Suleiman The Magnificent 1520 1566 (7 page)

The dominant fact of the European political situation at the time of the Sultan's accession was of course the preponderance of the power of the House of Hapsburg, now headed by the recently elected Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V. This prince, the grandson on his father's side of the Emperor Maximilian and of Mary the daughter of Charles the Bold of Burgundy, and on his mother's of Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, was born in 1500 at

24 Armin Vambery, The Story of Hungry (New York, 1886), pp. 267-283; Lavisse and Rambaud, IV, 617-622.

Ghent in the Netherlands, and during the first seventeen and a half years of his life never left his native land. As a young man he was unimpressive and unattractive; neither in aspect nor in conversation did he give any promise of the ability, ambition, or independence which he was afterwards shown to possess. But kingdoms and principalities seemed literally to fall, unsought for and undreamed of, into his lap. The early demise of his father Philip in 1506 made him the heir of the Hapsbiirg domains in the Low Countries, Burgundy, Switzerland, and Austria, as soon as his grandfather Maximilian should die. The deaths of Queen Isabella in 1504, of her two eldest children, and of their offspring, made it probable that he would inherit the Spanish kingdoms, with their dependencies and colonies in Italy, the Mediterranean and North Africa, and the New World; and that probability became a certainty a little later, when his mother Joanna went hopelessly insane, and his grandfather Ferdinand abandoned all efforts to oust him from the succession. Charles had left the Netherlands in September, 1517, to get official recognition in his Iberian realms; and though he had cut a sorry figure there, he had succeeded for the most part in accomplishing his object, only to be recalled, three years later, to the north, by the news that he had been chosen Roman Emperor-Elect on June 28, 1519, in succession to his paternal grandfather, Maximilian, who had died in the previous January. 25 A truly portentous inheritance, the greatest that Europe had seen since the days of Charlemagne; moreover, Charles's position was still further strengthened by the fact that his aunt Catharine of Ara-gon was the wife of Henry VIII of England, and by the introduction of Hapsburg influence into the affairs of the Scandinavian North through the marriage of his sister Isabella to Christian II of Denmark. Only one important

25 R.B.IVL,II, 319, 335; IH, i~5**

part of Western Europe had escaped him: the France of Francis I, his unsuccessful opponent in the recent imperial election; the France which divided his Spanish from his German inheritance; the France with which he inherited bitter rivalries, in Italy, in Burgundy, and in Navarre; the France which was to fight him, with intermissions, for the next thirty-five years.

For the moment, however, we are principally concerned with the reaction of this immense extension of Hapsburg territory and power on the progress of the Ottoman Turk. Obviously, if the Moslem advance was to be stemmed, the task would devolve on Charles. He fell heir in his Austrian domains to the work that Hungary had hitherto performed on the Danube; in his Spanish, Italian, and Mediterranean lands he must take up the naval side of the struggle where Venice had laid it down. At the outset, like almost everybody else in Western Europe, he underestimated the seriousness of the "Turkish peril"; on the other hand, he was clear-sighted enough to realize its existence. Moreover, it was evident that he could not be at both danger-points at once, to say nothing of his innumerable and far-scattered responsibilities in Western Europe. And it can be no matter of surprise, under the existing circumstances, that he chose Spain, and the naval role which the possession of his Spanish dominions implied, for the part that he preferred to play. In the first place, he had been there, whereas he had never been in Austria. He had had an inhospitable reception, it is true; nevertheless he had been keen enough to see that Spain was destined to be the main source of his power; the Mexican silver mines had already begun to yield him revenue. Spain was also far nearer to the theatre of future operations in the West; and for the time being Charles's impending struggle with Francis I took precedence over everything else. Finally, there was the all-powerful argument of ancient Spanish

tradition. For nearly eight centuries past, the national task of Christian Spain had been the expulsion of the Moslems from the peninsula; it was not till 1492 that the last Mohammedan sovereign had been driven out. And the fall of Granada was not the end of hostilities. There followed furious, if intermittent, straggles for the possession of outposts in North Africa. Cardinal Ximenes, who represented the royal authority in Spain between the death of King Ferdinand, and the arrival, eighteen months later, of his grandson, was most ardent, though for the most part unsuccessful in the Spanish cause. 26 On the other side, as we have already seen, the corsair Khaireddin Barbarossa had been taken over in 1518 into the service of Selim, and had begun that series of terrifying raids on Charles's Mediterranean possessions which were to continue, practically unchecked, until his death in 1546. The cause of the Turks and that of their coreligionists from Spain and in North Africa were now, to all intents and purposes, the same. We cannot wonder that Charles elected to meet the foe in that portion of his dominions which not only possessed the largest resources, but which also continued to be animated by a spirit which had wellnigh disappeared from the rest of Western Europe: the fierce devoted zeal of the warrior for the faith, who fights for the next world as well as for this; the same spirit, indeed, as that of its Moslem opponents.

