Una diferente ‘Plus Ultra’ - the Avís-Trastámara Kings of All Spain and the Indies (Updated 11/7)

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Torbald

TickTock The Witch's Dead said:
Could Spain try to take Corsica if given the chance? That's something I can see Spain do.
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It currently belongs to Genoa, which is still the primary funnel for Spanish money into and out of Europe, so I don't think the Spanish monarchs see any need to take the island in the near future. If the Genoese Republic is compromised by a Spanish enemy at some point, taking Corsica might be considered.
 

TickTock The Witch's Dead

Having read this thread I have to wonder if there will be some technological changes in this TL since the history of Spain will be much different.

I also read about the Cambodian-Spanish War and I wonder how it would go in this TL.

I’ve read about the usage of Latin during the Renaissance and after and I wonder if a more powerful Spain means a more widespread usage of the language. Speaking of language will the Spanish government make any attempts on standardizing the Spanish language?

Lusotropicalism was this idea that Portuguese colonialism was superior to other European forms of colonialism because Portugal was more tolerant to other races and cultures (their words not mine). Could a similar idea come up in this TL?

Also how long will it take for the Imperator totius Hispaniae title to be officially recognized across Europe?

Will councilarism take hold in the Catholic Church?

Not to mention fate of the Mandeans?
 
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44. The Middle Sea Transformed
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    • Torbald

    ~ The Middle Sea Transformed ~
    Mediterranean c. 1570-1585

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    By May of 1575, a naval counteroffensive by the princes of the Holy League against the Great Turk was imminent. Of the 280 Muslim vessels present at the battle of Otranto, only 81 remained in Ottoman hands. In contrast, 204 of the original 242 ships in the Holy League’s armada had survived the battle and most were still seaworthy and adequately manned. Those 81 Ottoman ships meanwhile were in disarray: of the vessels not captured or sunk at Otranto, 35 had regrouped at Corfu under Hassan Veneziano, 24 had scattered to the wind, and 22 had fled towards Tripoli under Sinan Reis, disobeying direct orders from Hassan. For the moment, Ottoman seapower was one crushing defeat away from being rendered virtually nonexistent. Feverish excitement seized the Christian leaders. The whole of the Mediterranean - right through the Aegean and possibly the Marmara as well - would be laid bare. Albania, Greece, Cyprus, Egypt, Syria, and the ultimate prizes of Constantinople and Jerusalem themselves all now seemed realistic goals for the Holy League. All that had to be done was strike while the iron was hot.

    This crusading spirit was encumbered by a few major issues, however. For one, the gargantuan fleet of galleys, galleasses, and galleons deployed at Otranto under the banners of the Holy League was brought together by an unwieldy coalition of dozens of princes and private individuals, most of whom had neither the funds nor the enthusiasm to push much further against the Turks. The Holy League’s success at Otranto was lightning in a bottle, a colossal undertaking propelled by a great number of equally skilled and inspired figures who - due to highly unusual circumstances - were able to convince an unprecedentedly large portion of Christendom to set aside their squabbles and cooperate against a common enemy for just one campaigning season. But now one of the Holy League’s leading patrons, Philipp II von Habsburg, was saddled with astronomical debt and plagued by a resurgent Protestant conspiracy in the Holy Roman Empire and Hungary, and was beginning to anxiously look for a way out of the conflict - at least for the time being. This was a matter that would continue to fan the ire of the king of Spain, who had bought the Kaiser's aid against the Turks with a hefty package of financial relief.

    Additionally, while the balance on land in Southern Italy had been decisively shifted against the Turks at Caserta in mid 1574, even after Otranto there remained tens of thousands of Turks on the Italian Peninsula under the yet-uncaptured Piyale Pasha. Sultan Mehmet also defiantly refused surrender, a refusal which would be echoed tenfold by his son and heir Mustafa when he took the throne after his father’s death in 1576. The king of Spain, Juan Pelayo, had given orders to his skilled admirals Luis de Requesens and Álvaro de Bazán that if total victory was achieved over the Turks at sea, they were to turn eastward to assist in the retaking of Lucania and Apulia. These orders they obeyed, leaving behind only 34 of the Spanish ships under Bazán’s lieutenant, Pedro de Bolnuevo, who was given the task of ensuring Turkish supply lines across the Adriatic and Ionian Seas remained terminated. So gargantuan had been the Ottoman undertaking that it took a whole year and 9 months after the Turks’ supply chain had been completely cut off at the battle of Otranto to finally finish off the last Turkish remnant on the Italian Peninsula.

    The question now was what to do with the initiative gained at sea. With the Ottoman navy in shambles and the bulk of the Ottoman army trapped in Apulia and afflicted with hunger and demoralization, there was overblown optimism for the next target, with many calling for an assault on Konstantiniyye itself. However, the resilience of the Turkish capital, disputes over who would take ownership of the city, and the exhaustion of a now 5 year conflict quickly shelved any such idea. To the Venetian admiral Agostino Barbarigo, the recapture of Corfu seemed to be the logical next step after securing the Straits of Otranto, but the Spanish, Papal, Genoese, and Hospitaller leadership overruled this in favor of hounding Hassan Veneziano and destroying the rest of the Ottoman navy. Barbarigo was beside himself over the decision and threatened to disengage his ships. Sebastiano Venier cooled his comrade’s temper by pointing out that the Ottomans still had a sizable garrison on the island that would require far more resources to besiege than they had. Venier also motivated Barbarigo by reminding him that this might be their only chance to capture Hassan Veneziano, a traitor not only to the Christian faith but to their own beloved Republic. The Turkish garrison in the old fortress at Corfu - too large to be confronted but dwindling along with their supplies - and the Holy League’s ships - out of range for the Turkish guns - eyed one another apprehensively as the fleet moved southward.

