CHAPTER XIII
In the western Mediterranean on the other hand, Christianity was once again in the ascendant. The Spanish Reconquista was making slow progress, but the salient date for Spain–perhaps one of the most significant dates in all Spanish history–was 17 October 1469, which saw the marriage of Ferdinand II of Aragon to his cousin Isabella of Castile. Neither then possessed a crown, nor, technically, did the union at once give rise to a united Spain; the two kingdoms were not yet one. The monarchs–los Reyes Catolicos, ‘the Catholic Kings’, to give them the title conferred on them by the Spanish (Borgia) Pope Alexander VI–though soon to be sovereign in their own homelands, were but consorts in each other’s. Of the two, Castile was very much the senior partner. In the marriage capitulations, Ferdinand bound himself to observe the laws and usages of Castile, to reside there (never leaving it without the consent of his wife) and to acknowledge her always as sovereign of Castile, he bearing the title of king by courtesy only. Nonetheless, when he succeeded to the Aragonese throne in 1479 his authority extended also over Catalonia, Valencia and the Balearic Islands, and included of course the great city of Barcelona, which had developed–since the fall of Constantinople had caused Genoa and Venice to draw in their horns–a commercial importance in all respects equal to theirs, with trading posts and consulates extending as far as Alexandria and even beyond.
Thus, from the beginning of their joint reign, Ferdinand and Isabella ruled over a far larger area of the Iberian peninsula than had been united for many centuries. They took immense pains, moreover, to display the closeness of their relationship: almost all official documents were issued in their joint names, and their propaganda endlessly–and exaggeratedly–stressed the love they bore each other. It seems legitimate, therefore, to see their marriage as the foundation-stone of modern Spain, and the vast conquests that they were to add to the kingdom during their lifetime served still further to emphasise its integrity.
The first of these conquests was that of the Muslim Kingdom of Granada, which despite its small size provided an example of civilised luxury which had no equal in Spain, and very few elsewhere. Despite the Arabic roots of its culture, relatively few of its people were in fact Arab; there had been little Arab immigration in recent centuries. In the towns the bulk of the population was composed of Berbers from North Africa; in the country the majority were native Spaniards, whose families had long since converted to Islam. As the Reconquista took its course, the kingdom had steadily diminished in size; Cordoba had been lost in 1236, Seville in 1248. By the end of the fifteenth century it could boast only two important cities: the city of Granada itself, with its population of about 60,000, and the port of Malaga, through which passed all the gold, the troops and the munitions collected from Africa and the Near East to carry on the holy war against Christian Spain.
On 2 January 1492, after ten years of resistance, the last Moorish ruler, Abu Abdullah Mohammed XI–known to Europeans as Boabdil–surrendered his kingdom and retired to Fez (though his wife Fatima and their children took Christian baptism and settled in Madrid). His surrender marked the beginning of the most crucial four months of Spanish history, seeing as they did both the intensification of that relentless course of religious persecution which was to have so disastrous an effect on the strength and vitality of Spain, and the launching of the most celebrated voyage of exploration ever known.
Few rulers in European history have shown themselves narrower or more bigoted than Isabella. Already in 1478 she and her husband had requested a papal bull introducing the Inquisition into Castile. It was at this time principally (and rather surprisingly) directed against the converted Jews–whose popular name, marranos (pigs), shows all too clearly how little their conversions had done to better their lot. Three years later all marranos charged with heresy were summoned to recant or face death at the stake. The firstauto-da-fé was held in 1481, with six victims. By the time of Isabella’s death in 1504 there had been more than 2,000.
Less than three months after the capitulation of Granada, the Queen felt strong enough to push her policy further. Encouraged by her Inquisitor-General Torquemada–who was himself originally Jewish–on 30 March she decreed that all Jews remaining unconverted by the end of June would be expelled from Spain, all their property confiscated. More than 100,000 were driven out, resulting in a vast Sephardic diaspora in northern Europe and the Near East. Several countries–notably the Netherlands–gave them a warm welcome; the Ottoman Sultan Bayezit II went further, sending a whole fleet of ships to their rescue.121
Now it was the turn of the Muslims. By the terms of their capitulation they had been guaranteed their personal and religious liberty; Isabella had made no attempt to expel them, if only because she had no wish to see the country depopulated, its commerce and agriculture going to ruin. Instead, she had agreed to what was effectively a state within a state: an Islamic community whose faith, laws and customs were to remain inviolate. Many Muslims had nevertheless sought voluntary exile across the straits in Africa, particularly in Oran and Algiers, but to thousands of others the Queen’s concessions must have seemed too good to be true–as indeed they soon proved to be. Isabella moved more carefully this time, only very gradually tightening the screw, but with every month that passed the Muslims found themselves treated more like pariahs, the practice of their religion more difficult and the pressure on them to accept Christian baptism more insistent. These attempts at forced conversion resulted in serious insurrections, and in 1502 a royal decree spelled out the choice once again: conversion, expulsion or execution. Unlike the Jews, the vast majority of the Muslims chose the first. By 1503, at least in theory, there were none left in Castile, but since few people believed in the genuineness of their conversion, the Moriscos (as the converts were called) supplied welcome new fodder for the Inquisition.
The war with Granada had been expensive; with its end spare funds again became available, and it was these that made possible the long-planned expedition by the Genoese Christopher Columbus, which was to end in the discovery of the Americas. Although Columbus had to defend his propositions to two separate commissions of enquiry, the first composed largely of churchmen and theologians, the second of philosophers, astronomers and cosmographers, the reasons for the Catholic Kings’ eventual authorisation to him to proceed were not far to seek: the mopping-up of the eastern Mediterranean by the Turks had effectively closed the traditional Mediterranean trade route to the east. Fortunately it was now agreed that the world was round, and that the Indies could consequently be reached by sailing in either direction. The most important question now to be settled was which of the two routes was the shorter. The Portuguese, having learnt their seamanship from the Genoese and now inspired by their brilliant Prince Henry the Navigator, were already putting their money on the eastward route and feeling their way down the African coast.
