By July 1496, King Ferrandino was back on the throne of Naples, mostly as a result of the help he got from Spain, specifically from Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba. He soon died, however, and was replaced on the throne by his uncle Federico. Naples had had four kings in three years, and none of them had been a successful ruler. The Kingdom of Naples, the largest single territory in Italy and the part most exposed to possible invasion, continued drifting in its habitual rudderless manner.
Pope Alexander VI was grateful for the help he had received from the Spanish sovereigns. In December 1496 he conferred on them an impressive new title, the Catholic Kings, as a recognition and reward for helping expel the French from Naples and for their successful conquest of Granada.39 The sovereigns took enormous pride in this new designation and began to use it as their personal sobriquet. It became the way their subjects referred to them as well. In a letter announcing the new title that had been granted, the pope wrote:
You serve as a public notice and example to Christian princes, because your strength and arms have not been for the ruin and killing of other Christians out of ambition for territory and dominion but instead for the benefit of Christians and in defense of the Church and faith.… Your reverence and devotion to the Holy See, so many times demonstrated, is once again patently clear in the recent war in Naples. To whom, then, is the title Catholic Monarchs better suited than to your majesties, who continually strive to defend and enlarge the Catholic faith and the Catholic Church?40
The instrument of these most recent successes, Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba, remained in Italy for two more years, engaging in mopping-up operations, including giving some help to the pope in recovering Rome’s port city of Ostia. The Great Captain at last returned to Spain in the summer of 1498. He went immediately to Zaragoza, where the royal court was sitting. King Ferdinand embraced him with kisses upon his arrival and conducted him to the presence of the queen. She was sitting on her throne, surrounded by her ladies-in-waiting, but when she saw that Gonzalo had arrived, she arose and walked to the landing to meet him. “He bowed one knee to the ground and kissed her hand; but she raised him up and embraced him, saying, ‘Great Captain, you are very welcome.’ ”41
Isabella showed her appreciation for his accomplishment with generous grants of towns, castles, and rents in Granada and Íllora, adding to the properties he already owned in Loja. Gonzalo, a second son, was now a wealthy man in his own right.
In the aftermath of the victory that returned King Ferrandino to his throne, however, Ferdinand and Isabella felt that Naples had not adequately appreciated their contributions, something that proved irritating to them. They stewed over the perceived ingratitude.
King Charles VIII, meanwhile, more or less walked away from Italy, abandoning his soldiers and doing nothing to bring home the survivors; he died a few years later of an injury suffered when he hit his head on a lintel. He may have been suffering from syphilis as well: he may have become infertile, as he left no heirs, and his cousin the Duke of Orléans inherited his throne, taking the title of King Louis XII.
Ironically, according to Commynes, Charles might have actually prevailed in battle against the Turks if he had attacked Bayezid at that particular moment instead of going after Naples. “Millions of Christians” in eastern Europe had taken Charles seriously, Commynes had learned in Venice, and had been preparing an uprising to support him. In Thessaly, for example, more than five thousand men had rallied for battle. “All these countries, Albania, Sclavonia, and Greece, all very populous, all acquainted with the fame and character of our king by their correspondents in Venice and Apulia, to whom they wrote constantly and expected nothing but their direction to rebel,” waited fruitlessly. If he had advanced at that time, King Charles could have succeeded, his ambassador sadly concluded.42
Instead the Turks remained an implacable reality. With Djem out of the way, Bayezid decided the opportunity was at hand to strike again at Europe, this time at Venice. In 1496 he closed Ottoman ports to Venetian grain merchants, cutting off their trade access. He imprisoned Venetian merchants living in the Ottoman Empire. In 1497 a Venetian ship carrying Christian pilgrims to Jerusalem was captured, and its passengers were killed or enslaved.43
By mid-year 1499, Peter Martyr reported, rumors were flying in the Castilian court that the Turks were amassing a “great fleet” in Istanbul and that a “land army is being collected throughout all Greece.”44 More details arrived within a few months: the fleet comprised more than three hundred ships, which was a vast armada for the day, including a number of ships with what Martyr called “sea towers,” floating fortresses that could come alongside other ships and allow soldiers in the towers to shoot down onto the crews of their opponents. Much to the relief of the Spanish, the fleet was hit by a storm, destroying some of the ships, but they were disappointed to learn that the Turks saw the loss as only a temporary setback. Bayezid was said to be leading a force of 120,000 warriors.45
In August 1499, Bayezid besieged and took Lepanto, one of several trading entrepôts that Venice maintained on the west coast of Greece; they were key parts of the city’s Adriatic trading empire. By this point, the Venetians had almost given up hope of seeing reinforcements from western Europe; they had already been disappointed so often when they had asked for help. Financially exhausted and demoralized by the Turkish drubbing that had now lasted more than sixty years, they gave up Lepanto almost without a fight.