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    The island and fortress of Corfu    ​

    After scouring the coast of Epirus, a Turkish fleet of 20 ships was eventually found and smashed in the Ambracian Gulf at Vonizza, in the shadow of another long abandoned Venetian castle, but Hassan Veneziano was nowhere to be found, having sped away as hastily as he could to the south. Facing either inevitable execution back in Konstantiniyye or capture by the vengeful Christians, Hassan was prepared to make a last stand against the Holy League at Igoumenitsa (opposite Corfu), but, in a rare act of mercy (or simply fearing for the fate of his ships), Sultan Mehmet wrote to Hassan swearing full pardon for the captain’s failure to secure victory at Otranto if he set sail for the Golden Horn immediately. With mixed orders as to how to proceed at this point, the admirals of the Holy League seized Preveza and harbored there indecisively for 16 days, with the Venetians renewing their appeal for a blockade of Corfu. The sudden arrival of 18 Venetian galleys under Marcantonio Bragadin - carrying orders from Doge Alvise Mocenigo to prioritize the securing of Venetian interests in the region - decided the matter for Barbarigo and Venier, who separated from the Holy League fleet and sailed north with Bragadin to put Corfu to siege. Pedro de Bolnuevo redirected the Holy League fleet to Avlonya and Durazzo, which he bombarded, reducing their fortifications but leaving their harborrs untouched, after which the Ottoman garrisons at Otranto and Brindisi were similarly harassed. After receiving news in early November of 1575 that Piyale Pasha was reorganizing his forces to confront the Holy League at Altamura, Pedro de Bolnuevo withdrew the Spanish ships to Barletta to assist in dealing a final blow to the Ottoman campaign in Italy. With this, the fleet assembled by the members of the Holy League at Otranto dissipated.

    Had matters on land in Southern Italy been resolved before the battle of Otranto, then the full weight of the Holy League’s armada might have been able to wreak havoc on the shores of the Islamic Mediterranean with impunity for decades to come and possibly could have rushed the Golden Horn, galvanizing a coup in the High Porte to secure peace and precipitating a real collapse of sorts of Ottoman authority in its fringe territories. This was not to be, however, and may have been an unlikely outcome to begin with. However, even without the assistance of the Venetians (who had succeeded in their recapture of Corfu and now turned to the remaining Ionian Islands) or the commitment of the Holy League’s other members, the Spanish monarchy and authorities in Spanish Italy were in agreement that some counteroffensive - no matter how small - should be pursued against the Turks.

    The long years of domestic and foreign strife and struggle - combined with the wear and tear of the Spanish monarchy’s customary semi-nomadic lifestyle - had finally come to bear on Juan Pelayo by the mid-1570s, and long distance or overseas travel was no longer feasible for the aging, arthritic king. Preoccupied with matters in Portugal, Juan Pelayo sent the Infante Gabriel to Naples to oversee the restabilization of Spanish Italy and gave him plenipotentiary powers in regards to the unresolved Turkish problem.With thousands of Spanish and Italian troops already mobilized across the Mezzogiorno and with Ottoman Epirus virtually ungarrisoned, Gabriel ordered an expedition to assemble at Taranto in early 1576 at the suggestion of Pedro Girona, 1st Duke of Osuna and new viceroy of Naples, to be commanded by Vespasiano Gonzaga, duke of Amalfi and lifelong friend of the infante. In less than a month and a half, Gonzaga and his fleet of 36 galleys and complement of 2,700 Spanish marines and 4,500 Italian conscripts and condottieri seized in rapid succession Durazzo, Avlonya, and the fortress of Bashtovë, the latter of which was not included in the original plan but which had been taken in a bold maneuver by the young Alessandro Farnese, son of the Duke of Parma. A loose maritime-based military frontier was hastily organized around these three ports, centered administratively around the newly fortified Durazzo, the command of which was given to the late Duke of Alba's son, Fadrique (4th Duke of Alba). Spanish forces were unsure of how to proceed next or of what reprisal could be expected from the new Ottoman Sultan, Mustafa. Venetian insiders in Konstantiniyye had, after all, informed them that Mustafa was a determined hothead who considered the unraveling of the Ottoman campaign in Italy as the cause for his father’s untimely death, and would make good on his promises to strike back at the Holy League.

    As much as Mustafa would have liked to continue the war and as much as Juan Pelayo also would have liked to inflict further punishment on the Ottomans, the two empires were gasping for breath. While Mustafa made a point to spurn the Spanish, Venetians, and Papal States when excluding them from the peace talks at Castelnuovo in May of 1577, an Ottoman party led by the sanjak-bey of Yanya appeared outside the walls of Durazzo a mere three weeks later, requesting an audience with Fadrique de Toledo. After less than two days in discussion and another week exchanging letters with the viceroy of Naples, an inconspicuous and indefinite ceasefire was declared. Nonetheless, there was a palpable feeling of missed opportunity among most of the Holy League’s members, and the protracted vanquishment of the Turkish invasion two years later brought the hunger for a more lasting victory at sea to the fore once again. Likewise, the pride of the Ottoman Empire and its loyal subjects had been profoundly hurt, and the High Porte losing its grasp on Southern Italy when it had come so frustratingly close to complete victory had caused the Ottoman State and its sultan to become consumed by a desire for revenge, or at least a reversal of fortunes. In a show of resolve, Sultan Mustafa had ordered another 120 galleys immediately after Hassan Veneziano’s return, but the reconstruction of the Ottoman fleet at such a scale was not a project that could realistically be completed in 2 years. Even the raw shipbuilding materials that the Ottoman State’s Balkan territories produced in abundance had been mightily strained by the demands placed prior to 1570. The Great Turkish War of 1570-1577 may have ended, but the conflict was far from over, even in the short term. The rulers and leadership of neither Spain, Venice, nor the Ottoman Empire were interested in a final and lasting peace so long as the innumerable violent transgressions of the past decade remained unavenged and mastery of the Mediterranean remained up in the air.

