And for all the victory bells and the bonfires, no one in the central Mediterranean saw Malta as closing a chapter on Ottoman ambitions. A sense of terrible and impending danger continues to sound in the Christian diplomatic exchanges after the enemy fleet had sailed home. Malta was in ruins, its fortifications shattered, its population indebted and impoverished; few of the surviving knights could ever fight again. There was certainty that Suleiman, wounded by the debacle of 1565, was rebuilding his fleet and would strike again. “He has given orders,” a report from Istanbul declared in October, “that fifty thousand oarsmen and fifty thousand soldiers be in a state of readiness by mid-March.” Europe remained panic-stricken and insecure. There was little time to collect troops and money and rearm the island. Feverish work began on Mount Sciberras to build a new citadel named Valletta in honor of the grand master. People looked nervously east.
But despite an inconsequential raid on Italy, the Ottomans abandoned the sea. Imperial ambitions swung north to Hungary. The following year Suleiman led the troops in person. It was his thirteenth campaign and his first for twelve years. The sultan was seventy-two years old and unwell; unable to ride, he traveled ponderously in a carriage. With him marched the largest army he had ever assembled. It was to be an exercise in imperial power. After Malta, Suleiman wanted to reassert his credentials as leader of the holy war, to demonstrate that the writ and power of the “Sultan of Sultans, Distributor of Crowns to the Rulers of the Surface of the Earth,” still ran in the world. The momentum of Islamic conquest was to be inexhaustible.
By mid-September, after the labored annihilation of the fortress of Szigetvár in the marshes, where a tiny Hungarian force fought and died with the spirit of Saint Elmo, Suleiman was on his way home. The imperial carriage jolted and rattled over the long plains. Six pages walked by its wheels reciting verses from the Koran. The sultan sat upright inside, white-faced and hawk-nosed, hidden by curtains. Sometimes half-visible reassuring glimpses of the Shadow of God on Earth were shown to the troops.
EXCEPT THAT THE MAN INSIDE was not Suleiman; he was a body double from the imperial household. The sultan was dead; his disemboweled, embalmed corpse jolted along secretly behind. When Suleiman died, on September 5 or 6, 1566, Szigetvár was still holding out. Impatient and irritated by the fort’s resistance, he wrote a few hours before his death, “This chimney is still burning, and the great drumroll of conquest has yet to be heard.” The words fall like a coda on the life of the great sultan, whose career had started so brilliantly nearby at the capture of Belgrade. They suggest disappointment, bitterness, a sense of failure. No matter how many islands were captured, how many citadels stormed, the dream of the world empire of Islam had slipped through his fingers, like grains of sand. He was thirty-seven miles from Mohacs, where he had shattered the Hungarians in 1526. The Christian skulls were still whitening on the long plains.
And within the Mediterranean basin, everyone knew that the propulsive thrust of Ottoman conquest would go on. Malta was unfinished business that lacked a conclusion. Southern Europe had escaped by the skin of its teeth.
CHAPTER 15
The Pope’s Dream
1566–1569
IT HAD TAKEN CHRISTIAN EUROPE perhaps one hundred fifty years to understand the true nature of Ottoman succession. To scotch the possibility of civil war, the news of a sultan’s death was always stage-managed; when word reached the West, it was invariably greeted with a collective sigh of relief. Pious hopes would be expressed that the new sultan would prove more amenable, less aggressive than his predecessor, as if the propensity for war derived from personal choice; even Mehmet, the conqueror of Constantinople who campaigned continuously for thirty years, had been considered at first too callow to threaten. By the time Selim ascended the throne in September 1566, Europe had been largely disabused of such notions: a change of ruler required fresh wars.
