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Juan Pelayo’s personality was formed in a whirlwind of symbolism. Bearing the name of the ancient hero of a united, Christian Spain, Juan Pelayo had been raised with the knowledge that he would be the first to inherit all three crowns of Spain at once, and thus bring a full and indivisible Iberian union one step closer to becoming a reality. Apart from his cognomen, he was also technically the third John to rule Castile, Aragon and Portugal. What added to this perceived grandeur was Juan Pelayo’s Valois blood - his grandfather was the king of France, and, if not for the Treaty of Toulouse, he would have inherited the duchy of Brittany through his mother Claude. This French heritage factored heavily into Juan Pelayo’s early life, as he was fluent in his mother’s language and, more significantly, had some nebulous designs on claiming the French throne. The union of Portugal, Castile, and Aragon - and their dependencies and subordinate titles in the Americas, Africa, Asia, and Italy - had come about so rapidly and so dramatically that it was easy for Juan Pelayo to believe that the linking of thrones would not end with Spain. Juan Pelayo’s tantalizing closeness to the French crown was made all the more tantalizing by the prospect of restoring the Western Roman Empire through a united France, Spain, and even Italy - even more so after the election of a Spanish pope, Ignatius. The practical inevitability of it to Juan Pelayo’s young and ambitious mind made too much sense in light of the semi-apocalyptic vision for the future of Spain espoused by his father Miguel, with all the realms of Christendom banding together by whatever means for an end-of-the-world clash with Islam. These sentiments seemed to have been part of a trend amongst the other potentates of the West - across the Islamic world, many were clamoring for the Ottomans to take custody of the holy cities and re-form the Caliphate, while in the West there were calls for crusade of a fervor that had not been seen for centuries. There were also similar trends concerning Juan Pelayo’s imperial ambitions - while Juan Pelayo was becoming intensely fascinated with Roman jurisprudence, the Ottomans had claimed the Second Rome and its heritage as their own and had designs on Italy, and the Hapsburgs began to emphasize the Roman element of their imperial office both politically and symbolically.

Needless to say, Juan Pelayo’s implicit desire for the French throne caused a good deal of often unspoken and sometimes loud and clear animosity between Juan Pelayo and Charles IX. The terms of 1504’s Treaty of Toulouse had ensured that Louis XII’s daughter Claude would still inherit her birthright, the duchy of Brittany, which would pass to Louis XII’s son upon Claude’s death. While never specified, it was heavily implied that Claude would not mix revenue gained from her duchy with Spanish projects, and thus could only use it within the boundaries of the duchy. This greatly improved Brittany’s infrastructure, especially in maritime regards, with Brest, St-Malo, and Vannes improving significantly. This whole arrangement had the unintended effect of making Brittany a major point of contention between Juan Pelayo - who envied the rich and geopolitically advantageous inheritance that had been deprived of him before he was even born - and Charles IX - who was impatient and dissatisfied with the continued disunity of what he believed was naturally French territory. Apart from this, there was still the issue of Navarra - vied for by Juan Pelayo’s great grandfather Fernando II and which Charles IX had succeeded in tethering to his bloodline - which was viewed in much the same way by Juan Pelayo as Charles IX viewed Brittany.



As he was only 19 when crowned, Juan Pelayo had not yet established a prerogative of his own in regards to rulership. Under the guidance of the old members of Miguel da Paz’s council, Juan Pelayo moved in lockstep with these advisors, and was therefore induced to continue his father’s policy of holy war against the Turk. The impending Ottoman invasion of Mamluk Syria accelerated the plans for an armada to be assembled, and ships, troops, and armament began to accumulate at the port of Valencia in late 1541. However, when the campaign against the Turks seemed its most inevitable, it was forced to abandon its original plans and reorganize, with the larger share heading to Mallorca and from there to the port of Orán, and with the rest moving further north, at Barcelona, in mid 1543. With the outbreak of hostilities between the Hapsburgs and the League of Fulda and its French allies, Juan Pelayo had sent his father in law Charles V assurances of his support, although he had been careful not to explicitly mention direct military assistance. Nonetheless, the situation for the Hapsburgs had grown too dire for Spain to continue in its guarded inaction - apart from a victory for the Protestants meaning the perpetration of great acts of depredation against the Church, victory for the French meant a renewal of difficulties in Italy, with Spain’s ally and primary financial liaison Genoa at risk of becoming a French puppet once again. Yet North Africa still required almost constant attention, and was a significant drain on money and manpower, neither of which were helped by the flurry of requests from the colonies for more resources. To make matters worse, the uninitiated Juan Pelayo had to tangle with the difficult Cortes of Aragon and Portugal for concessions, eventually having to settle with levies raised by the much more subservient Cortes of Castile and Sicily.

