by Henry Kamen
The year after the fall of Granada, the king sent an agent to North Africa to examine the military situation there. Chroniclers judged with hindsight that Ferdinand was anxious to extend his empire into the Muslim lands across the sea. A contemporary, Peter Martyr, commented that ‘for him the conquest of Africa is an obsession’. He may have had ideas in that direction, but several years passed after the fall of Granada and the king still made no aggressive move towards Africa. He continued to be concerned about the Muslim threat from across the straits, and intentions to go on crusade appeared in letters to his ambassadors and to other rulers, but they were never translated into action. Queen Isabella, more pious and more influenced by her clergy, was on the other hand very keen on the notion of a crusade. In her testament she begged her heirs to ‘devote themselves unremittingly to the conquest of Africa and the war for the faith against the Muslims’. The means for it, however, were not available. At the time of her death in 1504, her government had made no moves towards Africa. In the period immediately after the fall of Granada, some coastal towns of North Africa were in fact interested in establishing good relations with the victorious Spaniards. Both in Mers-el-Kebir and the neighbouring town of Oran, there were Muslim leaders who would have accepted Spanish sovereignty.65
When the war in Naples ended, those who had their eyes fixed on Africa saw their opportunity.66 The Portuguese had been established for a century on the coast of North Africa (they had been in Ceuta since 1415), and Castile was therefore precluded by treaty from making incursions in that direction. There were good incentives, however, for attempting to penetrate into the Mediterranean coastline. Protection of trade against corsairs, and the lure of gold brought across the Sahara, were convincing reasons. In 1495 Pope Alexander VI, continuing his policy of distributing the kingdoms of the non-Christian world among the sea-going Catholic powers, confirmed Spanish rights to the territories east of Morocco. A first step to Castilian expansion in North Africa was the occupation of the small, half-abandoned town of Melilla in 1497 by the duke of Medina-Sidonia, with the approval of the crown. Ferdinand subsequently agreed to finance a small force to defend the occupied town. He also gave his backing to small expeditions to North Africa led by the adelantado of the Canaries, Alonso de Lugo.
The foremost advocate of a holy war against the infidel in Africa was the archbishop of Toledo and Primate of Castile, Francisco Jiménez de Cisneros. This austere Franciscan reformer had been confessor of the queen. When he was appointed archbishop in 1495, he immediately set about reforming the lives of his clergy, and devoting his energies to the struggle against the infidel. He employed a Venetian sea captain, Geronimo Vianelli, to make a reconnaissance of the North African coast. Using troops recruited from Spain as well as some who were sent back from Naples, in August 1505 he personally directed an assault across the straits from the port of Málaga, on the small African town of Mers-el-Kebir. Some ten thousand troops were apparently used in the expedition, but they had little work to do. The Berber settlements of the coast changed their loyalty according to the current political situation, and at Mers-el-Kebir the commander had decided in September to hand the town over to the evidently superior force of Spaniards.67 ‘Africa, Africa, for the king of Spain, our sovereign lord!’ the soldiers are said to have cried as they charged into the population. Mers-el-Kebir was quickly occupied, but proved virtually impossible to retain, since it was isolated, far from Christian bases, and subject to regular attack from the Berbers of nearby Oran. The capture did not fail to excite emotions in Castile. The Andalusian soldier and chronicler Gonzalo de Ayora felt that it was only the beginning: ‘if this continues, the whole of Africa could be conquered with little resistance, thanks to the great rivalry among the Muslims’.68
Ferdinand could not finance another expedition, but he backed a much smaller venture, which led to the seizure of the settlement of Vélez de la Gómera in July 1508. Cisneros, meanwhile, offered to put the full resources of his diocese, the richest in all Christendom after that of Rome, at the disposal of the crown. When Ferdinand heard of it, he said ‘that he would be pleased and would consider it a great service’, commenting at the same time to his ambassador in Rome that ‘it can truly be said of the Cardinal that he has a very strong desire to wage war against the infidel’.69 The cardinal's efforts to mount a serious crusade bore fruit in the impressive expedition, both financed and commanded by him, which began crossing the straits in mid-May 1509.