There was nothing new about the idea of circumnavigating Africa. If we are to believe Herodotus, the Phoenicians had in effect achieved it around 600 BC,122 and Genoa had made another attempt in 1291, sending the brothers Ugolino and Guido Vivaldi with two galleys to find their way to India by the ocean route. (Venice had never bothered; her compact with Mameluke Egypt and virtual control of the shipping lane through the Red Sea made it unnecessary.) The Vivaldis had been unlucky–they had foundered off the Canaries–and the fourteenth century had come and gone with no further attempts. In the later fifteenth, however–by which time there had been significant progress in the arts of shipbuilding, seamanship and navigation–it was a different story. The Cape of Storms (renamed by John II of Portugal the Cape of Good Hope) was rounded by the Portuguese Bartholomew Diaz in 1488; after that it was only a matter of time before the route to India was assured.
The age-old rivalry between Spain and Portugal naturally inclined the Spaniards to favour the westward alternative, and when Columbus set about persuading Ferdinand and Isabella of its virtues he was to a very large extent preaching to the converted. But the main purpose of his journey was, as always with the Spanish explorers, twofold: gold and the Gospel. From the Indies (parts of which were believed to have been evangelised by St Thomas) it was thought to be possible not only to open up a profitable trade in the fabled luxuries of the East but, with the help of the Great Khan–a wholly mythical figure who was believed to be friendly to Christians if not a Christian himself–to spread Christianity throughout the unknown subcontinent. Here was a proposal that went straight to the Queen’s heart. True, her own kingdom had been theoretically cleared of the taint of Islam, but in the eastern and central Mediterranean the Ottoman advance showed no sign of slowing down. It had now reached as far as Italy, where bands of mounted Turkish irregulars had overrun the Friuli, laying waste the countryside, approaching so near to Venice that from the top of the campanile of St Mark the flames of the burning villages could be plainly seen. In 1480 the Sultan had launched a fleet of 100 sail against the port of Otranto in Calabria and invested it without difficulty. Naples was now threatened, and even Rome itself. Clearly Christendom must take decisive action, but how? Pope Pius II had tried on two separate occasions to launch another Crusade, but had met with little response. In any case, the Ottoman army consisted of highly-trained professionals. In a direct confrontation it would be effectively invincible.
Here, perhaps, lay the answer to the problem: to approach the Turkish horde from the east, attacking it from the rear, where it would be weak and probably undefended. Isabella hesitated no longer. She was, she believed, financing not just the opening-up of a new and important trade route; she was taking the first exploratory but essential step towards what might be the last Crusade against the infidel. Ferdinand too was enthusiastic; Columbus later claimed to have brought a smile to the monarch’s lips when he suggested that the profits from the great enterprise would pay for the conquest of Jerusalem. That smile may of course have been cynical, but Ferdinand could hardly have forgotten the old prophecy of the ‘promised prince’ who would raise his banner over the Holy City and rule the world. He and Isabella gave their formal approval on 17 April 1492, putting at Columbus’s disposal the three tiny caravels–the largest of them little more than 100 feet long–that were to change that world beyond all recognition.
The story of Christopher Columbus and his epic voyage is not ours. It is important to us, however, in the effect it had on the fortunes of the Mediterranean. Just five years before the Niña, the Pinta and the Santa Maria set sail, Diaz had rounded the Cape; just six years afterwards, on 20 May 1498, his compatriot Vasco da Gama dropped anchor at Calicut (Kozhikode) on the Malabar coast of India. Da Gama’s visit was not particularly successful; nobody wanted the distinctly shoddy merchandise he had brought with him, and he seems to have quite unnecessarily antagonised his hosts by his arrogance and quickness to take offence. His return journey, too, was plagued by bad luck. He missed the monsoon, thirty of his sailors died of scurvy, one of his ships had to be scuppered, and we do not even know the date he returned to Lisbon. But return he did, to uproarious acclaim. Not only had he found a continuous sea route to India; he had proved that Portuguese ships were capable–just–of getting there and back.
Another century and more was to pass before the Cape route was in regular use; throughout the sixteenth century there would be plenty of traffic passing through the Mediterranean. But henceforth the writing was on the wall. Even when the Turks did not make trouble–and they usually did–all cargoes bound for the further east had to be unloaded in Alexandria or some Levantine port. Thence they would be either transported overland to the pirate-infested Red Sea or consigned to some shambling camel caravan which might take two or three years to reach its destination. Now, merchants could look forward to a time when they could sail from London or Lisbon and arrive in India or Cathay in the same vessel. Meanwhile, thanks to Columbus and those who followed him, the New World was proving infinitely more profitable than the old, possessed as it was of a fabulous wealth, the lion’s share of which went to Spain–and legally too. Within only seven months of Columbus’s first landfall, Pope Alexander had issued the first of his five bulls settling the competing claims of Spain and Portugal over the newly discovered territories;123 within twenty-five years, the galleons were regularly returning to their homeland loaded to the gunwales with loot. No wonder that the successors of Ferdinand and Isabella had their eyes fixed so firmly on the west. Jerusalem could wait.
It was not immediately apparent that this sudden opening-up of the oceans on both sides had dealt trade in the Mediterranean what would prove to be a paralysing blow. Gradually, however, men realised that–at least from the commercial point of view–the Middle Sea had become a backwater. To the east of the Adriatic it was now passable only with great difficulty and much good luck. To the west, it was still indispensable to Italy; but France was nowadays finding her northern ports on the English Channel a good deal more useful than Marseille or Toulon, while Spain, now entering her years of greatness, had other and better fish to fry. Not for another three hundred years, until the building of the Suez Canal, would the Mediterranean regain its old importance as a world thoroughfare.
