Slaves who attempted to escape and were caught, Georgius wrote, were “whipped, tortured and beaten,” crippled by having their limbs burned or had their ears or noses cut off.18
He also confirmed the accounts of how women lived within the Ottoman Empire. Women were not allowed to buy or sell anything, he wrote. They were not allowed to ride horses. They went veiled even in their own homes. In one house where he had lived, the daughter-in-law had never eaten, spoken a word, or uncovered her face in the presence of her father-in-law, despite having lived in the same house with him for twenty years. And “a conversation between a man and a woman is so rare in public that if you were among them for a year, you would scarcely be able to experience this once.”19
There was more. A government-imposed program of child slavery, called the devsirme system, operated within lands that were already securely under Turkish domination. The system had been initiated in about 1432 but was expanded under the regimes of Mehmed II and Bayezid II, during the time that Isabella’s children were being born and growing to adulthood. Each year between 1451 and 1481, some fifteen to twenty thousand Christian children were collected through this system.20
It had specific rules. Every three or five years, a group of Turkish officials would travel from town to town in Christian regions. Children between the ages of eight and eighteen would be brought into public squares for their inspection, and Turkish officials would select the most intelligent and attractive and take them away. The children of nobles and clerics were preferred. Only Christian children were taken; Jewish children were viewed as better suited to commerce. Particularly good-looking children would be sent to the palace; strong and healthy ones would become workers or soldiers. All were removed from their families, circumcised, and taken to Turkish homes to be raised before they entered service of some kind.21 Many were trained as Janissary warriors and spent their lives killing people. They were forbidden from marrying, which had the effect of maximizing their ferocity.
Some scholars of Ottoman history claim that being selected for the child tribute was actually a favor to rural children, to whom it represented a chance at upward mobility within the military or government bureaucracy. But most families preferred not to have their most promising children taken from them, never to be seen again. Some parents were known to have maimed their children to make them less desirable as slaves.
Meanwhile, back in western Europe, as they had been before and after the fall of Constantinople in 1453, a series of popes were begging the Christian princes to take note, resolve their differences, and come together for a common defense of Christendom against the Turks.
Rulers of the lands in the path of the Turkish advance—Hungary, Venice, and those adjoining the Mediterranean and Spain—were acutely aware of the situation and dealt with it to the best of their ability. Rulers in England and Scotland, however, felt it was not their problem and repeatedly pleaded poverty when asked for help. King James IV of Scotland, for example, rebuffed Pope Innocent VIII when he was asked for funds in 1490 to help fend off the Turkish advances that were threatening Italy. “My kingdom, situated to the west and north, at a very great distance from Rome, does not overflow with silver and gold, although it abounds in other proper commodities,” the king told the pope.22
Similarly, in late 1493, Pope Alexander VI wrote to the English king Henry VII about the threat from the Turks, describing the massacres that had occurred in Dalmatia and Croatia. Henry responded, as most northern European rulers did, with fervent expressions of sympathy about the “immense slaughter” but nothing of substance. Writing from Windsor Castle on January 12, Henry told the pope that though he found the news “very distressing,” the “great distance and embarrassment by a variety of cares” impeded him from offering anything more concrete.23
This was one reason Queen Isabella was so insistent about the marriages of her daughters to the kings of England and Scotland. She was trying to get those rulers to take a greater interest in joining efforts against the Ottomans.
