~ The Great Turkish War ~
Part I:
- El Reino de África -
Africa as seen from Gibraltar
After the fall of Granada in 1492, the realms of Spain found themselves in a position to turn the tables on the Islamic powers of North Africa, and by the early 1520s had turned all of their newfound energy towards subduing the Barbary Coast. The combined strength of Portugal, Castile, and Aragon came down on the Western Maghreb at a critical moment, when the decadence, stagnation, and overall debility afflicting the native dynasties had reached its height. The resulting collapse of Wattasid rule in Morocco and Ziyyanid rule in Tlemcen accelerated the downward spiral, and the crisis that developed came close to mirroring the full-scale societal disintegration that occurred after Spanish conquest in the Mesoamerican realms on the other side of the Atlantic. Apart from the depredations of rampaging soldiers and underpaid mercenaries, the downfall of the standing political order led to a disruption of the food supply, causing frequent famines, while surges of refugees in crowded urban centers brought devastating waves of pestilence. It is estimated that - after the battle of Mequínez in 1524 - the population of Morocco declined by as much as a third within two decades.
But the Maghreb was by no means conquered, and the Spanish monarchy exercised little control over North Africa beyond the coastal pale or outside the walls of its ports. The Rif in particular posed more than one obstacle to Spanish involvement in Morocco: apart from the ruggedness of their terrain, the mountains also hosted a high concentration of exiled Mudéjares, renegade Moriscos, and their descendants and Berber allies. For instance, the two principal Riffian cities - Tetuán and Chefchauen - were both refounded in the late 15th century by refugees from the Sultanate of Granada. The Riffians were therefore the closest and most hostile of any of Spain’s enemies, and did not let their proximity to Spanish power cow them into pacifism. Much of the Rif had largely been bypassed by Spanish forces during the Moroccan campaign of Miguel da Paz in 1522-1528 (primarily due to its insignificance), and consequently it had absorbed a substantial number of refugees from elsewhere in Morocco, enlarging its towns and transforming the region into a center of resistance and piracy.
Tetuán especially had become prominent in this regard: it was close enough to the sea to harbor corsairs, but far enough inland to remain out of reach of any Spanish fleet that wished to bombard the city. Tetuán had become a major center of corsair activity and the trading of Christian slaves (with a system of caves in the nearby hills acting as slave pens), and was ruled by a zealous and strong-willed pirate queen, Sayyida al Hurra, who had fled to Morocco with her family after the fall of Granada (and whose father had founded Chefchauen). The plague of Riffian pirates became enough of a nuisance that one of Juan Pelayo’s first actions as king was to give his approval to fortify numerous locales along the Andalucian coast. The port of Almería - devastated by an earthquake in 1522 - was rebuilt with drydocks protected by walled quays and gun batteries, and other seaside towns - namely Málaga, Almuñécar, Torremolinos, Motril, Marbella, Fuengirola, Nerja, Estepona, Roquetas de Mar, Abdera, and Vélez-Málaga - were all re-fortified to deal with the return of Barbary piracy to the Alborán Sea. Gibraltar was also given a new defensive curtain wall after an attack by the Sicilian renegade Ali Hamet captured many of the town’s leading citizens.
As the anticipated Ottoman campaign against Egypt had not yet materialized, Juan Pelayo and his Council of State resolved to expend some of the realm’s pent-up crusading zeal on a cheaper and less daunting undertaking. A strongly worded ultimatum was sent to Sayyida al-Hurra in mid 1540, demanding she release her Christian slaves, surrender the corsairs that were under her protection, and agree to an annual tribute of 80,000 ducats per annum. Confident in the unassailable position of her city and the roughness of the Riffian countryside, Sayyida tore up the ultimatum and sent a letter of her own to the governor of Ceuta, threatening to behead each and every Christian within the walls of Tetuán if the Spanish king attempted to enforce his demands. This would prove to be overconfidence on the pirate queen’s part, having mistaken the past inaction of the Spanish towards the Riffian corsairs as inability.