It remained, as always, a battleground. In Italy, too, the year 1492 had been a milestone; it had seen the deaths of both Lorenzo de Medici (Lorenzo the Magnificent), ruler of Florence, and, just three months later, of Pope Innocent VIII. Lorenzo, now remembered principally for his patronage of the arts, had also been largely responsible for preserving the always tenuous balance of the Italian states; by maintaining the alliance of Florence, Milan and Naples he had provided a focus for the smaller powers such as Mantua, Ferrara and some of the Papal States, and had also kept in check the dangerous ambitions of Venice. With his death and the succession of his feckless son Piero, that moderating influence was gone. Pope Innocent, for all his corruption and nepotism, had also been a force for peace; Rodrigo Borgia, the Spaniard who succeeded him as Pope Alexander VI, was quite simply out for what he could get. Italy lay once again open to attack, and that attack was not long in coming.
The casus belli was Naples. Though it still claimed Sicily as part of its kingdom, it had in fact been separated from the island proper ever since the Sicilian Vespers, when the house of Anjou had been driven out by that of Aragon and had retreated to the mainland. In 1435 the Angevin line had died out with Queen Joanna II, and the mainland throne of Naples, which she had left to an Angevin relative, had been seized by the island ruler Alfonso of Aragon. Thus the two kingdoms were now effectively reunited; each, however, had retained its separate identity, and on Alfonso’s death in 1458 they were separated again, the mainland being devolved on his illegitimate son Ferdinand.124 Ferdinand inherited what continued to be, in every important respect, a medieval monarchy. Feudal principles still prevailed; municipal liberties on the northern model were still unheard of. The King–greedy, ruthless but extremely capable–was feared and detested by his subjects, as was his son Alfonso, who succeeded him in January 1494. But the bastard grandson of a usurper, it was generally agreed, had but a tenuous claim to the throne. Alfonso’s position was open to challenge, and that challenge came on 1 September 1494, when the twenty-two-year-old King Charles VIII of France–described by the historian H. A. L. Fisher as ‘a young and licentious hunchback of doubtful sanity’–led an army of some 30,000 into Italy to claim for himself, as a descendant of Charles of Anjou, the Neapolitan throne. At once the two-hundred-year-old rivalry between the houses of Anjou and Aragon flared up again.
Charles’s appearance was hardly what might have been expected in a dashing young military adventurer. ‘His Majesty,’ reported the Venetian ambassador125 in that same year, ‘is small, ill-formed and ugly of countenance, with pale, short-sighted eyes, nose far too large and abnormally thick lips which are always apart. He makes spasmodic movements with his hands that are most unpleasant to look upon, and his speech is extremely slow.’ For him, too, 1492 had been significant, being the year in which he had been freed from the stern control of the former regent, his elder sister Anne de Beaujeu. She, certainly, would never have countenanced an adventure of the kind on which her brother had now embarked, from which his ministers had also done their best to dissuade him but in which he believed himself to be abundantly justified. He had no wish, he protested, to conquer the territory of others, only to claim such lands as belonged to him by right–which, for him, unquestionably included the Kingdom of Naples. And there was a further consideration: with this kingdom there had for the past three centuries been associated the style of King of Jerusalem,126 a title which would give him the prestige necessary, once his Italian dominions were safely confirmed, to launch and lead the long-overdue Crusade of which he dreamed.
The expedition began promisingly enough. Charles, with his cousin the Duke of Orleans and his army–its cavalry drawn from the high nobility and gentry of France–his Swiss halberdiers and German pikemen, his Gascon archers and his quick-firing light artillery, crossed the Alps without incident over the Mont Genèvre pass, his heavy cannon having been shipped separately to Genoa. Milan, under its brilliant and all-powerful ruler Ludovico Sforza, received him with enthusiasm; so too did Lucca and Pisa; in Florence, welcomed as a liberator by the Dominican preacher Girolamo Savonarola, the King took the opportunity to expel Piero de’ Medici–who displayed none of the statesmanship of his father Lorenzo. On 31 December Rome opened her gates, while a terrified Pope Alexander briefly took refuge in the Castel Sant’ Angelo before sullenly coming to terms. Finally, on 22 February 1495, Charles entered Naples, while its people–who had never looked on the rival house of Aragon as anything other than foreign oppressors–welcomed him with enthusiasm. His Aragonese rivals fled to Sicily, and on 12 May Charles was for the second time crowned a king.
He did not remain long in his new kingdom; already his success was beginning to turn sour. The Neapolitans, delighted as they had been to get rid of the Aragonese, soon discovered that one foreign occupier was very much like another. Unrest also grew among the populations of many smaller towns, who found themselves having to support, for no good reason that they could understand, discontented and frequently licentious French garrisons. Beyond the Kingdom of Naples, too, men were beginning to feel alarm. Even those states, Italian and foreign, who had previously looked benignly upon Charles’s advance were asking themselves just how much further the young conqueror might be intending to go. Ferdinand and Isabella decided to send a fleet to Sicily; the Holy Roman Emperor-elect Maximilian,127 terrified that Charles’s successes might lead him in his turn to claim the imperial crown, also made his preparations; Pope Alexander, never happy about Charles, was becoming increasingly nervous; and even Ludovico Sforza of Milan, by now as alarmed as anyone, was further disconcerted by the continued presence at nearby Asti of the Duke of Orleans–whose claims to Milan through his grandmother, the Duchess Valentina Visconti, he knew to be no less strong than those of Charles to Naples. The result was the formation of what was known as the Holy League, ostensibly pacific but in fact with a single objective: to send the new King packing.
