Isabella: The Warrior Queen

by Kirstin Downey

  But the Ottoman Empire had undergone some changes since 1480, when the Turks had captured Otranto, and it had a new leader. The Neapolitans, with help from Spain, Portugal, and Hungary, had managed to recover Otranto during a moment of Ottoman weakness. In May 1481, Sultan Mehmed the Conqueror suddenly died. Many people suspected he had been poisoned. His death set the stage for a bitter succession battle. Mehmed had preferred his son Djem as his successor, but another son, Bayezid, wanted the throne as well. This was ordinarily the circumstance that led to the murder by one brother of the others, as Mehmed had specified by law.

  The two brothers gathered their supporters and clashed in battle, and Bayezid emerged as the victor. But then Djem did a surprising thing: he fled to refuge in Christian Europe, surrendering at Bodrum, a strongly fortified castle on the Turkish coast that served as one of Christianity’s few surviving outposts in the region. The commanders at Bodrum, the ancient home of the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus, accepted Djem and transferred him to the even more heavily fortified base of Rhodes, operated by the Knights Hospitaller, or the Order of St. John, originally a mission to the poor in Jerusalem that was a remnant from the First Crusade. From Rhodes, Djem was sent to mainland Europe and finally to Rome, where he became a guest and hostage of Pope Innocent VIII.

  Sultan Bayezid was glad to have Djem out of his realm, which allowed him to establish and secure his own reign, and he began paying the pope 400 golden ducats a year for keeping Djem as a guest and prisoner in the Vatican. Over the next decade, Djem became a valuable asset for rival European powers because he remained a potential contender for the Ottoman throne and thus a potent threat to Bayezid that made the Turkish sultan reluctant to engage the Europeans in direct combat. Djem lived in Rome until the French king Charles VIII invaded Italy. Then when Charles left Rome, he took Djem with him as a political bargaining chip, and the Turkish prince died mysteriously on the way to Naples in 1495. He had perhaps been poisoned on Bayezid’s orders, or he may have fallen victim to his own overindulgence in women, food, and drink. Whatever the cause, his death lifted the check on Ottoman aggression.

  These events filled the twelve-year period when Isabella was completing the conquest of Granada. The Ottoman army at the time was by far the most powerful land force in Europe, able to muster hundreds of thousands of soldiers when it decided to launch an attack. If it had chosen to intercede on behalf of the Muslims of Granada, it could have landed troops through Granada’s Mediterranean ports and prevented completion of the Reconquest. It could even have gone on to invade northward into Spain itself, in a repeat of the events of 711.

  In fact, the Muslims in Granada had sought help from the Turks, but according to a Turkish-Greek pirate named Khair ad-Din, known in the West as Barbarrosa, or Red Beard, the Turks had decided the Muslims of Andalusia were a lost cause and chose not to intervene.

  But they were planning to get to western Europe eventually. First they needed to deal with the Mamluks of Egypt, many of whom were embracing a mystical sect called Sufism, which was a subset of the Shiite branch of Islam; the Sunni Muslims of the Ottoman Empire considered it a doubly dangerous heresy. Once Egypt and adjacent North Africa were secured, southern Europe would be a short jump across the Mediterranean Sea.

  But Bayezid was chafing at the inaction against western Europe because the war establishment that he commanded was constantly pressuring him to make immediate advances on the Christian West. Year by year more and more threatening reports came to Spain—delivered by envoys in letters, and in person by desperate refugees from eastern Europe who had migrated to the West—warning that Bayezid was assembling a fleet to target Mediterranean islands that were held by Christian rulers. Popes Innocent VIII and then Alexander VI sent a steady stream of warnings as well. Bayezid’s movements were a constant source of concern for Isabella and Ferdinand, whose islands, Sicily and Majorca, might be particular targets for attack.

  In 1488 the Venetians were told that a “huge fleet” that included “warships of every kind” was being assembled by Bayezid to attack Venetian possessions in the Aegean Sea, and that the sultan “had set his heart on Cyprus,” a Venetian outpost near the coast of Turkey.4 The Venetians sent out a fleet to meet him, and Bayezid retreated home. In 1490 the Turks were on the advance again, and Venetians hastily prepared for battle once more, but the clash that followed was inconclusive.