That winter, when they recovered their nerve a bit, the Venetians sent an envoy to Istanbul to ask for Lepanto to be restored and for the merchants to be released. Sultan Bayezid instead demanded that they surrender the additional cities of Modon and Coron and begin to pay an annual tribute as well.46 His intention was clearly to eviscerate the remaining Venetian trading ports on the Greek mainland and to consolidate his control over the entire kingdom. Hearing this, Pope Alexander VI put out a plea to the western European nations to send support to Venice.
Isabella and Ferdinand decided it was time to weigh in. The queen sent a fleet to aid the Venetians, again in the charge of her beloved friend Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba. She asked other countries to join in. On January 20, 1500, she and Ferdinand told their ambassador, González de Puebla, to plead with the King of England to follow her lead.
We have received word from Italy of the damage that the Turks have done to the fleet of the Venetians and their lands, and that they have taken the city of Lepanto, as there was very little resistance from the Venetians, which causes us much sadness as you can imagine. Seeing the danger that is coming to the defense of Christianity from these, we have decided to send them our fleet.… Please tell the king of England our brother that we are begging him to help as well against these Turks, enemies of our holy Catholic faith. Write soon to tell us what he says and what he can provide.47
But Henry VII of England was not inclined to help. In June, González de Puebla responded to the queen. “Henry greatly praised their intention of sending a fleet against the Turks,” he wrote, “but added that, although he was on very intimate terms with Venice, the Venetians had said nothing to him about their great need. Henry does not seem to be inclined to take part in the expedition against the Turks.”48
The French sent some troops to aid the Venetians, but they soon withdrew from the front and were lost at sea.
Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba’s fleet, however, was on the way. He sailed from Málaga with six hundred seasoned knights and about eight thousand foot soldiers. They headed to Sicily, arrived there on July 19, 1500, and stayed for about a month. Gonzalo encountered some delays in his departure due to very high temperatures and difficulty obtaining food for his troops. Ferdinand was ruler there, but officials in Sicily did not seem to feel a sense of urgency in aiding the Castilian troops, despite the marital alliance of the two rulers.
So Gonzalo took his time getting to the eastern Mediterranean. He was also misled into believing the Venetians had the situation under control. On August 13 he learned they d
id not. He received a desperate message from the pope urging him to go to the relief of the city of Modon. But by the time he arrived in the area, both Modon and Coron had fallen to the Turks.
An unfortunate mistake at Modon had contributed to that fortress’s loss on August 9. The Turks had blockaded the port, and the defenders were running low on food and gunpowder. Both sides—the Venetians and the Turks—knew these fresh supplies were essential to the fortress’s defense. The Turkish commanders told their soldiers that anyone who allowed goods to get through the blockade would be executed. The Venetians nonetheless managed to get supply ships past the blockade and into the harbor, inspiring a wave of delight among the garrison. The fort’s commander, desperate to get the gunpowder up from the ships to the fortress, announced that whoever got the first cask of gunpowder within the walls would be rewarded with a gold drachma, and so a number of soldiers deserted their posts and clambered down to replenish the munitions.
