NINETEEN
As Isabella fully entered middle age, when she was in her forties, she realized that the problem that had haunted her since her youth—the aggressive expansion of the Ottoman Turks—was not going away and in fact seemed on the verge of accelerating. That was a terrifying prospect for the Christians of southern Europe, who could see the Turks were heading their way.
It meant that Queen Isabella, even after twenty years on the throne, would get no rest. She had spent the first four years of her reign at war with Portugal to bring peace to Castile’s western flank; she had spent the next three years crisscrossing Castile to bring order to a kingdom that had been torn by civil war and rampant criminality; she had spent the next twelve years fighting the Nasrid dynasty to secure Granada and hence the Iberian peninsula. The next nine years of her life—from 1494 to 1503—would be absorbed by efforts to protect and strengthen southern Europe from assault by the Ottoman Turks, who seemed invincible.
The Ottoman Empire was a kind of perpetual war machine. Military operations were at the core of its existence. Circulating the booty won in war was the cornerstone of its economy. Extensive slaving operations gave the empire a constant supply of human fodder to send off to battle. “The ideal of gazâ, holy war, was an important factor in the foundation and development of the Ottoman state,” wrote Turkish historian Halil Inalcik. “Society in the frontier principalities conformed to a particular cultural pattern, inbued with the ideal of continuous Holy War and continuous expansion of the… realms of Islam until they covered the whole world. Gazâ was a religious duty, inspiring every kind of enterprise and sacrifice.”1
It was also a system of “endless predation.”2 According to the historian Jason Goodwin, “The Ottoman Empire lived for war. Every governor in this empire was a general; every policeman was a janissary; every mountain pass had its guards, and every road a military destination.… Even madmen had a regiment, the deli, or loons, Riskers of their Souls, who were used, since they did not object, as human battering rams, or human bridges.”3
The Turkish empire presented Christians with a daunting ideological challenge as well as a military threat. The Turks were admirable in many ways: at home they were well ordered, philanthropic, personally clean, and often devoutly religious, something that can make people kindly, patient, and at peace with themselves. For those under their domination, the Turks were remarkably tolerant for the age: many of the Jews who left Spain found safe haven in Turkish lands; homosexuality, which was a crime in western Europe at the time, was accepted without criticism. A number of Catholic clerics who had been opposed to Isabella’s insistence that they live simply and honor their vows of chastity found that life in the Muslim world was more pleasant. They took their concubines with them and settled into happy married life. Islam itself is an attractive religion, and most people under Ottoman rule eventually converted to that faith, either out of sincere belief or because it made life easier. For many men it would have been a fairly easy transition, assuming they were not deeply committed Christians or Jews. People who wished to retain their own religious beliefs could do so by paying extra taxes and accepting the embarrassment of being treated as a despised infidel, but it was more advantageous to convert. For all those reasons, people who lived in Muslim lands generally converted to Islam.
But people in other lands who resisted Turkish domination for religious reasons, or because they preferred self-rule or feared life under the Turks, found themselves facing an entirely different prospect: enslavement, pedophilia, theft of children, robbery, death, and annihilation. For women, there were the additional threats of rape, sexual abuse, and submission to increasingly conservative rules governing female behavior. For Queen Isabella, there was no option but resistance.
The Turkish challenge was growing. Long feared for their powerful land armies, the Turks were beginning to move into the maritime arena as well. They were amassing a huge fleet of ships to make new rounds of attacks on western Europe and were becoming masters of the Mediterranean Sea. Turkish-supported piracy, meanwhile, was becoming a plague along the coasts of southern Europe, causing people to abandon the coastal regions.
Meanwhile childish squabbles among Christian rulers in western Europe were destabilizing the balance of power and making the Italian peninsula, in particular, appear weak and ripe for the plucking. In 1494 the French king Charles VIII had proceeded with his crazy scheme to seize Naples, and amazingly enough, he had been able to march through Italy almost unimpeded, looting and pillaging all the way down the peninsula. The callow and corrupt tyrants who ran Italy’s city-states simply surrendered, one after the other, as he arrived and offered him free passage through their lands. When Charles VIII arrived in Naples, his men descended into an orgy of drinking and licentiousness, just as syphilis from the New World was making its unhappy appearance in Europe. Fewer than one-tenth of his army ultimately staggered back home; the rest had died through battle, starvation, or disease. Italy had been exposed as completely vulnerable to assault, and Ferdinand’s Aragonese cousins who ruled Naples had proven themselves so incompetent and unpopular among their subjects that they had ended up fleeing for their lives rather than remaining to defend their people.
But the Ottoman Empire had undergone some changes since 1480, when the Turks had captured Otranto, and it had a new leader. The Neapolitans, with help from Spain, Portugal, and Hungary, had managed to recover Otranto during a moment of Ottoman weakness. In May 1481, Sultan Mehmed the Conqueror suddenly died. Many people suspected he had been poisoned. His death set the stage for a bitter succession battle. Mehmed had preferred his son Djem as his successor, but another son, Bayezid, wanted the throne as well. This was ordinarily the circumstance that led to the murder by one brother of the others, as Mehmed had specified by law.
The two brothers gathered their supporters and clashed in battle, and Bayezid emerged as the victor. But then Djem did a surprising thing: he fled to refuge in Christian Europe, surrendering at Bodrum, a strongly fortified castle on the Turkish coast that served as one of Christianity’s few surviving outposts in the region. The commanders at Bodrum, the ancient home of the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus, accepted Djem and transferred him to the even more heavily fortified base of Rhodes, operated by the Knights Hospitaller, or the Order of St. John, originally a mission to the poor in Jerusalem that was a remnant from the First Crusade. From Rhodes, Djem was sent to mainland Europe and finally to Rome, where he became a guest and hostage of Pope Innocent VIII.
Sultan Bayezid was glad to have Djem out of his realm, which allowed him to establish and secure his own reign, and he began paying the pope 400 golden ducats a year for keeping Djem as a guest and prisoner in the Vatican. Over the next decade, Djem became a valuable asset for rival European powers because he remained a potential contender for the Ottoman throne and thus a potent threat to Bayezid that made the Turkish sultan reluctant to engage the Europeans in direct combat. Djem lived in Rome until the French king Charles VIII invaded Italy. Then when Charles left Rome, he took Djem with him as a political bargaining chip, and the Turkish prince died mysteriously on the way to Naples in 1495. He had perhaps been poisoned on Bayezid’s orders, or he may have fallen victim to his own overindulgence in women, food, and drink. Whatever the cause, his death lifted the check on Ottoman aggression.