When news of the League was brought to Charles at Naples, he flew into a fury, but he did not underestimate the danger with which he was now faced. Only a week after his coronation, he left his new kingdom for ever and headed north. Following the west coast of the peninsula up to La Spezia, he then branched right along the mountain road that would bring him across the northern range of the Apennines and down again into Lombardy. Even in midsummer, the task of dragging heavy artillery over a high mountain pass must have been a nightmare. The ascent was bad enough, but the journey down was infinitely worse; it sometimes needed as many as 100 already exhausted men, lashed together in pairs, to restrain a single heavy cannon from careering over a precipice–and, if they did not act quickly, carrying them with it. At last, on 5 July, Charles was able to look down on the little town of Fornovo–and, deployed just behind it, on some 30,000 soldiers of the League under the command of the Marquis of Mantua, Francesco Gonzaga.
Gonzaga’s army had every advantage. It outnumbered the French by three–possibly four–to one; it was fully rested and provisioned; and it had had plenty of time to choose its position and prepare for the coming encounter. The French, by contrast, were exhausted, hungry and disinclined to fight. But fight they did, the King himself as bravely as any; the battle that followed was the bloodiest that Italy had seen for two hundred years. It did not, however, last long; according to the French ambassador to Venice, Philippe de Commines, who was present, everything was over in a quarter of an hour. Somehow Gonzaga managed to present it as a victory–even, on his return to Mantua, building a chiesetta di vittoria (a ‘little church of victory’) with a specially commissioned altarpiece by Mantegna; not everyone, however, would have agreed with him. The French admittedly forfeited their baggage train, but their losses were negligible compared with those of the Italians, who had utterly failed to stop them–as was seen when Charles and his men continued their march that same night and reached Asti unmolested only a few days later.
There was bad news awaiting them. A French naval expedition against Genoa had failed, resulting in the capture of most of the fleet. Louis of Orleans was being besieged in Novara by a Milanese army and unlikely to hold out much longer. Alfonso’s son Ferrantino had landed in Calabria where, supported by Spanish troops from Sicily, he was rapidly advancing on Naples. On 7 July 1495 he reoccupied the city. Suddenly, all the French successes of the past year had evaporated. In October Charles managed to come to an agreement with Sforza which ended the effectiveness of the League; a week or two later he led his army back across the Alps, leaving Orleans behind to maintain a French presence as best he could.
Paradoxically, Charles’s Italian adventure was to have its most lasting effect in northern Europe. When his army was paid off at Lyons in November 1495, it dispersed across the continent with reports of a warm, sunlit land inhabited by a people whose life of cultivated refinement went far beyond anything known in the greyer, chillier climes of the north, but who were too disunited to defend themselves against a determined invader. As the message spread, and as the painters, sculptors, plasterworkers and woodcarvers whom Charles had brought back with him from Italy began to transform his old castle at Amboise into a Renaissance palace, so Italy became ever more desirable in the eyes of her northern neighbours, presenting them with an invitation and a challenge which they were not slow to take up in the years to come.
The disbanded mercenaries carried something else too–deadlier far than any dream of conquest. Columbus’s three ships, returning to Spain from the Caribbean in 1493, had brought with them the first cases of syphilis known to the Old World; through the agency of the Spanish mercenaries sent by Ferdinand and Isabella to support King Alfonso the disease had rapidly spread to Naples, where it was rife by the time Charles arrived. After three months of dolce far niente, his men must in turn have been thoroughly infected, and all available evidence suggests that it was they who were responsible for introducing the disease north of the Alps. By 1497 cases were being reported as far away as Aberdeen. In that year Vasco da Gama reached India, where the disease is recorded in 1498; seven years later it was in Canton.
But however swift the spread of the morbo gallico–the French disease, as it was called–death came to Charles VIII more quickly still. At Amboise on the eve of Palm Sunday 1498, while on his way to watch the jeu de paume being played in the castle ditch, he struck his head on a low lintel. He walked on and saw the game, but on his way back to his apartments, just as he was passing the place where the accident had occurred, he collapsed. Although it was the most sordid and tumbledown corner of the castle–‘a place,’ sniffs Commines, ‘where every man pissed that would’–his attendants for some reason thought it better not to move him. There he lay on a rough pallet for nine hours; and there, shortly before midnight, he died. He was twenty-eight years old.
Since Charles’s only son had died in infancy, the throne now passed to his cousin the Duke of Orleans, thenceforth to be known as Louis XII. To the rulers of Italy, who had had plenty of experience of Louis in recent years, his succession could mean one thing only: a new invasion of the peninsula, this time to vindicate not only the Angevin claim to Naples but the Orleanist one to Milan. They were not in the least surprised to hear that the new King had expressly assumed the title of Duke of Milan at his coronation. The superiority of French arms had been proved at Fornovo, and the army that Louis was preparing bid fair to be considerably larger, better equipped and more efficiently organised than that of his predecessor. Pope Alexander might have objected, but Louis had managed to buy him without difficulty by offering to the Pope’s son Cesare–who, bored with being a cardinal, had decided to abandon the Church in favour of a life of military adventure–the rich Duchy of Valentinois and the hand in marriage of Charlotte d’Albret, sister of the King of Navarre.
It was in mid-August 1499 that this second invasion took place. On 2 September Duke Ludovico Sforza fled with his treasure to the Tyrol, and on 6 October King Louis made his solemn entry into Milan. He still did not have things entirely his own way–exactly four months later, after the King’s return to France, Sforza was back in the city–but ultimately the French army was too strong, and in April the Duke was taken prisoner, never to regain his liberty. Louis, however, was still not satisfied. Naples beckoned. His cousin Charles had won the city but then lost it again; he himself would be more careful. In November 1500 he concluded with Ferdinand of Aragon the secret Treaty of Granada, in which the two rulers would conquer Naples jointly. In return for his alliance–or at least his non-intervention–Ferdinand would receive a fair half of the kingdom, including the provinces of Apulia and Calabria. To Louis would go Naples itself, Gaeta and the Abruzzi. The Pope duly gave his approval, and in May 1501 the French army, supplemented by 4,000 Swiss mercenaries, was on the march.