Juan Pelayo, much like his father in law Charles V, had some initial difficulty in earning the respect of his grandees - especially given the lilting of his youthful French-tinged Castilian, quite the contrast to the quality of molten iron that Miguel da Paz’s Portuguese accent was said to have carried. Juan Pelayo possibly over-compensated for this with a heavy measure of pretension. Juan Pelayo’s inheritance of all three crowns of Spain at once meant that he was in possession of a dignity not seen since the days of the Visigoths centuries prior. Juan Pelayo was conscious of these circumstances, and consequently bore about himself an exceptional confidence which - although dismissed as simple arrogance by some - is considered by many in hindsight to have been a vital sense of authority that provided a still-new political and dynastic arrangement and a title not used for more than 700 years the necessary gravity and sense of self-importance it needed to prevent itself from collapsing. Nevertheless, the older Spanish grandees found Juan Pelayo's projected overconfidence tiresome and grating to their own interests, especially considering the young king's push for some truly broad financial and legal reforms on top of his demands for a prodigiously sized army with which he could assail France and assist Charles V. The siphoning of manpower by North Africa and the colonies posed such a difficulty that - lacking the unfazed determination his father had - Juan Pelayo was only able to move against France and the League of Fulda by mid 1545, with an army 15,000 strong either garrisoned at Perpignan and poised on the borders of Navarre, and another 8,000 strong being ferried from Barcelona to Genoa. With the official challenge issued to Charles IX, the war began predictably on the Iberian front, with Henry II of Navarre and his troops overrun at Tudela by the Spaniards under Álvaro de Sande and Francisco Fernández de la Cueva, 4th Duke of Alburquerque. Iberian Navarre would be squared away a few short months later in 1546 (roughly the time Brittany was fully occupied by the French), with Henry II again routed at Villava, leading to the surrender of nearby Pamplona and the flight of the Navarrese king across the Pyrenees to his family's holdings in France. André de Foix would arrive at the head of a 7,000 man Franco-Navarrese army in St-Jean-de-Luz in June, and would be forced to give battle at Baztan shortly after. Despite de Foix’s competence as a leader and the committed resistance of his troops, the Spanish won the day after a bloody two-day battle costing them 1,200 while de Foix fled the field with less than 3,500 of his own alive and uncaptured.




After leaving Barcelona, the Spanish fleet arrived in the harbor of Genoa on March 8th of 1547, ferrying Fernando Álvarez de Toledo y Pimentel, the 3rd Duke of Alba, at the head of two tercios - both 3,000 strong - and a complement of 800 horsemen, all of which would be augmented by another 1,500 Swiss and Genoan mercenaries. Juan Pelayo had instructed the Duke of Alba to disembark in Genoa and await further orders. Once it became apparent that those French present on the edge of Savoy were not poised to threaten Italy (with most of the garrisons in Savoy requisitioned to supplement other armies), Alba wrote his king for a course of action, and, as the nearest area of interest that could seriously undermine French efforts at the moment lay in Württemberg, Alba and his tercios were ordered over the Alps, with a token contingent left behind at Genoa. Charles V’s brother Ferdinand, still stuck at Bregenz, had received word of Alba’s arrival in Genoa, but assumed that the Spaniards had arrived merely to protect their interests there. On the 5th of April, when Ferdinand heard that Alba and his tercios had been spotted moving along the Alter Rhein, he was more than pleasantly surprised. Meeting at Lustenau on the 7th, Alba and Ferdinand coordinated their forces for an assault on Lindau, the nearest member city of the Heptapolis and its effective forward position. Despite their shortage of artillery, the Spanish tercios succeeded in forcing Lindau to surrender on the 8th of May through a display of sheer ruthlessness - dispersing the city’s outer garrison and torching the surrounding villages - something which they would soon be known for.