But there were Albanian spies or turncoats inside the fortress, and they signaled by waving their hands and their cloaks to inform the Turks that the stations had been left unguarded. The Turks threw their ladders up against the undefended sections of the walls, and more than ten thousand Turks surged inside. “A lamentable slaughter takes place; no one escaped who was not killed, captured or led as a slave,” Martyr wrote. “The Prince of the Turks, joyful with that victory, returns to Byzantium puffed up and insolent.”49
Another victory soon added to the Turks’ satisfaction. On the way back to Istanbul, the Turkish forces passed by the port of Coron, which had already heard what had happened in Modon. Its defenders, “terrified by the calamity of their neighbors and the threats of the Turks, surrendered itself,” Martyr concluded. “Thus through our sloth the strength of the enemy increased and ours is weakened.”50
It was into this unpromising scene, far to the east from his home bases in Castile, that the Great Captain finally arrived with orders to stem the Turkish tide. Gonzalo and his men joined the Venetian fleet at Corfu, an island off the west coast of Greece, south of the Adriatic Sea, on October 2. By November 7, he was pondering an attack on the port of Cephalonia, which the Turks had used as their staging point when they attacked Lepanto. He thought the port “was the best in the world and it is an island that belongs to the Turks,” he wrote to the sovereigns.51 Moreover, only about three hundred Turks were stationed there, with a civilian Christian population of about 3,500. The island had an interesting history: it had once belonged to Leonardo Toco, a close relation of the former Byzantine emperors of Constantinople; the Turks had taken it in revenge for the assistance that it had given to the Christian general Skanderbeg, who had resisted the Turkish advances in the 1460s.
Carrying with him, as he always did into battle, a figure of a baby representing the infant Jesus, Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba announced himself and his men to the Turks manning the castle at Cephalonia as “the conquerors of the Moors in Spain” and demanded they surrender. The Turks were not permitted to do such a thing and said they would not give up, but they sent him a gift of a golden bow and a golden quiver filled with arrows as a sign of respect. A ferocious battle then began for the castle, known to the Christians as the Fort of Saint George. The Spaniards and Venetians ran low on food and grew “ravenous with hunger,” eating whatever was available.52
At one point the Turks attempted to tunnel out from under the walls of the fortress, but the Spaniards discovered and blew up the tunnel, killing the men trapped inside. Gonzalo came up with a plan. He ordered a steady bombardment for several days, leaving the defenders exhausted. Then he ordered a coordinated attack. They won the victory on December 24, 1500.
This conquest, although relatively small, brought great glory to Spain. The return of Cephalonia was “a victory very celebrated everywhere,” the Aragonese historian Jerónimo Zurita wrote, because it was the only fortress the Christians had recovered from the Turks since the fall of Constantinople almost fifty years before.53 It was to be the last Christian victory and recovery of land from the Turks for more than one hundred years, but it became a symbol of the possibility of effective resistance. The Turks never reconquered the island, and much later, the Hapsburgs used it as a base when they fought and defeated the Turks at the climactic sea battle off Lepanto.
The unique success at Cephalonia was “achieved only with Spanish help,” writes John Julius Norwich in A History of Venice.54 The Venetians recognized that Gonzalo deserved the credit for the victory. They called him to their city, where they gave him the honorary title of Citizen of Venice, and they loaded him with awards and applause. The last, very old descendant of the ruling clan of the Byzantine Empire called Gonzalo the inheritor of the throne of Byzantium.