    - Mustafa and Meleksima -

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    Sultan Mustafa I & his beloved consort, Meleksima, "la Pugliana"​

    The next period of Mediterranean conflict would be one in which the Turks were decidedly put on the defensive, however. The issue of an inevitable re-emergent Ottoman navy plagued the minds of Venetian and Spanish leadership with increasing urgency as the years and months passed without taking advantage of the tremendous victory at Otranto. These concerns fully materialized when 55 new Turkish galleys had been outfitted and manned and departed the Golden Horn in April of 1578, joined shortly after by 30 older galleys protecting the sealanes of the Aegean and performing reconnaissance in the Ionian Sea. This fleet clearly anticipated a concerted effort by the Holy League to counter it, as it continued to Chalcis in unison, and was soon joined by another 30 corsair galleys from Tripoli and Misrata once it continued south. The Ottomans overestimated the speed and cohesion of their opponents’ response. Without enough oarsmen and sailors to man them, many galleys in the possession of Spain, Venice, Genoa, and the Papal States had been scuttled or sold since 1575, including many that had been captured from the Turks. The Turkish fleet stopped for no more than two days at a time between stops taking on fresh water and supplies along the Eastern coast of Greece, giving the Holy League no more than two weeks to assemble their response. Although 15 Genoese galleys and 8 Spanish galleys departed La Spezia for Taranto a week before the Turkish ships left Konstantiniyye, Spanish, Venetian, and Papal forces had to rely solely on whatever vessel could reach the Strait of Kythira on short notice. By early May of 1578, a grand total of 79 galleys, galleases, and galleons - 27 Venetian, 20 Spanish, 15 Genoese, 14 Papal, and 3 Hospitaller - gathered haphazardly in the Strait of Ithaca. After cautiously proceeding southward, a few Messenian fishermen informed the ships of the Holy League that the Turkish fleet was anchored at Modon (Methoni to the Greeks). The Holy League leadership were nervous about confronting a fleet that both outnumbered theirs by third and was protected by Modon’s fortress, but the Greek informants encouraged an attack, strongly emphasizing that there was something grievously wrong with many of the Turkish ships. In the early morning hours of May 9th, the Christian ships forced a battle at Modon.

    The rapidity of the Turkish fleet’s construction and movement had been intended to convince the Holy League of the unshakable power of the Ottoman Empire - that the Sultan of Sultans could so quickly assemble more than a hundred galleys even after a crushing defeat at sea and 7 years of massive military expenditures. Sultan Mustafa and all his naval architects and laborers did not, however, possess some supernatural ability to make wood and pitch cure faster. Whether Mustafa intended to put out so many ships so quickly to intimidate the Holy League into a more favorable peace treaty, or simply wanted to throw whatever he could at the Holy League to delay their intrusion into the Aegean, his new galleys were not fully sea-ready, and the still-green wood of many had already begun to rot when they reached Chalcis. Leadership proved another issue. With most of the Ottoman naval leadership being corsair captains with minimal loyalty to the High Porte, the only reliable admirals left were Piyale Pasha and Hassan Veneziano, but the former was still in Spanish custody and the latter - perhaps also the best experienced to take on the Holy League after Otranto - was under permanent house arrest in Konstantiniyye due to his shameful defeat in 1575. Assigned to lead the Ottoman fleet was Ridwan Pasha, an Albanian statesman whose only experience was as beylerbey of Anatolia. The fleet of the Holy League, on the other hand, was lucky enough to have the seasoned Venetian Marcantonio Bragadin at its head, as well as the esteemed Castilian Álvaro de Bazán, who opted to join the fleet at the last minute in Taranto. What was more, the galleys encountered by the Holy League at Modon were no different than those sunk at Otranto. If the Ottoman naval leadership present at that battle (or what remained of it) were consulted at length, there may have been strong suggestions made about improving the firepower of the average Ottoman galley or possibly building a squadron of heavy sail-powered ships akin to the Spanish galley. However, the Ottomans needed to quickly take measures to prevent a full-scale collapse of Turkish sea power, so spending time dabbling with new naval tactics and designs was considered out of the question. This ended up being another factor among many that doomed the reborn Ottoman armada.

    With many sailors ill from drinking spoiled water from rotten casks, the Ottomans put up a sluggish defense, although their numerical superiority put significant pressure on the Holy League. Realizing many of the Ottoman galleys had compromised hulls, the Holy League’s firepower was shifted away from clearing decks and became focused on getting a sinking shot on as many decaying galleys as possible. Soon the harbor waters became clogged with sunken vessels, making strategic withdrawal for the Holy League difficult once within range of the guns of Modon. This lightning offensive and slow, arduous withdrawal took its toll on the Holy League’s ships, with 35 galleys destroyed - an agonizing sacrifice. The Ottomans, however, had been fish in a barrel - 50 galleys sunk, 6 captured, and another 28 deemed unfit for service and irreparable, with the salvageable ships departing speedily for the protection of the Sea of Marmara. Reinforcements from Spain would arrive in Naples less than a week later in the form of 18 galleys, 3 galleasses, and 2 galleons, while the great arsenal of Konstantiniyye had gone completely silent. [1]