Up to twenty thousand men were ferried across on several hundred transports. Within forty-eight hours the entire army had put ashore close to Mers-el-Kebir. It was commanded by a veteran of the Italian wars, the Navarrese soldier Pedro Vereterra, count of Oliveto, known to the Castilians as Pedro Navarro. The seventy-three-year-old cardinal accompanied the force. Preceded by the great silver cross of his see, he rode on his mule along the ranks of assembled soldiers and exhorted them to fight or die for the faith. Their objective was the key town of Oran, with upwards of twelve thousand inhabitants and ‘all white like a dove’ (according to a witness) with its white-painted houses stretching along the coastline, ‘a paradise of gardens and fields and hillsides’.70 As had happened in the Granada wars, capture was facilitated by the defection to the Christians of two of the town's officials, who opened the gates to Cisneros.71 By nightfall on 17 May the Spanish troops had taken the town by assault, to the accompaniment of a mass slaughter of the defenceless civil population. The Spaniards’ own figures (which, in the light of the advantage they enjoyed, may be believed) were that they had lost thirty of their own soldiers and killed four thousand of the enemy. Cisneros was prevailed upon not to continue with his idea of proceeding to take the neighbouring town of Tlemcen, and he returned within the week to Spain.
A further capture was effected in January 1510 when the king commissioned Pedro Navarro to lead an expedition against the small town of Bougie. Navarro, with a force of four thousand men, took the town on 5 January. He went on that same month to ‘persuade’ the ruler of Algiers (a city of some twenty thousand inhabitants) to accept Spanish protection. To make sure the agreement would be observed, he placed a small Spanish force on the island facing Algiers, the Peñón of Algiers. On 25 July in the same year 1510, Navarro also succeeded in capturing the town of Tripoli, which lay considerably further east on the coastline, with a very high loss of life among the defenders. It was logically integrated into Ferdinand's kingdom of Sicily, whose security was more directly affected. The series of successes was soon cut short at the end of August, when an attempt under Navarro and the naval commander Garcia de Toledo to capture the island of Djerba, which boasted only one small town, ended in calamity. The soldiers failed to take enough drinking water with them, and fell victim to the scorching summer sun. Those who did not die of thirst were killed by the Muslim population. Some managed to escape, though the greater part of them drowned when four of the ships capsized in a storm. In total, over four thousand men perished.72
In practical terms, it made little sense to establish a Spanish presence on the north coast of Africa. The capture of towns satisfied the crusading urges of the archbishop of Toledo, but few Spanish settlers followed in the wake of the troops, despite Ferdinand's express wish that some of the towns be settled exclusively by Christians from the peninsula. The soldiers stationed in the African townships, moreover, were always in a vulnerable position. In 1515, for example, Ferdinand had to find three thousand troops from Mallorca to defend Bougie against attacks by four redoubtable Turkish seafaring brothers, headed by ‘Aruj and Khayr al-Din (the latter was nicknamed ‘Barbarossa’ or ‘Redbeard’ by the Christians). Khayr al-Din established his base in Algiers and later extended his authority to the main cities of the Mediterranean coast.
Chroniclers were proud to consider Oran and the other garrisons as proof of the power of Spain and the reality of its empire. The possession of a few scattered outposts on the southern shores of the Mediterranean satisfied a historic yearning to turn the tables on a cu
lture that had dominated the Iberian peninsula and menaced Christian Europe for so many centuries. It also demonstrated for the first time in Castile's history that effective use could be made of the sea in order to establish lines of defence beyond national territory. ‘Africa’, a concept that till then had played little role in the Spanish mentality, now took on the shape of a new frontier that challenged and fascinated Castilians. The African dream entered into the vocabulary of Spain's empire.73 But it was still only a dream, giving little more than the smell and illusion of power. The Spanish garrisons possessed an authority that never extended outside the limits of the Muslim-populated towns they occupied. They could not rely on the surrounding countryside for support nor even for food supplies, and the desire to spread the gospel remained in the realm of the unattainable. Nor, for lack of ships, were they able to command the seas that washed the shores of Africa.