The victory, to be sure, was limited in what it had accomplished. In December 1502 the Venetians agreed to a treaty that gave the Ottomans everything they had asked for on the mainland. This marked an important turning point in Ottoman-Venetian relations. “From the military standpoint, the 1499–1502 war seems a decisive moment in the construction of a hardening line between the Christian and Islamic Mediterranean worlds,” writes the historian Daniel Goffman. “As a result of this conflict, the front between the Ottomans and the Venetians became almost entirely coastal, and thus clearly delineated.”55 But the victory at Cephalonia and the resulting truce helped win the Christian West a two-decade breathing space from Turkish incursions. The period of “Ottoman disengagement from Europe… was to last until 1521,” writes the historian Colin Imber, while the Turks turned their attention to violently squelching religious heresies and schismatic movements inside the Muslim world.56
These events in the eastern Mediterranean proved a bittersweet victory for the Great Captain, for Gonzalo soon learned that while he had been fighting the Turks in Greece, the conquered Muslims in Spain had rebelled and killed his brother. With much of the Spanish army away, a revolt had sprung up among the Muslims of Andalusia, and they had killed a number of Castilian soldiers, including Gonzalo’s older brother Don Alonso de Aguilar. The Muslims remained furious about the Reconquest and angry that they were being forced to convert to Christianity. Alonso’s body was sliced into pieces and rendered almost unrecognizable.
But Gonzalo couldn’t go home, and he couldn’t go any further against the Turks in eastern Europe either. Instead he was recalled to Sicily, to deal with new hostilities arising in Italy. France, now under King Louis XII, had decided to retake Naples. Ferdinand and Isabella were growing fatigued with the need to repeatedly come to the rescue of their unpopular cousins, who lacked the support of their own people and were under perpetual pressure from the French. They were also still smarting from the sting of the Neapolitan ruling family’s ingratitude. “We have never had any gratitude shown us by King Fadrique for what we formerly did for him, nor any amity or brotherhood, but quite the contrary,” the Spanish sovereigns wrote their ambassador in England. “Notwithstanding, we have not ceased to travail for him, endeavoring by all possible means to bring about a reconciliation between him and the King of France, in order that he might remain secure in his kingdom, and that the King of France might desist from the enterprise he had in hand.”57
Faced with flagging support from Castile and a new threat from France, the Neapolitan ruling family decided to reach out for military reinforcement from an unexpected quarter. They asked for troops from the Turks, or so they told Ferdinand and Isabella. This step went much, much too far, the sovereigns told their ambassador:
King Fadrique sought aid from the Turks, giving us notice of the same by his ambassadors more than a year ago, and certified us of his determination, notwithstanding that we opposed him, and censured him, and endeavored to turn him away from his purpose. At last we told him that we should be his chiefest enemies if he should persist in his purpose, but we could never prevail upon him to relinquish it.… The Turks also, having taken part in the matter, that alone would have been cause sufficient for us not only to refuse to aid King Fadrique, b
ut to oppose him.… Seeing that King Fadrique was and still is determined to have recourse to the Turks, it was our duty for the sake of the Christian faith, to unite ourselves with Christian princes.58
And so Ferdinand and Isabella decided to ally themselves with their old enemy, France, and to partition Naples between the two kingdoms, which they quickly did. The Neapolitan ruling family left for exile in various places—King Fadrique went to live in France; others, including Ferdinand’s sister and the male heir to the throne, Fadrique’s son Ferdinand, the Duke of Calabria, went to Spain.
Isabella and Ferdinand were a bit defensive about their action here: they had in effect taken by force a kingdom ruled by their relatives. But they said at the time that they were only being practical about it. They told people at the court that they had accepted the lesser of two evils—that they had, as Peter Martyr explained, opted to take “half of the kingdom lest it should all fall into the hands of the French,” and that they hoped in time to gain control of the entire kingdom. This caused some consternation, however, Martyr noted, because King Fadrique was “indeed an excellent man.”59
Not surprisingly, the two allies in the partition of Naples, Spain and France, found themselves too deeply at odds to be able to share their trophy amicably. They engaged in border disputes that ultimately erupted into war. Under new orders from the Spanish sovereigns, Gonzalo found himself once more engaged in pitched battles with the French. One of these battles, fought at Cerignola on April 28, 1503, is considered a turning point in modern warfare by military historians. Using small firearms and shooting from trenches, Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba’s military tactics set a model that would be followed by Spaniards all over the world and that established Iberian supremacy on the battlefield for the next two hundred years. He also instituted the battlefield custom, after that battle, of praying for the fallen among the enemy.
Isabella: The Warrior Queen Page 45