The expedition to Tetuán was quickly turning into a grand affair, pulling in the services of many hidalgos filled with zeal for
cruzada y oro. This included the illustrious Hernán Cortés, who - despite being 56 years old - had made an Atlantic crossing to participate in the campaign (hoping to curry royal consideration for the position of viceroy of Nueva Castilla). The number of troops needed to punish a middling corsair port well within range of Spain was never more than a few thousand, but the army being sent to Tetuán eventually numbered more than 15,000. The Crown was conscious that military intervention in the Maghreb was extremely risky business, and even the indomitable Spanish war machine could yet only claim mixed results from its endeavors there. Additionally, the campaign against the free Rif was intended to not just overwhelm a single troublesome port, but rather to drub the entire region and brutalize more than one target in order to properly send a message to the Maghrebi resistance.
The young Juan Pelayo chose to accompany Beltrán de la Cueva, Duke of Alburquerque, and Teodósio I, Duke of Bragança, and these 15,000 troops (4,500 Portuguese, 8,000 Castilians, 1,000 Aragonese, and 1,500 Italian mercenaries) as they were unloaded on the beaches south of Cabo Negro in the fall of 1542 while a squadron of galleons pulverized the defenses set up at the mouth of the Río Martín, effectively cutting off Tetuán from the sea. Al-Hurra had plenty of spies operating on both sides of the Strait of Gibraltar, and had been aware of the magnitude of the Spanish army for many months. The queen scuttled her ships and moved the powder kegs within the city walls, while thousands of able bodied Jebala Berbers converged on Tetuán to help drive back the intrusive infidel. Some 8,000 men and women committed themselves to Tetuán’s defense, but the Spanish were not keen on staying through the winter. A massive ring of gabions were piled up quickly in order to deny the defenders any potshots and to allow the close positioning of dozens of bronze cannons specially forged in Granada and Lisbon. Virtually the entirety of Tetuán’s fortifications were pulverized within 2 weeks, and the inhabitants were unable to flee before Albuquerque and Bragança ordered their men to offer no quarter as they flooded the city. Two and a half days of pillaging were allowed before the Spanish troops were ordered to stand down, and after another week the army continued southeast while 1,200 Portuguese soldiers were stationed in Tetuán indefinitely. Much to the dissatisfaction of the Spaniards, Sayyida al-Hurra evaded capture, and would never be seen again.
The path to Chefchauen was significantly more difficult than that to Tetuán. Although there were only 65 kilometers to cross (roughly 2 to 4 days’ distance for foot soldiers), the Spanish did not reach Chefchauen until 9 days had passed due to the harsh Riffian hill country and its hostile native populace. Between the two towns, the elevation varied between less than 10 and more than 500 meters above the ocean, and the Jebala mountain tribes harassed the Spanish rearguard relentlessly, leading to the retaliatory destruction of the towns of Zinat and Talambote along the way. The Spanish military had extensive experience with such terrain and with hit-and-run struggles, but it was impossible to circumvent the associated damage to morale and timeliness. Luckily, Chefchauen was a much smaller settlement than the previous target, and although the hakim of the kasbah refused to negotiate with the Spanish after learning of the cruelty shown to Tetuán, the walls were penetrated after 3 weeks and the city was fully occupied by 2,000 Portuguese troops before November. As would become common practice, the Christian slaves freed during this campaign would be offered property within or around the settlements in which they were formerly enslaved. This was done as a means of both indemnifying the freed slaves and of populating subjugated Islamic towns with grateful Christian subjects (without the pains of having to ship them over from Spain).