These events filled the twelve-year period when Isabella was completing the conquest of Granada. The Ottoman army at the time was by far the most powerful land force in Europe, able to muster hundreds of thousands of soldiers when it decided to launch an attack. If it had chosen to intercede on behalf of the Muslims of Granada, it could have landed troops through Granada’s Mediterranean ports and prevented completion of the Reconquest. It could even have gone on to invade northward into Spain itself, in a repeat of the events of 711.
In fact, the Muslims in Granada had sought help from the Turks, but according to a Turkish-Greek pirate named Khair ad-Din, known in the West as Barbarrosa, or Red Beard, the Turks had decided the Muslims of Andalusia were a lost cause and chose not to intervene.
But they were planning to get to western Europe eventually. First they needed to deal with the Mamluks of Egypt, many of whom were embracing a mystical sect called Sufism, which was a subset of the Shiite branch of Islam; the Sunni Muslims of the Ottoman Empire considered it a doubly dangerous heresy. Once Egypt and adjacent North Africa were secured, southern Europe would be a short jump across the Mediterranean Sea.
But Bayezid was chafing at the inaction against western Europe because the war establishment that he commanded was constantly pressuring him to make immediate advances on the Christian West. Year by year more and more threatening reports came to Spain—delivered by envoys in letters, and in person by desperate refugees from eastern Europe who had migrated to the West—warning that Bayezid was assembling a fleet to target Mediterranean islands that were held by Christian rulers. Popes Innocent VIII and then Alexander VI sent a steady stream of warnings as well. Bayezid’s movements were a constant source of concern for Isabella and Ferdinand, whose islands, Sicily and Majorca, might be particular targets for attack.
In 1488 the Venetians were told that a “huge fleet” that included “warships of every kind” was being assembled by Bayezid to attack Venetian possessions in the Aegean Sea, and that the sultan “had set his heart on Cyprus,” a Venetian outpost near the coast of Turkey.4 The Venetians sent out a fleet to meet him, and Bayezid retreated home. In 1490 the Turks were on the advance again, and Venetians hastily prepared for battle once more, but the clash that followed was inconclusive.
The Ottomans finally found an overland opening into Europe after the death of the doughty warrior Matthias Corvinus, king of Hungary, prompting them to engage in massive raids into the leaderless kingdom in 1492. “The great incursions of 1492 brought swift and terrible ruin to the Christians,” writes the Ottoman historian V. J. Parry. They hit again the next year: “The incursions were renewed in 1493 with increased ferocity, Croatia and lower Styria being ravaged once more and the Croat nobility almost annihilated at Adbina on 9 September.”5
The terrible losses on the Christian side that year came at what became known as the Battle of Krbava Field, near the small inland town of Adbina, just across the Adriatic Sea from Italy, in southern Croatia. Some seven thousand Croatian soldiers lost their lives in a single day, and most of the kingdom’s nobility was killed or enslaved. It caused another vast movement of population, as waves of Croatian refugees fled toward Austria and the Italian coast to escape from the Turks.
In western Europe, there was a macabre guessing game each year of wondering where the Turks would strike next. Would it be Sicily? Cyprus? Rhodes? Rome? Naples? The reports from the places the Turks had successfully conquered fueled additional terror.
Refugees fleeing the Ottoman advances were traumatized. Marin Becikemi, an Albanian survivor of the Scutari attack, who had been an eleven-year-old eyewitness to the slaughter of twenty-six of his thirty family members, told the Venetian Senate that he believed Bayezid II was the “bloodiest person the world has ever seen.” Years later he recalled:
With my own eyes I have seen Venetian blood flow like fountains. I have observed that countless citizens from the most noble stock have been made to roam. How many noble captains have I seen slain! How many harbors and shores have I seen littered with the corpses of highborn men of renown! How many ships have been sunk! How many vanquished cities have I seen disappear! To recall the terrible dangers of our day causes the hearts of all to tremble.6
The surviving accounts from Ottoman and Arab sources suggest that Christian fears were not unfounded. The Persian scholar Idris-i Bitlisi, speaking about the raids on the castles of Zabljak, in Montenegro, and Drisht, in Albania, said Muslim warriors at one point caught the Christians as they were trying to flee in boats loaded with their possessions.
The heroic men of valor had never seen such vessels, filled to the brim with precious plunder beyond description, not to mention the handsome boys and the women as beautiful as the houris of paradise. Enflamed with lust for loot and remuneration, the men swarmed the riverbank. A host of trained swimmers disrobed and dove into the water, clenching their swords between their jaws. They swam furiously to unleash their swords of courage. In a moment they cut down the infidels with their sharp sabers and took all the families and the beautiful women captive. They also took booty, money, and countless possessions.7
The Ottoman Turks were callous about the deaths of people they called “infidels.” An Ottoman account of the siege of Scutari (or Shkodra), near Kosovo in Albania, where many of the inhabitants holding out against the Turkish assault starved to death, described the inhabitants with contempt. “Those squalid pigs ate whatever they could find, swallowing anything, regardless of whether it was pure or foul,” wrote Ottoman chronicler Kemal Pasha-zade.8
This was all bad enough. But in addition, the Ottoman Empire was growing increasingly oppressive to women of all walks of life, as a fundamentalist orthodoxy clamped tighter and tighter controls on women’s behavior. Reports of life under the Turks would have been unimaginably distasteful to a woman like the strong-willed and independent-minded Queen Isabella, who was physically active and regularly rode cross-country across her domains governing and dispensing justice in public forums. And as a mother of four daughters, the accounts would have been particularly chilling.
The rape of captured Christian women was not only condoned but advocated by Ottoman rulers. When the pirate Barbarossa and his chronicler wrote his memoirs, called in Turkish Gazavat-I Hayreddin Pasa, or Holy War of Hayreddin Pasha, Barbarossa described how his father had taken possession of his mother after the Turks conquered Mytilene, a city on the Greek island of Lesbos, in 1462:
When Sultan Mehmet took Mytilene from the Christians, he left behind to guard them a military encampment of soldiers. They were men and had arrived without women, and there were no Moorish women they could marry because all the women on the island were Christian—and they asked for some to be provided so they could continue in his service. The Great Sultan, seeing their just petition, ordered that they should ask for wives among the daughters of the Christians. And, because [the Christians] did not wish to give them to them, they took the women by force and married them. And in this way there was good communication and employment of them and the land was guarded. The soldiers, with this provided, remained content.9
And so Barbarossa’s mother, a widow, subsequently produced four sons and two daughters with her new husband. The boys became pirates who attacked Christian vessels and made their living capturing Christians and Jews to enslave them.