  The Ottomans finally found an overland opening into Europe after the death of the doughty warrior Matthias Corvinus, king of Hungary, prompting them to engage in massive raids into the leaderless kingdom in 1492. “The great incursions of 1492 brought swift and terrible ruin to the Christians,” writes the Ottoman historian V. J. Parry. They hit again the next year: “The incursions were renewed in 1493 with increased ferocity, Croatia and lower Styria being ravaged once more and the Croat nobility almost annihilated at Adbina on 9 September.”5

  The terrible losses on the Christian side that year came at what became known as the Battle of Krbava Field, near the small inland town of Adbina, just across the Adriatic Sea from Italy, in southern Croatia. Some seven thousand Croatian soldiers lost their lives in a single day, and most of the kingdom’s nobility was killed or enslaved. It caused another vast movement of population, as waves of Croatian refugees fled toward Austria and the Italian coast to escape from the Turks.

  In western Europe, there was a macabre guessing game each year of wondering where the Turks would strike next. Would it be Sicily? Cyprus? Rhodes? Rome? Naples? The reports from the places the Turks had successfully conquered fueled additional terror.

  Refugees fleeing the Ottoman advances were traumatized. Marin Becikemi, an Albanian survivor of the Scutari attack, who had been an eleven-year-old eyewitness to the slaughter of twenty-six of his thirty family members, told the Venetian Senate that he believed Bayezid II was the “bloodiest person the world has ever seen.” Years later he recalled:

  With my own eyes I have seen Venetian blood flow like fountains. I have observed that countless citizens from the most noble stock have been made to roam. How many noble captains have I seen slain! How many harbors and shores have I seen littered with the corpses of highborn men of renown! How many ships have been sunk! How many vanquished cities have I seen disappear! To recall the terrible dangers of our day causes the hearts of all to tremble.6

  The surviving accounts from Ottoman and Arab sources suggest that Christian fears were not unfounded. The Persian scholar Idris-i Bitlisi, speaking about the raids on the castles of Zabljak, in Montenegro, and Drisht, in Albania, said Muslim warriors at one point caught the Christians as they were trying to flee in boats loaded with their possessions.

  The heroic men of valor had never seen such vessels, filled to the brim with precious plunder beyond description, not to mention the handsome boys and the women as beautiful as the houris of paradise. Enflamed with lust for loot and remuneration, the men swarmed the riverbank. A host of trained swimmers disrobed and dove into the water, clenching their swords between their jaws. They swam furiously to unleash their swords of courage. In a moment they cut down the infidels with their sharp sabers and took all the families and the beautiful women captive. They also took booty, money, and countless possessions.7

  The Ottoman Turks were callous about the deaths of people they called “infidels.” An Ottoman account of the siege of Scutari (or Shkodra), near Kosovo in Albania, where many of the inhabitants holding out against the Turkish assault starved to death, described the inhabitants with contempt. “Those squalid pigs ate whatever they could find, swallowing anything, regardless of whether it was pure or foul,” wrote Ottoman chronicler Kemal Pasha-zade.8

  This was all bad enough. But in addition, the Ottoman Empire was growing increasingly oppressive to women of all walks of life, as a fundamentalist orthodoxy clamped tighter and tighter controls on women’s behavior. Reports of life under the Turks would have been unimaginably distasteful to a woman like the strong-willed and independent-minded Queen Isabella, who was physi
cally active and regularly rode cross-country across her domains governing and dispensing justice in public forums. And as a mother of four daughters, the accounts would have been particularly chilling.