The Spanish-held ports of Morocco would be re-garrisoned and numerous intimidation campaigns were mounted in the following months, directed primarily at the tributary villages in the vicinity of Tangier, Ceuta, Alcácer-Ceguer, Arzila, and Melilla. Intending to get the most out of the shockwaves sent through Northern Morocco by the sacking of Tetuán and Chefchauen, Spanish detachments of varying sizes were also sent to Uxda, Taza, Uezán and Alcácer-Quibir to ensure their continued subservience. The Crown had clearly gotten its point across, as each city allowed the Spanish troops to enter and leave without offering any resistance.
The decision to garrison Chefchauen - rather than merely pillage it and prop up a compliant local ruler (as was the usual course of action with cities of the North African interior) - marked the first conscious step towards the actual conquest, rather than containment, of the Maghreb. After 1541, the Crown began to make serious, albeit sporadic efforts to sow Christian settlers in its North African possessions. While it was easy enough to induce Spaniards to set up shop within the walls of North African port cities, establishing thriving - or even stable - Christian farming and fishing communities was incredibly onerous, owed primarily to the tendency of mountain-dwelling Berber tribesmen to descend into the valleys and coastal plains to wipe out these intruders, returning to their rugged strongholds before the Spanish had time to organize a response. Consequently, a great deal of importance was placed on establishing new fortifications in the more defensible locations in the interior and appropriating existing kasbahs, in order that Christian fishermen, herdsmen, and cultivators might have a refuge nearby where they might evade marauding locals in a timely manner. An added difficulty came with the fact that the lands most suitable to agriculture and settlement were usually already densely populated with native Muslims, although the populations of many of these regions had certainly been thinned out by decades of warfare and instability.
This intensification of Spain’s involvement in North Africa was not simply the product of religious militancy and lust for plunder. While the North African Muslim was perhaps the common Spaniard’s most hated enemy, there is little to suggest that extermination of the natives of the Maghreb was ever seriously considered to be an ideal outcome. As the Spanish Crown had suddenly found itself ward and suzerain of hundreds of thousands of Muslims (and as thousands of Spaniards were now neighbors to said Muslims), an approach different to that previously employed in European Spain had to be made in regards to governing these nonconformists. Consequently, despite centuries of ill will between Spanish Christians and Maghrebi Muslims, the situation in Spanish North Africa gradually came to reflect not that of 16th century Metropolitan Spain, but rather that of 13th century Iberia: most mosques were left untouched and no attempts at forced conversion were made, relatively peaceful trade relations were established between Spanish settlements and the semi-autonomous Muslim principalities, and negotiation - rather than
fogo e sangue - became the norm in resolving potentially violent private disputes between local Christians and Muslims.
Spanish North Africa, c. 1550
(Not shown: Tabarca, Bizerta, and Tunis)
Beyond the
cruzado-minded garrison troops or members of the Órdenes Militantes, the Christian inhabitants of North Africa were comparatively impartial in their opinion of their Muslim neighbors, and, despite the frequent religious confrontations, both parties mostly wanted to live in peace. In 1566, the Crown ordered the expulsion of all Muslim inhabitants - whether free or enslaved - of Tangier, Ceuta, and Alcácer-Ceguer. Yet such extreme measures taken against the potential insurrection of Muslims in the Maghreb not only undermined the commercial value of Spanish North Africa, but also threatened the invaluable and constantly delicate continuation of peace between millions of native Muslims and their Spanish hegemons. The general relationship between the Christian and Muslim inhabitants of these ports was so benign, in fact, that many Spanish residents moved elsewhere (such as Arzila or Casabranca) so that they might keep their Islamic servants and maintain their profitable trade arrangements with the Islamic interior.
