A work of fiction half-populated by historic figures can be frustrating, fascinating, or both. E.L. Doctorow’s 1975 novel “Ragtime,” for instance, gave  Harry Houdini a fictional role, and must have driven a generation of readers to libraries — this was two decades before Google — to learn the sordid real-life tale of the architect Stanford White, his lover Evelyn Nesbit and her jealous husband Harry Thaw.
>It can be entertaining or it can be irritating to separate the things that really happened from the things the author invented.
Among the characters in Salman Rushdie’s new novel are Niccolò Machiavelli and his secretary Agostino Vespucci; as well as Akbar the Great, ruler of the Mughal Empire from 1556 to 1605, and his wife Jodhabai, whose existence and identity is debated.
This is the time “before the real and unreal were segregated forever,” and in “The Enchantress of Florence” (Random House, $26), Rushdie makes Jodhabai a creation of Akbar; the emperor  has many wives, but he turns to his imagination to find  the perfect woman. But Jodhabai is not the title enchantress.
The story of that woman, an extraordinary beauty and powerful sorceress, brings a handsome blond traveler to Sikri, Akbar’s stately pleasure dome in the Mughal empire of India. The stranger’s tale about his kinship to the  emperor,  descendant of Genghis Khan, at first seems to be a lie that could cost the adventurer his life. So, Scheherazade-like, the traveler beguiles the residents of Sikri with the tale of the Hidden Princess who travels from East to West, first with a powerful ruler, then with a powerful warrior.
Rushdie’s story toggles not just between fantasy and history, but also leaps back from the last half of the 16th century in the Mughal empire of India to the late 15th century in Renaissance Florence.  “A Mirror of Princes: The Mughals and the Medici” is among the references listed in Rushdie’s bibliography — yes, this novel has a five-page bibliography —  and the mirror metaphor becomes a somewhat heavy-handed device. The princess’s servant, who looks just like her, is called the Mirror, and her image appears in a magic Medici mirror.
The bibliography, or the work it represents, may be the weight that keeps this novel from  taking flight. The characters of “Enchantress” feel like products of research rather than the imagination of the author of “The Satanic Verses” and “The Moor’s Last Sigh.” And, while it may be a deliberate effect, the novel’s language is stiff and courtly, though there is poetry in the names and titles  as they’re adapted to countries and customs — “Genghis, Changez, Jenghis, or Chinggis Qan … thanks to whom he, Akbar, had to accept the name of mughal, had to be the Mongol he was not….”
By story’s end, I had respect for Rushdie’s manipulation  of historic detail for his story’s ends, if not a devotion to the art of his novel. There’s a funny moment when the enchantress meets the sailor of fortune Andrea Doria as he is posing nude with a trident for his portrait as Neptune, done by Agnolo Bronzino. There’s a  melancholy view of the effect torture had on the career public servant Machiavelli.  And there is a diabolical confluence of his heroine’s tragic error with the death of Lorenzo II, ruler of Florence, because of syphilis.