The man to whom they owed this providential improvement of their situations was named Doménikos Theotokópoulos. He was Greek and he introduced himself as a soldier of Christ. He asked them to accompany him to Christian territory to champion the true faith, combat the usurper and in this way redeem their sins and save their souls. The leader of the freed prisoners replied: ‘Thank you, stranger, for the favour you’ve done us in giving us our freedom, but we’ve suffered too much servitude in irons to voluntarily give ourselves over to any other kind, even if it involved serving God himself. As for saving our souls, I’m afraid that our list of crimes is so long and so bad that three lifetimes wouldn’t be enough. Brigands we are, and brigands we’ll die. Our only honour is never to submit to any law or authority, except for that of the bandoleros.’ With these words, the bandit bowed, picked up the still-loaded musket, hung two swords from the belt that he took from one of the guards (also taking his jacket and his boots), mounted the better of the two horses, and rode off at a gallop. The other prisoners immediately went their separate ways into the hills, and soon only young Cervantes remained: alone, friendless, a fugitive now sought by the authorities of a foreign country, leaving behind him three seriously wounded men and one corpse, he had little choice but to follow his saviour.
The Greek seemed to know the country like the back of his hand. He knew how to thwart the patrols by avoiding the busiest roads and most populous towns. He absolutely refused to go through Bologna, preferring to cut through forests and sleep under the stars. In this way, they reached Ancona, then set off for Venice, a city that – had Atahualpa never appeared in the world – would still be considered peerless: but, by the favour of heaven, and the ingenuity of the Aztecs, the great Venice has now found a city that may be compared to herself. The streets of those two famous cities, which are almost wholly of water, make them the admiration and terror of all mankind – that of Europe dominating the old world, and that of Mexico the new.
3. Which treats of the most glorious affair ever seen in centuries past, the present century or in centuries to come, and which was also responsible for the great misfortune of poor Cervantes
‘The Church, the sea or the royal house.’ Led by wars and destiny from Guadalajara to this Venetian tavern, where he was presently downing a few quarter-gallons in the company of his friend the Greek, the famous captain Diego de Urbina spoke those words to young Cervantes, who sat at the table with them. ‘In this Spain of ours, there is a proverb, to my mind very true – as they all are, being short aphorisms drawn from long practical experience – and the one I refer to says: Iglesia o mar o casa real.’ He broke off to swallow a mouthful of beer, and also to allow the young man time to consider the profound truth of what he’d just said. But as Cervantes did not seem to understand, he took it upon himself to explain: ‘In plainer language, whoever wants to flourish and become rich, let him follow the Church, or go to sea, adopting commerce as his calling, or go into the king’s service in his household, for they say: “Better a king’s crumb than a lord’s favour.”’
Miguel objected that Maximilian was not a king but an archduke. This earned him a tongue-lashing from the Greek: ‘Don’t blaspheme! Besides, His Majesty is king of Hungary, Croatia and Bohemia, and his grandfather Charles Quint was king of Spain and Holy Roman Emperor. If God wills it, his grandson will regain those honours.’ With that, he crossed himself and ordered another quarter-gallon.
When Miguel expressed his surprise at hearing such Catholic fervour from a Greek, who might have been expected to favour some Byzantine or Mohammedan cult, Doménikos told him how he had left his country as a very young man to travel to Italy. First, he had studied painting in Venice, then he had gone to Rome and entered the service of the Cardinal Alessandro Farnese, before joining the Society of Jesus; finally, as a soldier of Christ, he had gone into enemy territory to spy and recruit for his Lord and for the Church.
