had his father put under house arrest, who had just started constructing another Mosque in black marble, a mirror image of the white one housing his wife, in between which would run the river, now almost dead from pollution.

Shah Jahan had the plan of getting buried one day in a mirror-image structure of black marble, near his wife. The old King would be barred from visiting the white mosque, for the rest of his life, BY HIS YOUNGEST SON, AURANGZEB, who became king.

On the continent, and roughly around the same epoch (middle of the 2nd Millennium AD), a man would emerge on the British throne, who was called Henry VIII. He was born in 1491, and in 1509, exactly at the tender age of 18, he was crowned King of England.

Six Ladies became his wives at different times. People (and that might include even historians), are presently most interested in his marriage to, and divorce from Catherine of Aragon.

In the process, he broke away from the Catholic Church, through the Act of Supremacy in 1534.

Isabella I was Queen of Spain, and she had financed, prior to that, the acquisition of the Pinta, the Nina, and the Santa Maria. Christopher Columbus, the Italian navigator resident in Espanola, would sail to the New Land.

The Catholic Church in Europe, and later far beyond, would be shaken in more ways than one. Henry VIII would go down in history as a very Eminent Monarch of the English Island.