Bayezid II, the new sultan, was more conservative, more orthodox than his father Mehmed had been. In the fourteenth century, western European merchants had described Ottoman streets teeming with women; by the sixteenth century, merchants reported that there were few women to be seen outside at all. As the years went by, women were required to conceal their bodies in voluminous robes, some eventually covering not just their heads but also their faces and their eyes, leaving them stumbling along the streets when they were allowed to venture out of their homes.
Conditions for women deteriorated over the years, according to reports issued much later by the Turkish Ministry of the Interior, describing what had become invisible to Western visitors. Women were increasingly sequestered inside their homes, living within high walls, seeing sunlight only through latticed windows, often guarded by eunuchs. They were forbidden to go to public places in the company of men, even with their husbands. Educating them was seen as problematic, even verging on being what the Turkish government called a “sin.” Women had to be concealed from the world. “Even the tips of her fingers were not to be seen,” one government report said.10
The Ottomans were contemptuous of the Christians for allowing their women to talk to men and walk about unaccompanied. The Ottoman Evliya Celebi, the scion of a wealthy family with ties to the court, wrote an account of his travels, Seyahatname, in the early 1600s. He visited a resort town near Vienna:
All the infidel notables and sophisticates of the walled town of Vienna take their pleasure for weeks and months in this city and its gardens and orchards.… Because the climate is delightful, the lovely boys and girls of this city are renowned. Indeed, the men and women do not flee from one another. The women sit together with us Ottomans, drinking and chatting, and their husbands do not say a word but rather step outside. And this is not considered shameful. The reason is that throughout Christendomwomen are in charge, and they have behaved in this disreputable fashion ever since the time of the Virgin Mary.11
Being captured by the Turks was a social death sentence for Christian or Jewish women, because they would be viewed in negative terms in their own cultures if they ever managed to get home. Female slaves in the Ottoman Empire were required to provide sexual services to their masters. The demeaning and degrading practice of polygamy, meanwhile, which gave men the right to have multiple wives and was forbidden by Christian and Jewish practice, was universally accepted in Ottoman lands. This meant that a woman who married while under Turkish domination and who then managed to escape would have committed a sin, and broken the law, by participating in a bigamous union.
Of course, slavery was not unique to the Ottoman Empire. It was widespread all over the world in 1500; in Castile and Aragon, most prisoners taken in war, particularly Canary Islanders and black Africans, were kept captive in homes. Some Muslims captured in the war against Granada, such as following the siege of Málaga, were also enslaved. Isabella’s daughters each had two or three in their royal entourages when they married and moved from Spain.
But in Ottoman Turkey, the enslavement of Christians was one of the empire’s leading and most lucrative industries, fueled by raids and constant military expansion. Nobles and serfs were equally at risk. Tens of thousands of Christians were enslaved each year;Barbarossa himself seized at least forty thousand in his career, according to his own accounts. In the 1500s about 17,500 slaves were taken each year from Russia and Poland.12 The eastern European slave trade was so great that the words slave and slav are related.
Expert slave merchants accompanied Turkish raiding parties, gathering up the captives and calculating their worth. The slaves were collected in groups of ten, bound in chains, and forced to march with their captors; younger captives, including children and infants, were placed in baskets and bags and carried in carts or on mules. Sometimes the children were seen as valuable because they could be adopted and trained for work or put to sexual use. But sometimes the littlest children were left behind as unnecessary nuisances when their parents and older siblings were led away. In June 1499, following an Ottoman attack near Zadar in Dalmatia, the Venetians found about fifty abandoned infants in a field.13
Islamic law permitted slavery for people born as slaves or captured in war. Free Muslims were not permitted to be enslaved, but it was permissible to enslave Christians, Jews, and pagans. The entire economy “rested upon slavery,” according to the Turkish historian Halil Inalcik. “Endless wars provided a continuous supply of slaves,” writes the historian Pal Fodor.14
The going price of slaves rose and fell according to supply and demand. Inalcik, who analyzed estate records in the Ottoman Empire, has written that they were the third most important part of estates left when people died, after cash and real estate. Silk weavers, for example, depended on slaves as trained laborers who produced the merchandise they sold. But sometimes an excess of slaves made them less valuable: at one point, slaves sold for “as little as a fur cap.”15 Selling the labor of slaves was another industry, according to Inalcik: “Many people made a livelihood of hiring out their slaves for 7 or 12 akces a day.”16 (Akces were a small copper coin of minimal value.)
Once people were enslaved by the Turks, they were typically never heard from again. Mass deportation to a distant land was the system the Turks used to break the bonds between a captive and his or her home. Sometimes for a brief period after a raiding party struck, survivors, if any, could ransom their family members; but few families had the ready cash to pay the kind of ransoms that were demanded. Slaves who attempted to escape were cruelly punished by being beaten, starved, or forced to wear heavy chains. Once a slave was moved thousands of miles away from home, the chances of escape became remote. Escape was viewed as so unlikely that it could only occur through supernatural forces. Shrines in Hungary contain accounts of miraculous escapes from Turkish captors, usually through the intercession of angels. Those who escaped with their shackles on their bodies deposited them in churches, a custom that Queen Isabella repeated when she placed the chains of liberated Christian slaves on the walls of the church she built in Toledo, San Juan de los Reyes.
Not many people in those times were literate, so first-person accounts of life in captivity were rare, compelling, and widely circulated. One Christian, a student at the time of his capture in Romania, spent twenty years as an Ottoman slave and was bought and sold seven times before he escaped. Georgius de Hungaria’s memoir of his experiences became a best seller across the continent, printed and reprinted between 1480 and about 1550. He became a cleric in Rome and described how the slave industry operated in the Ottoman Empire:
In all the provinces, just as for other sorts of trafficking, a particular public place is held for buying and selling human beings, and places legally assigned for this purpose. To this location and public selling ground, the poor captives are brought, bound with ropes and chains, as if sheep for slaughter. There, they are examined and stripped naked. There, a rational creature made in the image of God is compared and sold for the cheapest price like a dumb animal. There (and this is a shameful thing to say) the genitals of both men and women are handled publicly by all and shown in the open. They are forced to walk naked in front of everyone, to run, walk, leap, so that it becomes plainly evident, whether each is weak or strong, male or female, old or young (and, for women,) virgin or corrupted. If they see someone blush with shame, they stand around to urge those on even more, beating them with staves, punching them, so that they do by force that which of their own free will they would be ashamed to do in front of everyone.