The first news of the coalition to reach King Federico of Naples–brother and successor of Ferrantino, who had died soon after his return to his city–came from Rome, in the shape of a papal bull deposing him and dividing his kingdom according to the terms agreed at Granada. He retired to the island of Ischia, where after a time he accepted Louis’s offer of asylum in France. Two days after his departure French garrisons occupied the castles of Naples, while other contingents headed north into the Abruzzi. Simultaneously, the celebrated Spanish captain Gonzalo de Cordoba occupied his master’s share of the kingdom.
But alas, the Treaty of Granada had left too many questions unanswered. Nothing had been said about the province of the Capitanata, which lies between the Abruzzi and Apulia, nor about the Basilicata, on the instep of Italy between Apulia and Calabria. One might have thought it possible to settle such bones of contention by amicable means, but no: by July France and Spain were at war. The fighting continued on and off for two years, victory finally going to the Spaniards, who in 1503 smashed the French army at Cerignola. On 16 May Gonzalo entered Naples. In the last days of December he fell on the French yet again, by the Garigliano river. This time the battle was decisive, spelling the end of the French presence in Naples. Gaeta, the last French garrison in the kingdom, surrendered to Spanish troops on 1 January 1504. Thenceforth in the mainland kingdom, as well as in Sicily and Spain, the house of Aragon reigned unchallenged.
At this point in the story the spotlight shifts, briefly, to Cyprus. Some two and a half centuries before, the island had been bestowed by Richard Coeur-de-Lion on the hopeless Guy of Lusignan; and although it had from time to time fallen under foreign influences–notably that of Genoa in the fourteenth century and that of Cairo (to which it was still a tributary) in 1426–the house of Lusignan had continued to reign. In 1460, however, James of Lusignan, bastard son of the former king John II, had seized the throne from his sister Queen Charlotte and her husband Louis of Savoy, forcing them to take refuge in the castle of Kyrenia for three years until they could escape to Rome. Once king, James needed allies, and, turning to Venice, he had formally requested the hand in marriage of Caterina, the beautiful young daughter of Marco Cornaro (or Corner, as the Venetians had it), whose family had long been associated with the island. Marco himself had lived there for many years and had become an intimate friend of James, for whom he had accomplished several delicate diplomatic missions, while Caterina’s uncle Andrea was shortly to become Auditor of the Kingdom. On her mother’s side her lineage was still more distinguished: there she could boast as a great-grandfather no less a personage than John Comnenus, Emperor of Trebizond.128
The prospect of a Venetian Queen of Cyprus was more than the government of the Serenissima could resist; lest James should change his mind, it arranged for an immediate marriage by proxy. On 10 July 1468, with all the considerable pomp and magnificence of which the Republic was capable, the fourteen-year-old Caterina was escorted by forty noble matrons from Palazzo Corner at S. Polo to the Doge’s Palace. There Doge Cristoforo Moro handed a ring to the Cypriot ambassador, who placed it on the bride’s finger in the name of his sovereign. She was then given the title of Daughter of St Mark–an unprecedented honour which caused the Bishop of Turin acidly to observe that he never knew that St Mark had been married and that, even if he had, his wife must surely be a little old to have a child of fourteen. Four years later, on 10 November 1472, Caterina sailed away, with an escort of four galleys, to her new realm.
The following year, however, King James died suddenly at the age of thirty-three, leaving his wife heavily pregnant. The inevitable suspicions of poison were probably unfounded, but Venice, fearing a coup to topple Caterina and reinstate Charlotte, was taking no chances. The Captain-General Pietro Mocenigo was sent at once to Cyprus with a fleet, ostensibly to protect the young Queen but in fact to watch over Venetian interests, with orders to remove all persons of uncertain loyalty from positions of power and influence. The fact that Cyprus was an independent sovereign state troubled the Republic not at all; Mocenigo was instructed to act through the Queen as far as possible, but was specifically empowered to use force if necessary.
Unfortunately, the measures he took served only to increase the resentment already felt by the Cypriot nobility at the continued interference by Venice in their affairs. A conspiracy soon took shape under the leadership of the Archbishop of Nicosia, and three hours before dawn on 13 November 1473 a small group–including the Archbishop himself–forced its way into the palace at Famagusta and cut down the Queen’s chamberlain and her doctor before her eyes. Next it hunted out her uncle Andrea Corner and her cousin Marco Bembo. Both suffered a similar fate, their naked bodies being thrown into the dry moat beneath her window, where they remained until they had been half eaten by the dogs of the town. Finally Caterina was forced to give her consent to the betrothal of a natural daughter of her late husband to Alfonso, the bastard son of the King of Naples, and to recognise the latter as heir to the throne of Cyprus–despite the fact that James had specifically bequeathed his kingdom to her and that she had by this time given birth to a son of her own.
Mocenigo soon managed to lay hands on most of those responsible. One or two, including the Archbishop, had fled; of the others the ringleaders were hanged, the remainder imprisoned. The new arrangements for the succession were countermanded and the Venetian Senate sent out two trusted patricians who, under the title of Councillors, took over the effective government of the island in Caterina’s name. The unhappy Queen remained on the throne, but now shorn of all her powers. Her baby son, James III, died in 1474, almost exactly a year after his birth; thenceforth she had to contend with the intrigues of her sister-in-law Charlotte on the one hand and young Alfonso of Naples on the other, while at home the great nobles of the island, seeing her less as their queen than as a Venetian puppet, hatched plot after plot against her. Her survival, as she well knew, was due only to Venetian protection, but even that was becoming intolerable; every important post at court or in the administration was in Venetian hands. At one period she and her father had to complain that her protectors had become more like jailers; she was forbidden to leave the palace, her servants were withdrawn and she was even compelled to take her meals alone, at a little wooden table. Daughter of St Mark or not, it was now plain to her that she was nothing but an inconvenience both to her subjects and to the Republic, which would not hesitate to get rid of her when the moment came.