Charles, then, had chosen the Spanish, Mediterranean, naval end of the conflict for himself. There remained the problem of the Danube. He already knew enough of Germany to realize that it could give him no effective support. The selfishness of its individual princes and the cumber-someness of its constitutional machinery served to paralyze it in such fashion that it could accomplish nothing against

26 R. B. M., II, 240-260; Ernest Mercier, Histoire de VAfrique Septentrional* (Paris, 1888-91), III, 15-27.

a foreign foe. The Holy Roman Empire was but a ghost of its former self; in the future it was by nations and dynasties that results were to be achieved. Somehow the tottering kingdom of Hungary must be bolstered up, and if possible annexed by the traditional Hapsburg method of marriage. The Emperor Maximilian had foreseen the need of this and had planned for it. There must be a double union, between Charles's younger brother Ferdinand and Anna the sister of Louis Jagello, and between Louis and Mary, the sister of Ferdinand and Charles. All the details were arranged before the end of 1520, and both weddings were celebrated in the summer of 1521.** If, as seemed not improbable and ultimately occurred, Louis should die childless, there was an excellent chance that Ferdinand might become king of Hungary and Bohemia. Obviously from every point of view it was essential that he be further strengthened by the addition of Austria to his domains. There would thus be created a really powerful buffer state against the Turk, and Charles would be relieved of further anxiety in that quarter. At the Diet of Worms in 15 21 the young Emperor announced his intention of handing over his Austrian dominions and their dependencies to Ferdinand. On February 7, 1522, the transaction was completed by a convention signed at Brussels. 28 The Turk was now confronted by the power of the House of Hapsburg on land as well as on the sea. A few details remain to be added, to complete the picture of Western Europe as it presented itself to the gaze of the "Magnificent" Sultan in the early months of 1521. Despite all Charles's inherited territorial and political preponderance, the outlook for the House of Hapsburg was

21 Karl Brandi, The Emperor Charles V, tr. C. V. Wedgwood (London,

)i PP- 54* 99» !3 6 » r 4°-

Cr. H. Pkenne, Histoire de Belgique (Braxeiles, 1902-1932), III, 89 ff.; H. Baumgarten, Geschichte Karls F., 3 vols. (Stuttgart, 1885-1892), II, 112-113.

by no means wholly bright. The inevitable war against Francis I had indeed begun favorably, and the young Emperor had the advantage, for the time being, of the cordial friendship of his uncle Henry VIII. On the other hand, almost all his own dominions were honeycombed with discontent. In Castile the resentment aroused by his Flemish advisers and his own inability to speak Spanish resulted in the famous revolt of the Comuneros. It was by far the most serious outbreak by which the power of the crown had been challenged since the accession of Ferdinand and Isabella; and though the rebels were decisively defeated (April 23, 1521) on the field of Villalar, the royal authority was not effectively reestablished for many months to come. There also occurred almost simultaneously an ominous rebellion in Valencia, the only one of Charles's Spanish realms which he had left unvisited. It had its repercussions in the Balearics, and led to many cruel outrages against the Moorish portion of the population. Indeed, the ultimate result of it was to extend, in 1525, to the realms of the Crown of Aragon the edict of expulsion of the Moors which had been put forth in 1502 for Castile. The natural consequence of this was a series of desperate raids on the Valencian coasts by Khaireddin Barbarossa—fresh proof of the identity of the cause of the Spanish Moslems with that of the Ottoman Turks. 25 And finally, and vastly most important of all, the authority of Charles V as the lay head of Western Christendom had been solemnly challenged (April 18, 1521) by a heretic Saxon monk named Martin Luther at the Imperial Diet at Worms. 30 Four years earlier, when he first heard that religious trouble was brewing in the Empire, Pope Leo X had hazarded the contemptuous guess that "it was but a monkish quarrel"; but his legate Aleander, who was on the

29 R. B. M, HI, 67-116, passim.

^Deutsche Reichstagsakten unter Kaiser Karl V., II, 551-555.

ground, came far nearer the truth when he reported from the Diet that "Nine-tenths of Germany shout "Hurrah for Luther,' while the other tenth cries 'Down with the Pope.' " 31 The Protestant Reformation had in fact begun. It was at this critical moment in the political and religious history of the world that Sultan Suleiman set forth on his first campaign against Christian Europe.