There a son is sold with his mother watching and grieving. There, a mother is bought in the presence and to the dismay of her son. In that place, a wife is made sport of, like a prostitute, as her husband grows ashamed, and she is given to another man. There a small boy is seized from the bosom of his mother, and… his mother is separated from him.… There no dignity is granted, nor is any social class spared. There a holy man and a commoner are sold at the same price. There a soldier and a country bumpkin are weighed in the same balance. Furthermore, this is just the beginning of their evils.…
…Oh how many, unwilling to bear the crisis of such an experience, fell to the depth of desperation! Oh how many, exposing themselves to die in various ways, fled into the hills and woods and perished because of starvation or thirst, and there’s also this final evil: taking their own hands against themselves, they either wrung out their own lives with a noose, or hurling themselves into the river, they lost the life of their body and spirit at the same time.17
Slaves who attempted to escape and were caught, Georgius wrote, were “whipped, tortured and beaten,” crippled by having their limbs burned or had their ears or noses cut off.18
He also confirmed the accounts of how women lived within the Ottoman Empire. Women were not allowed to buy or sell anything, he wrote. They were not allowed to ride horses. They went veiled even in their own homes. In one house where he had lived, the daughter-in-law had never eaten, spoken a word, or uncovered her face in the presence of her father-in-law, despite having lived in the same house with him for twenty years. And “a conversation between a man and a woman is so rare in public that if you were among them for a year, you would scarcely be able to experience this once.”19
There was more. A government-imposed program of child slavery, called the devsirme system, operated within lands that were already securely under Turkish domination. The system had been initiated in about 1432 but was expanded under the regimes of Mehmed II and Bayezid II, during the time that Isabella’s children were being born and growing to adulthood. Each year between 1451 and 1481, some fifteen to twenty thousand Christian children were collected through this system.20
It had specific rules. Every three or five years, a group of Turkish officials would travel from town to town in Christian regions. Children between the ages of eight and eighteen would be brought into public squares for their inspection, and Turkish officials would select the most intelligent and attractive and take them away. The children of nobles and clerics were preferred. Only Christian children were taken; Jewish children were viewed as better suited to commerce. Particularly good-looking children would be sent to the palace; strong and healthy ones would become workers or soldiers. All were removed from their families, circumcised, and taken to Turkish homes to be raised before they entered service of some kind.21 Many were trained as Janissary warriors and spent their lives killing people. They were forbidden from marrying, which had the effect of maximizing their ferocity.
Some scholars of Ottoman history claim that being selected for the child tribute was actually a favor to rural children, to whom it represented a chance at upward mobility within the military or government bureaucracy. But most families preferred not to have their most promising children taken from them, never to be seen again. Some parents were known to have maimed their children to make them less desirable as slaves.
Meanwhile, back in western Europe, as they had been before and after the fall of Constantinople in 1453, a series of popes were begging the Christian princes to take note, resolve their differences, and come together for a common defense of Christendom against the Turks.
Rulers of the lands in the path of the Turkish advance—Hungary, Venice, and those adjoining the Mediterranean and Spain—were acutely aware of the situation and dealt with it to the best of their ability. Rulers in England and Scotland, however, felt it was not their problem and repeatedly pleaded poverty when asked for help. King James IV of Scotland, for example, rebuffed Pope Innocent VIII when he was asked for funds in 1490 to help fend off the Turkish advances that were threatening Italy. “My kingdom, situated to the west and north, at a very great distance from Rome, does not overflow with silver and gold, although it abounds in other proper commodities,” the king told the pope.22
Similarly, in late 1493, Pope Alexander VI wrote to the English king Henry VII about the threat from the Turks, describing the massacres that had occurred in Dalmatia and Croatia. Henry responded, as most northern European rulers did, with fervent expressions of sympathy about the “immense slaughter” but nothing of substance. Writing from Windsor Castle on January 12, Henry told the pope that though he found the news “very distressing,” the “great distance and embarrassment by a variety of cares” impeded him from offering anything more concrete.23
This was one reason Queen Isabella was so insistent about the marriages of her daughters to the kings of England and Scotland. She was trying to get those rulers to take a greater interest in joining efforts against the Ottomans.
But Isabella wasn’t the only ruler in Christendom who wanted to fend off the Turks. Ironically, the subterfuge under which King Charles VIII had launched his attack on Italy had involved claiming that he was a Christian warrior preparing to fight back against the Turks. He may have believed this himself, at least on some level. But according to his ambassador, Philippe de Commynes, King Charles never had any intention of doing anything that difficult: the king “talked much at his first entrance into Italy” of his “designs against the Turks, …declaring he undertook that enterprise for no other end but to be nearer and more ready to invade him; but it was an ill invention, a mere fraud.”24
Some people had hoped that what Charles was saying was true. As the most powerful ruler in western Europe, the French king was best equipped to make a stand. Pope Alexander VI wrote to Ferdinand and Isabella in March 1494 asking them to urge Charles VIII to set aside his interest in Naples and focus on the threat from the east.25 The next month, on April 6, 1494, the pope wrote to Charles himself, praising him for his intention to make war on the Turks.26
Inside France, however, the king’s plan seemed like madness. “For to all persons of experience and wisdom it was looked upon as a very dangerous undertaking,” Commynes wrote. Moreover, the expedition, though gaily adorned, was poorly equipped and outfitted: “The king was young, foolish, and obstinate, without either money, officers or soldiers.” He had borrowed the money for the expedition from the bank of Genoa at a high interest rate, marching off without “tents or pavilions, though it was winter when the army entered into Lombardy.”27
The Italians didn’t take the French king very seriously, viewing him as foolish and gullible; moreover, his head appeared overly large and misproportioned to his body, causing him to be called Charles the Fathead. Most rulers across Europe seemed to view his proposed military expedition as a “holiday excursion by a hare-brained youth,” according to the historian John Addington Symonds.28 But Charles’s naïveté and desire to somehow win glory for himself made him vulnerable to the scheming of others. The ruling family of Naples was unpopular in Italy; Charles was told that he would be welcomed as a liberator by the Neapolitans.
That was in fact true: King Ferrante of Naples, who was Ferdinand’s cousin and also his brother-in-law, was not well liked. He was illegitimate, which raised succession issues, and he used a variety of brutal tactics to establish and maintain power, including imprisoning and killing many members of the ancient Neapolitan nobility. He kept some nobles imprisoned for years; he had ordered others killed, and then had their corpses stuffed and mounted like trophies and arranged them around a banquet table. He found it particularly amusing to kill people who had just enjoyed his hospitality. This had the understandable effect of silencing much dissent in Naples, but it did not win him many friends.