The new sultan had survived the murderous selection process through the death or execution of his more talented siblings. No one had a high opinion of Selim. He was physically unprepossessing; he was lazy and unpopular with the army—the janissaries referred to him as the Ox; he was said to be a drunkard. The ambassadors filed back unfavorable reports: “by nature irascible and bloodthirsty, he is given to all kinds of carnal pleasures, and above all he is a great wine lover.” But by the middle of the sixteenth century Europe understood that personal qualities were almost irrelevant. The idea of conquest was central to the sultanate, intricately interwoven with its holder’s position as leader of the Muslim world. Conquest was expressed repeatedly in the visible trappings of power; the high-sounding titles proclaimed dominion over the earth. The elaborate campaign tents and banners, the jeweled swords and ceremonial helmets decorated with the victory suras from the Koran, emphasized his role as an Islamic warrior. Only spectacular conquests could legitimize a sultan. War was not dependent on personal volition; it was an unceasing imperial project, authorized by Islam. The whole machinery of the Ottoman state required it; if conquest momentarily faltered, as at Malta, it was a temporary check, soon to be overcome. “Turkish expansion is like the sea,” a Serbian had observed a hundred years earlier, “it never has peace but always rolls.” Once, the sultan had led every campaign. Now he could be there just through the presence of his horsetail banners and splendidly decorated flagship, while proxy commanders conducted the fighting. Distance from the battlefield lent Selim a certain disregard for the odds; the Venetians, inquisitive judges of Ottoman sultans, thought him to have “too high an estimation of himself, contempt for all the other potentates of the world; he considers himself capable of putting into the field infinite armies, refuses to listen to all who oppose him.”
The internal necessity for war was immediately impressed on Selim. On the day he made his triumphal entry into Istanbul through the Edirne Gate—the gate of conquest—the janissary corps mutinied. They barred the palace gates to the new sultan and demanded their customary gifts. Piyale Pasha, still admiral of the fleet, was knocked from his horse. It took the hurried distribution of gold coins to resolve the matter, but the lesson was not wasted on Selim. The standing army was a tiger every successive sultan had to learn to ride; harnessing it required victories and the accompanying rewards of booty and land. Selim, fearful of coups, was the first sultan never personally to go away on campaign—in this respect his reign marked a watershed—but the conquests would proceed anyway. And the Mediterranean remained a project in which he was keenly interested.
Sultan Selim
The man who orchestrated Selim’s succession with consummate skill was the Bosnian-born chief vizier, Sokollu Mehmet Pasha. It was Sokollu who concealed Suleiman’s death with the cooperation of his doctor and quelled the janissary revolt back in Istanbul. Tall, thin, inscrutable, susceptible to bribes but utterly loyal to each successive sultan—and he served three before he fell—Sokollu was a man of exceptional talents. He had proved his abilities to Suleiman as general, judge, provincial governor, even admiral of the fleet after Barbarossa’s death, before his appointment as grand vizier in 1565 and marriage to Selim’s daughter. Sokollu was wary of Mediterranean ventures after the failure on Malta; he would have preferred a land campaign in Hungary, but he had other contenders for the sultan’s loyalty. The Venetians carefully appraised Sokollu’s strengths and weaknesses: “He is extremely skillful and has a deep understanding of diplomatic negotiations…. The sultan leaves all the care of government to him…. Despite this,[Sokollu] Mehmet is not sufficiently confident of keeping the sultan’s favor to dare speaking to him without fear…. He sometimes says that despite the important power that he enjoys from the sultan, he does not risk, in cases when he is ordered to arm two thousand galleys, to tell him that His Majesty’s empire is not in a fit state to do so. This timidity arises in part from the sultan’s nature…partly from the fact that [Sokollu] is the constant object of jealousy on the part of the other pashas.” Sokollu’s principal aim was to cling to the pinnacle of power, but from the start
of Selim’s reign, he was confronted by ambitious rivals, foremost of whom were Selim’s childhood tutor, Lala Mustapha Pasha, and Piyale Pasha. The swirling factions that surrounded the stay-at-home sultan were to have potent effects on Ottoman decision-making in the White Sea. All the candidates for imperial favor were also keenly mindful of the blood-spattered walls that marked the downfall of Ibrahim Pasha; it did not encourage failure in the sultan’s service.