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    Modon​

    By the time word of the Turkish fleet’s collapse arrived in the Golden Horn, Spanish and Venetian ships were already tentatively probing the Aegean. After encountering no resistance, the Venetians organized into two separate fleets, one to break up the blockade of Crete and one to coordinate with the Spanish for a potential raiding campaign. Both Spain and Venice were hemorrhaging cash, and, as peaceful indemnities from the High Porte were unlikely to be secured in a peace treaty any time soon, large scale ravaging of Turkish commerce was necessary to recoup the monstrous cost of humbling the Ottoman Sultan. Luckily the seizure of Durazzo and Avlonya and the recapture of Corfu and the Ionian islands made projecting naval power deep into the heart of the Ottoman Empire much more feasible than it was previously. The idea of a continued push into the Mediterranean - unthinkable even after the victory at Otranto - was still seen as an unnecessary overextension after Modon by the Spanish, and Álvaro de Bazán was alone in supporting the idea. However, two fortuitous developments in the Summer of 1578 put an Aegean offensive back on the table. Terms for a ceasefire with the Turks were already drying on their paper in Naples when news came forward that a power shift in Tripoli - the last great corsair port in the Mediterranean - had removed the city from its close affiliation with the Ottoman state. Sinan Reis, one of the three Turkish admirals at the battle of Otranto, had established himself in Tripoli since 1575 and had filled in the position of the city’s unofficial Ottoman consul. During one of the frequent oligarchic power struggles within the city, Sinan Reis had become unexpectedly separated from his entourage of bodyguards on one sweltering June night in 1578, and had been murdered in one of the alleyways. This was significant in that Sinan was one of the very few remaining Turkish loyalists in Tripoli, and most of Tripoli’s corsair magnates had grown exasperated with the continued assistance to the Ottoman Sultan in his increasingly unrealistic project of taking Italy for himself, and had suffered more losses in ships and seamen than could be compensated with Italian slaves and plunder. In spite of this, commitment to the war against the infidel was still strong enough for Sinan to secure a united fleet of 44 galleys, galiots, and xebecs - drawn not only from Tripoli but also from Misrata, Sirte, and even distant Alexandria - to put pressure on the Holy League from the south. With Sinan removed from the picture, this armada dispersed, and the Libyan corsairs returned to more local machinations. There were plenty of Spanish and Hospitaller spies and informants keeping a close eye on the internal politics of Tripoli, and made sure to quickly notify the viceroys of Sicily and Naples that the threat from Tripoli had greatly diminished.

    Meanwhile, all was not well in Konstantiniyye. The Ottoman Empire had suffered major setbacks due to overextension and the determined resistance of its neighbors on all sides, but it had also been blessed with consistently competent rulers, and a relatively painless transfer of power between them since 1521. Musa I may have bled the Ottoman treasury and lost superfluous troops in his two attempts to dislodge the Knights of St. John from Rhodes and may have failed to fully resolve the rivalry between his sons, and Mehmet III may have caused similar losses with his 1561 expedition into Hungary and nearly broke the spirit of two centuries of westward expansion with his all-or-nothing invasion of Spanish Italy, but both sultans left behind an empire that was larger than the one they had inherited. The young Sultan Mustafa now seemed too hard headed to make the prudent decisions necessary to bring back the Ottoman Empire from its existential crisis. However, under any other circumstances, such a stubborn monarch - so stubborn even in the face of obvious defeat - would have spelled further disaster for the Ottoman state, but Mustafa was nothing if not diligent and determined. Also, ever-present by Mustafa's side was his sole consort, Meleksima (known to the Christians as la Pugliana), who shared her husband's vigor for statebuilding, a highly unconventional interest for an Ottoman consort. It was Meleksima’s intuition and persistent warnings that convinced Mustafa that he could not trust his late father’s grand vizier, Lala Mustafa Pasha. This suspicion was vindicated when Lala’s dutiful deafmute secretary was tortured and forced to reveal a hidden repository in Lala’s quarters, which contained documents and letters proving the grand vizer’s extensive embezzlement of imperial funds since 1576, as well as negotiations with powerful timariots and even Venetian ambassadors to orchestrate a coup to reduce Mustafa to a figurehead monarch. Lala Pasha would be arrested and strangled in the dead of night, followed shortly after by every co-conspirator Sultan Mustafa could get his hands on, right down to the most insignificant errand boy. The destabilization of the Ottoman state did not stop here, however. The importance of the janissary corps to both the Ottoman war machine and to the Ottoman state’s image and prestige - as well as the presence of their barracks in the Ottoman capital - afforded the janissaries a precarious amount of influence in regards to the High Porte. Further inflating this level of influence was the size of the janissary corps, which had been raised during the reigns of Musa I and Mehmet III from 7,000 to 14,000. Mehmet III had to combat the assertive self-importance of the janissaries on multiple occasions, attempting to appease them by granting them permission to marry in 1574. The contention between the janissaries and the sultanate continued to simmer, however, as irregularity of payment caused by the depletion of the imperial treasury in the late 1570s left the sultan’s most elite troops feeling underappreciated, and the sacrifices made for the sultan’s ambitions - the death, capture, or desertion of more than 6,000 janissaries in Italy - intensified this feeling. With the High Porte’s funds exhausted and the support for Mustafa flagging in almost every part of the empire, the janissaries felt the time was right to force Mustafa’s hand by marching on Topkapı Palace in mid September of 1578. Luckily for Mustafa, a janissary revolt was long anticipated, and, although many of his courtiers pleaded with him to flee the city for the safety of Edirne, Mustafa elected to stay - lest his subjects lose even more faith in him. Besieged in Topkapı, Mustafa relied on the 30 or so galleys that had returned from Modon to sustain him, until these too chose to abandon the sultan, holding Ridwan Pasha prisoner after a mutiny and departing for Çanakkale to protect the Dardanelles. Mustafa’s resolve paid off when Sinan Pasha (later known as Koca Sinan Pasha, or Sinan the Great), beylerbey of Anatolia who had served under Mustafa’s father in Egypt and Hungary, arrived in Üsküdar with 14,000 sipahis and azebs. Surprisingly, the Turkish inhabitants of Konstantiniyye stood with their sultan, facilitating the crossing of Koca Sinan’s army and participating in the street-to-street fighting against the janissaries. After 5,000 lay dead - 1,200 of them janissaries - a ceasefire was declared by Mustafa to avoid the wholesale slaughter of the janissary corps as they holed up in their barracks. The janissaries - reduced to less than 4,000 - were downsized and reformed by Mustafa, partially as a punishment: the janissary corps would be opened to Turkish volunteers, no more than 3,000 janissaries would be present in Konstantiniyye at any given time, and the remaining janissaries would be garrisoned at Edirne in Thrace and Eskişehir in Anatolia. Koca Sinan would concurrently be rewarded with the office of grand vizier in an unprecedented show of imperial gratitude. This was an auspicious choice, as Koca Sinan would prove to be as devoted to pulling the Ottoman Empire out of its crisis as Mustafa. Koca Sinan was also interested in innovative plans for Ottoman renewal, including one which was thought over during his stint as beylerbey of Egypt and which was especially troubling to the Spaniards - that of a canal cutting through the Isthmus of Suez, connecting the Mediterranean to the Red Sea, and thus to the Indian Ocean.