  The rape of captured Christian women was not only condoned but advocated by Ottoman rulers. When the pirate Barbarossa and his chronicler wrote his memoirs, called in Turkish Gazavat-I Hayreddin Pasa, or Holy War of Hayreddin Pasha, Barbarossa described how his father had taken possession of his mother after the Turks conquered Mytilene, a city on the Greek island of Lesbos, in 1462:

  When Sultan Mehmet took Mytilene from the Christians, he left behind to guard them a military encampment of soldiers. They were men and had arrived without women, and there were no Moorish women they could marry because all the women on the island were Christian—and they asked for some to be provided so they could continue in his service. The Great Sultan, seeing their just petition, ordered that they should ask for wives among the daughters of the Christians. And, because [the Christians] did not wish to give them to them, they took the women by force and married them. And in this way there was good communication and employment of them and the land was guarded. The soldiers, with this provided, remained content.9

  And so Barbarossa’s mother, a widow, subsequently produced four sons and two daughters with her new husband. The boys became pirates who attacked Christian vessels and made their living capturing Christians and Jews to enslave them.

  Bayezid II, the new sultan, was more conservative, more orthodox than his father Mehmed had been. In the fourteenth century, western European merchants had described Ottoman streets teeming with women; by the sixteenth century, merchants reported that there were few women to be seen outside at all. As the years went by, women were required to conceal their bodies in voluminous robes, some eventually covering not just their heads but also their faces and their eyes, leaving them stumbling along the streets when they were allowed to venture out of their homes.

  Conditions for women deteriorated over the years, according to reports issued much later by the Turkish Ministry of the Interior, describing what had become invisible to Western visitors. Women were increasingly sequestered inside their homes, living within high walls, seeing sunlight only through latticed windows, often guarded by eunuchs. They were forbidden to go to public places in the company of men, even with their husbands. Educating them was seen as problematic, even verging on being what the Turkish government called a “sin.” Women had to be concealed from the world. “Even the tips of her fingers were not to be seen,” one government report said.10

  The Ottomans were contemptuous of the Christians for allowing their women to talk to men and walk about unaccompanied. The Ottoman Evliya Celebi, the scion of a wealthy family with ties to the court, wrote an account of his travels, Seyahatname, in the early 1600s. He visited a resort town near Vienna:

  All the infidel notables and sophisticates of the walled town of Vienna take their pleasure for weeks and months in this city and its gardens and orchards.… Because the climate is delightful, the lovely boys and girls of this city are renowned. Indeed, the men and women do not flee from one another. The women sit together with us Ottomans, drinking and chatting, and their husbands do not say a word but rather step outside. And this is not considered shameful. The reason is that throughout Christendom women are in charge, and they have behaved in this disreputable fashion ever since the time of the Virgin Mary.11

  Being captured by the Turks was a social death sentence for Christian or Jewish women, because they would be viewed in negative terms in their own cultures if they ever managed to get home. Female slaves in the Ottoman Empire were required to provide sexual services to their masters. The demeaning and degrading practice of polygamy, meanwhile, which gave men the right to have multiple wives and was forbidden by Christian and Jewish practice, was universally accepted in Ottoman lands. This meant that a woman who married while under Turkish domination and who then managed to escape would have committed a sin, and broken the law, by participating in a bigamous union.

  Of course, slavery was not unique to the Ottoman Empire. It was widespread all over the world in 1500; in Castile and Aragon, most prisoners taken in war, particularly Canary Islanders and black Africans, were kept captive in homes. Some Muslims captured in the war against Granada, such as following the siege of Málaga, were also enslaved. Isabella’s daughters each had two or three in their royal entourages when they married and moved from Spain.

  But in Ottoman Turkey, the enslavement of Christians was one of the empire’s leading and most lucrative industries, fueled by raids and constant military expansion. Nobles and serfs were equally at risk. Tens of thousands of Christians were enslaved each year; Barbarossa himself seized at least forty thousand in his career, according to his own accounts. In the 1500s about 17,500 slaves were taken each year from Russia and Poland.12 The eastern European slave trade was so great that the words slave and slav are related.

