Moguls meet Medicis in Salman Rushdie's first venture into historical romance, The Enchantress of Florence. When its story opens, a handsome young Florentine with flowing golden hair is riding towards Fatehpur Sikri, the newly built victory capital of the emperor Akbar. He bears with him a dramatic secret only to be disclosed to the Mogul ruler: despite his youth and European origins, he is, he claims, the emperor's uncle. Can this be true? And, if so, how?

Long before the answers to these riddles are provided in the book's last pages, other questions are likely to have presented themselves rather more pressingly to any reader proceeding through this novel's farrago of curses, omens, potions, prophecies, aphrodisiac unguents, evil queens, sorceresses, irresistible beauties, love-struck despots, wise whores, jealous wives, wicked aunts, albino giants, phantoms, “potato witches”, magic mirrors, miraculous perfumes and telepathic bathwater. Prominent among these questions is why any author wishing to be taken seriously would put his name to such stuff.

The probable explanation is that Rushdie sees himself as applying the fabulous tale-telling techniques of The Thousand and One Nights to an epic of interaction between Renaissance Florence and India at the height of the Mogul supremacy. To garner historical material for it, he has, he indicates in a bulky bibliography to his novel, ransacked more than 80 scholarly tomes, articles and websites about the period. Celebrated literary texts such as Ariosto's Orlando Furioso (and its lesser-known predecessor, Boiardo's Orlando Innamorato) have, it's apparent, been pillaged for the plot. Real-life personages get press-ganged into service, too. Machiavelli keeps turning up. Vlad the Impaler bloodily skulks on the periphery of the story. Towards the end of it all, there are gesturings towards Rushdie's perennial themes of the vitalising results of migration and diversity, and the life-enhancing powers of narrative.

None of this saves the novel from being, by a long chalk, the worst thing he has ever written. Fiendish tortures - agonising suspension from ropes, death by suffocation inside a slowly drying donkey skin - are shudderingly mentioned in it. But they are more than rivalled by the book's repertoire of excruciating effects. Merciless authorial garrulity is unleashed in chapter after chapter. Usages such as “In the beginning there were three friends” recur unsparingly. So do stagy stereotypes (femmes fatales, beglamoured potentates, fearsome warriors), weirdly entangled in a story tortuous with convoluted genealogies and geographical meanderings. Incidents such as falling abruptly in love are recycled punitively. Guffawing facetiousness is another ordeal. The penchant for silly-sounding names Rushdie has let rip in previous novels (Nadia, Fadia and Kapadia Wadia, CB and Hebe Jeebeebhoy etc) resurfaces with a trio called Otho, Botho and Clotho. Whimsy sets your teeth on edge, as does ponderously jocose hindsight humour. Rushdie shakes with mirth behind a character opining in the 16th century that “The English had no future” and “would surely be erased from time's record before very long”. One of the book's numerous royal lovelies is, we're informed with a nudge in the ribs, “the people's princess”.

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Fabular formulations (“after a year and a day Akbar's love vanished as swiftly and mysteriously as it had appeared”) ostentatiously advertise that what you are reading is fantasy. But fantasy deserves better than to be used as a safe-conduct pass for melodramatic cliché, arbitrary-seeming lurches of event, and reams of penny-dreadful prose. There are lines that churners-out of blood-and-thunder grand guignol would blush to acknowledge: “His hair was long and black as evil and his lips were full and red as blood”; “It was as if every man in the city had turned werewolf and was howling at the moon”; “She was Argalia's doom... She was to dance a pavana with the assassin of her hopes”. Sentences drip with sentimentality (“So it was that Shah Ismail of Persia drowned in the 17-year-old princess's black eyes”; “She unleashed the beauty she had kept veiled and he was lost”). The prose often looks as if it has been scissored out of some antiquated historical novelette: “In the sanctum of the great courtesan, the city's grandees were asleep, sated, in déshabillé on velvet couches, their limbs flung wantonly across the prone bodies of naked hetaerae”; “They saw standing before them an odalisque of royal bearing, bare of midriff, wearing a tight bodice and loose pantaloons”.

Only rarely does Rushdie find scope for the quick, cartoonish vividnesses of description that are his forte. When he does, the novel's flaccid artificiality instantly flickers into life. As a parched traveller drinks deep from a gourd, “the water ran down from the edges of his mouth and hung on his shaven chin like a liquid beard”. Blazing down on Fatehpur Sikri, the sun makes the air “quiver like a frightened blackbuck”.

An interlude set among the flowerbeds of a sultan's palace on the Bosphorus emphasises that he has 1,001 gardeners. It's a device by which, as often in his fiction, Rushdie seeks to keep the reader aware that his guiding inspiration is The Thousand and One Nights. Sadly, by the time you reach the end of this novel with its garish banalities and depthless sensationalisms, what you're most aware of are the 1,001 ways in which it would have been more profitable and enjoyable to pass the time. q

The Enchantress of Florence by Salman Rushdie

Cape £18.99 pp359

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