Whether because he had heard this story too many times before or because he considered it irrelevant, the captain grew impatient and, after ordering another three quarter-gallons, returned the conversation to its original subject: young Miguel’s future. ‘You’re young. There’ll be plenty of time for you to join the Church later. And you’re not really in a position to become a merchant: banished from Spain and the Fifth Quarter, the route to the west is closed to you and you wouldn’t be able to trade with Mexico or Tawantinsuyu. Which leaves only the most glorious path of all: a military career.’ In an attempt to convince young Cervantes, the Greek added: ‘Not to mention the glory of serving your God by fighting for the last defenders of Christianity, because I don’t need any proof that you’re an old Christian and that your blood is pure.’ Hearing these grand words, the captain necked his beer and slapped Doménikos Theotokópoulos on the back, laughing loudly. And amid this burst of laughter, no longer thinking about the prisoner’s words, Miguel said yes.
So that was how Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra was recruited into the army of the Archduke Maximilian of Austria.
To begin with, he found adventure, and had no regrets.
His regiment took him to Poland, to Sweden, to the Marches of Germany, to wherever there was fighting, wherever the new emperor and the old – or, rather, their son and grandson – battled over the hegemony of Europe. He adapted to garrison life, he grew battle-hardened. But it was in the Mediterranean that he would take part in the events that decided the fate of the old world.
Charles Capac had, like his father, always been conciliatory towards the Catholics. Since there were more of them than any other sect in the Empire, certainly in Spain and Italy, he was careful, as far as possible, to avoid upsetting them needlessly. His father, moreover, had made sure he was baptised at birth, so Charles Capac was officially a member of the Roman Church, although naturally he did not claim to be an old Christian or to have the pure blood that the Inquisition, now in Rome, continued to demand from its faithful. In olden times, the Catholic kings had ordered the Inquisition to supervise and verify this purity of blood, and – where it was lacking – to punish the culprits, with fire if necessary.
The Emperor was aware that Rome was plotting against him, and that Pius V was in regular contact with Austria. Charles Capac knew that the old man, despite his debonair charm, was a viper, not to be trusted. However, news of an alliance between the Holy City and the Turks caught him off guard, since he had imagined such a scenario impossible. The reports of his spies in Rome and Constantinople (the latter reporting to Genoa, where the intelligence network was the best in the Empire) were, nonetheless, categorical: they confirmed the creation of the League of the Book (referred to by certain Christian historians as the League of Writing), which represented a terrible threat to the Fifth Quarter.
That was why Charles Capac had sent troops to Rome: to make the Pope renounce this highly un-Christian alliance.
Pius V, though, saw things differently, and rather than falling into the hands of his imperial neighbour, he fled aboard a brigantine that took him to Greece, where Selim II offered him asylum and protection.
Furious, Charles Capac decided that this flight from Rome was tantamount to an act of desertion, and he decreed the dismissal of the Holy Father. A conclave was summoned, and Alessandro Ottaviano de’ Medici was elected as the new Pope, taking the name Leo XI. This new Pope, needless to say, would be far more conciliatory towards the emperor.
Pius V had no intention of renouncing his title or his duty, however, and – in agreement with Selim – decreed the transfer of the Holy See to Athens, which became de facto the new Rome.
And so Christianity – unusually but not unprecedentedly – found itself with two popes. This was obviously one too many, and Charles Capac used this new schism as an excuse for a new crusade, the avowed aim being to bring Pius V back in an iron cage, but the real (and barely concealed) objective being to extend the Fifth Quarter into Greece, to control the Mediterranean, to drive the Turks out of Europe, and to catch Maximilian in a pincer attack.
>
Six months later, the two most powerful armies the world has ever known faced each other in the middle of the Mediterranean, in the Gulf of Lepanto.
On one side: the Kapitan Pasha’s Turkish armada; old Sebastiano Venier’s Venetian fleet; and the Austro-Croatian navy, reinforced with contingents of exiled Spaniards and Romans, led respectively by the dashing Marquess of Santa Cruz, Alvaro de Bazan, and by Marcantonio Colonna.