  Expert slave merchants accompanied Turkish raiding parties, gathering up the captives and calculating their worth. The slaves were collected in groups of ten, bound in chains, and forced to march with their captors; younger captives, including children and infants, were placed in baskets and bags and carried in carts or on mules. Sometimes the children were seen as valuable because they could be adopted and trained for work or put to sexual use. But sometimes the littlest children were left behind as unnecessary nuisances when their parents and older siblings were led away. In June 1499, following an Ottoman attack near Zadar in Dalmatia, the Venetians found about fifty abandoned infants in a field.13

  Islamic law permitted slavery for people born as slaves or captured in war. Free Muslims were not permitted to be enslaved, but it was permissible to enslave Christians, Jews, and pagans. The entire economy “rested upon slavery,” according to the Turkish historian Halil Inalcik. “Endless wars provided a continuous supply of slaves,” writes the historian Pal Fodor.14

  The going price of slaves rose and fell according to supply and demand. Inalcik, who analyzed estate records in the Ottoman Empire, has written that they were the third most important part of estates left when people died, after cash and real estate. Silk weavers, for example, depended on slaves as trained laborers who produced the merchandise they sold. But sometimes an excess of slaves made them less valuable: at one point, slaves sold for “as little as a fur cap.”15 Selling the labor of slaves was another industry, according to Inalcik: “Many people made a livelihood of hiring out their slaves for 7 or 12 akces a day.”16 (Akces were a small copper coin of minimal value.)

  Once people were enslaved by the Turks, they were typically never heard from again. Mass deportation to a distant land was the system the Turks used to break the bonds between a captive and his or her home. Sometimes for a brief period after a raiding party struck, survivors, if any, could ransom their family members; but few families had the ready cash to pay the kind of ransoms that were demanded. Slaves who attempted to escape were cruelly punished by being beaten, starved, or forced to wear heavy chains. Once a slave was moved thousands of miles away from home, the chances of escape became remote. Escape was viewed as so unlikely that it could only occur through supernatural forces. Shrines in Hungary contain accounts of miraculous escapes from Turkish captors, usually through the intercession of angels. Those who escaped with their shackles on their bodies deposited them in churches, a custom that Queen Isabella repeated when she placed the chains of liberated Christian slaves on the walls of the church she built in Toledo, San Juan de los Reyes.

  Not many people in those times were literate, so first-person accounts of life in captivity were rare, compelling, and widely circulated. One Christian, a student at the time of his capture in Romania, spent twenty years as an Ottoman slave and was bought and sold seven times before he escaped. Georgius de Hungaria’s memoir of his experiences became a best seller across the continent, printed and reprinted between 1480 and about 1550. He became a cleric in Rome and described how the slave in
dustry operated in the Ottoman Empire:

  In all the provinces, just as for other sorts of trafficking, a particular public place is held for buying and selling human beings, and places legally assigned for this purpose. To this location and public selling ground, the poor captives are brought, bound with ropes and chains, as if sheep for slaughter. There, they are examined and stripped naked. There, a rational creature made in the image of God is compared and sold for the cheapest price like a dumb animal. There (and this is a shameful thing to say) the genitals of both men and women are handled publicly by all and shown in the open. They are forced to walk naked in front of everyone, to run, walk, leap, so that it becomes plainly evident, whether each is weak or strong, male or female, old or young (and, for women,) virgin or corrupted. If they see someone blush with shame, they stand around to urge those on even more, beating them with staves, punching them, so that they do by force that which of their own free will they would be ashamed to do in front of everyone.

  There a son is sold with his mother watching and grieving. There, a mother is bought in the presence and to the dismay of her son. In that place, a wife is made sport of, like a prostitute, as her husband grows ashamed, and she is given to another man. There a small boy is seized from the bosom of his mother, and… his mother is separated from him.… There no dignity is granted, nor is any social class spared. There a holy man and a commoner are sold at the same price. There a soldier and a country bumpkin are weighed in the same balance. Furthermore, this is just the beginning of their evils.…

  …Oh how many, unwilling to bear the crisis of such an experience, fell to the depth of desperation! Oh how many, exposing themselves to die in various ways, fled into the hills and woods and perished because of starvation or thirst, and there’s also this final evil: taking their own hands against themselves, they either wrung out their own lives with a noose, or hurling themselves into the river, they lost the life of their body and spirit at the same time.17