- Çapraz ve Hilal -
However, all was not well in North Africa, and every blow delivered by the Spanish only reheated the billowing indignation of the non-Christian natives. The chastening of the Rif - while largely successful - was one of the last operations of its kind for many years. Any tangible gains to be made sending thousands of soldiers into rough terrain filled with a hostile populace for the sole purpose of punishing recalcitrance were meager compared to the cost in lives and reales. The sheer expense and trouble involved with squashing two minor targets so close to Spain dissuaded the Avís-Trastámaras from pursuing large-scale conquests in North Africa (and likewise delayed their entry into the 20 Years War until 1545). Additionally, there remained one worrisome obstacle to a fully pacified Morocco. After the dramatic downfall of the Wattasid dynasty, the powerful sharifs of the Saadi dynasty represented the last hope for a united, sovereign Morocco. After the death of Abu Abdallah al-Qaim, head of the Saadian family, at the battle of Mequínez in 1524, their familial holdings in the Sus predictably descended into chaos, but returned to reasonable normalcy in the 1540s under the leadership of Abdallah al-Ghalib. The downfall of Tetuán and Chefchauen had once again intensely soured the attitude of most Moroccans towards the presence of Spaniards in their homeland, and galvanized them into throwing their support behind whomever possessed the strength to liberate them. The Saadians quickly presented themselves as the obvious choice in this regard after conquering the city of Tarudante in 1549, thus disposing its emir, who was a Portuguese puppet.
The fall of Tarudante was disquieting for the Portuguese operating on Morocco's Atlantic Coast, as the Sus had previously been occupied by numerous tribes whose rivalries were exploited by the Spanish in Cabo de Gué in order to acquire cheap prices for the region's grain supply. The tables had suddenly turned to the south of the High Atlas mountains: the important Spanish-held port of Agadir (Santa Cruz to the Portuguese) was obviously the next target for Abdallah al-Ghalib, who had made it clear that after its inevitable fall he would march for Marrakesh and claim the sultanate of Morocco for himself and his successors. The emirs of Marrakesh and Fes - both tributaries of the Spanish crown - had long been seen as obsequious grovelers to the king of Spain, and although Miguel da Paz had promised that his subjects would never enter their domains while armed in their accession treaty in 1530, this guarantee had to be abruptly nullified when numerous attempts on their lives (one of which successfully killed the elderly emir of Fes by poison in 1551) required Spanish intervention.
Beyond Morocco, the other Spanish exclaves were beset by similar anxiety towards their subservient Maghrebi states. After 1546, Ahmad III, the Hafsid ruler of Tunisia, had to deal with a pretender to his throne who claimed to be the real Ahmad (after he seized the city of Kairouan), and who promised his followers that he would personally expel the Spanish from La Goletta. The two Kabyle Berber kingdoms of Kuku and Ait Abbas had likewise begun to turn their eyes to the chronically undermanned Spanish garrisons in Bugia and Algiers. This fearlessness did not materialize out of nowhere, however. Turkish emissaries had in fact been received by Abdallah al-Ghalib, Ahmad the Pretender, and Abdelaziz Labes (sultan of Ait Abbas) in 1553, 1548, and 1556 respectively.
Piri Reis' map of the Mediterranean
The Turks had previously invested themselves in the Maghreb in the 1510s, a development which plunged the nascent Spanish presence in North Africa into dire peril. The arrival of Turkish corsairs in the Central and Western Mediterranean brought a wave of unprecedented devastation to Christian shores, spearheaded by the brothers Oruç and Hayreddin Barbarossa. This period had come to a head in 1534, when a coordinated invasion of Turkish and Barbary corsairs came ashore in Puglia and was repulsed by the Spanish in 1534, and a truce with the Ottoman Sultan was secured in January of 1535. The Spanish monarchy had considerable difficulty in stamping out this particular influx of marauding Turkish mariners, only achieving a return to relative normalcy in the Western Mediterranean only after 25 years of carnage and despoliation. The reign of corsairs such as the Barbarossas would have lasted much longer in the Western Mediterranean had Spain not so strongly inserted itself into the Maghreb several years prior.
