>> From the Library of
Congress in Washington DC. >> Jason Steinhauer:
Well good afternoon. My name is Jason Steinhauer
and I'm a program specialist at the John W Kluge Center
at the Library of Congress. Before we begin today's
program, please take a moment to check your cell phones
and other electronic devices, and please set them to silent. I'll also make you aware that this
afternoon's program is being filmed for future placement on the
Kluge Center website as well as our YouTube and iTunes channels. I encourage you to visit
our website loc.gov/kluge, to view other lectures, excuse me, delivered by current
and past Kluge scholars. Today's lecture is presented
by the John W Kluge Center at the Library of Congress. The Kluge Center is a vibrant
scholar center on Capitol Hill that brings together scholars and
researchers from around the world to stimulate and energize one
another, to distill wisdom from the library's rich
resources, and to interact with policymakers and the public. The center offers opportunities
for senior scholars, postdoctoral fellows, and PhD
candidates to conduct research in the Library of Congress
collections. We also offer free public lectures,
such as this one, symposia, conferences, other programs, and
we administer the Kluge prize, which recognizes outstanding
achievement in the humanities and
social sciences. For more information
about the Kluge Center, please visit our website
loc.gov/kluge and I invite you to sign up for our email alerts on
your way out this afternoon to learn about future programs,
as well as opportunities to conduct your own research. And as an aside, we are
currently accepting applications for Kluge fellowships,
which is a fellowship that today's speaker holds. We'll be accepting those
applications through July 15th. Today's program is titled The
Kingdom of Jerusalem and War Against the Infidel, sixteenth
century doctrines of just war and the origins of
the Spanish Empire. It features scholar Andrew
Devereux, currently a Kluge fellow at the John W Kluge Center. While at the Library of
Congress, Andrew has been working on a book project that takes an
expansive view of Spanish rationales for empire by analyzing processes
of Mediterranean expansion against similar episodes in
early 16th century Americas. His talk today examines the legal
and moral questions of empire on the threshold of the early
modern era by casting light on Spain's expansionary ventures in
the Mediterranean in the late 15th and early 16th centuries. Andrew Devereux is
assistant professor of history at Loyola Marymount University. He's a historian of the medieval
and early modern Mediterranean. He earned his PhD from
the department of history at Johns Hopkins University, where his dissertation examined
Spanish imperial ideologies in the context of the
Mediterranean world. During 2011 and 2012, he was an
Ahmanson-Getty postdoctoral fellow at UCLA's William Andrew
Clark Memorial Library. He has published in the Journal
of Spanish cultural studies. He has contributed book chapters
to, In and of the Mediterranean, medieval and early
modern Iberian studies, and to representing imperial rivalry
in the early modern Mediterranean. His work has been recognized with
grants from the IIE-Fulbright, the National Endowment for the
Humanities, the Spanish Ministry of Culture and Education, and of
course, the Library of Congress. He is a founding member of
the Spain-North Africa project and a member of its
executive committee. So please join me in
welcoming Andrew Devereux. [ Applause ] >> Andrew Devereux: Well
thank you so much Jason for that very kind introduction
and thanks to all of you for being here this afternoon. I just wanted to start things off
today by expressing my gratitude. First of all, having the opportunity
to spend this academic year as a fellow here at the Kluge
Center has been extraordinary. And when I was growing
up in Charlottesville, Virginia in the 1980s,
stories circulated about the philanthropist
John W Kluge who lived on an estate somewhere
outside of town in the rolling farmland
near Charlottesville. And at the time, I had no idea that
I would someday be a beneficiary of his largess and I
am profoundly grateful. I would also like to
extend my deepest gratitude to the staff here at
the Kluge Center. Mary Lou Reker, Travis
Hensley, JoAnne Kitching, Jason Steinhauer, and Dan Terullo. All of you share a commitment to making this a place
where ideas matter. It is greatly appreciated. Moreover, the interim directors
during my tenure here, Bob Gallucci and Janice Heinz, have both
cultivated an atmosphere of vigorous intellectual exchange. And of course, all the fellows here with whom I've had the tremendous
good fortune to interact this year. From the talks you've given and
from countless conversations in this wonderful setting, I've
learned an extraordinary amount. So thank you. My talk today brings
together sections of several different
chapters of my book manuscript that I've been working on this year. And it gives a sense of the overall
shape of the project and some of the major themes that
I'm exploring in the book. So I'm going to begin
today with an anecdote. In early January of
1516, the Aragonese King, Ferdinand the Catholic,
widower of Isabella of Castille, was in the region of
Extremadura in southwestern Spain, which you can see highlighted
in yellow here on this map. The 64-year-old king was ill and many feared this
illness would be his last. In anticipation of this possibility,
Ferdinand had recently drawn up his last will and testament. And in Extremadura, he was to meet
with the ambassadors of Charles of Ghent, the King's
grandson and appointed heir. The chronicler and member
of the Royal Council, Lorenzo Galindez de
Carvajal, upon whose version of this narrative I'm drawing here,
relates that while in the town of Madrigalejo, royal counselors
informed the king that he stood at death's door and
urged him to confess and to receive the sacraments. Ferdinand however, turned away
his confessor, Juan de Matienzo, and suggested that the friar was
more interested in negotiating with the king for gifts and
privileges than in helping him to unburden his conscience. Ferdinand insisted
that he was not dying. Apparently a few weeks earlier
while the king was in Plascencia, a member of his counsel had
come from the nearby town of El Barco de Avila bringing word
from a local Bayata [phonetic], a holy woman reputed to
possess powers of prophecy. This particular Bayata had
been an intermittent presence of Ferdinand's court for at least
seven years, and our source tells us that she had prophesied that
King Ferdinand would not die until he had conquered Jerusalem. Eventually, members of the
royal entourage concerned for the salvation of
Ferdinand's soul, prevailed on the king
to accept last rites. Ferdinand called back his confessor
who administered the sacraments. On the afternoon of January 22nd,
Ferdinand received extreme unction, and on January 23, he died wearing
the habit of the Dominican order. Galindez de Carvajal
recorded that the cause of death was edema