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    Konstantiniyye​

    The destructive intrigue in Tripoli and Konstantiniyye compelled the Spanish to join the Venetians in their despoliation of the Aegean in early 1579, which would culminate in a devastating sack of Thessaloniki, the second most important Ottoman port in the Aegean, in which nearly the entire city was burned. Spanish and Venetian dominance in the Aegean reached its high water mark when the Dardanelles were forced open and the Turkish squadron there routed, bringing the Hispano-Venetian fleet close to the very walls of Konstantiniyye, before assessing the city’s defenses and ruling it too formidable to risk losing ships harassing it. A possibly apocryphal report tells of how Álvaro de Bazán’s flagship fired a single cannonball over the seawall. A few more raids would occur that year before the fleet would refocus itself on Western Greece and Epirus in 1580, with the capture of Parga, Preveza, Missolonghi, and the island of Kythira by the Venetians, and of Ulcinj and Castelnuovo by the Spanish, with a failed raid on Tripoli in 1581. Faced with a popular revolt over increased war taxes in Egypt and a breakdown of Ottoman authority in Serbia outside of the major cities, Mustafa offered a ceasefire to Venice, Spain, Genoa, the Papal States, and the Knights of St. John in early 1582, which was to be respected for at least 4 years - the longest period of peace in the Mediterranean in half a century.

    - Un nuovo Mediterraneo -​

    After 1575, it took some time for the new circumstances in the Adriatic and Ionian Seas to become fully realized by the Christian natives of Albania and Epirus. The Greeks and Albanians of the region had already revolted en masse in the late 1560s - an event which had to be put down by large Turkish armies and for Mehmet III to begin the invasion of Italy ahead of schedule - and the flames of rebellion, not fully extinguished, reignited with even greater force in the late 1570s. The policies directed towards the Albanians in particular were much harsher than the normative laws for dhimmi populations elsewhere in the empire, involving restrictions limiting freedom of movement, dress code, animal ownership, and other directives that bordered on forced religious conversion. With Spanish possessions organized into the “principality of Arbanon” - which was awarded to Vespasiano Gonzaga - the Ottomans could no longer afford to keep the inhabitants of Epirus under their thumb by the old restrictive measures, lest they drive more of the dhimmi out of the countryside and into Spanish and Venetian hands, where they could become soldiers, informants, and taxable heads. Much Of Ottoman Albania thus became a no man’s land where neither Ottoman nor Spanish and Venetian laws were strictly enforced. The Spanish and Venetians may not have been able (or willing) to help ignite a full scale war for independence in Albania or Greece, but were still eager to grant sanctuary to its inhabitants. Over the course of 3 decades, more than 40,000 Albanians (between 1/5th and 1/4th of the entire Albanian population) and 10,000 Greeks were ferried across the Strait of Otranto or settled in Durazzo and Avlonya. The refugees from across the Adriatic and Ionian Seas continued to trickle afterward, and, by 1610, Arbëresh had become the dominant language of the Apulian countryside while Greek mercenaries could be found in Spanish employ as far away as Casabranca.

    This sort of resettlement was not only welcome in the Western Mediterranean but was in fact also badly needed. The Ottoman State may have been reeling, but its rivals were also having to mend the wounds of mass depopulation and accommodate huge population movements. The Spanish Monarchy and its kingdoms in Southern Italy were particularly smarting over the events of 1570-1577. Out of a total population of over 4 million, just shy of 1 million people had been affected by the 7 year conflict. Salento - the heel of the Italian Peninsula on which Otranto and Brindisi were located - had endured the most drastic population shift, with Pedro Girona, viceroy of Naples, describing its countryside in 1578 as "scraped clean of man, beast, tree, and stalk of grain alike." The urban population of Brindisi immediately following Ottoman surrender had been reduced to "a little over a thousand," and Otranto's was now "in the mere hundreds." The depredations of war, piracy, famine, and disease combined with fear of the Turk had caused the death or enslavement of nearly 300,000 Southern Italians, with an additional 450,000 Southern Italians displaced temporarily and another 200,000 displaced permanently. Of those permanently displaced, 80,000 were resettled in Central Italy - mostly under the charitable provision of the Holy See and the Marquis of Pescara - where the turbulent events of the 1550s and 1560s had freed up land and employment to be filled by newcomers. For similar reasons, between 15,000 and 20,000 Southern Italians had migrated or been invited to the cities and duchies of Northern Italy. Juan Pelayo and his successor Gabriel also made sure to look after their beleaguered subjects by welcoming 35,000 Italian refugees into Spain, 16,000 of which put down roots in the kingdom of València, while 8,000 found their way to Catalonia, 6,000 to Andalucía, and 5,000 to the Balearic Isles (which had experienced significant depopulation by Barbary raids). Roughly 10,000 Italians managed to jockey their way to the Americas (primarily Cuba, Nueva Castilla, and Nueva Vizcaya) and another 10,000 or so were unwilling to renounce or face persecution for their newfound Islamic faith and fled to the Barbary ports of Libya or across the Adriatic to the domain of the Ottoman Sultan.