The Venetian government bided its time. Since 1426 Cyprus had been held in vassalage to the Sultan of Egypt, to whom it was bound to pay an annual tribute of 8,000 ducats; its direct annexation might well cause diplomatic complications which Venice could ill afford. But then in 1487 the Sultan sent warning to Caterina that the Ottoman Sultan Bayezit was planning a massive expedition against him, and was likely to make an attempt at Cyprus en route. This development, offering as it did the prospect of Venice and Egypt allied against a common enemy, may well have encouraged the Senate to take the plunge; what certainly did so was the discovery, in the summer of 1488, of a further plot, this time with the object of securing the marriage of Caterina to Alfonso of Naples. Here was a possibility which could clearly not be contemplated. In October 1488 the decision was taken: Cyprus was to be formally incorporated into the Venetian Empire and its queen brought back–in state if possible, by force if necessary–to the land of her birth.
Anticipating some reluctance on Caterina’s part–for marriage to Alfonso might well have seemed to her a welcome alternative to her present situation–the Venetian Council of Ten had secretly briefed her brother Giorgio to persuade her that a voluntary abdication would be for the good of all concerned. Cyprus, still dangerously exposed, could then be properly protected from Turkish cupidity, while she herself would acquire glory and honour for bestowing such a gift upon her motherland. In return for this she would be received in state, endowed with a rich fief and a generous annual income, and enabled to live in peace and luxury as the queen that she would always be. Her family, too, would gain immeasurably in power and prestige, whereas if she were to refuse they would be ruined.
Caterina protested bitterly, but she yielded at last. Early in 1489, at Famagusta, she formally charged the Captain-General to fly the standard of St Mark from every corner of the island; and in the first week of June she arrived in Venice. The Doge sailed out in his state barge to the Lido to greet her, accompanied by a train of noble ladies. Unfortunately a sudden storm arose; the barge was forced to ride it out for several hours, and when Caterina was able to embark its passengers were no longer at their best. But they nevertheless managed a stately progress up the Grand Canal while the trumpets sounded, the church bells rang, and the people of Venice–who probably cared little for Caterina but who dearly loved a parade–raised all the cheers that were expected of them.
Later the Queen went through a solemn ceremony of abdication in St Mark’s, where she formally ceded her kingdom to Venice. In October she took possession of the little hill town of Asolo, where for the next twenty years she was to remain at the centre of a cultivated if vapid court, enjoying a life of music, dancing and the polite conversation of learned men–a life which, after her earlier tribulations, she richly deserved. Only in 1509, threatened by the advancing army of the Emperor Maximilian, was she obliged to return to her native city. There in July 1510, at the age of fifty-six, she died.
In February 1508 the Emperor Maximilian entered the territory of Venice at the head of a sizable army, ostensibly on his way to Rome for his imperial coronation. He had given the Republic advance notice of his intention the year before, requesting safe conduct and provisions for his army along the way, but Venetian agents in and around his court had left their masters in no doubt that his primary objective was to expel the French from Genoa and Milan and themselves from Verona and Vicenza, reasserting the old imperial claim to all four cities. The Doge had therefore politely replied that His Imperial Majesty would be welcomed with all the honour and consideration due to him if he came ‘without warlike tumult and the clangour of arms’; if, on the other hand, he was to be accompanied by a military force, the Republic’s treaty obligations and its policy of neutrality unfortunately made it impossible to grant his request.
Furious at this response, Maximilian had marched regardless on Vicenza–and found the opposition a good deal stiffer than he had expected. With French help, the Venetians not only turned him back but occupied three important imperial cities at the head of the Adriatic: Gorizia, Trieste and Fiume (now the Croatian port of Rijeka). By April, with his army’s six-month contract expired and no money with which to extend it, the Emperor was obliged to agree to a three-year truce, allowing Venice to keep the territory she had gained. For him it was a salutary lesson; for Pope Julius II, on the other hand, who detested Venice and was hell-bent on her destruction, it was a piece of intolerable arrogance, and when within a few weeks the Republic refused to surrender some Bolognese refugees and appointed its own bishop rather than the papal nominee to the vacant see of Vicenza, he decided to act. A stream of emissaries was despatched from Rome: to the Emperor, to France and Spain, to Milan, Hungary and the Netherlands. All bore the same message: a call for a joint expedition by Western Christendom against the Republic and the subsequent dismemberment of her Empire. Maximilian would regain all the lands beyond the Mincio river that had ever been imperial or subject to the house of Habsburg, including the cities of Verona, Vicenza, Padua and Treviso and the regions of Istria and Friuli. To France would go Bergamo and Brescia, Crema and Cremona and all the lands, towns and castles east of the river Adda and as far south as its confluence with the Po. In the south, Trani, Brindisi and Otranto would revert to the house of Aragon; Hungary could have back Dalmatia; Cyprus would go to Savoy. Ferrara and Mantua would have their former lands restored to them. There would, in short, be something for everyone–except for Venice, which would be stripped bare.
The Pope himself intended to take back Cervia, Rimini and Faenza, but his long-term aim went far beyond any question of territorial boundaries. Italy as he saw it was now divided into three. In the north was French Milan, in the south Spanish Naples. Between the two, there was room for one–and only one–powerful and prosperous state; and that state, Julius was determined, must be the Papacy. Venice might survive as a city; as an empire she must be destroyed.
The princes of Europe had no interest in this theory. They were, however, well aware that Venice had a perfect legal right to the territories they planned to seize, a right enshrined in treaties freely entered into by both France and Spain and, more recently still, by Maximilian himself. However much they might try to present their action as a blow struck on behalf of righteousness by which a rapacious aggressor was to be brought to justice, they were all fully conscious of the fact that their own conduct was more reprehensible than Venice’s had ever been. But the temptation was too great, the promised rewards too high. They accepted. So it was that on 10 December 1508, at Cambrai in the Netherlands, there was signed what appeared to be the death-warrant of the Venetian Empire. Venice was now confronted with an array of European powers more formidable than any Italian state had ever faced in history. Allies she had none. On 27 April 1509 the Pope announced a sentence of solemn excommunication and interdict over all Venetian territory.