But Isabella wasn’t the only ruler in Christendom who wanted to fend off the Turks. Ironically, the subterfuge under which King Charles VIII had launched his attack on Italy had involved claiming that he was a Christian warrior preparing to fight back against the Turks. He may have believed this himself, at least on some level. But according to his ambassador, Philippe de Commynes, King Charles never had any intention of doing anything that difficult: the king “talked much at his first entrance into Italy” of his “designs against the Turks, …declaring he undertook that enterprise for no other end but to be nearer and more ready to invade him; but it was an ill invention, a mere fraud.”24
Some people had hoped that what Charles was saying was true. As the most powerful ruler in western Europe, the French king was best equipped to make a stand. Pope Alexander VI wrote to Ferdinand and Isabella in March 1494 asking them to urge Charles VIII to set aside his interest in Naples and focus on the threat from the east.25 The next month, on April 6, 1494, the pope wrote to Charles himself, praising him for his intention to make war on the Turks.26
Inside France, however, the king’s plan seemed like madness. “For to all persons of experience and wisdom it was looked upon as a very dangerous undertaking,” Commynes wrote. Moreover, the expedition, though gaily adorned, was poorly equipped and outfitted: “The king was young, foolish, and obstinate, without either money, officers or soldiers.” He had borrowed the money for the expedition from the bank of Genoa at a high interest rate, marching off without “tents or pavilions, though it was winter when the army entered into Lombardy.”27
The Italians didn’t take the French king very seriously, viewing him as foolish and gullible; moreover, his head appeared overly large and misproportioned to his body, causing him to be called Charles the Fathead. Most rulers across Europe seemed to view his proposed military expedition as a “holiday excursion by a hare-brained youth,” according to the historian John Addington Symonds.28 But Charles’s naïveté and desire to somehow win glory for himself made him vulnerable to the scheming of others. The ruling family of Naples was unpopular in Italy; Charles was told that he would be welcomed as a liberator by the Neapolitans.
That was in fact true: King Ferrante of Naples, who was Ferdinand’s cousin and also his brother-in-law, was not well liked. He was illegitimate, which raised succession issues, and he used a variety of brutal tactics to establish and maintain power, including imprisoning and killing many members of the ancient Neapolitan nobility. He kept some nobles imprisoned for years; he had ordered others killed, and then had their corpses stuffed and mounted like trophies and arranged them around a banquet table. He found it particularly amusing to kill people who had just enjoyed his hospitality. This had the understandable effect of silencing much dissent in Naples, but it did not win him many friends.
Consequently, when Charles first set out toward Italy, no one acted to oppose him. Venice, for example, waited to see what would happen next. The city did not want “to arouse the king’s ill-feeling,” recalled Venetian chronicler Pietro Bembo,
especially since it was possible that Charles would abandon the undertaking of his own accord, as the generality of men change their minds almost at a whim; or young and ignorant of the military arts as he was, he might be put off by the difficulty and scale of the war to be waged; or again, if some other delay arose, or other rulers put difficulties in his path, he might be unable to extricate himself.29
In Florence, meanwhile, the government was foundering. The brilliant leader Lorenzo de’ Medici died in early 1492, leaving his son Piero as ruler, but the young man turned out to be a disappointment to the Florentines. They were, in any event, engaged in deep introspection about their place in the world, mesmerized by the prophetic fire-and-brimstone preaching of Friar Girolamo Savonarola, who was exhorting the multitude to reject the secular materialism and corruption of the modern world and of the church itself. Rodrigo Borgia’s ascension to the papacy only made Savonarola’s critic
ism of the church in Rome even sharper and isolated Florence even more than before.
Many Christians, moreover, hoped on some level, as did Pope Alexander VI, that King Charles would succeed in using Italy as a base to fight the Turks. Ever since the fall of Constantinople in 1453, Christians had suffered an almost unending string of disappointments, defeats, and setbacks at the hands of Muslims. The word spread through eastern Europe that Charles was coming with a mighty army to set things right. The Turks heard of his advance and warned their allies in the conquered lands of Albania, Croatia, and Macedonia to retreat to positions in the hills; the Christians in those countries watched the coastline and prayed for deliverance.
Isabella and Ferdinand were apparently taken in as well, at least to some extent. In a memorandum they sent from the royal court in Burgos to the English court in July 1495, they said they had offered to assist Charles, promising to allow French forces to use a base that they had occupied in North Africa to launch his invasion of the Holy Land. They had told him that it was a good time to strike, “for the glory of God and the oppression of the infidels,” because the Moors were “much debilitated by hunger and pestilence.” But Charles, they said, had been cool to their suggestion.30
The sovereigns were also trying to turn the situation to their own advantage. Charles offered to give back to Ferdinand, for free, the lands of Perpignan and Roussillon, which Ferdinand’s father, King Juan, had lost during the Catalan civil war. That offer was too good to pass up, and Ferdinand and Isabella quickly signed a peace treaty with France to that effect. That agreement put Spain on the sidelines, and in no position to oppose French initiatives elsewhere, at least for a while.
