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

the emperor himself, more prudent about how such claims might be received in France or Protestant Germany, was less explicit. He was the defender of the faith against the infidel, both Islamic and Protestant. Suleiman, in a more unified Islamic world, could be forthright. “Just as there is only one God in heaven, there can be only one empire on earth,” his chief vizier, Ibrahim Pasha, roundly declared to visiting ambassadors. “Spain is like a lizard, pecking here and there at a bit of weed in the dust, while our sultan is like a dragon which gulps down the world when it opens its mouth.”
             
     
    BENEATH THE BRAGGING, there was popular fear in Istanbul of Charles’s aggressive intentions. Anxiety and pessimism, amplified by the failures in Hungary, dogged the city; omens were widely cited to suggest that the wheel of fortune would reverse again and restore Christian Constantinople. Like plague and a shortage of bread, these were symptoms of troubled times, but they reflected matching fears. If Charles’s dream was the restitution of Constantinople, Suleiman’s was the capture of Rome. Both men were committed to leading their armies in person, though careful to choose their terrain. By 1530 this contest had become increasingly personal. It centered on their rival claims to the crucial title, Caesar, and ownership of the center of the world. Nothing enraged Suleiman as much as the accounts of Charles’s coronation in 1530. “He detests the emperor and his title of Caesar, he, the Turk, causing himself to be called Caesar,” declared Francis I of France. The sultan was set on a face-to-face trial of strength with the man he only ever called “the king of Spain.” In the spring of 1532, Suleiman prepared to march his army up the Danube again and delivered a thunderous challenge: “The king of Spain has for a long time declared his wish to go against the Turks; but I by the grace of God am proceeding with my army against him. If he is great of heart, let him await me in the field, and then, whatever God wills, shall be. If, however, he does not wish to wait for me, let him send tribute.” Charles’s response appeared unequivocal. He wrote to his wife, “In the light of duty I have to defend the faith and the Christian religion in person.”
    Competition focused on the emblems of power. The details of Charles’s entry into Bologna had been minutely reported to the sultan. On his march north, Suleiman staged his own rival triumphs, contriving a matching iconography. From the Venetians he had commissioned a set of ceremonial objects worthy of a Roman emperor: a scepter, a throne, and an extraordinary jeweled helmet-crown, which the Italians claimed had been a trophy of Alexander the Great. He entered Belgrade in a cavalcade of opulent pageantry, “with great ceremony and pomp and with pipes and the sound of different instruments, that it was an extraordinary thing to marvel at and he went through triumphal arches along the streets of his progress, according to the ancient customs of the Romans.” It was propaganda war on a grand scale. Charles, detained by tetchy negotiations with the German Protestants, raised a substantial army and prepared to float it down the Danube. The stage seemed set for a final confrontation.
    Yet the definitive battle never happened. Suleiman was held up for weeks by the heroic defense of the small fortress of Köszeg in central Hungary; Charles was probably too prudent to risk open-field warfare anyway. Bogged down in the rain, Suleiman was again forced to retreat. It was an exhausting slog home across mountain passes and swollen rivers: “continuous rain…difficult river crossing…the fog so thick it’s impossible to tell one person from another” the campaign diary has a familiar ring to it. There were the habitual celebrations in Istanbul on Suleiman’s return—triumphant processions and nighttime illuminations to celebrate the happy conclusion to the war