This conclusion was certainly not the end of Ottoman interest in North Africa. With the whirlwind conquest of the entire Levant and Egypt by 1548, the Ottoman sultan had attained undeniable supremacy amongst his fellow Sunni princes. A war against the Ottomans was no longer just a war against a Turkish state, but was now a war against the entire Dar al-Sunnah. From the Atlantic coast of Morocco all the way to the Straits of Malaca, the Sunni world was finding itself progressively inclined to acknowledge the suzerainty of the Ottoman Empire, and - although the Relics of Muhammad and all the caliphal authority bound up in them had escaped across the Red Sea - the Ottoman Padishah had come to be regarded as the Caliph in all but name. The confidence of the Ottoman Turks under Sultan Mehmet III was beyond staggering, and consequently a new aggression was boldly pursued in nearly every direction - particularly in the Mediterranean. The Ottoman court had become so confident that the Spanish could easily be shaken out of North Africa that in 1555 the grand vizier Rüstem Pasha informed his liege that “the king of Spain has so many commitments, my sovereign, and the province of Africa gives him so much trouble, that it is beyond any doubt that he would surely withdraw his armies from those ports if tested.”
There were numerous vulnerabilities within Spanish society that could also be taken advantage of, the most appealing of which was the presence of hundreds of thousands of Moriscos still living in Spain. Miguel da Paz had attempted to encourage the Moriscos to settle in the cities of Spanish North Africa in order to distance them from the Iberian Peninsula and thereby prevent them from sowing dissent close to the heart of Spain, but eventually an opposite approach had to be undertaken as episodes of Moriscos turning renegade and joining Islamic insurgents in the Maghreb became more common. It was implicitly understood that a large share of Moriscos were only nominally Christian, and a significant percentage of them still practiced their old faith in private. To many Spaniards, such surreptitious activity was proof that the Moriscos had been subdued but not entirely defeated, and that they would need to be kept in line with an iron rod. A more astute observation, however, would reveal the actual culprit behind the Moriscos’ lackluster response to Christianization to be an increasingly superficial catechesis and rampant suspicion and prejudice among the clergy. As the Holy Office of the Inquisition only had jurisdiction over those of the Christian faith, Moriscos were therefore much easier to harass within the confines of the law than Moors, despite being baptized. A Morisco by the name of Francisco Núñez Muley recounted the agitation felt by the Moriscos of Granada in the 1560s: "Day by day our situation worsens, we are maltreated in every way; and this is done by judges and officials… How can people be deprived of their own language, with which they were born and brought up? In Egypt, Syria, Malta and elsewhere there are people like us who speak, read and write in Arabic, and they are Christians like us.”
The misery of many Moriscos who refused to either openly or privately accept Christianity drove them to depart Spain entirely, often bringing with them valuable wealth and expertise and swelling the manpower of Spain's Islamic enemies. It was partially for this reason that the new fortifications constructed in the ports of the Alborán Sea were constructed prior to the conquest of Tetuán - when it came to undermining the nefarious Barbary pirates, it was equally important to prevent their communication with the Moriscos of Spain and restrict the latter's outflow as it was to take direct military action against corsair harbors in North Africa. Relations between the two dominant powers of the Mediterranean were therefore worsened by large numbers of refugees with anti-Spanish leanings that the Ottoman state had absorbed, as a significant portion of the Jews that had been expelled and crypto-Muslims that had emigrated from Spain were ferried east by Turkish galleys to be resettled under the auspices of the High Porte. Just as dangerous to Spain's power projection in the Mediterranean was the persistent tether in which it was held by the Republic of Genoa, and consequently the Ottomans took their first movement against Spain in 1552, with the invasion of the Genoese island of Chios.