Consequently, when Charles first set out toward Italy, no one acted to oppose him. Venice, for example, waited to see what would happen next. The city did not want “to arouse the king’s ill-feeling,” recalled Venetian chronicler Pietro Bembo,
especially since it was possible that Charles would abandon the undertaking of his own accord, as the generality of men change their minds almost at a whim; or young and ignorant of the military arts as he was, he might be put off by the difficulty and scale of the war to be waged; or again, if some other delay arose, or other rulers put difficulties in his path, he might be unable to extricate himself.29
In Florence, meanwhile, the government was foundering. The brilliant leader Lorenzo de’ Medici died in early 1492, leaving his son Piero as ruler, but the young man turned out to be a disappointment to the Florentines. They were, in any event, engaged in deep introspection about their place in the world, mesmerized by the prophetic fire-and-brimstone preaching of Friar Girolamo Savonarola, who was exhorting the multitude to reject the secular materialism and corruption of the modern world and of the church itself. Rodrigo Borgia’s ascension to the papacy only made Savonarola’s criticism of the church in Rome even sharper and isolated Florence even more than before.
Many Christians, moreover, hoped on some level, as did Pope Alexander VI, that King Charles would succeed in using Italy as a base to fight the Turks. Ever since the fall of Constantinople in 1453, Christians had suffered an almost unending string of disappointments, defeats, and setbacks at the hands of Muslims. The word spread through eastern Europe that Charles was coming with a mighty army to set things right. The Turks heard of his advance and warned their allies in the conquered lands of Albania,Croatia, and Macedonia to retreat to positions in the hills; the Christians in those countries watched the coastline and prayed for deliverance.
Isabella and Ferdinand were apparently taken in as well, at least to some extent. In a memorandum they sent from the royal court in Burgos to the English court in July 1495, they said they had offered to assist Charles, promising to allow French forces to use a base that they had occupied in North Africa to launch his invasion of the Holy Land. They had told him that it was a good time to strike, “for the glory of God and the oppression of the infidels,” because the Moors were “much debilitated by hunger and pestilence.” But Charles, they said, had been cool to their suggestion.30
The sovereigns were also trying to turn the situation to their own advantage. Charles offered to give back to Ferdinand, for free, the lands of Perpignan and Roussillon, which Ferdinand’s father, King Juan, had lost during the Catalan civil war. That offer was too good to pass up, and Ferdinand and Isabella quickly signed a peace treaty with France to that effect. That agreement put Spain on the sidelines, and in no position to oppose French initiatives elsewhere, at least for a while.
Soon Charles’s true intentions became clear. Ferdinand and Isabella decided that the French king’s real goal was unseating King Ferrante, who was, of course, their blood relation. They sent Antonio de Fonseca, another member of the influential Fonseca family, as their ambassador, instructed to intercept Charles and head him off, warning that the right to succession of the Neapolitan crown should be decided through legal processes. The Spanish sovereigns told Fonseca that if Charles did not agree to halt, he was authorized to “tear up the draft of the old treaty before his eyes and declare hostilities.”31 That was exactly what Fonseca did. Ferdinand and Isabella gave substance to this gesture by gathering an army and dispatching a fleet to Naples, under the command of Isabella’s childhood friend, Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba. The fleet soon departed from the Castilian port of Málaga.
But Charles was undeterred and continued on his way. Within weeks, he and his invading army reached Rome, entered it without a trace of resistance, humiliated the pope, and laid waste to the countryside everywhere they passed. It was on that occasion that they took the Turkish prince Djem into their custody, then continued on their march south to Naples. Charles said he planned to topple Bayezid from power and replace him with Djem as a puppet sultan under Christian control. But that idea, if it was ever anything more than a pipedream, evaporated with Djem’s death.
Coincidentally, around that same time, the tyrannical King Ferrante of Naples suddenly died of a heart infection. His son Alfonso replaced him on the throne. But when Alfonso realized that Charles was on his way south with an army, the kingship ceased to have the same appeal as previously. Alfonso timorously fled from his own kingdom, leaving his twenty-four-year-old son Ferrandino to rule in his place. Alfonso crossed to Sicily, which was ruled by his Spanish cousin, King Ferdinand, and meekly declared himself a private citizen. Young Ferrandino attempted to rally a defense but blanched in the face of the ferocity of the French and urged his citizens to surrender to avoid being killed. His subjects agreed with alacrity and blocked Ferrandino from reentering Naples; he departed the city with his relatives and moved his remaining forces offshore.
King Charles was consequently invited to enter Naples. This welcome, on February 22, 1495, was soon bitterly regretted by the city’s inhabitants. His troops began pillaging the city; they seized valuable properties for themselves from ancient families.
As if that weren’t bad enough, a strange, mystifying, and disturbing new disease erupted catastrophically in the city. It was that virulent strain of syphilis, the ailment so new to Europe that it lacked a name. Depending on where it first came to public attention, it became known as the “French disease” or the “Spanish disease.” It soon spread from the south of Italy to the north, and then to the Ottoman Empire, where Turkish statesman Idris-i Bitlisi, who contracted it, called it a previously unknown disease.32 The Venetian chronicler Pietro Bembo was one of the earliest to describe it in Europe:
It generally afflicts the genitals first of all, and the body is wracked with pain, then boils and blotches break out, chiefly on the head and face but also on other limbs. Tumors and, as it were, lumps appear, at first somewhat hard, later full of blood and pus as well. Thus many people met a miserable end after long torments in almost every limb, and so disfigured by protuberances and ulcers as to be scarcely recognizable. It was impossible to know what medicines were needed against this new and unprecedented pestilence.33
And so it raged across Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East, killing many people and leaving others disfigured, blind, or sterile.
Not surprisingly, Sultan Bayezid II was watching Charles’s advance with particular interest. At first he had been worried about the strength and power of King Charles’s army and the threat posed by his own brother, Prince Djem. But the subsequent developments had revealed Italy to be weak, disunited, and powerless in the face of a coordinated assault. Europe as a whole suddenly seemed far more vulnerable than it had ever been, and the Turks prepared to take advantage of the opportunity. “Sultan Bayezid had in fact already begun to outfit old galleys and construct new ones as soon as he found out that Charles had entered Florence, and he ordered his infantry and cavalry to get themselves ready for war so that they would be at his disposal when he wanted them,” wrote Bembo.34
But the brutality of the French invasion of Italy had truly shocked the rest of Europe. The army sent by Ferdinand and Isabella had arrived on the peninsula to resist the French, but now the sovereigns mobilized a group of other rulers, including the leaders of the Republic of Venice, the Holy Roman emperor Maximilian I, and the pope, calling themselves the Holy League. Maximilian was, of course, inclined to join up right away—he had been miffed at King Charles ever since the young French king had jilted his daughter and stolen his own betrothed wife, Anne of Brittany. The Venetians, for their part, had decided by now that things were clearly out of hand; the English were soon persuaded to join the alliance because King Henry VII remained so keen to please the blue-blooded Queen Isabella.