Soon Charles’s true intentions became clear. Ferdinand and Isabella decided that the French king’s real goal was unseating King Ferrante, who was, of course, their blood relation. They sent Antonio de Fonseca, another member of the influential Fonseca family, as their ambassador, instructed to intercept Charles and head him off, warning that the right to succession of the Neapolitan crown should be decided through legal processes. The Spanish sovereigns told Fonseca that if Charles did not agree to halt, he was authorized to “tear up the draft of the old treaty before his eyes and declare hostilities.”31 That was exactly what Fonseca did. Ferdinand and Isabella gave substance to this gesture by gathering an army and dispatching a fleet to Naples, under the command of Isabella’s childhood friend, Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba. The fleet soon departed from the Castilian port of Málaga.
But Charles was undeterred and continued on his way. Within weeks, he and his invading army reached Rome, entered it without a trace of resistance, humiliated the pope, and laid waste to the countryside everywhere they passed. It was on that occasion that they took the Turkish prince Djem into their custody, then continued on their march south to Naples. Charles said he planned to topple Bayezid from power and replace him with Djem as a puppet sultan under Christian control. But that idea, if it was ever anything more than a pipedream, evaporated with Djem’s death.
Coincidentally, around that same time, the tyrannical King Ferrante of Naples suddenly died of a heart infection. His son Alfonso replaced him on the throne. But when Alfonso realized that Charles was on his way south with an army, the kingship ceased to have the same appeal as previously. Alfonso timorously fled from his own kingdom, leaving his twenty-four-year-old son Ferrandino to rule in his place. Alfonso crossed to Sicily, which was ruled by his Spanish cousin, King Ferdinand, and meekly declared himself a private citizen. Young Ferrandino attempted to rally a defense but blanched in the face of the ferocity of the French and urged his citizens to surrender to avoid being killed. His subjects agreed with alacrity and blocked Ferrandino from reentering Naples; he departed the city with his relatives and moved his remaining forces offshore.
King Charles was consequently invited to enter Naples. This welcome, on February 22, 1495, was soon bitterly regretted by the city’s inhabitants. His troops began pillaging the city; they seized valuable properties for themselves from ancient families.
As if that weren’t bad enough, a strange, mystifying, and disturbing new disease erupted catastrophically in the city. It was that virulent strain of syphilis, the ailment so new to Europe that it lacked a name. Depending on where it first came to public attention, it became known as the “French disease” or the “Spanish disease.” It soon spread from the south of Italy to the north, and then to the Ottoman Empire, where Turkish statesman Idris-i Bitlisi, who contracted it, called it a previously unknown disease.32 The Venetian chronicler Pietro Bembo was one of the earliest to describe it in Europe:
It generally afflicts the genitals first of all, and the body is wracked with pain, then boils and blotches break out, chiefly on the head and face but also on other limbs. Tumors and, as it were, lumps appear, at first somewhat hard, later full of blood and pus as well. Thus many people met a miserable end after long torments in almost every limb, and so disfigured by protuberances and ulcers as to be scarcely recognizable. It was impossible to know what medicines were needed against this new and unprecedented pestilence.33
And so it raged across Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East, killing many people and leaving others disfigured, blind, or sterile.