combined with heart disease. He wrote that some, however, had a different explanation
for the king's demise. Citing the fact that Ferdinand's
jaw drooped at the end of his life, some believed that he had died from ingesting a concoction
of harmful herbs. Galindez de Carvajal asserted that nothing certain was
known of this allegation. But the theory was that Ferdinand
had been given an herbal potion designed to arouse his desire
for the Queen, his second wife, Germaine de Foix, because he
hoped to conceive with her an heir for his realms of Aragon and Naples. Now I'd like to pause here to
take stock of a few salient points that are conveyed by this anecdote. When we imagine the early modern
Spanish Empire, we reflexively think of the establishment of
colonies in the Caribbean and on the American mainland. An empire decidedly
Atlantic in its orientation. Less noted is the fact that
concurrent with this moment of Atlantic expansion, Spain
embarked on an ambitious course of Mediterranean conquest. Between 1497 and 1510, the crowns
of Aragon and Castille won control of the southern half of the Italian
peninsula and established a string of outposts and presidios
along a 2500 mile stretch of the North African coastline, thereby making Spain the dominant
power in the Western Mediterranean. And this map demonstrates some
of what I'm talking about here. You can see the arrows
showing the expansion into some of the North African cities and
presidios that Spain occupied. In some cases, for just a few
decades, and in some cases, for several centuries, or in
the case of Melilla and Ceuta, right up until the present day. King Ferdinand of Aragon intended to
use his newly acquired territories as forward bases from which
to extend his conquests into the eastern Mediterranean
and beyond. The monarch and many of his advisers
harbored plans to conquer Egypt, Greece, Anatolia, Palestine,
and a vaguely swath of Asia. If we are to believe the
chronicler Galindez de Carvajal, then even in his final days,
Ferdinand remained focused on his Mediterranean interests. Moreover, this anecdote that
I have opened with today, contests the traditional
teleological interpretation of Spanish history that is tended
to present the Union of the crowns of Aragon and Castille through the
marriage of Ferdinand and Isabella as the starting point
of the inexorable rise of the early modern Spanish empire. In fact, Ferdinand was
attempting, right up to the end, to produce a male heir who would
inherit his patrimonial lands of the Crown of Aragon, which
included Eastern Iberia as well as the Italian possessions of
Sardinia, Sicily, and Naples, but that did not include Castille. And when I refer to the Crown of
Aragon, it's in green on this map. So you can see it here in
Eastern Iberia and then stretching across to the Central
Mediterranean, including the islands and the southern Italian peninsula. Galindez de Carvajal's account
illustrates that the ultimate union of Aragon and Castille was in fact
an accident that occurred only because the aging king, in spite
of his consumption of aphrodisiacs, was unable to produce an heir with
his second wife Germaine de Foix. Galindez de Carvajal occupied
numerous important positions at Ferdinand's court, including
posts on the Council of Castille and as official chronicler. In this capacity, he spent a great
deal of time in the king's presence. A fact that suggests that
he knew Ferdinand's mind or, at the very least, understood
the capacity of the written word to serve as vehicle for the
projection of the sort of image that Ferdinand desired
to see propagated. In this light, it is tempting to
read the anecdote about the conquest of Jerusalem as the conqueror's
attempt to portray the king in as pious a light as possible. And yet, the Mediterranean
orientation of Ferdinand's reign was quite real. As King of Aragon, Ferdinand
inherited a Mediterranean political outlook that shaped his priorities. These Mediterranean interests
entangled the Spanish realms of Aragon and Castille in
conflicts with Portugal, France, the Ottoman Empire, and
sundry North African states. These Mediterranean wars
required legal justification. What the eminent historian of
Latin America, Lewis Hanke, termed the Spanish Struggle for
Justice in the Conquest of America, is a well-known historical topic. One that embroiled the likes
of Bartolom de las Casas, Juan Gin s de Sepœlveda, and
Francisco de Victoria in debates over the possibility for
non-Christian peoples to exercise dominium or
to enjoy sovereignty. Less noted is the fact that
Spanish wars and conquests in the Mediterranean,
whether in Catholic Italy or in Muslim North Africa, also demanded legal and
moral justification. Galindez de Carvajal's
reference to Ferdinand's interest in effecting a Christian
recovery of Jerusalem is related to these legal arguments. We will get to these later in
this talk, but in order to arrive at the eastern Mediterranean, I
would first like to shift attention to the southern Italian
kingdom of Naples. The protracted struggle
to control this realm in the central Mediterranean ties
together a number of the themes of this talk and of my book project. During the second half of the 15th
century, the kingdom of Naples, comprising the southern
half of the boot of Italy, shown here with the red arrow,
was ruled by a cadet branch of the Spanish royal dynasty. In addition to internal instability,
such as repeated baronial revolts, external threats added
to the realm's problems. In particular, Ferdinand of Aragon
held a rival claim to the crown as did the [inaudible] of France. During the final two
decades of the 15th century, the Kingdom of Naples became the
object of the expansionist designs of three ascended states that sought to become hegemonic powers
in the Mediterranean. Between 1480 and 1495, Naples
was invaded successively by the Ottoman Empire,
by France, and by Spain, finally being incorporated into the
Spanish Crown of Aragon in 1503. The way these conflicts played
out and the political vocabulary, the actors involved chose to
articulate their objectives and claims, illustrates a great deal about the religio-political
understanding of empire in the late 15th and early
16th century Mediterranean. In two discrete episodes
of conflict, one against the Ottoman Empire
and the other against France, the Catholic monarchs
Ferdinand and Isabella, along with their diplomats,
articulated their Italian policies as a holy war undertaken
in defense of the church and the body politic of Christendom. The Spanish crown asserted
its sovereignty in the Neapolitan kingdom
through the use of a rhetoric that represented Spain as the
guarantor of peace and stability within the Christian Commonwealth. Commensurately, Spaniards attempted
to invalidate the claims put forward by their French rivals,
depicting the French as a threat to the security of Christendom on
a magnitude equal to or greater than that posed by
the Ottoman Empire. So I'll begin here with
the Ottoman Empire. In July 1480, an Ottoman
fleet laid siege to Rhodes, off the coast of Anatolia, and
at that time, the headquarters of the Knights of St.
