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.
CHAPTER XIV
The King, the Emperor and the Sultan
The deaths of Louis XII and Ferdinand of Aragon within little more than a year of each other brought two young men, still relatively unknown, to the forefront of European affairs. They could hardly have been more unlike. King Francis I of France was twenty years old at the time of his accession and in the first flush of his youth and virility; he would have been a far better husband for young Mary Tudor than his poor cousin Louis, just as she would have been a far better wife for him than was Louis’s prim and pious daughter Claude. He was already an accomplished ladies’ man: not particularly handsome perhaps, but elegant and dashing, with a quick mind, a boundless intellectual curiosity and an unfailing memory which astonished all who knew him. He loved spectacle and ceremonial, pomp and parade; and his people, bored by a long succession of dreary, colourless sovereigns, took him to their hearts.
Charles of Habsburg, born in 1500 to the Emperor Maximilian’s son Philip the Handsome and Ferdinand and Isabella’s daughter Joanna the Mad, had inherited neither of his parents’ primary attributes. His appearance was ungainly, with the characteristically huge Habsburg chin and protruding lower lip; he suffered also from a bad stammer, showering his interlocutors with spittle. He had no imagination, no ideas of his own; few rulers have ever been so utterly devoid of charm. What saved him was his innate goodness of heart and, as he grew older, a tough sagacity and shrewdness. He was also, in his quiet way, quite extraordinarily tenacious, wearing away those who opposed him by sheer determination and endurance. Though by far the most powerful man in the civilised world, he never enjoyed his empire in the way that Francis I enjoyed his kingdom–or, presumably, Leo X his Papacy–and when he finally abandoned his throne for a monastery, few of his subjects can have been greatly surprised.
His inheritance was vast, but it was not all undisputed, nor did it all fall to him at the same time. First came the Low Countries, formerly Burgundian, which his grandfather Maximilian had acquired through marriage to Mary of Burgundy. After the death of his father in 1506 Charles had been brought up by his aunt Margaret of Savoy, regent of the Netherlands; from the age of fifteen he had ruled them himself. Already by that time his mother, Joanna, now hopelessly insane, was being held under the restraint that she was to endure for more than half a century; technically, however, she remained Queen of Castile, while Ferdinand ruled as regent in her name. On Ferdinand’s death, despite her condition, he left her his own crowns of Aragon and the two Sicilies, awarding the regency to Charles. The government of Castile, on the other hand, he entrusted to the octogenarian Cardinal Archbishop of Toledo, Francisco Ximenes–though one of the Archbishop’s first acts was to proclaim Charles king, conjointly with his mother.
The young King who, at the age of seventeen, landed on the coast of Asturias and saw his Spanish kingdom for the first time was still a Netherlander through and through, utterly ignorant of the habits, the customs, even the language of his new subjects. He did not make a good start. The Spaniards saw him as the foreigner he was, and deeply resented the hordes of Flemish officials who now flooded the country. Rebellion was never far below the surface. Ximenes, who had done everything possible to smooth Charles’s path, was elbowed aside by the Flemings and not even allowed a meeting with his new master; he was simply ordered back to his diocese. Two months later he was dead, and Charles was in full
authority throughout the country. He did his best, as always; but he was quite unable to control his ambitious and endlessly grasping countrymen, while the Spanish cortes left him in no doubt that he was there on sufferance, and would be tolerated only so long as he did its bidding.
Francis I, at the outset of his reign, had a very much easier hand to play than Charles: his early successes in Italy stand out in sharp contrast to Charles’s first tentative and ill-starred steps in Spain. Francis had revealed his Italian intentions clearly enough when, at his coronation, he had formally assumed the title of Duke of Milan; by July 1515 he had assembled an army of over 100,000 to make good his claim; and on 13 September he and the Venetians together inflicted a crushing defeat on a papal–imperial army–composed largely of Swiss mercenaries–at Marignano (now Melegnano), a few miles south of Milan. Francis himself fought in the thick of the battle, and was knighted on the field by the almost legendary Bayard, the original chevalier sans peur et sans reproche.130 He took formal possession of Milan three weeks later. Then, in December, he met Pope Leo at Bologna where, reluctantly, the Pope surrendered Parma and Piacenza; in the summer of 1516 he made a separate peace with Charles at Noyon, by which Spain recognised his right to Milan in return for French recognition of the Spanish claim to Naples.
His relations with two of the three main protagonists were now satisfactorily settled. There remained the Emperor Maximilian. Now politically isolated, he too was obliged to come to terms with France–and also with Venice, in whose favour he abandoned (in return, it must be said, for a substantial down payment by the Republic) his claims to all those lands that he had been promised at Cambrai, including his cherished Verona. Thus, eight years after the formation of the League, Venice had recovered nearly all her former possessions and resumed her position as the leading secular Italian state. These agreements, if they did not bring permanent peace to Italy, at least afforded a welcome breathing space: the year 1517 was the quietest that most Italians could remember. This is not to say that it was devoid of interest; no year that began with the capture of Cairo by the Turks and ended with Martin Luther’s nailing of his Ninety-Five Theses to the church door at Wittenberg can be written off as easily as that. But the impact of these events, momentous as they were, was not immediate, and the people of Lombardy and the Veneto were able, then and in the twelve months following, to rebuild their shattered homes, resow their devastated fields, and sleep at night untroubled by terrors of marauding armies, of rape and pillage and blood.