On the other side: the Hispano-Inca armada captained by Juan Maldonada, and Admiral Coligny’s Franco-Mexican fleet, reinforced by the Portuguese fleet, the Genoese galleys of the brilliant Giovanni Andrea Doria (nephew of the great admiral), the Tuscan galleys of Filippo di Piero Strozzi, and above all the formidable Barbary corsairs of the ferocious Uchali Fartax, the Scabby Renegade.
In all, there were almost five hundred ships, including six Venetian galleasses: floating fortresses with unequalled firepower.
The battle of the four empires was about to take place, and Miguel de Cervantes – commanded by Diego de Urbino – was there. The contingent of refractory Spaniards were under the authority of the Venetians, which caused friction. But in no other group of men was the appetite for conflict so great.
Aboard his galley, Miguel was surprised to find his friend the Greek, whom he had left behind in Venice almost a year before. What had he done during all that time? In any case, he seemed eager to enter the fray.
The night before the battle, Miguel had a fever, and in the morning, his body still wracked with pain and pouring with sweat, Captain Urbino told him to stay in bed during the assault. But young Cervantes had by now imbibed the soldiers’ code of honour and would not have missed the battle for anything in the world. He got up, gathered his weapons, buckled his belt, and went up on deck with the others, pushing his way forward to the most exposed position on the ship.
All the chroniclers have recounted that battle: the shock of the ships colliding, the flames, the creaking wood that snapped like bones, the bravery of the combatants, the deafening noise, the ferocious attacks, the men in the sea who were killed like tuna fish, the water turning red, the smell of death. Giovanni Andrea Doria was not his uncle’s equal, and doubtless his timorous nature, at the moment when the decisive attack was launched, cost the Inca coalition victory. The Venetian galleasses fired thousands of their lethal cast-iron bullets, the lightest of which weighed twenty pounds. Coligny saw young Bourbon-Condé decapitated by one of those cannonballs. All the Portuguese galleys were taken or sunk. Maldonado was forced to retreat. But Uchali, the bold pirate, caused yet more losses among the Islamo-Christian ranks.
Cervantes’s galley, the Marquesa, had survived the Franco-Mexican attacks, but – escaping Charybdis only to encounter Scylla – now found itself in the way of Uchali as the pirate snaked his way with demonic skill out of the trap set for him by the Christians and Turks.
The king of Algiers (to give him his full title) had just sunk the Maltese captain’s galley when the Marquesa sailed across to bar its passage; the collision was inevitable, and Cervantes’s ship would surely have been cut in two, sacrificing itself so that Uchali could be taken. But the renegade’s skill surpassed even the most fanciful tales. With a feat of navigation that no witness has ever managed to explain, he succeeded in steering his galley alongside the Marquesa. The hulls grazed each other, and a long cracking sound was heard.
As the two vessels went side by side, the Greek leaped on to the enemy galley, a sword in one hand and a pistol in the other.
Dozens of men went after him, all proudly yelling, ‘Santiago!’ One of those men was Cervantes. But, to the terrible misfortune of those brave men, the Barbary galley moved away, preventing the rest of the crew from following. Now, cut off and vastly outnumbered, many of them badly wounded, they had no choice but to surrender.
Young Cervantes had been fired at by so many arquebuses during the battle that he was bathing in his own blood, with bullets in his chest and his hand.
And since, as you know, Uchali saved himself and his whole squadron, the survivors of that unfortunate assault became his captives.
All the surviving galleys from the Inca coalition gathered at Messina; men and ships alike were in a piteous state, and there was nothing to be done but sink the galleys in port. ‘All the Incas and their allies who were there made sure that they were about to be attacked inside the very harbour, and had their kits and shoes ready to flee at once on shore, without waiting to be assailed, in so great fear did they stand of our fleet. But Heaven ordered it otherwise, not for any fault or neglect of the general who commanded on our side,’ said the Greek, ‘but for the sins of Christendom, and because it was God’s will and pleasure that we should always have instruments of punishment to chastise us.’