John of Jerusalem. The Grand Master of the military
order wrote to Ferdinand pleading for assistance in the face
of this threat for the sake of what he termed, the
well-being of Christendom. Ferdinand responded by taking the
military order under his custody for the benefit of the body
politic of Christian believers. Or to use the term that Ferdinand
used, [foreign language], which I'm translating roughly to
mean the Christian Commonwealth or the body politic of
all Christian believers. Just days later on August 11th
1480, Ottoman forces invaded and occupied Otranto on the Adriatic
coast of the kingdom of Naples. Western Europeans viewed the
Ottoman occupation of Otranto as a grave threat to the
stability of the Neapolitan kingdom and to the Italian
peninsula as a whole. In light of Ottoman conquests in
the Balkans during the late 14th and early 15th centuries, concern that Naples might
succumb was not unfounded. Moreover, should Naples fall,
the kingdom's immediate neighbor to the north, the Papal States,
including the city of Rome, would lie exposed to the forces of
Mehmed who had earned the sobriquet of conqueror through his capture
of Constantinople in 1453. Prophecies of a Turkish advance
as far as Rome circulated in both Christian and Islamic
lands during the second half of the 15th century. Within Ottoman territories, Rome
was represented as the red apple. The conquest of which, in the wake
of their conquest of Constantinople, would affirm the Ottomans legitimacy
as heirs to the Roman Empire. In Western Europe of course, prophecies of an Ottoman
conquest of Rome sparked dread. So in 1480 when the
Ottomans captured Otranto, the news quickly spread
throughout Europe. Peter Schott, a canon
of Strasburg whose study of the classics no doubt influenced
his views of Rome, was so concerned that the Ottoman advance would not
be stemmed that he traveled to Rome to visit the Holy Sea in case
it should fall to the Turks and be lost to Christendom forever. Following a pattern established in
his response to the siege of Rhodes, Ferdinand of Aragon portrayed the
Ottoman presence on Italian soil in terms that reflected this sense of an existential crisis threatening
the entirety of Christendom. Ferdinand emphasized that
the Turkish occupation of Otranto posed a
threat well beyond Naples. Warning of "the hardship that all
Christendom suffers as a result of the Turkish invasion of Italy". And positing that Christians
did not resist, then the Ottomans "would easily
establish dominion over Italy and Rome to the great offense of
our Lord God and to the detriment of the Christian religion". When Neapolitan forces ultimately
recovered Otranto a year later, Ferdinand celebrated the news
in a letter to the Duke of Milan as representing the liberation
of Italy and the restoration of a significant portion of
the Republic of Christendom. For years following the
Ottoman withdrawal from Otranto, Ferdinand continued to use a
Christian universalist discourse to frame the external forces
menacing the Italian peninsula. For example, in June 1482,
he expressed deep concern over the Ottoman presence in
Verona, modern [inaudible] Albania, just 50 miles across the Adriatic
from the Kingdom of Naples. "Being in Verona so close
to Italy, should the enemy of our faith see Italy
divided and weakened by war, he will launch an attack". Such an invasion, suggested
Ferdinand, would pose a threat not only
to the Neapolitan Kingdom and the other Italian states, but
would jeopardize the very survival of the Christian religion
by inflicting "such great universal harm to
Christendom, as might follow from an Ottoman assault,
should the internecine turmoil in Italy persist". Now it comes as little
surprise that Christian rulers in 15th century Europe portrayed
Ottoman westward advances as posing a threat to the
survival of Christendom. King Charles VIII of France,
like Ferdinand of Aragon, styled himself an exemplary
Christian Prince and champion of the Christian Commonwealth. Intriguingly, King Charles
soon found himself the target of precisely the same rhetoric
the Spanish had recently deployed to characterize the Ottoman threat. In September 1494, Charles
VIII led forces across the Alps and into Italy, pressing
his own dynastic claim to the Kingdom of Naples. Drawing on centuries-old
crusading associations between the southern Italian
lands and the holy land, the French king indicated
that his incursion into Naples would be merely the
first step in a much grander design of Mediterranean conquests. In the context of the 1490s with
the second Rome, Constantinople, now the seat of an Islamic empire, the crusading resonances
Charles invoked took on a new sense of urgency. Looking well beyond the
southern, the southern reaches of the Italian peninsula, Charles
depicted his actions as part of a strategy to subjugate
the Ottoman Empire and as an important first step
toward a Christian recovery of the holy land. The reigning pope, Alexander VI,
even offered crusade indulgences to French soldiers who participated
in the invasion of Naples. As the French forces
marched south through Italy, Ferdinand of Aragon responded
immediately in a desperate attempt to prevent his arch rival from attaining a position
of hegemony in Italy. In October 1494, Ferdinand and
Isabella wrote their ambassadors in Rome, counseling them on how to represent the Spanish
monarchs protest against the French king's
actions before the papal Curia. And urging them to emphasize
the degree to which Ferdinand and Isabella had always worked
for the peace and tranquility of the Christian Republic,
and the union and concord of Christian princes. This vocabulary was of a piece
with Ferdinand's response to the Ottoman threat during
the occupation of Otranto. Painting the French as a threat
equal to that posed by the Turks, Ferdinand and Isabella lamented
that the eruption of war in Italy would cause as
much harm to Christians as would war against the Turks. The Spanish monarchs went on to warn
that if the French did not desist, there would result "universal
harm and great danger to the Christian Republic". The Spanish response to French
aggression was of course, but one side of a dialogue
of competing claims. The French King appealed to
a similar political ideology, representing himself
as a crusading king and portraying his invasion
as divinely sanctioned. The King's Italian partisans
appealed to the same imagery. In Florence, the charismatic
preacher, Savonarola, painted Charles as