Worse was to come. On 9 May, just outside the village of Agnadello, the Venetian army suffered a catastrophic defeat at the hands of King Louis. The whole mainland was as good as lost. What was left of it lay defenceless. Most of the objectives agreed upon by the League of Cambrai had been achieved at a single stroke. Had it not been for those treacherously shallow waters by which she was surrounded, Venice would have stood little chance of survival. A century earlier, she could have done without the terra firma, but times had changed. Her Levantine trade had never recovered from the fall of Constantinople in 1453. No longer was she mistress of the eastern Mediterranean; her colonial empire had now been reduced to a few tenuous and uncertain toeholds in an Ottoman world. No longer, if the Turks closed their harbours to her, could she trust to the more distant eastern markets for her salvation; the Portuguese had seen to that. No longer, in short, could she live by the sea alone. Nowadays Venetians tended to look west rather than east, to the fertile plains of Lombardy and the Veneto, to the thriving industries of Padua and Vicenza, Verona and Brescia, and to the network of roads and waterways that linked them to the rich merchant cities of Europe. It was on the mainland, now, that they had invested their wealth and reposed their hopes, and already Maximilian’s specially empowered representatives were receiving the submission of one city after another–Verona, Vicenza and Padua, Rovereto, Riva and Cittadella–until the Venetians had fallen back on Mestre. All Lombardy and the Veneto were lost.
Or so, at least, it seemed; but already by July things were looking up. Many of the cities and towns that had surrendered had been perfectly content to live under Venetian rule, and were beginning to resent the heavier and far less sympathetic hand of their new masters. Less than two months after Agnadello came the first reports of spontaneous uprisings in favour of Venice. After just forty-two days as an imperial city, Padua returned beneath the sheltering wing of the lion of St Mark; many smaller towns in the region followed its example. Meanwhile, a condottiere named Lucio Malvezzo, temporarily in Venetian pay, had seized Legnago, a key town on the Adige, from which he was threatening Verona and Vicenza. Perhaps the situation was not quite so desperate after all.
Until now the Emperor Maximilian, after lending it his name, had not lifted a finger on behalf of the League. He had as yet sent no army, and indeed had not explicitly declared war until 29 May, three weeks after Agnadello. The news of the reconquest of Padua, however, stirred him into action. By August a heterogeneous and unwieldy army had started on its way to the city, to be joined at various stages of its journey by a force of several thousand French, a body of Spaniards and smaller contingents from Mantua, Ferrara and the Pope. Maximilian himself, meanwhile, decided to set up temporary headquarters at Asolo, in the palace of the Queen of Cyprus–who, with her numerous entourage, had wisely fled to Venice at the first news of his approach.
It was a good month before the imperial army was collected and ready, during which time the Paduans had plenty of time to strengthen their fortifications and to lay in plentiful stocks of food, water and ammunition. When on 15 September the siege at last began in earnest, they were well able to defend themselves. For a fortnight the German and French heavy artillery pounded away at the northern walls, reducing them to rubble, and yet somehow every assault was beaten back. At last the Emperor gave up the attempt. Making hurried arrangements to leave part of his army in Italy under the Duke of Anhalt for the garrisoning of other, less spirited cities and to provide an emergency force should the need arise, he led his shambling army back across the Alps whence it had come.
The Venetians were jubilant. To have recaptured Padua had been in itself a victory, but to have held it successfully against an army of some 40,000–that was a triumph. And there was more to come. In November Anhalt surrendered Vicenza without any serious struggle, and in the weeks following more and more other towns voluntarily declared themselves for Venice. When Pope Julius heard of the reconquest of Padua he flew into a towering rage, and when after the failure of Maximilian’s siege he learned that Verona too was likely to defect and that the Marquis of Mantua had been taken prisoner by the Venetians he is said to have hurled his cap to the ground and blasphemed St Peter. But he remained implacable, and the Venetians began to realise that despite their recent successes the situation had not fundamentally changed. The League was still in force; the imperial army remained intact. The French in Milan were also sharpening their swords. Meanwhile, Venice continued to stand alone, her army defeated, her treasury empty, most of her income from the mainland cut off, and without a single ally. When she sought help from England the new king, Henry VIII, expressed sympathy but offered no material support. Finally, in despair, she swallowed her pride and even appealed to the Sultan, but received no reply.
By the end of the year she was at the end of her tether, and was obliged to accept Pope Julius’s conditions for peace. They were predictably savage. The Republic might no longer appoint its own bishops and clergy. It must compensate the Pope for all his expenses in recovering his territories and for all the revenues he had lost. The Adriatic would in future be open to all, free of the customs dues which Venice had always levied on foreign shipping. Finally, in the event of war against the Turks the Republic would provide not less than fifteen galleys at its own expense. On 24 February 1510, in the course of a long and deliberately humiliating ceremony outside the central doors of St Peter’s, five Venetian envoys were made to kneel for a full hour while the agreement was read out in full, and were then handed twelve symbolic scourging rods from the twelve cardinals present. (The scourging itself was mercifully omitted.) Only when they had kissed the Pope’s feet and received absolution were the great doors opened; the assembled company then proceeded in state to the high altar for prayers before going to Mass in the Sistine Chapel–all except the Pope, who, as one of the Venetians explained in his report, ‘never attended these long services’.
The news of Pope Julius’s reconciliation with Venice had not been well received by his fellow members of the League. The French in particular had done all they could to dissuade him from taking such a step, and at the ceremony of absolution their ambassador, together with his imperial and Spanish colleagues–all of whom were in Rome at the time–was conspicuous by his absence. Had he known just what that ceremony portended, his disapproval would have given way to horrified alarm. The Pope’s scores with Venice had been settled; now it was the turn of France.