The sudden appearance of more than 8,000 battle-hardened Spaniards and the even more sudden capitulation of Lindau sent the rest of lower Swabia into a panic: the Heptapolitan League’s army at Markdorf scrambled northeast to Ravensburg to prevent its easy capture by the Hapsburgs, and were there gradually joined by tens of thousands of peasant rebels who had arrived in a quasi-apocalyptic mood, eager for a cataclysmic showdown. With more than 40,000 anti-Hapsburg combatants amassed on the hills south of Ravensburg, the Spanish-Imperial army felt dwarfed, standing at little more than 17,000. But the two tercios that now marched opposite the swarming Protestant army would prove to be the deciding factor of the resulting battle of Ravensburg on May 16th. These specific tercios were comprised almost entirely of seasoned veterans, for many of whom warfare had been the only common thread for much of their adult lives, having spent the last five to ten years of their lives cycling through different garrisons in North Africa and Southern Italy. Under Alba, referred to contemporarily as the “Iron Duke” due to his unrelenting emphasis on discipline, these six thousand scarred, sun-broiled Spaniards constituted possibly the deadliest group of soldiers in Europe and its environs at the time. It was against such a force that tens of thousands of overconfident, under-trained, non-professional German militants gathered on the battlefield, grievously lacking also in artillery and cavalry. What came of this match was a massacre of horrific proportions, with the anti-Hapsburg army losing anywhere from half to three-fourths of its combatants (most of which were slaughtered in the chaotic retreat) in ill-advised charges against the Spanish pikes and arquebuses, and from counter charges by the Austrian heavy cavalry. The Hapsburg side lost a little more than 2,000 of its own, only around 400 of which were Spanish. While the individual cities would take a few short sieges to fully surrender and rejoin the Swabian League under Hapsburg pressure, the Heptapolitan League and the Swabian revolt had died in a single day, and less than a week later, the ex-duke Ulrich would be captured at Zwiefalten as well. While Spanish troops would assist Ferdinand in retaking Tübingen and Stuttgart, once Hapsburg rule had been re-established in the region, their travails in Germany were done, and they would now turn westward.





The tercios of Spain were certainly capable of inflicting such dramatic defeats on hordes of German irregulars, but against the French they were having less luck - as was to be expected considering the tercios sent into France were primarily new recruits and the leadership abilities of Álvaro de Sande or Francisco Fernández de la Cueva were not quite as resolute under pressure as those of the Duke of Alba. When the Spanish entered Southern France, they were also walking into a region with increasingly complicated social tensions; Farelard communities had attained homogeneity in much of the Massif Central and Landes, and were beginning to gear up militarily for a long-overdue standoff with their Catholic countrymen. Stymied in the west after being rebuffed at Arcangues and withdrawing to St-Jean-de-Luz in early 1547, most of the Spanish troops were redirected eastwards in the hope of taking Toulouse and also of avoiding a direct confrontation with the 18,000 Frenchmen that had just arrived north of Bordeaux. Francis, the Count of Enghien and leader of the French army sent south, remarked on the weakening Catholic position in Guyenne, as was to be seen elsewhere: “It would seem that everywhere I care to look, there are large crowds listening to Farelard sermons in the open air. Where is the bishop? Hiding perhaps. If I had but two hundred horsemen of my choosing and the king’s consent I would have this heretic rabble quelled in a month.” However, the French crown would owe much to these audacious Protestants, who began to harass the trespassing Spaniards and even achieve victories over them. At the battle of Rosis, the Farelards of Cévennes succeeded in forcing to Spanish to withdraw back to back to the plateau of Sidobre in early 1549 after four days of intermittent skirmishing - an exceptionally rare instance of Spanish troops being outmatched in montane combat.