a leader sent by God to punish the institutional
church for its sins and to purge it of impurities. When Charles entered the
city of Naples and triumph on February 22nd 1495, he rode through Naples wearing
the imperial cloak and adorned with a quadruple crown
representing France, Naples, Constantinople, and Jerusalem. The Regalia of Constantinople
was intended to convey Charles' imperial
rank, affirming the French King as the long-awaited leader
who would reunite the Eastern and Western halves
of the Roman Empire. In response to such
French claims, however, the Spanish issued their own, suggesting that Charles' crusading
professions amounted to not and that his actions were
in fact counterproductive, insofar as the instability
they wrought in Italy could invite a
second Turkish invasion. Several months after Charles'
triumphal entry into Naples, agents in the employ of the
Spanish crown issued a broadside for circulation outside of Spain. It read in part, their
majesties Ferdinand and Isabella wanted nothing
more than to undertake the holy and just war against the
Muslim kings of Africa, and toward this end, they were
already making preparations in Andalucia and in the ports along
the coast, and it is to be assumed that their plans would have
succeeded due to the justice of their cause and their holy
intentions, but as a result of the machinations of the
devil, enemy of Christianity and of the church,
the king of France at that time took it upon himself
to invade and conquer the Kingdom of Naples without first adjudicating
his rights to the realm. And their highnesses, Ferdinand
and Isabella, feared that the war of Naples would disrupt
the peace of the church and that the Pope would be
grievously harmed by this. And that from this would
follow an infinite number of misfortunes throughout
all Christendom, as indeed was later
shown to be the case. In effect, the document portrayed
the French invasion as an act of aggression that distracted
from the universal goal of crusade against the infidel that
Christian princes ought to share. In stark contrast to Charles'
triumphal entry into the city of Naples as a crusading king,
the text depicted the French king in his assertion of his
claim to Naples as an enemy of Christendom and of the church. The Spaniard's rhetoric implied that
Ferdinand and Isabella did not act as did Charles VIII, they
were defenders of Christendom, not violators of the pax Christiana. Ultimately, the Spanish monarchs
responded to the French conquest of Naples by sending
a military force led by the grand captain
Gonzalo Fern ndez de C-rdoba. After eight years of
intermittent warfare, Ferdinand and Isabella finally
incorporated the Neapolitan kingdom into the Spanish Crown
of Aragon in 1503. Aware of the charge that their
counter invasion could be viewed as further destabilizing the
Italian peninsula, Ferdinand and Isabella made several strategic
choices concerning the portrayal of their military response. The Spanish monarchs and their
counselors could have argued that they had a dynastic
obligation to intervene, and that the armada was sent to assist their cousin,
the Neapolitan king. Alternatively, in light of rumors that the French king was
contemplating an invasion of Aragonese Sicily, Ferdinand
could have cast a military response as a defensive move to
protect his island kingdom. Ferdinand and Isabella and
their counselors however, chose not to employ
a dynastic discourse to legitimate their policy. Instead, drawing on
a similar approach to that they had employed 15
years earlier during the Ottoman occupation of Otranto, they opted
to depict their military response to the French invasion as
a defense of the church and of Christendom at large. At a meeting of the Catalan
Parliament in December 1495, Ferdinand addressed the assembled
representatives on the matter of the French conquest
of Naples in a bid to convince the Catalans
to furnish troops. Ferdinand represented Charles'
actions as constituting an act of war against the church and as sowing division
throughout Christendom. As an exemplary Christian Prince,
Ferdinand had avoided declaring war against France for as long
as possible, he claimed. But events had finally forced him
to form a league with the pope, with the holy Roman Emperor, with
Venice, and with the Duke of Milan "for the well-being and
peace of Christendom". Ferdinand stressed to his Catalan
subjects, and it's worth noting here that the Catalans were
traditionally enemies of France. So in a sense, Ferdinand is
preaching to the choir here, he stressed that the alliance
that he had formed stood not to the detriment of France, but
rather in defense of the church. Now several particularities
in the struggle for Naples, may have led the Spanish monarchs
to represent their actions as undertaken solely in
defense of the church. In other words, to choose
the rhetorical strategy that I've been analyzing here. I do not have time to go in
to all of them in detail here, but there are several
that are worth noting. First, the kingdom of Naples
was a thief of the papacy. Meaning that an invasion of Naples
could be construed as an act of aggression against the pope. Second, and perhaps more
important, Italy's proximity to Ottoman ruled lands
in the Balkan Peninsula and the Eastern Mediterranean
served to increase the perception of an Italy and a Christendom
under siege. As the diplomatic correspondence
examined thus far demonstrates, Ferdinand and his counselors
frequently elided the safety and security of the
Italian peninsula with that of the entirety of Christendom. The evidence presented here
suggests that the equation between the security of Italy and
the security of the body politic of Christendom was an intentional
strategy employed in order to depict Ferdinand's interests and
actions in the Italian peninsula as deriving from a devotion to
the defense of Christendom rather than a desire to attain
dominion over any part of Italy. The dynastic dispute over Naples
between the houses of Valois and Trastamara was transformed
into a referendum on the survival of Christendom in the face of
the ascendant Ottoman Empire, a fact reflected in the
rhetoric that the French and Spanish sides deployed
throughout the conflict. Thus, what was at root
the continuation of a centuries-old dynastic struggle
took on the aspect of a holy war for the defense of Christendom. The factors elucidated here,
particularly Naples' exposure to Ottoman attack, raised the stakes