31 Lavisse and Rambaud, IV, 407.

Belgrade and Rhodes

11 would be interesting to know just how accurately the Sultan was informed of the great events that had occurred in Western Europe during the last two or three years of his father's reign and the first few months of his own. 1 There were of course nothing like resident Turkish representatives, either diplomatic or consular, in any of the European states except Venice; but the Venetians were already famous for the accuracy and extent of their knowledge about what was occurring all over the world. Their local representative, or bailo, was almost always present in Constantinople, and it seems inconceivable that Suleiman and his agents should not have learned much from him. There can be no doubt that he desired to know of everything that was taking place beyond his own borders as

1 There is no question that the Turks were exceedingly well acquainted with the recent progress of geographical exploration in the West. The map drawn by the Turkish admiral Piri Reis in Gallipoli in 1513, and presented by him to Selim the Terrible in 1517, was discovered in Constantinople in 1929, and was published there in 1935, with the Turkish lemmata translated into English, French, and German. It gives the appearance of having been torn out of what was originally a map of the world, and represents the western shores of France, Spain and Africa, the Atlantic Ocean, and the eastern coast of South and Central America. There seems little doubt that Piri Reis had in his possession a copy of the chart which Columbus is known to have been compiling as he sailed along, and which is now lost; if so, the Turkish admiral's map may lay claim to be one of the very first to show the two continents in something like their proper relationship. The lemmata are masterpieces of laconic information and are always interesting if not invariably correct. Many of the names of the islands in the Caribbean are also misplaced, but it is evident that Piri Reis was well acquainted with the delimitations established by the Tordesillas Line.—The inference from all this seems to be that the Turks knew a great many other things as welL

as within them, and he had plenty of secret emissaries and spies. We may be sure that he was fully and promptly informed of the extent of Charles V's vast inheritance, of his election as Emperor, and of his German coronation (October 23, 1520) at Aix~la-Chapelle. The young Christian sovereign threatened, in fact, to overshadow him, and that was not to be tolerated. Suleiman longed to measure swords with the head of the House of Hapsburg. Indeed he frequently expressed his disappointment, in the course of the next thirty-five years, that the Holy Roman Emperor insisted on keeping under cover in such fashion that it was impossible to find him, and delegated the task of fighting the House of Osman to vicars and subordinates.

Under all the circumstances it was evident that the new Sultan must give speedy proof that he proposed to play a part in European politics. The fact that his father Selim had busied himself exclusively with conquests in Asia and Africa was but an added reason why he should do so. There were two obvious places for him to begin operations: all the more obvious because both recalled bitter memories of past Turkish defeats which he was in honor bound to avenge. Belgrade blocked his route up the Danube, and made contact with the Hapsburgs impossible. Until Rhodes should be wrested from the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem, his fleets could not venture into the Western Mediterranean, nor were his ships safe outside the Dardanelles.

Belgrade, the White City, the ancient Singidunum, is situated on the southern side of the Danube at its junction with the Save, which, coming from the westward, flows at this point nearly north, with Belgrade on its right bank. The town is on a tongue of high land, protected on two sides by water, and its highest part, the citadel, is at its tip.

Immediately below it is a large island in the Danube; opposite it, to the northwest, above the confluence with the Save, is the town of Sernlin. Few places have been besieged and captured as often as Belgrade. In 1343 it was fortified by the Servian king Stephen Dushan; some years later it was taken by the Hungarians; in course of time it returned again to Servia, only to be ceded by George Brankovic, the last independent prince of that country, to Sigismund of Hungary, who strengthened its defences. This was a wise precaution, for in 1440 it was again besieged, though in vain, by Murad II. In 1456 Mohammed II, fresh from his capture of Constantinople, assailed it in his turn, but was repulsed, as we have already seen, with the loss of his artillery, by Hunyadi and a crusading army under John of Capistrano. Since then the town had been left undisturbed, though it was destined to be the scene of many a bloody conflict in the succeeding centuries.