While Ferdinand was absorbed with events in Italy, he was also profoundly occupied with the preservation of his power in the peninsula. In January 1502 his daughter Juana arrived from the Netherlands in the company of her husband the archduke Philip of Habsburg (whom she had married at Lille in 1496). In Toledo and Saragossa they attended the Cortes and were sworn in as heirs to the thrones of Spain. They returned to the Netherlands in the spring of 1504. A few months later, however, Queen Isabella died, and the dynastic link with Aragon lapsed. No sooner, then, was Ferdinand ruler of Naples than he ceased to be ruler of Castile. Not to be outdone, he began negotiations to wed the niece of the French king, Germaine de Foix, whom he married in a ceremony near Valladolid in March 1506. Six weeks later Juana and Philip arrived in the peninsula, as rulers of Castile. In September Ferdinand and Germaine departed for Naples, where a few weeks after his arrival the king received news of the sudden death of Philip. The royal couple made preparations to leave Naples, from which they sailed in June 1507.
Their first stop was the town of Savona, near Genoa, where an historic four-day meeting with the king of France, Louis XII, had been arranged. Ferdinand was accompanied by the Great Captain, and Louis by d'Aubigny. The great protagonists of the war in Naples were able to negotiate together in conditions of peace. When he eventually arrived in Castile in August, Ferdinand could see for himself how the mental condition of his daughter Juana, grief-stricken by the death of her husband, had deteriorated. In October 1510 the Cortes of Castile recognized him as governor of the realm in his daughter's name. It was a difficult period for the king, made more difficult by the failure of his new wife to bear him a son. Germaine's most solid contribution lay in another direction, concerning her home country of Navarre, a small principality nestling in the forested western Pyrenees between France and Spain.
Ferdinand had a direct claim to the throne of Navarre through his father's first wife, Blanche of Navarre. After his father's death in 1479, the kingdom passed to Ferdinand's half-sister Eleanor, wife of the French magnate Gaston de Foix, and through her heirs into the hands of the powerful Albret family. Both the Foix family (from which Ferdinand's wife Germaine came) and the Albrets therefore had direct claims to the throne. When Gaston de Foix was killed in the battle of Ravenna in Italy in 1512, Ferdinand immediately laid claim to the throne on behalf both of himself and his wife. Though the rulers of Navarre were French in culture rather than Spanish, the kingdom since the late fifteenth century had been within the Castilian sphere of influence. France, however, needed the security of Navarre at this period, in order to defend the frontier against invasion by Ferdinand. Indeed, following an agreement of the latter with England, up to ten thousand English troops commanded by the earl of Dorset arrived at the port of Los Pasajes in June 1512 in order to participate in an invasion. The action had been a long time in the planning. The young English king, Henry VIII, had been Ferdinand's son-in-law since 1509 when he married Catherine of Aragon, widow of his brother Prince Arthur. From 1511 Ferdinand had been busy with what he termed preparations for war against the Saracen. ‘The Saracen in question is myself’, Louis XII of France commented sardonically.74 In July 1512 the English troops were waiting at Renteria in the Basque country for the signal to advance. However, Ferdinand changed his priorities and decided that the question of the succession to the throne of Navarre could not wait.
In June the king assembled in Guipúzcoa a small army of a thousand knights, drawn from the Castilian nobility; they were accompanied by 2,500 cavalry, six thousand infantry and twenty pieces of artillery.75 A further three thousand infantry and four hundred cavalry were supplied by the towns of Castile. The joint forces were put under the overall command of the duke of Alba, Fadrique de Toledo.76 Meanwhile the humanist Nebrija, always a faithful servant of the crown, followed in the rear with the mission of writing up the exploits of the army. Ferdinand hoped that the English would join him. But when the earl of Dorset realized that the exercise was not being directed against his intended objective of southern France but against Navarre, he refused to budge and prepared to return home. Fortunately for Ferdinand, by their very presence the English tied the French down in that region and made his campaign easier. On the pretext that the Navarrese had refused to let his troops cross their territory and had allied with France, he ordered his army to move into Navarre. The troops crossed the frontier on 21 July. There was almost no opposition from the small and virtually defenceless mountain kingdom. The royal family, the Albrets, fled into France, and on 24 July the capital, Pamplona, surrendered. The campaign was not exclusively Castilian, for the archbishop of Saragossa raised an army in Aragon of three thousand infantry and four hundred horse with which on 14 August he laid siege to Tudela, which surrendered a month later.