of the Franco-Spanish struggle, and viewing it with
the aura of a crusade. The papacy's actions
contributed to this perception. In July 1496, in reversal of
his proffer of indulgences to French soldiers two years before, Pope Alexander VI granted plenary
indulgences to those who died in Naples fighting to defend the
church against the French invaders. This perception of the war of Naples as a holy war spread well beyond
the Iberian and Italian peninsulas. Soldiers from Germany and other
northern European lands ventured to Italy to fight, viewing their
military service as merely one facet of a holy pilgrimage of sorts. This was an outgrowth
of a pattern established over a decade earlier
during the war of Granada. And I'm referring here to the
decade-long war between 1482 and 1492 that led to the Castilian
conquest of the last Muslim polity on the Iberian peninsula,
Nasrid Granada. Soldiers from northern Europe who
traveled to the Iberian peninsula to fight for Castille in the war against Muslim Granada frequently
combined their military service with religious pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela
in northwestern Spain. And we know this because surviving
safe conduct passes issued by Ferdinand and Isabella
attest to that fact, being issued to Germans returning to
their homeland before and embarking on a crusade, on a pilgrimage
to Santiago on their way. In light of the fact that
Granada was under Islamic rule, it is not surprising that these
Germans viewed their military service in southern Iberia and their
pilgrimage to Santiago as two parts of a whole, a religiously purifying
experience in the Iberian peninsula, as the war of Granada was
depicted throughout Europe as a crusade undertaken for
the whole of Christendom. The fact that precisely
the same practice developed in the Italian wars comes as
a bit more of a surprise given that the warring parties
were both Christian kingdoms. Surviving safe conduct passes that
Ferdinand issued to German soldiers who had fought on the Spanish
side in Naples attest to the fact that some of these northern
Europeans combined their military service in Italy with
pilgrimage to Santiago, justice had been done during
the war against Nasrid Granada. The wars of Italy between France
and Spain and the war of Granada in which Castille conquered the
last Islamic polity in Iberia, were thus rendered
equivalent as holy endeavors that afforded opportunities for
spiritual salvation through holy war and devotional pilgrimage. German perceptions of the religious
valence of warfare conducted in the Italian Mezzogiorno
might be partially attributable to political alliances. Since May of 1493, Spain had been
allied with the Holy Roman Empire through a dual marriage alliance. The alliance was one component
of King Ferdinand's tactic to encircle France by forming pacts
with all of France's neighbors. In light of the enmity between the
Emperor Maximilian and the monarchs of France, it is likely that the
war in Naples was also portrayed in German lands as a
religious obligation. The pilgrimage destination
of Santiago however, raises further questions. Medieval Castilians had developed
an association between Santiago and wars against Muslims. An association that had led to
the transformation of the apostle into a medieval Crusader,
Santiago Matamoros or St. James the moor-slayer. And this is a 15th century
painting of Santiago here. This is from an altarpiece
in the Alcazar in Segovia. And it might not be immediately
apparent here, but this is St. James on his white horse, and what
you see underneath his feet, underneath his horse there
are the four severed heads of Muslim enemies. So this represents really
extraordinary transformation of the Christian apostle
into a medieval Crusader. In this association of Santiago
with war against enemies of the faith may explain in part
the decision by German soldiers to undertake the lengthy journey from southern Italy
to Northwest Spain. Now we don't know exactly
how they got there. They could have been returning
by ship, going back to Germany around the Iberian Peninsula
and up the West Coast France, in which case Santiago would
not be too far out of the way. But they might have
been going overland. Nothing in the safe conducts
indicates what the route was. In any event, the German
soldiers choice of pilgrimage destination
likely reflects the perception that southern Italy formed a
frontier zone on the front lines in a struggle against
the forces of Islam, as embodied by the Ottoman Empire. In some sense, the Spanish crown's
choice of rhetoric through which to portray the Italian wars
represented a transposition of the confessional frontier from
southern Iberia to southern Italy. In both locales, the Spanish
crown claimed to act as a bulwark against the Islamic world. Those who supported Spain in the Italian wars often
represented the French as every bit as much a threat to
Christendom as were the Turks. By 1511, the French crown of the
papacy were increasingly at odds. Open French hostility to the papacy
determined that Popes too came to portray French involvement
in Italy as akin to or worse than the Turkish threat. Following the battle
of Ravenna in 1512 in which a French army defeated
a joint Spanish papal force, a papal Nuncio wrote a letter to Pope Julius the second
detailing the carnage and describing the actions of the
French victors as worse than those of the Turks when they
conquered Constantinople. And I want to quote
from his letter here, "they have despoiled monasteries
and churches and have made off with chalices and crucifixes,
throwing the Eucharist and relics on the ground and stealing
the silver. Never did the Turks
commit such acts of cruelty when they conquered
Constantinople and Negroponte". So in the portrayal of these
episodes of intra-Christian warfare, we can see that the Turks are always
present even when they aren't. There was, however, another
factor that rendered the kingdom of Naples particular and that
contributed to the representation of the Franco-Spanish conflict
there in terms of a holy war. Since the 13th century, the
title to the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem had been joined to
the title of the Kingdom of Naples. It is this fact that explains why,
in his triumphal entry into Naples in February 1495, Charles VIII of France wore a quadruple
crown representing Naples as well as Jerusalem. From the moment that Ferdinand
incorporated Naples into the Crown of Aragon in 1503, he included
