Free Empires of the Sea - the Final Battle for the Mediterranean 1521-1580 by Roger Crowley

on the Barbary shore. It was an unattractive prospect but L’Isle Adam had no alternatives; without a base for piracy, the Order would certainly collapse. In 1530 Charles dispatched the fateful document to L’Isle Adam, “bestowing on the Knights in order that they may perform in peace the duties of their Religion for the benefit of the Christian community and employ their forces and arms against the perfidious enemies of Holy Faith—the islands of Malta, Gozo and Comino in return for the yearly presentation, on All Saint’s Day, of a falcon to Charles, Viceroy of Sicily.” This bargain placed the knights at the very center of the sea, in the eye of a rising storm.

CHAPTER 4
     
The Voyage to Tunis
     
1530–1535
     

    C HARLES’S NEED TO STRIKE COUNTERBLOWS was not confined to the shores of Spain and Italy. By 1530 warfare between sultan and emperor stretched diagonally across the whole of Europe, and Christendom perceived itself everywhere on the back foot. The central metaphor of Martin Luther’s famous protestant hymn, “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God,” was not randomly chosen: Suleiman was besieging Vienna at the time. Where the Ottomans thought of advance and encirclement, the Christian mind-set was obsessively defensive. Exorbitantly expensive fortress chains dotted the Hungarian plains; the Italians were busy constructing watchtowers along their vulnerable shores; the Spanish forts clung precariously to the shipwrecking coasts of the Maghreb. Everywhere the threat of Islam seemed to press.
             
     
    THE SCALE OF THE CONFLICT dwarfed all preconceptions. The early sixteenth century witnessed a new concentration of imperial power: the Austrian Hapsburgs and the Ottoman Turks were able to aggregate men and resources on an unprecedented scale—and to find the means to pay for them. The engines of warfare were the centralized bureaucracies in Madrid and Istanbul, which could raise taxes, levy men, dispatch ships, organize supplies, manufacture cannon, and mill gunpowder with a comparative efficiency unimaginable in the hand-made wars of the Middle Ages. Armies became bigger, cannon more powerful, logistics and resource allocation—within the limitations imposed by traveling times and communications—more sophisticated. It was a struggle between empires with global reach; the 1530s would see the Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro conquer Peru, the Ottomans attack India. A grid of interconnections between distant places drew the world together. The Austrians sought treaties with the Persians, the Ottomans with the French; the cause of German Lutherans was furthered by decisions taken in Istanbul; New World bullion paid for wars in Africa. If the commitment to holy war was the lever to empire, there were other forces at work. In Europe, the decline of Latin, new notions of national identity, and protestant revolt were shaking old certainties. The whole basin was prey to mysterious forces. Populations and cities grew rapidly, cash replaced barter, inflation effortlessly leaped the frontiers of faith.
    In the 1530s, this sense of global disturbance was widely felt across the Mediterranean. Millennial expectations gripped the popular imagination. Within Islam it was thought that the tenth century of the Muslim era would usher in the end of history; in Christendom, 1533 was taken to be the fifteen hundredth anniversary of the crucifixion. Prophecies abounded on both sides of the religious divide. It was widely believed that Suleiman and Charles were embarked on a contest for the world. In 1531, the Dutch humanist Erasmus wrote to a friend, “the rumour here—indeed not a rumour, but public knowledge—is that the Turk will invade Germany with all his forces, to do battle for the great prize, whether Charles or the Turk be monarch of the entire globe, for the world cannot any longer bear to have two suns in the sky.” The notion of a world ruler was much discussed by Charles’s advisers, though