Ferdinand and Isabella used the proposed marriage of Catherine and Arthur, something Henry VII really wanted, to pressure him into sending support for the war against the French in Italy, ideally as soon as possible. This was a point they repeatedly made clear in letters to their ambassador in England. “A single day, now that the war has actually begun, is of greater moment than a year would have been before hostilities between Spain and France had taken place,” they wrote in March 1496. “The War is a war for the Pope and the Church.”35
In March 1496, around the time the marriage contract between Catherine and Arthur was finalized, Venice, Spain, Pope Alexander VI, and the Holy Roman Empire signed a twenty-five-year treaty to defend and protect the pope. King Henry soon jumped on board as well.
Each of the rulers pledged to contribute to a standing force of 34,000 cavalry and 20,000 infantry, and to the costs of sending a fleet, as needed, to aid in Italy’s defense. This alliance formed so quickly and quietly that the French ambassador to Venice, Philippe de Commynes, who had been in constant communication with the ambassadors of the other kingdoms, was entirely blindsided by it. As Bembo recalled, Commynes was “dumbstruck” and stumbled from the Doge’s palace, asking for companions to recount what he had just been told, as he was unable to process it all.36
Isabella organized Spain’s contribution to this force as an army that consisted of “specifically Castilian troops, under a Castilian commander,” who was her lifelong friend and stalwart support Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba. Of the six captains assigned to lead the troops, four had served with the Santa Hermandad during the war with Granada. Some had fought for Isabella ever since the war against Portugal over the Castilian succession. Francisco de Bobadilla was originally assigned to go to Italy as well but was sent toHispaniola instead to deal with the uprising against Christopher Columbus. About five thousand men went with the first contingent; more followed later. These battle-hardened troops brought to the Italian campaign the techniques they had used to win the war against Granada—siegecraft, light artillery, and the element of surprise—to startling success. Most important, they brought a unique esprit de corps to battles that had been dominated by mercenary soldiers who were fighting for personal gain, not for a greater cause in which they believed.37
This Spanish fleet, with some forty ships, joined up with the Neapolitan king Ferrandino, who had twelve ships of his own that had remained faithful to him. When they arrived in Naples, they found that many of the residents had returned their allegiance to Ferrandino and that everywhere people were beginning to fight back against the French.
Despite shortages of food and supplies, Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba quickly distinguished himself on the Italian battlefields, where he earned the nickname “the Great Captain.” The town of Crotone, for example, had shifted its allegiance from Ferrandino to the French, then back to Ferrandino and back to the French; Gonzalo landed in Calabria and put an end to the vacillations by taking the town by storm. The Venetians watched in admiration as Gonzalo, whom Bembo called “a man of great spirit and remarkable courage,” broke the French and their supporters in a “pitched battle,” killing a number of officers, as well as two hundred infantry and cavalry, and took more than twenty nobles prisoner.38 Gonzalo similarly turned the tide of battle in the town of Tela.
By July 1496, King Ferrandino was back on the throne of Naples, mostly as a result of the help he got from Spain, specifically from Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba. He soon died, however, and was replaced on the throne by his uncle Federico. Naples had had four kings in three years, and none of them had been a successful ruler. The Kingdom of Naples, the largest single territory in Italy and the part most exposed to possible invasion, continued drifting in its habitual rudderless manner.
Pope Alexander VI was grateful for the help he had received from the Spanish sovereigns. In December 1496 he conferred on them an impressive new title, the Catholic Kings, as a recognition and reward for helping expel the French from Naples and for their successful conquest of Granada.39 The sovereigns took enormous pride in this new designation and began to use it as their personal sobriquet. It became the way their subjects referred to them as well. In a letter announcing the new title that had been granted, the pope wrote:
You serve as a public notice and example to Christian princes, because your strength and arms have not been for the ruin and killing of other Christians out of ambition for territory and dominion but instead for the benefit of Christians and in defense of the Church and faith.… Your reverence and devotion to the Holy See, so many times demonstrated, is once again patently clear in the recent war in Naples. To whom, then, is the title Catholic Monarchs better suited than to your majesties, who continually strive to defend and enlarge the Catholic faith and the Catholic Church?40
The instrument of these most recent successes, Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba, remained in Italy for two more years, engaging in mopping-up operations, including giving some help to the pope in recovering Rome’s port city of Ostia. The Great Captain at last returned to Spain in the summer of 1498. He went immediately to Zaragoza, where the royal court was sitting. King Ferdinand embraced him with kisses upon his arrival and conducted him to the presence of the queen. She was sitting on her throne, surrounded by her ladies-in-waiting, but when she saw that Gonzalo had arrived, she arose and walked to the landing to meet him. “He bowed one knee to the ground and kissed her hand; but she raised him up and embraced him, saying, ‘Great Captain, you are very welcome.’ ”41
Isabella showed her appreciation for his accomplishment with generous grants of towns, castles, and rents in Granada and Íllora, adding to the properties he already owned in Loja. Gonzalo, a second son, was now a wealthy man in his own right.
In the aftermath of the victory that returned King Ferrandino to his throne, however, Ferdinand and Isabella felt that Naples had not adequately appreciated their contributions, something that proved irritating to them. They stewed over the perceived ingratitude.
King Charles VIII, meanwhile, more or less walked away from Italy, abandoning his soldiers and doing nothing to bring home the survivors; he died a few years later of an injury suffered when he hit his head on a lintel. He may have been suffering from syphilis as well: he may have become infertile, as he left no heirs, and his cousin the Duke of Orléans inherited his throne, taking the title of King Louis XII.