In theory the conflict had arisen because of a dynastic dispute, and Ferdinand was at first concerned to negotiate terms. But when he saw that this was not possible, he declared a ‘conquest’ and assumed the title of king of Navarre. On 28 August a section of the notables of Navarre met in Pamplona and took an oath of loyalty to him. In November the French claimant, Jean d'Albret, entered the territory with French troops but failed to dislodge the Castilians. The rump of the estates of Navarre, in the absence of those members who were partisans of the Albrets, accepted the inevitable and in March 1513 took an oath of allegiance to the king of Aragon. To make sure of his hold on the kingdom, in 1514 Ferdinand sent the army through the Pyrenees and occupied the small region of French Navarre (which was relinquished after the king's death). In June 1515 at the Cortes of Burgos Ferdinand joined Navarre to the Crown of Castile, after rejecting the alternative of uniting it to Aragon. The political consequences for Navarre were minimal. It was in reality neither ‘conquered’ nor ‘annexed’, for it retained its full autonomy in all respects. The only relevant change took place in its ruling dynasty. In subsequent generations the Navarrese managed to remain for all practical purposes independent, and even the taxes raised within their borders went largely to their ruling élites rather than to the Castilian state.77
There continued to be problems in Navarre, from nobles and communities who opposed the regime. A small Castilian force was garrisoned in Pamplona, to defend the city against future invasions from France. When Ferdinand died in 1516, Navarrese exiles attempted to recover the kingdom but the plan misfired and the regent of Castile, Cardinal Cisneros, took firm action against the rebels. Castles of opponents were dismantled, among them the castle of the Xavier family. A scion of the family, Francisco, who was just ten years old at the time of these events, looked on as workmen tore down half the ancestral home.78 Some of his brothers were in exile in France, and five years later in 1521 took part in an invasion of Navarre. When they besieged Pamplona one of the knights in the defending force was a young Basque noble, Ignatius Loyola, who was wounded in the action and forced to abandon his career as a soldier. Ignatius spent the next few years travelling and in 1528 enrolled himself as a student at the University of Paris. The year after, he moved into living quarters there with other students, among them young Francisco Xavier, who had been studying a
t the university since 1525. It was the beginning of a friendship that a few years later led to the foundation in Paris of the Society of Jesus, and was to have epoch-making consequences for the development of the Portuguese and Spanish empires.
By the time of his death in 1516 the Catholic King appeared to have laid the basis for Spain's future greatness. Subsequent historians of Castile were never in any doubt about it. Ferdinand, wrote the priest Claudio Clemente in his Dissertatio christiano-politica (1636), ‘laid the foundations of the immense structure of this Spanish empire’.79 He had determined the broad lines of future international policy: containment of French interests (both in Italy and in the Pyrenees), domination of the western Mediterranean, checking Islamic power. By the addition of Rosselló and Navarre he gave Spain security on its northern frontier for a century and a half. In the Mediterranean, where the rulers of Aragon had held Sardinia and Sicily since 1409, possession of Naples made Spain into the arbiter of southern Europe.
None of these gains came about because of superior Spanish power, or through a lust for expansion. Both in Naples and in Navarre, the operative factor was a hereditary right to the throne, and the ruling classes of the realms accepted Ferdinand's claims with little demur. It is sometimes claimed that the secret of success was the emergence of ‘Spain’ as a nation. The potential for overseas expansion, however, was never dictated by its potential as a ‘nation state’.80 The peninsular territories known collectively as ‘Spain’ did not begin to develop as a nation before the eighteenth century. Nor were they capable of producing by themselves the impetus necessary for imperial growth. Expansion was always a multiple enterprise, attainable only through the joint use of resources. In a Europe without nation states, colonial enterprise in the sixteenth century was a challenge taken up by all who had the means to do so, the product of international co-operation rather than of national capacity.