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    The Italian diaspora of 1570-1580​

    While the resettlement of thousands of Southern Italians in Spain proper reinvigorated the mercantile and maritime industries of the Spanish Levant and strengthened Iberia’s bonds to that of Naples, Sardinia, and Sicily, the most transformative migration occurred in Spanish North Africa (ironically a safe haven compared to Southern Italy during the 1570s), with more than 50,000 Italians settling permanently during the 1570s and 1580s and bolstering the relatively meager local Christian populace. With less than 100,000 Christians living under Spanish rule in North Africa (roughly 50,000-60,000 in Morocco and 20,000-30,000 everywhere else) before the arrival of these Italian refugees, the change was sudden and immense. 6,000 Italians set up shop in Tánger, Ceuta, and Alcácer-Ceguer, 7,000 in Orán, Mazalquivir, and Mostagán, 10,000 in Algiers and the surrounding Mitidja, and the lion’s share - 27,000 - in Tunis, Cape Bon, and Biserta. The principal African cities of the Strait of Gibraltar - namely Tánger, Ceuta, and Alcácer-Seguer - had declined significantly in the 1560s despite the ongoing consolidation of Spanish possessions in North Africa. The Muslim inhabitants of Tánger, Ceuta, and Alcácer-Seguer were expelled in 1560 due to mounting anxiety over a Turkish-assisted rebellion on both sides of the Alborán Sea, reducing their respective urban populations from 12,000 to 6,000, 5,000 to 3,000, and 2,700 to 1,100. At the height of the Saadian War of 1562-1567, when the threat of Abdallah al-Ghalib overrunning the entirety of Spanish Morocco seemed very real, the Christian populations of Tánger, Ceuta, and Alcácer-Seguer dropped to 3,000, 1,300, and 700, respectively, before rebounding to 7,000, 3,500, and 1,200 after the battle of Témara dealt a fatal blow to Saadian momentum. The arrival of 6,000 Southern Italians in the 1570s and 1580s therefore prevented a permanent deterioration of this strategically important region's urban development. The much more at-risk Christian populace in Spanish-held cities on Morocco's Atlantic Coast ironically remained stable during this period, as unmolested emigration from the area was rendered impossible by besieging Saadian armies. Tunis and its surroundings especially benefited from the influx of Italian settlers: as the city and its environs were relatively recent acquisitions by Spain they needed a large and loyal populace to hold down such a sizeable territory in such a highly contested region of the world, and also needed enough heads to populate it in order to make it profitable after tens of thousands of its previous inhabitants. On the observation of the viceroy of Sicily in 1601, Tunis and Palermo were apparently almost identical.

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    Spanish North African frontiersmen - "fronterizos/fronteiriços"​

    The acceleration of settler colonialism in Spanish North Africa changed the fabric of not just the cities under direct Spanish control but also of their frontiers and of the Maghreb as a whole. In the Rif - perhaps the most unruly and rugged region of Spanish North Africa - Christian settlers were surrounded and outnumbered by the native Muslim populace but could not rely on Spanish authorities to divert protective forces to their rough and relatively unprofitable new home. In Tetuán and in its environs along the River Martín there were only 300 Christian households (1,200-1,500 Christian heads, not counting the garrison) by 1580 - 39 years after its capture by the Spanish. Living among them were 700 Muslim households (2,800-3,500 Muslims), although the latter were in steady decline, with most of the Berber-speaking population opting to withdraw into the rebellious valleys and hills of the Rif. Chefchauen was in an even more precarious situation, with only 70 Christian households (also not counting the garrison, which fluctuated between 700 and 1,000) measured against 320 Muslim households. The relative military inexperience of the average Christian settler in Spanish North Africa when compared to the bellicose Berber raiders they had to contend with therefore necessitated contracting specialized protection. Particularly popular were the Stratioti (known as estradiotes in Castilian), primarily Greek and Albanian light cavalry mercenaries from the Balkans who were content to live even on the hostile Barbary frontier if it meant finally escaping the Ottoman yoke. Where protection from hostile and numerically superior Muslim neighbors could not be outsourced, a semi-nomadic frontier culture emerged among the more daring Christian settlers. Much like their Mesetense predecessors during the Reconquista and also like the contemporaneous Slavic cossacks on the Pontic Steppe, these frontier-dwellers - known as fronterizos (fronteiriços in Portuguese) - occupied the marginal hill country and no man’s land between the ever-shifting frontiers of Spanish North Africa. As fixed control over these regions vacillated constantly, the fronterizos lived beyond the grasp of Spanish corregidores and press gangs and therefore evaded paying any taxes or dues and mandatory military service (although their services were frequently bought by Spanish authorities for campaigns or Christian settlers for protection). Their livelihood was on horseback, herding cattle, sheep, and goats, and rustling the herds of their Berber adversaries. Their presence at the edge of the Spanish pale meant that their communities often accumulated lançados and degredados (voluntary exiles and exiled convicts, the former usually of Jewish origin) as well as escaped slaves and the bastard children of Spaniards and Arab, Berber, or Subsaharan women.