Ironically, according to Commynes, Charles might have actually prevailed in battle against the Turks if he had attacked Bayezid at that particular moment instead of going after Naples. “Millions of Christians” in eastern Europe had taken Charles seriously, Commynes had learned in Venice, and had been preparing an uprising to support him. In Thessaly, for example, more than five thousand men had rallied for battle. “All these countries, Albania, Sclavonia, and Greece, all very populous, all acquainted with the fame and character of our king by their correspondents in Venice and Apulia, to whom they wrote constantly and expected nothing but their direction to rebel,” waited fruitlessly. If he had advanced at that time, King Charles could have succeeded, his ambassador sadly concluded.42
Instead the Turks remained an implacable reality. With Djem out of the way, Bayezid decided the opportunity was at hand to strike again at Europe, this time at Venice. In 1496 he closed Ottoman ports to Venetian grain merchants, cutting off their trade access. He imprisoned Venetian merchants living in the Ottoman Empire. In 1497 a Venetian ship carrying Christian pilgrims to Jerusalem was captured, and its passengers were killed or enslaved.43
By mid-year 1499, Peter Martyr reported, rumors were flying in the Castilian court that the Turks were amassing a “great fleet” in Istanbul and that a “land army is being collected throughout all Greece.”44 More details arrived within a few months: the fleet comprised more than three hundred ships, which was a vast armada for the day, including a number of ships with what Martyr called “sea towers,” floating fortresses that could come alongside other ships and allow soldiers in the towers to shoot down onto the crews of their opponents. Much to the relief of the Spanish, the fleet was hit by a storm, destroying some of the ships, but they were disappointed to learn that the Turks saw the loss as only a temporary setback. Bayezid was said to be leading a force of 120,000 warriors.45
In August 1499, Bayezid besieged and took Lepanto, one of several trading entrepôts that Venice maintained on the west coast of Greece; they were key parts of the city’s Adriatic trading empire. By this point, the Venetians had almost given up hope of seeing reinforcements from western Europe; they had already been disappointed so often when they had asked for help. Financially exhausted and demoralized by the Turkish drubbing that had now lasted more than sixty years, they gave up Lepanto almost without a fight.
That winter, when they recovered their nerve a bit, the Venetians sent an envoy to Istanbul to ask for Lepanto to be restored and for the merchants to be released. Sultan Bayezid instead demanded that they surrender the additional cities of Modon and Coron and begin to pay an annual tribute as well.46 His intention was clearly to eviscerate the remaining Venetian trading ports on the Greek mainland and to consolidate his control over the entire kingdom. Hearing this, Pope Alexander VI put out a plea to the western European nations to send support to Venice.
Isabella and Ferdinand decided it was time to weigh in. The queen sent a fleet to aid the Venetians, again in the charge of her beloved friend Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba. She asked other countries to join in. On January 20, 1500, she and Ferdinand told their ambassador, González de Puebla, to plead with the King of England to follow her lead.
We have received word from Italy of the damage that the Turks have done to the fleet of the Venetians and their lands, and that they have taken the city of Lepanto, as there was very little resistance from the Venetians, which causes us much sadness as you can imagine. Seeing the danger that is coming to the defense of Christianity from these, we have decided to send them our fleet.… Please tell the king of England our brother that we are begging him to help as well against these Turks, enemies of our holy Catholic faith. Write soon to tell us what he says and what he can provide.47
But Henry VII of England was not inclined to help. In June, González de Puebla responded to the queen. “Henry greatly praised their intention of sending a fleet against the Turks,” he wrote, “but added that, although he was on very intimate terms with Venice, the Venetians had said nothing to him about their great need. Henry does not seem to be inclined to take part in the expedition against the Turks.”48
The French sent some troops to aid the Venetians, but they soon withdrew from the front and were lost at sea.
Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba’s fleet, however, was on the way. He sailed from Málaga with six hundred seasoned knights and about eight thousand foot soldiers. They headed to Sicily, arrived there on July 19, 1500, and stayed for about a month. Gonzalo encountered some delays in his departure due to very high temperatures and difficulty obtaining food for his troops. Ferdinand was ruler there, but officials in Sicily did not seem to feel a sense of urgency in aiding the Castilian troops, despite the marital alliance of the two rulers.
So Gonzalo took his time getting to the eastern Mediterranean. He was also misled into believing the Venetians had the situation under control. On August 13 he learned they did not. He received a desperate message from the pope urging him to go to the relief of the city of Modon. But by the time he arrived in the area, both Modon and Coron had fallen to the Turks.
An unfortunate mistake at Modon had contributed to that fortress’s loss on August 9. The Turks had blockaded the port, and the defenders were running low on food and gunpowder. Both sides—the Venetians and the Turks—knew these fresh supplies were essential to the fortress’s defense. The Turkish commanders told their soldiers that anyone who allowed goods to get through the blockade would be executed. The Venetians nonetheless managed to get supply ships past the blockade and into the harbor, inspiring a wave of delight among the garrison. The fort’s commander, desperate to get the gunpowder up from the ships to the fortress, announced that whoever got the first cask of gunpowder within the walls would be rewarded with a gold drachma, and so a number of soldiers deserted their posts and clambered down to replenish the munitions.
But there were Albanian spies or turncoats inside the fortress, and they signaled by waving their hands and their cloaks to inform the Turks that the stations had been left unguarded. The Turks threw their ladders up against the undefended sections of the walls, and more than ten thousand Turks surged inside. “A lamentable slaughter takes place; no one escaped who was not killed, captured or led as a slave,” Martyr wrote. “The Prince of the Turks, joyful with that victory, returns to Byzantium puffed up and insolent.”49
Another victory soon added to the Turks’ satisfaction. On the way back to Istanbul, the Turkish forces passed by the port of Coron, which had already heard what had happened in Modon. Its defenders, “terrified by the calamity of their neighbors and the threats of the Turks, surrendered itself,” Martyr concluded. “Thus through our sloth the strength of the enemy increased and ours is weakened.”50
It was into this unpromising scene, far to the east from his home bases in Castile, that the Great Captain finally arrived with orders to stem the Turkish tide. Gonzalo and his men joined the Venetian fleet at Corfu, an island off the west coast of Greece, south of the Adriatic Sea, on October 2. By November 7, he was pondering an attack on the port of Cephalonia, which the Turks had used as their staging point when they attacked Lepanto. He thought the port “was the best in the world and it is an island that belongs to the Turks,” he wrote to the sovereigns.51 Moreover, only about three hundred Turks were stationed there, with a civilian Christian population of about 3,500. The island had an interesting history: it had once belonged to Leonardo Toco, a close relation of the former Byzantine emperors of Constantinople; the Turks had taken it in revenge for the assistance that it had given to the Christian general Skanderbeg, who had resisted the Turkish advances in the 1460s.
Carrying with him, as he always did into battle, a figure of a baby representing the infant Jesus, Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba announced himself and his men to the Turks manning the castle at Cephalonia as “the conquerors of the Moors in Spain” and demanded they surrender. The Turks were not permitted to do such a thing and said they would not give up, but they sent him a gift of a golden bow and a golden quiver filled with arrows as a sign of respect. A ferocious battle then began for the castle, known to the Christians as the Fort of Saint George. The Spaniards and Venetians ran low on food and grew “ravenous with hunger,” eating whatever was available.52
At one point the Turks attempted to tunnel out from under the walls of the fortress, but the Spaniards discovered and blew up the tunnel, killing the men trapped inside. Gonzalo came up with a plan. He ordered a steady bombardment for several days, leaving the defenders exhausted. Then he ordered a coordinated attack. They won the victory on December 24, 1500.