SELIM’S SULTANATE COINCIDED with another significant succession. In the complex matrix of European power politics, no institution provided such consistent opposition to the sultan as the papacy. Rome and Istanbul stood at the centers of two worlds, implacable and unwavering opponents. On December 9, 1565, Pius IV, who had shepherded Christendom through the terrors of the Malta siege, died in his apartment in the Borgia Tower. During the short days of midwinter, the cardinals of the Catholic Church withdrew into whispering seclusion to horse-trade for a successor.
With the white smoke from the Vatican chimneys on January 8 came a name that almost none had foreseen. Michele Ghisleri was a different type of prelate from his predecessor. Pius IV, as coolheaded and tolerant as was possible in the eye of the gathering Protestant storm, had been a man of the world—scion of a wealthy family, political, urbane—a pope of the Renaissance. Ghisleri was a son of the poor, who had begun life as a shepherd boy in the hills of Piedmont and owed everything to the church. He had served it with a startling zeal; latterly as grand inquisitor. The new pope took the name of Pius V. It was a somewhat inappropriate choice under the circumstances, as his predecessor had disliked him intensely. Ghisleri was not a prelate to sit down at table with the nobility of Rome or Florence. With his bald head and flowing white beard, Pius V was intransigent, ascetic, and uncompromising, more an Old Testament prophet than a Borgia pope. He had no political subtleties, lived frugally, worshipped zealously, never rested. The man who owned only two coarse woollen shirts—one to wash and one to wear—crackled with pious energy. He was filled with a fervent zeal to defend and enhance the Catholic Church in the face of its enemies, Protestants and Muslims, a zeal that harked back to the spirit of the medieval Crusades. It was Pius V who excommunicated Elizabeth of England as “a slave of wickedness.” There was a whiff of brimstone about his presence, a sense of violent and intolerant energy that divided opinion. Philip II’s agent at the Vatican reported him to be “a good man…of great religious zeal…. He is the cardinal we need as pope in the present times.” More worldly observers were less enthusiastic. “We should like it even better if the present Holy Father were no longer with us, however great, inexpressible, unparalleled and extraordinary his holiness might be,” wrote back an imperial councillor dryly within the year.
The project that caught the old man’s glittering eye was the revival of the crusading dream. It was more by luck than judgment that Europe had survived at Malta. There had been no unity of purpose before the siege; recriminations over the relief left a sour taste in the mouth afterward. Christendom was still in terrible peril, from the frontiers of Hungary to the shores of Spain. Only by unified action could it successfully oppose the Ottoman Empire: “No one alone can resist it,” the pope insisted. Pius set his heart on succeeding where his predecessors had failed: to wake the Christian powers from their dangerous slumber and to align their disparate interests in the formation of a durable Holy League to confront the infidel. He brought the inquisitor’s zeal to the task. Four days after his succession he renewed the papal subsidy to Philip II for galleys to protect the Christian seas. It was a small first step, but in the turbulent years of the late 1560s, Pius was to emerge as the champion of Christendom, a force of nature propelling the crusade against Islam.
Pius V
The enormity of his task in 1566 was self-evident. Europe was a ferment of violent passions, torn apart by different interests, imperial dreams, and religious tensions. Philip’s attention was divided among a score of conflicting priorities: the New World colonies, the security of his outposts on the North African shore, the internal crusade against Spain’s remnant Muslim population, the threat from the Turks, the mutual suspicion with rival France, and the smoldering Protestant rebellion in the Netherlands. These all successively commanded the Catholic King’s attention at his gloomy palace high above Madrid. His dispersed empire was riven with fault lines and difficulties; only the steady argosy of galleons laden with South American silver could keep the Spanish imperial venture afloat—and still there was insufficient money for the need. Philip had no strategy for the Mediterranean, only piecemeal responses to a thousand problems. When sullen dissent in the Low Countries burst out into open revolt in 1566, Philip was compelled to march his best troops across a tense and suspicious Europe; within the Mediterranean he was largely powerless to act. The French offered no better prospect to the pope. They still had treaties with the Ottomans and a religious war—in 1566 the Protestant revolt burned brightly across Southern France—while no one trusted the self-serving Venetians at all. In order to mount a unified response against the Turks, Pius needed at least to triangulate the resources of the papacy with those of Venice and Spain. It would take five years and the trigger of particular events for him to succeed.