As the huge influx of liquid assets available to the Spanish crown in the mid 16th century had allowed the royal treasury almost complete independence from its Italian creditors, the Genoese banking families were poised to lose their preeminence in the financial sector of Spain (and possibly Europe), and consequently had become hell-bent on infiltrating or manipulating the Casa de Prestación in whatever way they could. The Spanish monarchy’s insistence on handpicking its bureaucrats prevented the inclusion of foreigners in the offices of the Casa, meaning that directly controlling royal credit was an impossibility, but the tight commercial links between Genoa and the Spanish merchant class meant that a significant amount of pressure could be placed on the Casa to better serve Genoese interests. What this meant for the Genoese was large concessions in Spanish North Africa, where Italians were rapidly entrenching themselves. The nebulous legal standing of Spanish North Africa east of the Rif - a property of the Spanish monarchy under the administration of the Órdenes Militantes, belonging to neither the crown of Aragon, Castile, or Portugal - allowed an opening for Northern Italian merchants, mercenaries, and settlers that had been shut to them in European Spain, leading to the creation of Italian urban communities that were further augmented by Southern Italians from Spanish Naples and Sicily. In this way, the cities of Bugia, Algiers, Tunis, and the isles of Tabarca and Djerba were essentially Italian colonies under Spanish rule.
For this reason, the Ottoman campaign against Genoa was not merely a long overdue mopping-up of foreign-held islands in the Eastern Mediterranean, but was a deliberate attempt to hack off the grasping fingertips of the Hispano-Genoese maritime conglomerate, drawing it into a naval war that would strain its resources and allow the Turks to assume overlordship of the disgruntled Maghreb and from there take aim at the ultimate target: Rome. The desire of the High Porte to provoke Spain and Genoa into conflict was made clear right away, when Sultan Mehmet III ordered his Kapudan Pasha, Piyale, to seize the isle of Chios (the last major Genoese colony) without any ultimatum issued to the Genoese - an unusual break from Ottoman warmaking protocol. While the Genoese garrison surrendered without resistance, their compatriots at home took this unlawful seizure as a declaration of war, and prepared accordingly. While Juan Pelayo had made the first steps towards reforming the navies of the Spanish realms at the behest of his father’s confidant, Martim Branco da Grândola, in 1545, by 1553 the Spanish navy was still hampered by overreliance on the services of Italian admirals, in particular the Genoese condottiero Andrea Doria.
Hoping to keep the burden of naval warfare equal between Spain and Genoa and nervous about withdrawing ships from Spanish North Africa, Juan Pelayo restrained from taking the fight to the Eastern Mediterranean and instead ordered his galleys to protect Tunis and patrol the Strait of Sicily. The initial encounters with the Turkish corsairs were neither excellent nor hopeless. While one Ottoman fleet was routed near the isle of Lampedusa in 1553, another was able to pass right through the Strait of Messina and ransack the Aeolian Islands, enslaving more than half of its populace. Juan Pelayo eventually yielded to the suggestion of the General-Captain of the Galleys of Spain, Álvaro de Bazán (the Elder), to organize a large fleet to deliver a critical injury to the Ottoman navy when news arrived that the Spanish-garrisoned port of Castelnuovo had been encircled by 50,000 Turkish troops. Castelnuovo allowed the Spanish a presence on the Balkans, and therefore represented a significant shield against an Ottoman invasion of Southern Italy. Meeting with Genoese and Spanish ambassadors from at the Pontifical Palace in August of 1553, Pope Ignatius I agreed to join the warships of the Papal States to those of Genoa and Spain as part of a Holy League against the Turks. Giovanni Battista Doria, the 84 year old Doge of Genoa, appointed his son, Nicolò, to lead 50 Genoese galleys to Naples, where they would be joined by another 40 galleys from Spain and 20 galleys from the Pope, after which the fleet of the Holy League would proceed eastward to the Strait of Otranto to intercept 95 Ottoman galleys reported to be rounding the Peloponnese on its way to encircle Castelnuovo.