    - “Ut omnes unum sint” -​

    Just as the Ottoman State was beginning to inch through painful and experimental reforms to its structure and military composition in the aftermath of the Great Turkish War, so too was Spain undergoing a few important transformations brought about by the strains of war. As with any other ruler, the younger Juan Pelayo’s primary desire was for his kingdoms to function and cooperate within their established systems, but, with the concerned and contemplative spirit that comes with old age, the elder Juan Pelayo became more interested in leaving behind lasting and substantial solutions to the systems dividing his kingdoms and jeopardizing the union of a Spanish state. Juan Pelayo’s ancestors had scored innumerable military and diplomatic victories against the Moors, the French, and one another to ensure that the fate of All Spain culminated under one monarchy, and the Revolt of the Grandees and the laborious inefficiency of the combined Spanish war machine in the Great Turkish War had cast a glaring light on how easily the work of centuries could be undone. The loosely united federation over which Miguel da Paz had ruled was no longer a serviceable political arrangement, especially in the face of Spain’s rapidly centralizing rival states in France and Rumelia. Conforming the law codes of the kingdoms of Spain and declaring their union indissoluble were all helpful measures, but written law issued from the top-down would not secure a united Spain the way fundamental changes on the ground could. While permanent resettlement between the kingdoms of Spain required the consent of either the Crown or the relevant cortes, domestic crises and social disarray such as that experienced throughout the 1560s allowed such restrictions to be ignored without penalty, and the depredations of warfare as well as the Monarchy’s desire to amalgamate its many subjects to promote cultural unity and dampen the individual kingdoms’ desire for independence increased internal migration within Spain. After the Revolt of the Grandees and the pacification of Estremadura, 8,000 Portuguese families departed the Tagus Basin and relocated to the kingdoms of Galicia and Leon and along the Sierra Morena, while 11,000 Castilian families resettled in their place, all within a roughly 20 year period.

    Both to express goodwill towards his Portuguese subjects and to keep their rebellious kingdom at arm’s length, Juan Pelayo spent most of the remaining years of his life after 1566 taking up residence in Lisbon, enlisting the accomplished Portuguese architect Francisco de Holanda to renovate the neglected Paço da Ribeira, embellishing it with a Plateresque façade. Holanda likewise informed Juan Pelayo of the chronic shortage of freshwater in the city and convinced the king to set aside funds for the construction of a Lisboan aqueduct, although such a project would not come to fruition in Juan Pelayo’s lifetime. As Juan Pelayo clearly intended for the kingdom of Navarra to eventually be integrated into the Spanish Monarchy (having taken its queen, Jeanne de Valois, daughter of Charles IX of France, as his second bride), his Navarrese offspring - Juan Carlos and Clara - accompanied their father to Lisbon and received their instruction there from 1567 to 1575, largely under the tutelage of Flemish Albertine teachers. While Portugal was his patrilineal homeland, Juan Pelayo could not help but treat his Portuguese subjects with suspicion after the many decades he spent struggling against the Dukes of Bragança and their independence movement. Additionally, it had become undeniable that Castile was Spain’s center of gravity in terms of population, wealth, and simple geography. Juan Pelayo indirectly promoted the use of Castilian during his later years in Lisbon, and luckily Castilian entertained a certain prestige among the Portuguese nobility, in no small part due to Castile’s success in the Americas and the notoriety of Castile’s military and commercial repertoire in Western Europe.

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    Juan Pelayo, King of All Spain and the Indies c. 1576​

    Having lived just long enough to witness his greatest victory unfold, John III of Castile, Aragon, and Portugal - colloquially known to posterity as Juan Pelayo - expired at the age of 62 on October 3rd, 1579, two years after the Turks were expelled from Otranto. According to the new instructions of Juan Pelayo’s 1570 Edict of Union, the Cortes of Castile, Aragon, and Portugal were all required to convene in the Alcázar of Toledo (a building restored by Juan Pelayo in 1566-1569), the ancient capital of Visigothic Spain, to affirm Juan Pelayo’s eldest son, Gabriel, as their king in a mostly symbolic coronation ceremony, after which he would convene each of the Cortes within their respective borders to receive their more binding, legal affirmation. Even after the Revolt of the Grandees, the passing of the Leyes Nuevas, and the proclamation of the Edict of Union, the nobility of Spain still dragged its heels before acquiescing to this exhibition of Spanish unity and submission to the victorious Monarchy, particularly the nobles of Portugal and Aragon, who chafed at the idea of the coronation taking place with the borders of Castile - the symbolic significance of Toledo be damned. When the lords and deputies of the Portuguese Cortes departed from Castelo Branco (having avoided Elvas and Olivenza for obvious reasons), riots erupted among the lower classes in Porto, Braga, and Coimbra, Attach filesegged on by the lower clergy, who had been the country’s leading proponents of anti-Castilian fervor since the Interregnum of 1383-1385. Nevertheless, the four coronations of Gabriel the First of All Spain passed without issue. The transfer of power from Juan Pelayo to Gabriel was almost a formality by 1579. Juan Pelayo’s heir had intimately been included by his father in the management of the realm since 1564 at the age of 28 - being made the viceroy of València in 1568 - and was de facto regent of the realm by 1575.