In the years immediately after Malta, Philip resisted the pope’s pleas for a Holy League while continuing to take his crusading subsidies; he was distracted by the Netherlands and had no wish to provoke new wars. The king could be surprisingly pragmatic; he even toyed secretly with a formal truce with Selim. At the same time Philip had not forgotten the lessons of Djerba; with quiet calculation he continued building galleys in Barcelona; by 1567 he had one hundred—not enough to take on the Ottomans alone, but sufficient to deter a long-distance strike.
BUT THE OTTOMANS CONTINUED to be largely absent from the sea. In 1566 Piyale had caused further tremors in the Christian world by appearing in the Adriatic with one hundred thirty galleys. All the defenses of Sicily, Malta, and La Goletta were readied, then stood down again after the Turks conducted a halfhearted raid on the Italian coast. This pattern of expectation and anticlimax continued in successive years. The Turks were quiet, their behavior inexplicable. The Mediterranean once again became a sea of rumors, a shadowy world of unattributed intelligence reports. Throughout the northern ports, spies profited, picking up scraps of gossip and passing them on, among whom was Venice’s man in Dubrovnik, paid by the word for his intelligence. Both sides spread false reports, which rival intelligence services patiently unpicked. There were whispers, suggestions, threats: the Turks were preparing strikes against one of a dozen places—La Goletta or Malta, Cyprus or Sicily—or nowhere. There was shadowboxing—the Ottomans would put out a cruising fleet, then withdraw it again—a war of nerves; each side scanned the horizons for sails that did not materialize. Caught between the two, the Venetians became alarmed and edgy; they began to fear for Crete and Cyprus. The Ottomans meanwhile seemed almost to be disarming; they concluded a new agreement with the jumpy Venetians in 1567, sealed a peace in Hungary the following year. The deceptive quiet at least bought time: Malta was rebuilt; Spain worked to clear its waters of corsairs.
In Madrid, Venice, Genoa, and Rome a hundred theories were circulating about Ottoman intentions. It was said that the sultan had no appetite for war: “The Turk is only interested in amusing himself, having a good time and eating and drinking; he placed all affairs of state in the hands of his chief minister,” came back a Spanish report. Others claimed that the Ottomans were busy in the East or were just biding their time.
The true sources of Ottoman policy were hidden from foreign powers, no matter how hard agents in Istanbul pressed their ears to the wall; nor did anyone possess a panoptic vision of the sea. There were larger rhythms at work in the Mediterranean in the years 1566–68 that interfered with human plans: harvest failures and grain shortages in cities with swelling populations, outbreaks of plague and famine. People were dying of hunger in Egypt and Syria in 1566; in 1567, Spanish agents reported a terrible shortag
e of bread in Istanbul; plague carried off many people there. The narrow margins of human survival quieted war talk.
At the same time the energetic Sokollu Mehmet was occupied with trouble farther east. The Ottomans learned early the difficulty of managing Arab lands; there were revolts in the marshes north of Basra, more serious trouble in the Yemen. Simultaneously Sokollu conceived visionary projects to overcome the barriers to new conquests; he ordered the construction of a Suez canal that would give Ottoman ships direct access to the Indies, and he developed a matching plan for a second canal linking the Black and the Caspian seas to enable an attack on the Persian foe by water. Neither project came to fruition and these failures were significant. There would be no New World for Ottoman navigators. Hemmed in, they necessarily had to push forward again into the Old.
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