This conquest, although relatively small, brought great glory to Spain. The return of Cephalonia was “a victory very celebrated everywhere,” the Aragonese historian Jerónimo Zurita wrote, because it was the only fortress the Christians had recovered from the Turks since the fall of Constantinople almost fifty years before.53 It was to be the last Christian victory and recovery of land from the Turks for more than one hundred years, but it became a symbol of the possibility of effective resistance. The Turks never reconquered the island, and much later, the Hapsburgs used it as a base when they fought and defeated the Turks at the climactic sea battle off Lepanto.
The unique success at Cephalonia was “achieved only with Spanish help,” writes John Julius Norwich in A History of Venice.54 The Venetians recognized that Gonzalo deserved the credit for the victory. They called him to their city, where they gave him the honorary title of Citizen of Venice, and they loaded him with awards and applause. The last, very old descendant of the ruling clan of the Byzantine Empire called Gonzalo the inheritor of the throne of Byzantium.
The victory, to be sure, was limited in what it had accomplished. In December 1502 the Venetians agreed to a treaty that gave the Ottomans everything they had asked for on the mainland. This marked an important turning point in Ottoman-Venetian relations. “From the military standpoint, the 1499–1502 war seems a decisive moment in the construction of a hardening line between the Christian and Islamic Mediterranean worlds,” writes the historian Daniel Goffman. “As a result of this conflict, the front between the Ottomans and the Venetians became almost entirely coastal, and thus clearly delineated.”55 But the victory at Cephalonia and the resulting truce helped win the Christian West a two-decade breathing space from Turkish incursions. The period of “Ottoman disengagement from Europe… was to last until 1521,” writes the historian Colin Imber, while the Turks turned their attention to violently squelching religious heresies and schismatic movements inside the Muslim world.56
These events in the eastern Mediterranean proved a bittersweet victory for the Great Captain, for Gonzalo soon learned that while he had been fighting the Turks in Greece, the conquered Muslims in Spain had rebelled and killed his brother. With much of the Spanish army away, a revolt had sprung up among the Muslims of Andalusia, and they had killed a number of Castilian soldiers, including Gonzalo’s older brother Don Alonso de Aguilar. The Muslims remained furious about the Reconquest and angry that they were being forced to convert to Christianity. Alonso’s body was sliced into pieces and rendered almost unrecognizable.
But Gonzalo couldn’t go home, and he couldn’t go any further against the Turks in eastern Europe either. Instead he was recalled to Sicily, to deal with new hostilities arising in Italy. France, now under King Louis XII, had decided to retake Naples. Ferdinand andIsabella were growing fatigued with the need to repeatedly come to the rescue of their unpopular cousins, who lacked the support of their own people and were under perpetual pressure from the French. They were also still smarting from the sting of the Neapolitan ruling family’s ingratitude. “We have never had any gratitude shown us by King Fadrique for what we formerly did for him, nor any amity or brotherhood, but quite the contrary,” the Spanish sovereigns wrote their ambassador in England. “Notwithstanding, we have not ceased to travail for him, endeavoring by all possible means to bring about a reconciliation between him and the King of France, in order that he might remain secure in his kingdom, and that the King of France might desist from the enterprise he had in hand.”57
Faced with flagging support from Castile and a new threat from France, the Neapolitan ruling family decided to reach out for military reinforcement from an unexpected quarter. They asked for troops from the Turks, or so they told Ferdinand and Isabella. This step went much, much too far, the sovereigns told their ambassador:
King Fadrique sought aid from the Turks, giving us notice of the same by his ambassadors more than a year ago, and certified us of his determination, notwithstanding that we opposed him, and censured him, and endeavored to turn him away from his purpose. At last we told him that we should be his chiefest enemies if he should persist in his purpose, but we could never prevail upon him to relinquish it.… The Turks also, having taken part in the matter, that alone would have been cause sufficient for us not only to refuse to aid King Fadrique, but to oppose him.… Seeing that King Fadrique was and still is determined to have recourse to the Turks, it was our duty for the sake of the Christian faith, to unite ourselves with Christian princes.58
And so Ferdinand and Isabella decided to ally themselves with their old enemy, France, and to partition Naples between the two kingdoms, which they quickly did. The Neapolitan ruling family left for exile in various places—King Fadrique went to live in France; others, including Ferdinand’s sister and the male heir to the throne, Fadrique’s son Ferdinand, the Duke of Calabria, went to Spain.
Isabella and Ferdinand were a bit defensive about their action here: they had in effect taken by force a kingdom ruled by their relatives. But they said at the time that they were only being practical about it. They told people at the court that they had accepted the lesser of two evils—that they had, as Peter Martyr explained, opted to take “half of the kingdom lest it should all fall into the hands of the French,” and that they hoped in time to gain control of the entire kingdom. This caused some consternation, however, Martyr noted, because King Fadrique was “indeed an excellent man.”59
Not surprisingly, the two allies in the partition of Naples, Spain and France, found themselves too deeply at odds to be able to share their trophy amicably. They engaged in border disputes that ultimately erupted into war. Under new orders from the Spanish sovereigns, Gonzalo found himself once more engaged in pitched battles with the French. One of these battles, fought at Cerignola on April 28, 1503, is considered a turning point in modern warfare by military historians. Using small firearms and shooting from trenches, Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba’s military tactics set a model that would be followed by Spaniards all over the world and that established Iberian supremacy on the battlefield for the next two hundred years. He also instituted the battlefield custom, after that battle, of praying for the fallen among the enemy.
Ultimately, Spain emerged as the unquestioned winner against France, ending up in control of Naples. That meant that the Spanish Empire now included the entire southern half of the peninsula of Italy. Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba became the very popularviceroy of Naples, establishing Spanish rule there so firmly that Spain would retain control of the city and surrounding provinces for the next three hundred years.
Under the administration of the Spanish Hapsburgs, the Neapolitans would not enjoy self-government, and they would suffer from the religious intolerance that by this time was ingrained into the culture. Still, the Neapolitans were somewhat protected from incursions by pirates that were backed and supported by the Turks and, for the most part, from further assault by the French.
More important, Spanish imperial control reduced and eventually eliminated the threat of an Ottoman invasion of the Italian peninsula, at a time when Turkish aggression was approaching its zenith in the Mediterranean. “Until the battle of Lepanto in 1571, Naples remained the bulwark of Christianity against the Turks,” writes the historian Tommaso Astarita.60