Not surprisingly, Sultan Bayezid II was watching Charles’s advance with particular interest. At first he had been worried about the strength and power of King Charles’s army and the threat posed by his own brother, Prince Djem. But the subsequent developments had revealed Italy to be weak, disunited, and powerless in the face of a coordinated assault. Europe as a whole suddenly seemed far more vulnerable than it had ever been, and the Turks prepared to take advantage of the opportunity. “Sultan Bayezid had in fact already begun to outfit old galleys and construct new ones as soon as he found out that Charles had entered Florence, and he ordered his infantry and cavalry to get themselves ready for war so that they would be at his disposal when he wanted them,” wrote Bembo.34
But the brutality of the French invasion of Italy had truly shocked the rest of Europe. The army sent by Ferdinand and Isabella had arrived on the peninsula to resist the French, but now the sovereigns mobilized a group of other rulers, including the leaders of the Republic of Venice, the Holy Roman emperor Maximilian I, and the pope, calling themselves the Holy League. Maximilian was, of course, inclined to join up right away—he had been miffed at King Charles ever since the young French king had jilted his daughter and stolen his own betrothed wife, Anne of Brittany. The Venetians, for their part, had decided by now that things were clearly out of hand; the English were soon persuaded to join the alliance because King Henry VII remained so keen to please the blue-blooded Queen Isabella.
Ferdinand and Isabella used the proposed marriage of Catherine and Arthur, something Henry VII really wanted, to pressure him into sending support for the war against the French in Italy, ideally as soon as possible. This was a point they repeatedly made clear in letters to their ambassador in England. “A single day, now that the war has actually begun, is of greater moment than a year would have been before hostilities between Spain and France had taken place,” they wrote in March 1496. “The War is a war for the Pope and the Church.”35
In March 1496, around the time the marriage contract between Catherine and Arthur was finalized, Venice, Spain, Pope Alexander VI, and the Holy Roman Empire signed a twenty-five-year treaty to defend and protect the pope. King Henry soon jumped on board as well.
Each of the rulers pledged to contribute to a standing force of 34,000 cavalry and 20,000 infantry, and to the costs of sending a fleet, as needed, to aid in Italy’s defense. This alliance formed so quickly and quietly that the French ambassador to Venice, Philippe de Commynes, who had been in constant communication with the ambassadors of the other kingdoms, was entirely blindsided by it. As Bembo recalled, Commynes was “dumbstruck” and stumbled from the Doge’s palace, asking for companions to recount what he had just been told, as he was unable to process it all.36
Isabella organized Spain’s contribution to this force as an army that consisted of “specifically Castilian troops, under a Castilian commander,” who was her lifelong friend and stalwart support Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba. Of the six captains assigned to lead the troops, four had served with the Santa Hermandad during the war with Granada. Some had fought for Isabella ever since the war against Portugal over the Castilian succession. Francisco de Bobadilla was originally assigned to go to Italy as well but was sent to Hispaniola instead to deal with the uprising against Christopher Columbus. About five thousand men went with the first contingent; more followed later. These battle-hardened troops brought to the Italian campaign the techniques they had used to win the war against Granada—siegecraft, light artillery, and the element of surprise—to startling success. Most important, they brought a unique esprit de corps to battles that had been dominated by mercenary soldiers who were fighting for personal gain, not for a greater cause in which they believed.37
This Spanish fleet, with some forty ships, joined up with the Neapolitan king Ferrandino, who had twelve ships of his own that had remained faithful to him. When they arrived in Naples, they found that many of the residents had returned their allegiance to Ferrandino and that everywhere people were beginning to fight back against the French.
Despite shortages of food and supplies, Gonzalo Fernández de Córdoba quickly distinguished himself on the Italian battlefields, where he earned the nickname “the Great Captain.” The town of Crotone, for example, had shifted its allegiance from Ferrandino to the French, then back to Ferrandino and back to the French; Gonzalo landed in Calabria and put an end to the vacillations by taking the town by storm. The Venetians watched in admiration as Gonzalo, whom Bembo called “a man of great spirit and remarkable courage,” broke the French and their supporters in a “pitched battle,” killing a number of officers, as well as two hundred infantry and cavalry, and took more than twenty nobles prisoner.38 Gonzalo similarly turned the tide of battle in the town of Tela.
Isabella: The Warrior Queen Page 44