Jerusalem among his lengthy list of titles. What is more, the Aragonese
king gave every indication that his imperial projects in Italy
and North Africa were intended to lead to a Christian
recovery of the holy land. Following the Spanish conquest
of Tripoli in North Africa 1510, King Ferdinand composed a letter to Cardinal Francisco
Jimenez de Cisneros claiming that the victory demonstrated
God's clemency. And that the path, or camino, was
being opened for the completion of the holy enterprise,
a term that referred to the recovery of Jerusalem. Ferdinand's use of the
term camino gives a sense of the geographical crusading
strategy the King envisioned. The establishment of Spanish
control over the Maghreb, which could then serve as a locus
through which to move Spanish forces and supplies into the
eastern Mediterranean in order to support a Spanish assault
on Mamluk-ruled Palestine. This strategy is discernible in other diplomatic
correspondence relating to the Spanish conquest of Tripoli. On September 8th 1510, [inaudible],
the master of the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem
based at Rhodes, wrote to Ferdinand congratulating
him on recent Spanish victories in the African cities
of Bougie and Tripoli. The Knights of St. John had
ordered solemn processions to mark the conquest of Tripoli, he
related, and he expressed confidence that the Spanish would
soon reach Egypt where [inaudible] military order
would join forces with them to liberate the holy land. "May it please God that all
Christians following your Majesty's example, take up arms
against the infidels who have afflicted the
Christian nation for so long, and in their lands may we
raise the banner of the cross and recover the holy land, a task
that will not be as difficult as many ignorant people believe. May God Almighty carry out your
majesty's wishes and allow you to proceed with and complete the
conquest of Africa as far as Egypt, where we hope to join forces with
your highness' army and serve God in this worthy endeavor". [inaudible] letter, while ascribing
great importance to the conquest of Tripoli, places this
event into a broader strategy with Spain's North
African possessions serving as stepping stones toward Egypt. Aside [inaudible] intimates would
be employed as a forward base for a Christian assault
on the holy land. Ferdinand claimed the right to
lead the conquest of Jerusalem due to the fact that through
his acquisition of Naples, the title to Jerusalem
now belonged to him. Although the territory of
the Kingdom of Jerusalem was under the control of the Mamluks
of Egypt in the early 16th century, Ferdinand's diplomatic
correspondence reveals the way in which the possession of
this seemingly symbolic title in fact played a critical
part in his articulation of Spanish imperial interests in
lands ringing the Mediterranean. On February 28th 1510,
Ferdinand wrote to his ambassador in Rome instructing him to
solicit from Pope Julius II a bull that would grant Ferdinand the
right to the conquest of the lands of the East, a vaguely
defined region stretching from North Africa eastward
into Asia. And the Aragonese King wrote, I'm
quoting here, "and in the said bull that you are to procure, I desire
that it grant, in general terms, the lands from the eastern border of
the Kingdom of Tlemcen or beginning from the Kingdoms of Bougie
and Algiers inclusive, all the lands from
there toward the east. Perhaps some might raise concerns
saying that in such generality, this grant could be understood
to include all of Greece and Asia and to this I would respond that,
should God favor us with a conquest of these territories, it
would not be unsuitable that the apostolic sea
should grant us these lands. Although it is not necessary
to express it in these terms, but rather state your case
according to the generalities that I've outlined here". Now this is an absolutely
extraordinary request, I mean, incredibly audacious, but it's to
be understood, to be interpreted as being part of a series of
papal bulls of donation that had, going back over the
previous two decades. And if you think back to 1493
for instance, there's a series of five papal bulls that are
issued by Alexander VI that serve to grant lands newly discovered in
the Atlantic world, the Americas, to Spain and then to delimit
boundaries for prospective spheres of expansion between Spain
and Portugal in the Atlantic. A couple years after that in 1495, Alexander VI issues another
bull donating Africa to Spain. This is Mediterranean
Africa, it's to be understood as being a relatively small
geographical area compared to our modern understanding
of Africa, but still all of Mediterranean
Africa from Morocco all the way over to the Nile, to Spain. So what Ferdinand is asking
for here is of a piece with those earlier papal donations. He's asking for a similar
kind of papal donation of the lands of the East. But he emphasized that although
he desired the recognition of this right from the papacy, the
right to conduct these conquests of the East, that it
was a mere formality. Citing the Italian jurist, Bartolus
of Saxoferrato, Ferdinand claimed that his status as king
of Jerusalem entitled him to conduct conquests not
only in the holy land proper, but more generally
throughout Greece and Anatolia and in any other lands
ruled by the Turks. Indeed, Ferdinand expanded
his argument further stating that as King of Jerusalem,
he was aggrieved not only by the infidels occupying the holy
land, but by all other infidels. This, he claimed, rendered
any military action he took against non-Christians a just war. Now we see here in Ferdinand's
letter the articulation of a doctrine justifying any acts of
aggression that he might instigate in non-Christian lands
ringing the Mediterranean. A right that Ferdinand arrogates
to himself on the grounds that he is the titular
king of Jerusalem. And while Ferdinand's letter does
instruct his ambassador to solicit from the Pope the recognition
of this right, it is a right that Ferdinand
claims on dynastic grounds as King of Jerusalem, rather than as
deriving from the Pope's authority as dominos munde [phonetic]
as Lord of the world. So, what does all this mean? I think there are several
significant points that can be drawn from the material that
I've presented here. First, the rhetoric that Spaniards
employed to describe their response to the Ottoman invasion of
Italy in 1480 cast this event as an existential threat