The Spanish were facing mounting odds and were now running out of time. After a few notable victories early on - at Fabrezan against the French garrison under Rodolphe de Laissac in April of 1549, and at Carcassonne two months later - the Spanish had become mired in a seemingly interminable siege at Toulouse, which had stubbornly held out against the Spanish cannons and was being occasionally re-supplied by night along the Garonne. To add to this, the French Royalists i the south had formed a temporary coalition with the Farelard militias, organized by Claude d’Annebault who, as Marshal of France, outranked even the Count of Enghien (a prince du sang) and who was thus was able to order him to refrain from aggressive actions towards the Protestants and to suspend their religious persecution. After the Savoyard War, d’Annebault had granted asylum to one of the late duke Ludovico’s most trusted advisors, Arnaud de Sarre, who just so happened to be an unapologetic Karlstadter Protestant. D’Annebault, either because he favored his position at court or due to a genuine obedience to Catholicism, would never make the switch to Radical Protestantism, but his attitude towards it remained nebulous throughout his life - as it did for many other high-ranking gentlemen in France during this increasingly unsteady period - and in cases such as these he actively encouraged its protection. Arnaud de Sarre was an extremely well-read, self-made man from the Aosta valley who possessed both a strong sense of mysticism and a heavily pragmatic worldview, which allowed him to both entrance his listeners and also provide them with solid advice in statesmanship. De Sarre had thus convinced the marshal of France to recognize the usefulness of the Farelards and had also managed to operate with impunity in southern France, linking a good number of converts to Protestantism amongst the nobility into a “League of Valence,” with a compact signed in June of 1549.


As was customary for young monarchs, Juan Pelayo had accompanied his now 21,000 man army (Navarra garrisoned with 8,000) into France alongside a retinue of grandees, the most prominent of whom were the Duke of Alburquerque (having left Navarra in the hands of its new interim governor, Álvaro de Sande) and Juan Alfonso Pérez de Guzmán, 6th Duke of Medina Sidonia. When the southern French army under the Count of Enghien began to push against the ranging Spaniards in the west, the extensive corridor established to support the siege of Toulouse (which had been ongoing for nearly two years at this point) suddenly seemed much narrower. The Castilian guerrilleros were quite proficient at their chosen method of warfare, but found themselves having to contend with the skirmishers and sappers of the local Farelard communities, who - unlike their counterparts - did not require wages or supplies provided them by the crown to continue their aggressive sabotage, and who also considered the Spanish intruders to be both representative of everything they found hateful about Catholicism and also lacking the fraternal connection that held the Farelards back from acting viciously towards their French Catholic brothers. It was critical that Toulouse fall soon, in order that the Spanish army might not be caught at unawares in the highly unfavorable defensive position of their encampment outside the city’s walls. After scraping the bottom of the barrel and coming up with an odd 3,000 soldiers (mostly drawn from Perpinyà) to maintain the siege, Juan Pelayo’s makeshift war council advised him to take his army north to seize Montauban - where the bulk of his forces would remain - once the campaigning season started up again in mid March of 1550, and from there move east to seize Albi, and thence to seize Castres to the south, before moving further south and finally linking up with the Spanish garrison in occupied Carcassonne - thus encircling Toulouse (and, indeed, a sizeable portion of southern France) from Auch (which the Duke of Albuquerque would concurrently break off to take with reinforcements from Navarra) to Béziers, and keeping the king removed from the disastrous possibility of capture without having him appear to be in a shameful retreat. Juan Pelayo saw no issue with the idea and, after hearing from a pair of scouts in early March the reassuring news that the Count of Enghien was moving along in poor order and would not reach even Marmande by the end of the month, he began the march northwards to Montauban.

Juan Pelayo had been misled. Seasonals fog had made tracking French movement quite difficult, and the report he had heard on the Count of Enghien was already two weeks old: the French army would in reality reach Agen by the end of the current week. The Duke of Albuquerque, both secure in his plan and hesitant to move forward without his much-needed Navarrese contingent, took his time in advancing from Toulouse, securing a minor victory outside of L’Isle Jourdain. This battle left the Duke perhaps too confident, as he was only some thirty kilometers from Auch at Gimont when he decided to pursue an unusually heavily armed French cavalry detachment to the south, leading him to the outskirts of Lombez, where he found hundreds of fleur-de-lys banners awaiting him. After reaching Agen, the Count of Enghien had in fact turned south for Auch, arriving in the city in a remarkable two weeks, and from there moving south again so that he might cut off the Spanish line of supply and cut off the king of Spain himself at Toulouse. It had been a complete stroke of luck for the Count’s scouting party to reel in Albuquerque and his 3,000 unprepared Spaniards. While Albuquerque and his men strove valiantly to make a good showing of their renowned Castilian discipline, there was not much that could be done to hold the line, and Albuquerque buckled at the sight of so many thousands of Frenchmen, prompting him to sound the retreat within an hour of combat. Without the footmen he was expecting from Navarra, the Duke of Albuquerque’s cavalry-heavy force was able to keep apace from the Count of Enghien for quite some time, but ultimately he was finally pinned down at Muret in mid April, where a defeat led to his capture. The small Spanish army outside of Toulouse was forced to withdraw across the Garonne to Belbèze, where the Count of Enghien considered wiping them out before deciding not to waste any further French blood before trapping the king of Spain and his army at Montauban, for which he would surely be rewarded handsomely.