The bad weather, the losses and damage in the Christian ranks, the Turk’s unwillingness to pursue a war in the west when he was busy putting down a Tartar revolt in the Crimea … all of this combined to create a lost opportunity.
And so the fate of Europe was decided.
When Cervantes recovered, after several weeks in a fever, his torso was completely covered in bandages, he had lost the use of his left hand, and he was in a jail in Algiers, where Uchali had brought him with the other prisoners, Turks and Christians all mixed together.
4. Of what followed young Cervantes’s misfortunes
The king of Algiers refused to be separated from his prisoners, because it was his custom to ransom them. This had probably saved Cervantes’s life – Uchali had spared him, even though he was half-dead – but he had little hope of recovering his freedom, given that neither he nor his family nor any of his friends were wealthy.
Cervantes and his companions had spent the journey locked in the hold, but the Greek told them that there was another prisoner who had been kept in Uchali’s private apartments, so that nobody had seen him or knew who he was: they had disembarked separately, and he was not held in the jail with them but in a Moor’s house, its windows overlooking the prison courtyard. As with most windows in that country, they were essentially just holes in the wall, covered with deep, dense latticework screens. One day, when Cervantes and the Greek were on a terrace of their prison, drawing on the ground with chalks that they had procured to pass the time, they happened to look up and saw that someone was observing them from behind one of those little windows.
On each of the following days, they went back to the terrace to draw, and each time they could sense a presence behind the screen.
Then, one morning, some guards came to fetch the Greek, and they did not bring him back until nightfall. On his return, he was very agitated, and he told Cervantes: ‘My friend, Providence is perhaps offering us the opportunity to get out of this prison! Listen to this: I was taken into the house next door, where I was introduced to the man at the window, who is that high-ranking prisoner we used to speculate about. Miguel, you will never guess who it is! It is his Holy Father in person who is held behind that window.’
Uchali’s men had indeed gone to Athens, during preparations for the battle, and secretly abducted Pius V and taken him on board the renegade’s galley.
The Inca would have paid dearly to get his hands on the Pope he had dismissed, but Uchali had not informed his allies about his illustrious prisoner because he believed that Vienna would pay an even higher sum.
‘His Holiness,’ the Greek went on, ‘asked me if it were true that I had been Titian’s pupil in Venice, and when I told him that it was, and that the master had always been happy with my work, he granted me the grace and the honour of painting his portrait. But Miguel, the best is yet to come! He promised me that, in exchange for my services, he would pay my ransom and take me to Vienna with him, as soon as the gold arrives. But don’t worry: I would not abandon you, alone and penniless, in this hell. That would hardly be Christian, would it? So I begged His Holiness to let you come with us, telling him that I owed you a debt and could not under any circumstances leave you behind (because it was I, after all, who brought you
into this adventure, and I now consider you my brother), and so, in the end, he agreed to also pay your ransom and to bring you with us.’
Young Miguel was overjoyed by these words, and in the weeks that followed he would wait for the Greek to return from the Moor’s house every afternoon, so that he could ask him how the portrait was progressing.
Even after it was finished, to the great satisfaction of the Holy Father – because it showed him as a charming man, without any of his severe manners or cold-heartedness – they had to keep waiting, since the sum of money demanded for the Pope was entirely in keeping with the dignity of his position. In other words, it was extremely high.
Nevertheless, Vienna paid, and the gold arrived at last.
A galley was chartered to take His Holiness to Venice. He went aboard with his portrait, but without Miguel or the Greek.
Had he conned the painter? Had he forgotten them? Had Vienna ultimately refused to add the price of their ransoms to the exorbitant sum demanded for the Pope? Had Uchali broken his promise? Whatever the reason, His Holiness was abandoning them to their fate, without so much as a goodbye, taking the Greek’s painting with him. In the portrait, Pius raised his hand in a gesture of blessing; now, it seemed to them an ironic adieu.
Civilizations Page 26