for all of Christendom. This proved to be so effective
and so seductively powerful that 15 years later, Spaniards
used exactly the same discourse to portray the French
invasion of Italy. The use of this religio-political
vocabulary by Spaniards against a fellow Catholic power
productively complicates our sense of how religious discourses
were accessed and deployed in the early modern Mediterranean. While the grounds upon which
this rhetoric were deployed here ostensibly, this is ostensibly
against the external threat posed by the expansionist Ottoman
Empire, the religious discourse that permeates the
documents I've drawn on was directed primarily toward
an internal threat as embodied by the kingdom of France. In other words, what
I'm suggesting here is that while this is a discourse
that is predicated on this notion of there being a sharp division
between Christendom and Islam, in fact this is the kind of
rhetoric or political vocabulary which is just as often directed
towards a fellow Catholic power. So I think we should
rethink our conception of the Mediterranean being
bifurcated into Islamic and Christian halves
during this century. Second, these means of asserting
sovereignty through the claim to act as defender of the church
developed in the context of Mediterranean conflicts, but
were also deployed in other arenas of modern, of early
modern imperial expansion. Namely, Spanish claims
to the Americas. The legal doctrines justifying war against non-Christian
peoples were being worked out in the Mediterranean
basin in this crucible in which the Ottoman
Empire loomed large in the European imaginary
and consciousness. These doctrines were then adapted
and applied in a somewhat messy or awkward fashion to
the entirely novel set of circumstances the Spanish
encountered in the Americas. The American angle of
this story has been told. During my time here at the Kluge
Center, I've worked to shed light on the Mediterranean
counterpart and to demonstrate that these two processes
were intimately linked and informed one another
in the development of early modern Spanish
political thought on conquest, just war, and empire. Finally, I would like to
conclude with a brief comparison to a conflict that the eastern and
to the Mediterranean that was more or less contemporary to the
events I've examined here. During the Ottoman-Mamluk
struggle for control over Egypt and the holy cities of
the Levant and Hijaz, the Ottoman ruler Selim I employed
a discourse of legitimation that would've been completely
intelligible to the counselors at Ferdinand of Aragon's court. Scholars of the Ottoman Empire,
including Jamal [inaudible], [inaudible], and Giancarlo Casale
have noted that during a period of rapid expansion, and at times
contested political legitimacy, Selim cast himself as a guardian
of religious orthodoxy as a means of cementing his authority within
the Islamic world, particularly, vis-a-vis the ascendant Shia
Safavid empire in Persia. Following the Ottoman conquest of
Jerusalem, Medina, and Mecca in 1516 and 1517, Selim participated in
a triumphal entry into Cairo, the former Mamluk capital. In which he proclaimed himself
servant of the two cities, Medina and Mecca, and
assumed the title of caliph, claiming sovereignty over
all Muslims in an expression of sovereignty that Giancarlo
Casale has termed extraterritorial, meaning that this does not apply to a precisely defined
geographical space. While Spanish monarchs never
asserted claims of sovereignty over the Res publica
christiana quite as far-reaching as Selim's proclamation, the
similarities between the means of claiming political legitimacy
through defense of the faithful by rulers of the two ascendant
empires at opposite ends of the Mediterranean
points to commonalities in the way both empires
represented their mission according to a complexly negotiated engagement
with the accreted legacies of the Mediterranean world,
including the imperial legacy of ancient Rome, as well as
the universalist doctrines of both Christianity and Islam. Thank you. [ Applause ] And I'm eager to take questions. So any suggestions, comments,
questions, advice is more than welcome, and I understand that today we do not
have a roving microphone, so when you address your
question, I will just repeat it or give a brief synopsis of the
question into the microphone so that it does get
picked up for the podcast. Mike. >> I was wondering if you
could talk about the continuity of this discourse that you're
describing [inaudible] being applied in this, you know, 15th, 16th century context
[inaudible] much older. And I wondered what was new
about what the Spanish were doing or if anything was knew about
what the Spanish were doing with regards to this. >> Andrew Devereux: Just to
give a brief synopsis of that, Michael Sizer asked about the
continuity of this discourse. The language that I'm citing
here seems to bear a great deal of continuity going back
centuries before the time period that I'm looking at. So what is new about the
deployment of the discourse in the particular context
that I'm looking at. I think it's an outstanding
question, it's something that I've wrestled with actually
because it is the sort of discourse that you can actually
trace back to Augustine. I mean, it goes back centuries. And prior to the period that
I'm looking at, it's been used by French monarchs, by
holy Roman emperors, and by popes going
back hundreds of years. But I think that what's
distinct about it here is that the Mediterranean world has
become a very different place post 1453. I think the Ottoman Empire
really does change the calculus and it changes the
particular resonance that this kind of vocabulary
carries. And it's also unique because
it's being used by Spain in a way that I think is actually
an attempt to carve out a new political
space in a sense. I think that, you know, the
Spanish monarchs do not have a claim to the imperial title,
the Holy Roman Empire, but what they are trying
to do is they are trying to claim a responsibility
as guardians of the Res publica christiana. At this moment when the Ottoman
Empire seems to be unstoppable in the Eastern Mediterranean
and no one appears capable of checking their progress, here
are Ferdinand and Isabella were able to conquer Granada and then to move
into North Africa all in defense of the Christian Commonwealth. And so I think that what they're
doing there is they're to trying to sort of assume a mantle, an
imperial mantle in a way that sort of gives them a quasi