By all objective standards, the papal volte-face was contemptible. Having encouraged the French to take up arms against Venice, Julius now refused to allow them the rewards which he himself had promised, turning against them with all the violence and venom that he had previously displayed towards the Venetians. Conversely, just as he had previously been the chief architect of Venice’s impoverishment and humiliation, so now he suddenly became her saviour. Not only did he step forth as the powerful champion she had so desperately sought; he took the principal initiative. The Republic could now withdraw from the centre of the stage. Henceforth the war would primarily be between the Pope and King Louis–together with Louis’s chief Italian ally, the Duke of Ferrara. The Duke’s salt-works at Comaccio were in direct competition with the papal ones at Cervia; moreover, as the husband of Lucrezia Borgia he was the son-in-law of Pope Alexander VI–a fact which, in Julius’s eyes, was more than enough to condemn him.
As always, the Pope fought against his new enemies with all the means at his disposal: the military, the diplomatic and the spiritual. His first military action against the French–an attempt in July 1510 to drive them out of Genoa–ended in failure, but diplomatically he struck a more telling blow when, a few weeks later, he recognised Ferdinand of Aragon as King of Naples, passing over the old Angevin claims of King Louis. Shortly after that, in a bull couched in language that St Peter Martyr said made his hair stand on end, he anathematised and excommunicated the Duke of Ferrara. By this time he was approaching seventy. In October, lying with a high fever in Bologna, he narrowly escaped capture by the French, who took the city a few months later.129 Another bout of sickness followed in the summer of 1511, during which his life was despaired of. But the energy with which he continued to pursue his vindictive policies was undiminished, and in the autumn he had recovered sufficiently to proclaim a new Holy League, this time against France.
King Louis, however, now played an important new card: his nephew Gaston de Foix, Duke of Nemours, who at the age of twenty-two had already proved himself one of the outstanding military commanders of his day. In February 1512 Nemours launched a whirlwind campaign against the papal and Spanish forces, ending on Easter Sunday at Ravenna with the bloodiest battle since Charles VIII’s invasion nearly twenty years before. When it was over nearly 10,000 Spanish and Italians lay dead on the field. It had, however, been a Pyrrhic victory. The French infantry alone had lost over 4,000 men; most of the commanders had also perished, including Nemours himself. Had he lived, he would probably have rallied the remains of his army and marched on Rome and Naples, forcing the Pope to come to terms and restoring King Louis to the Neapolitan throne; and the subsequent history of Italy would have been different indeed.
By this time the three principal protagonists in the war of the League of Cambrai had gone through two permutations in the pattern of their alliances. First France and the Papacy had been allied against Venice, then Venice and the Papacy had ranged themselves against the French. It remained only for Venice and France to combine against the Papacy–which, in March 1513 at the Treaty of Blois, they did. Venice, having reasserted her position on the mainland, was determined that Pope and Emperor should not elbow her aside, and as the French no longer constituted any danger to her they were her obvious allies. But in fact the situation changed even before the treaty was signed: on 21 February 1513 the seventy-year-old Julius II died in Rome. In one of the most shameless acts of official vandalism in all Christian history, he had virtually completed his demolition of St Peter’s. The new building designed by Bramante had scarcely begun to rise, and only one tiny chapel remained in which the assembled cardinals could elect his successor. Their deliberations were too slow for the guardians of the conclave, who in an effort to speed things up successively reduced the catering, first to a single dish per meal and later to a purely vegetarian diet. Even so, it was a full week before their choice was announced: Cardinal Giovanni de’ Medici, who took the name of Leo X.
‘God has given us the Papacy; now let us enjoy it.’ Whether or not the new Pope actually uttered the superbly cynical words ascribed to him, few Italians of the time would have shown surprise. Leo was thirty-seven. He was immensely rich, immensely powerful–his family had been re-established in Florence in 1512, after an eighteen-year exile–and showed a far greater penchant for magnificence than his father, Lorenzo, had ever done. He was also, unlike Julius, a man of peace–within the curia he was known as ‘His Cautiousness’–and his election was genuinely popular. On the other hand, he was enough of a realist to believe that King Louis would soon be once again on the warpath, and he was determined to protect papal interests wherever necessary.
But Louis’s adventures in Italy were over. The Emperor Maximilian, having joined the Holy League, now decreed that all imperial subjects fighting with the French army should return at once to their homes on pain of death, while the French themselves were hurriedly recalled to their native soil to deal with the English–also League members–who had invaded France and had already captured Tournai. There were simply no soldiers left to carry on the Italian struggle; besides, the King no longer had the heart to continue. Worn out at fifty-two and already showing signs of premature senility, he had married during the previous autumn Princess Mary of England, sister of Henry VIII. She was fifteen years old, radiantly beautiful and possessed of all her brother’s inexhaustible energy. Louis had done his best with her, but the effort had proved too great; he lasted just three months, dying in Paris on 1 January 1515. In France, he had somehow acquired the title of ‘Father of his Country’; in Italy he had achieved precisely nothing.
Just a year later, on 23 January 1516, King Ferdinand of Aragon followed him to the grave. Of all the monarchs involved in this twisted and tormented tale, only he had emerged consistently the winner. He had concluded with Louis the secret treaty of Granada to decide the fate of Naples; by its terms he had gained more than half its territory, together with the valuable provinces of Apulia and Calabria. Soon afterwards the entire kingdom was his; it was to remain under Spanish control for the next two centuries. After the death of his wife, Isabella, in 1504 he also ruled over both Castile (as regent for his mad daughter Joanna) and Aragon, together with Navarre, Roussillon and the former Kingdom of Granada, to say nothing of vast and unmeasured territories in the New World. He left behind him a Spain which, though still not completely unified, was infinitely richer, stronger and more powerful than ever before, and on the threshold of her golden age.