However, the galleys flying the banners of the Ottoman Sultan were no longer the disorderly vultures that once sailed under the Barbarossas. Since the completion of Sultan Musa’s Imperial Arsenal in Konstantiniyye, the Ottoman navy had been transformed into a disciplined and deadly fighting force under the guidance of accomplished admirals such as Dragut, Piali Pasha, and Piri Reis. The corsair Sinan Reis was chosen to lead the Ottoman fleet - a solid choice, as Sinan was born into a family of Sephardi Jews who had been expelled from Spain by the Alhambra Decree, and was therefore especially resentful towards the Spaniards. Misfortune in Italy also hampered the Holy League from the very beginning. Unexpectedly, Pope Ignatius I passed away at the age of 62 in February of 1554, and the papacy was once again seized by a group of cardinals who were long-embittered over the perceived interference of foreign powers and the rigid anti-corruption of Reform Catholicism. This reactionary faction was able to successfully outmaneuver the Spanish and Imperial factions by capitalizing on their disagreement over candidates and their bad luck in nomination. For Charles von Hapsburg, he was unable to convince his first candidate, Cristoforo Madruzzo, Prince-Bishop of Trent, to give up his prince-bishopric and his second candidate, Joris van Egmont, Bishop of Utrecht, was unpopular with his fellow cardinals. For Juan Pelayo, his favored cardinal, Bartolomé Carranza, Archbishop of Toledo, had become entangled in controversy in 1553 when he was investigated by the Inquisition for sympathy with Martin Luther. The conclave ultimately chose as Pope Paul IV the Neapolitan cardinal Gian Pietro Carafa, who had been bishop in multiple locations in Lazio and was mentored by his relative, Cardinal Oliviero Carafa, an old school Italian Renaissance churchman determined to keep the papacy in Roman hands. This election was untimely for Spain and Genoa, who found the new pope disinclined to dispense funding from the papal treasury.
This led to mixed orders for the leader of the Papal fleet, Giovanni Grimani, which in turn led to heated arguments between the leaders of the Holy League’s armada at Naples. Exasperated with the change in Papal management and impatient to relieve Castelnuovo, the Spanish and Genoese ships departed without their allies and succeeded in catching Sinan Pasha as his fleet collected freshwater off the isle of Vido on the 27th of September in 1554. The battle unfolded predictably, but soon the inequality between the combatants became apparent. Unlike the leadership of the Holy League, the Turkish fleet was under the sole command of Sinan, who easily utilized the discrepancy between his many different opposing admirals, who hesitated to engage the Ottoman center and had decided to advance before the wind was in their favor. By the time Nicolò Doria sounded the retreat, 45 ships had been destroyed or captured by the Ottomans, who had lost only 5 galleys of their own. To add insult to injury, the Christian fleet was gruesomely demolished within sight of the port of Corfu, where the Christian Venetians sat by in their neutrality. Despite having inflicted thousands of casualties on the Turks more than 300 kilometers away, the Spanish garrison in Castelnuovo numbered only 600 when word arrived of the disaster at Vido. The remaining Spaniards chose to sally forth from the fort and make their last stand. There were no survivors.
With Spain and Genoa sent reeling from the Eastern Mediterranean after Vido, the black hulls of corsair ships began to appear regularly off the coast of Southern Italy. Further east, Mehmet III left behind the old Ottoman support of John Zápolya’s ambition for the Hungarian throne and acknowledged the legitimacy of Charles V’s claim to Hungary, while simultaneously assembling a massive army to enter the Pannonian Basin from Belgrade. The Ottoman threat was not solely felt by Europe, however, and to the east the Turks were likewise in contest with the Safavid Shahs over ownership of the Fertile Crescent. With access to the Red Sea via Egypt, the High Porte had become keen on entering the politics and trade routes of the Indian Ocean in order to pry at least a small part of the lucrative spice trade from the Portuguese, and there were plenty of local Muslim polities (the sultanates of Ahmadnagar, Bijapur, and Gujarat in particular) who were more than happy to assist. The long anticipated conflict between the great powers of Christendom and the Ottoman-led Sunni world had finally begun in earnest, but it arrived with an acute sense of foreboding for the Christians.