Then, on 12 January 1519, the Emperor Maximilian died in his castle at Wels in Upper Austria. The succession of his grandson Charles was by no means a foregone conclusion. The Empire remained elective. There were many who preferred Charles’s younger brother, the Archduke Ferdinand. A still more formidable rival was Francis I–who, in the early stages of his candidature, had the enthusiastic support of the Pope. (Henry VIII of England also at one moment threw his cap into the ring, but no one took him very seriously.) Fortunately for Charles, the German electors hated the idea of a French Emperor; the Fuggers–that hugely rich banking family of Augsburg–lined as many pockets as was necessary; and at the last moment Pope Leo abandoned his opposition. On 28 June Charles was elected, and on 23 October of the following year he was crowned–not in Rome but in the old Carolingian capital of Aachen–as the Emperor Charles V. In addition to the Netherlands and Spain, Naples and Sicily and the New World, there now devolved on him all the old Empire, comprising most of modern Austria, Germany and Switzerland. Milan, Bohemia and western Hungary were to follow a little later. For a man of modest talents and mediocre abilities, here was an inheritance indeed.
Charles’s imperial coronation had repercussions both in Spain and in Europe as a whole. In Spain it vastly increased his popularity. The ruling class of Castile had, as we have seen, at first shown little enthusiasm for the foreign Habsburgs; but when their king was suddenly transmogrified, becoming overnight emperor of half the continent, he acquired a new respect among his subjects, who thenceforth identified themselves with both his dynasty and his destiny. No longer were they relegated to the remote southwestern tip of Europe. Their soldiers fought in Germany and the Netherlands, their writers and philosophers imbued themselves with the new humanism of Erasmus and his followers. At the same time, however, they were acutely conscious of being the one firm rock of Catholic orthodoxy which could support the Church against the heresies that were springing up in the north.
The coronation also completed the polarisation of continental Europe. The King of France was trapped in a vice, virtually encircled by the Empire; conversely, the Emperor found himself sovereign of a divided dominion, its two parts cut off from each other by a hostile state, and linked only by a neutral sea. From this moment onwards the two men were engaged in a deadly struggle for dominance in Europe and mastery of the western Mediterranean.
After the death of Sultan Mehmet II in 1481 Europe had breathed again. Mehmet had been a man of wide culture and scholarship. He had ordered Archbishop Gennadius, whom he had nominated as Orthodox Patriarch of Constantinople, to write for him a treatise on the Christian religion; he had a considerable knowledge of Greek, inviting Greek scholars regularly to his court; and he had summoned Gentile Bellini from Venice to paint his portrait.131 But he was not known as Fatih–‘the Conqueror’–for nothing. His first and greatest triumph, the capture of Constantinople in 1453, had been only the beginning of a long succession of territorial acquisitions in the eastern Mediterranean, and, as we have seen, he was preparing yet another major offensive–against the Knights of St John in Rhodes–when his life was suddenly cut short. His successor, Bayezit II–who, though the elder, gained the throne only after a monumental struggle with his brother Cem132–was very unlike his father. He consolidated Mehmet’s conquests in the Balkans and appropriated the Venetian castles in the Morea, but with his much narrower mind he had no real interest in Europe–removing, for example, the Italian frescos that Mehmet had commissioned for the imperial palace and favouring instead the mosques, hospitals and schools that were so important an element of his fervent Islamic faith. His description by the Venetian ambassador–‘molto melancolico, superstizioso e ostinato’133–sums him up as well as any.
In 1512 Bayezit’s son Selim rebelled against his father and forced him to abdicate in his favour. (He may have poisoned him as well, since the old man died suspiciously soon afterwards.) Selim I, as he now became, was always known as Yavuz, ‘the Grim’. His first act as Sultan was to eliminate, as potential rivals to the throne, his two brothers and five orphan nephews–the youngest of whom was five years old–by having them strangled with a bowstring; he is said to have listened with satisfaction to their screams from an adjoining room. He then turned his attention to the east, directing his formidable energies against Ismail I, the founder of the Safavid dynasty in Iran, massacring some 40,000 and incorporating various Kurdish and Turkoman principalities in eastern Anatolia into his empire. His next objective was Syria, still in the hands of the Mamelukes. Aleppo, Damascus, Beirut and Jerusalem fell in quick succession, and on 24 August 1516, at the battle of Marj Dabik, he effectively destroyed the Mameluke dynasty; its penultimate sultan, al-Ghawri, died on the field. In Egypt al-Ghawri’s nephew Tuman Bey proclaimed himself Sultan and refused to submit, whereupon Selim marched his army across the Sinai desert and after one more particularly bloody encounter–at Raydaniye, near the Pyramids, in January 1517–captured him and had him hanged at the gates of Cairo. Six months later the Sherif of Mecca made voluntary submission in his turn, sending Selim the standard and cloak of the Prophet and the keys of the Holy Cities. At last, with Egypt, Syria and the Hejaz all acknowledging him as their sovereign, the Sultan returned in triumph to the Bosphorus. His empire was not only increased; it was transformed. Possession of Mecca and Medina made it an Islamic Caliphate; henceforth the Ottoman Sultans were to consider themselves protectors of the Muslim world.
Dying in September 1520, Selim was succeeded by the onl
y male member of his family whom he had left alive on his own accession: his son Süleyman, then aged twenty-six. Of the four larger-than-life monarchs who bestrode Europe during the first half of the sixteenth century–the other three being the Emperor Charles V, Henry VIII of England and Francis I of France–Süleyman was arguably the greatest. He was, in his own oriental way, a son of the Renaissance: a man of learning and wide culture, himself a sensitive poet, under whom the imperial pottery workshops of Iznik (Nicaea) were at their most inspired and the imperial architects–above all, the great Sinan–adorned the cities of the empire with mosques and religious foundations, caravanserais and schools, many of which still stand today. Like his forebears, however, Süleyman was also a conqueror, whose overriding ambition was to achieve in the west victories comparable to those of his father in the east. Thus he was to swell his already vast empire with conquests in Hungary, the Balkans and central Europe–to say nothing of North Africa, where Tripoli was to fall to him in 1551.
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