    Gabriel was introduced to the management of the Spanish Empire at the most trying time possible. Tasked with co-managing the immediate aftermath of the Revolt of the Grandees and then 9 years of cataclysmic war with the Turks, Gabriel then had to manage - without his esteemed father - the seemingly unending and unresolvable conflict with the Turks and the institutional reform needed to remedy Spain’s shortcomings in the 1570s. The most glaring deficiency of the Spanish state had been the difficulty with which it raised its armies and fleets. Only through endless concessions and maneuverings could a fleet be assembled that could challenge Turkish naval supremacy, and the old troop-raising methods produced an army that without the assistance of the Holy League would have been utterly overwhelmed by the Turks (having concurrently fielded less than 40,000 men at any given moment). Spain’s forests had suffered as well - hundreds of trees were sometimes required to be felled in order to construct and outfit a single galleass. Deforestation in certain areas on the Meseta Central was so severe during the years 1570-1585 that many hundreds died from exposure and famine due to the lack of fuel. Reports of fuel shortages and hardship on the Meseta prompted Gabriel to form a Council of Forestry (Consejo/Conselho de Silvicultura), technically an appendage to the Council of State, which would regulate the cutting and replanting of trees, and imported thousands of pine saplings to be planted along the Sierra de Guadarrama and the Serra de Estrela [2]. Likewise, the minting of gold and silver coinage in Spain would increase exponentially during the war of 1570-1577, leading to the creation of a regulatory body of gold and silversmiths in Toledo in 1580 to mitigate further devaluation of Spanish currency.

    What would be harder to regulate were the usage of Spain’s recruitable males. Primarily following the suggestion of his trusted advisor García Álvarez de Toledo y Osorio, 4th Marquess of Villafranca del Bierzo and son of the former alcalde of Naples, Juan Pelayo had first put forward the idea of a standing army proportionate to the demographics of the kingdoms of Spain and proportionate to Spain’s needs in 1573. Given the Ottoman sultan’s ability to quickly raise up armies numbering above 100,000, it was estimated that Spain should at the very least be able to maintain an army of 120,000 in order to properly defend itself. The potentates of Naples, Sicily, and Sardinia were immediately on board with the idea of expanding the Spanish monarchy’s standing army, especially when its expansion was done in consideration of the marauding Turks that were desolating Southern Italy. In Iberia, however, this “union of arms” would be a much harder sell. The cortes of Spain’s kingdoms were fairly easy to convince of a standing army while the Turks were outside the walls of Naples, but once the Duke of Alba drove Piyale Pasha back in 1574 and the Holy League shattered the Muslim fleet in 1575, the proposed union of arms seemed unnecessary (both to the cortes and - at the time - also to Juan Pelayo). The king of Spain let the idea be shelved until 1578, when he intended to force it through the cortes, but he unfortunately passed away a mere 7 months into negotiations, leaving the proposal in the hands of his son, Gabriel. Much of the Spanish nobility was still harboring deep resentment over its humiliation in 1566, and, as the Turkish threat appeared to be undone, they were prepared to use their influence in the cortes to stonewall any further empowerment of the monarchy and the Spanish state. Likewise, while Castile’s streamlined political mechanism left it prostrate before the Spanish monarch, the extensive fueros of the Crown of Aragon and the fiercely guarded independence of the Crown of Portugal meant that the two other constituent kingdoms of Spain would not surrender their manpower to a Castile-oriented monarch without a fight - especially when submitting meant footing the bill for the year-round training, drilling, feeding, and housing of thousands of professional soldiers. Those opposed to the union of arms were also confident that Gabriel would be an easier opponent than Juan Pelayo, as he was considerably more reticent than his father.

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    El Rey Gabriel, c. 1579​

    Gabriel, however, had been enmeshed in the Spanish government for 15 years before his accession to the throne, during which time Juan Pelayo continuously stressed the importance of Gabriel eventually safeguarding his Leyes Nuevas and the post-1566 state of affairs once made king. The new king was therefore prepared to see the union of arms through, no matter what concessions were necessary. For the kingdom of Aragon and the principality of Catalonia, the longstanding exclusion of subjects from the Crown of Aragon from the Atlantic endeavors of Spain’s Castilian and Portuguese subjects and their unofficial exclusion from Spanish affairs in general. A missive from the Generalitat of Catalonia decried the treatment of Aragonese travelers in Castilian lands as “being treated as aliens in the lands of their very cousins …. shunned and offered contempt in the most rudimentary exchanges.” In 1582 an agreement was reached, whereby the constituent kingdoms of the Crown of Aragon would offer 16,000 troops on a yearly basis if the prohibition against Aragonese settlement in the Americas and North Africa (the latter hardly enforced) were done away with, and if an Aragonese consulate were allowed to establish itself adjacent to the Casa de Contratación and the Casa de Prestación in Sevilla. For Portugal, all that was needed were the substantiated reports in 1583 of thousands of laborers hollowing out locks from the lagoon of El Mallahah in the north and at as-Suways in the south, proving the Turks’ commitment to connecting the Eastern Mediterranean to the Red Sea. With the 4-year ceasefire of 1582 with the Ottomans drawing to a close, a standing army would be ratified by an unprecedented gathering of all three cortes of Spain at Madrid in October of 1585, after having been ratified by the kingdoms of Naples, Sicily, and Sardinia separately from April to June. 16,000 Portuguese troops would be added to the 16,000 from Aragon, alongside the 40,000 from Castile, and 12,000 from Naples, Sardinia, and Sicily, reaching a more modest 84,000 soldiers to be expected at any time from the kingdoms of Spain. Deep seated trouble was brewing in Spanish Italy, and the conflict with the Turks and their allies was progressing into the Indian Ocean, but Spain was keeping apace to evolve.

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    [1] This whole battle might sound fantastical, but this is almost copy-paste what nearly happened to the new Turkish fleet IOTL after Lepanto.
    [2] OTL Philip II also seeded the Sierra de Guadarrama with thousands of imported pines, although this was done for primarily aesthetic purposes IIRC.
     
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    • A Random Man

    A Random Man

    Nice chapter, just read all the current chapters of this series, a long and entertaining read. The war between the Ottomans and the Holy League was great to read. I hope the Ottomans are pushed out of Europe earlier. Like the centralizing efforts of Gabriel, much needed with a Empire he controls. Can we see more of France and the HRE? Keep up the good work.
     
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