When the exhausted Spaniards who had avoided capture at Muret and Toulouse began to trickle into Juan Pelayo’s camp, it had become apparent that the Duke of Albuquerque’s plan had backfired spectacularly and 15,000 Spaniards were now completely outmaneuvered and cut off from any hope of relief. Faced with capture or death on the battlefield, Juan Pelayo instructed Cristóbal de Mondragón, the maestre de campo of the Tercio de Toledo and the king’s aide-de-camp, to have an emergency will written up, leaving the three crowns of Spain to his eldest, the 14 year old Gabriel, who was to be supervised by the Duke of Alba and Juan Pelayo’s uncle, Fernando. Bracing for the inevitable, Juan Pelayo had his forces drawn up on the hills north of Montauban, with each of the four tercios given a hill and with the light cavalry maneuvering between them. The Count of Enghien would arrive within four days from the south, expecting to see before him a much diminished crowd of shivering, vulnerable Spaniards. What he instead found were an abandoned camp and four hilltop redoubts, protected by four virtual stockades of pikes and guns. Despite the nearly fifty years that had elapsed from France’s last European war with any of the realms of Spain, the French had not elected to take much from their encounters with the fearsome Spanish tercio - such defeats were attributed to terrain, numbers, or simple cowardice rather than more complex notions of unit discipline and tactical innovation. Consequently, the advantage that the Spaniards had held in the early Italian Wars under the command of the unmatched Gonzalo de Córdoba still held. This was a lesson that the 18,000 Frenchmen under the Count of Enghien were being set up to learn the hard way.

The seasonal fog that had so undermined the Spaniards just months earlier now returned to work in their favor. The irresistible prospect of snuffing out both the king of All Spain and a considerable portion of the Castilian nobility was too great a temptation for the young and eager Count of Enghien and his adjutants, especially given how favorable their circumstances had been thus far. On April 7th, the French engaged in a few tentative assaults within the first day, hoping to test the resilience of the Spaniards. Despite some concerning levels of resistance from the Spanish tercios, the Count of Enghien decided to commit to an assault on the 8th once the Duke of Medina Sidonia inexplicably departed eastward from the battlefield with most of his cavalry in tow. This would be an act Juan Pelayo would never forget or fully forgive, with threats made after the war of putting the Duke on trial for treason - something which the Duke contested, claiming the extremely low visibility that day had left him confused as to whether or not the king was still on the battlefield. Whatever the case, the Duke of Medina Sidonia’s exit convinced the Count of Enghien that the Spaniards that remained behind had surely reached the peak of their despair, and a crushing victory for France would naturally follow. What followed instead were eight hours of highly confusing combat, with the French army’s size working against itself, further riven in more subtle ways by the religious differences of its soldiery. The rigid discipline of the Spanish tercios held true, with needed relocation taking place in the worst of the fog. As the afternoon sun cleared the hills of Montauban, the number of dead and dying heaped in the dales was made visible - 8,000 Frenchmen to 1,000 Spaniards. There would be no time wasted pursuing the now highly disorganized French columns down the hillsides, with many more killed and captured as the Count of Enghien struggled to restore his troops to a semblance of order, before being captured himself.


With France's southern army shattered and a prince du sang in chains, Spain had achieved what would be considered by posterity to be one of its greatest victories, while the situation for the French had shifted as rapidly as it had for the League of Fulda after Ravensburg, and would likewise continue to devolve.