imperial status without actually having a
claim to the imperial title. So I don't know if that
answers your question, but I think that I'm trying to
get some of the context here that makes this quite particular. Will. >> First, I just want to say that I
think, I don't think I've ever heard such a clear explanation
of the complex and intricate diplomatic
[inaudible], it was just so clearly
explained, I really appreciate it. Following up on that, I wanted to
ask about if you have a kind of view of what your discourse is just
kind of being instrumentalized for these political and
imperial ends [inaudible]. So in other words, is it,
you know, to what extent. [ Inaudible ] >> Andrew Devereux:
Thank you very much. The question is whether this
discourse is being deployed in a purely instrumentalist
way, so in other words, this is a convenient way to make
an argument against the French for instance, or for the French
to make a similar argument against the Spanish, or whether
there is something more sincere operating here as well. And again, I think it's an
excellent question and something that I've wrestled with, I don't
think that it's answerable. Because I think that in a
sense, that entails something of a psychological understanding of
these actors that we can't perform. There's no way for us to get inside
the minds of Ferdinand or Julius II or King Charles of
France and try to discern to what extent this is
being sincerely deployed. But I think that what I'm, what
compels me here is not the question of to what extent this is just being
instrumentalized, but rather the way in which this vocabulary
is operating. Because I think that it's important
to note that they have choices, they have rhetorical choices here. You know, the Spanish, for instance,
could represent their engagement in the Italian peninsula or
their engagement in North Africa for instance, through
a dynastic discourse. And actually what's sort of
striking about all of this, and this is in a separate
chapter of the book manuscript, they actually articulate
their claims in Africa in a more dynastic discourse
than they do in Italy, which is fascinating
because it is Islamic. And, but I think that they
make a deliberate choice here to use this kind of discourse, this Christian universalist
discourse, because it does work. Whether or not, I mean any
discourse has the capacity to be used cynically by any actor
deploying discourse for any purpose. But I think that whether or not
Ferdinand believes it or whether or not Julius believes it, what's
interesting about the choice to use this kind of discourse
is that the decision to do so represents the assumption
among all of these different parties involved
that this will be effective. That this can gain
traction and can operate within the political
sphere of that time. So I think in order for it to
have the potential to do that, somebody at least, if not
Ferdinand, is buying into it. Yes Juan. >> Really excellent, thank
you so much for this talk. My question has to do with
the action of deployment of Spanish [inaudible]
in the face of all of this religious universalist
rhetoric. In the Persian Gulf where they were
not embarrassed at all to align with those Persian
shiites [inaudible]. And do you find any evidence that
they theorize this real [inaudible]. Do they ever talk about, you
know, other than sticking it to the Ottomans, any theoretical
justification to that alliance? >> Andrew Devereux: Yeah. This is a wonderful question
that Juan Cole has asked here about the slightly later decision
on the part of the Spanish under Charles V to forge an
alliance with Safavid Persia, Safavid Iran against the Ottomans. And this is wonderful
actually because, you know, what gets all the press here is the
impious alliance between Francis of France and Suleiman
the Magnificent. And what gets a whole lot less
press is the fact that Charles V, as the holy Roman Emperor and
successor to King Ferdinand in Spain, forges a very similar
kind of alliance with the Safavids. Now the rationale that's
used there is that, the Ottomans are the graver
danger to the Christian republic and so therefore, this is justified. There's also this really wonderful
strain of humanist scholarship about the Safavids viewing them as
being in some way sort of, you know, quasi Christians who inhabit the
East who might be potentially, you know, good allies
against the Ottoman Empire. And so all of this is sort
of a Latin Christian way to understand the Shia and to rationalize forging
alliances with them. Margaret [inaudible] had
done wonderful work there on the [inaudible], she
has a terrific article that addresses that. So it is sort of rationalized,
but in realpolitik terms, the Ottomans are closer and
they pose a graver danger. Yes. >> [inaudible speaker] >> Andrew Devereux: They, the
Spanish actually supply munitions to the Mamluks against the Ottomans and there's actually a Mamluk
victory over the Ottomans I believe in 1508, and the Spanish celebrate as if it was their own
victory back in Spain. And, you know, to, again, I
think that this discourse, to go back to an earlier question, I think that this discourse
does have the potential to be interpreted sincerely
on the part of people who are operating within
this sphere. But just to get back to this the
pragmatism or the realpolitik card, in a lot of Ferdinand's conquests
of North African Presidios, he actually forged
capitulation treaties with the local Muslim inhabitants
that allowed them to remain or, if not remain in the city itself,
be subject vassal populations on the outskirts of the city. So in other words, the policies
against the Muslims being enacted in Spanish-North Africa
were not nearly as harsh as the policies being enacted in
Iberia proper against the Muslims. So this complicates
our understanding of all this, it's pretty messy. Danielle. >> [inaudible speaker] >> Andrew Devereux: There are,
Danielle's question has to do with with visual culture and whether or not there are visual
representations of these ideals of Christian peace or
Christian universalism. Just to clarify, the image of
Santiago there, those are the heads of Muslims who have
been killed in battle. And so this notion of a Christian
universal peace is a peace that includes Christians and
Christians alone, and it has, there's no, I mean, in the minds of
these people living in the late 15th and early 16th century, that is
completely reconcilable with acts of war against enemies of the faith. There is wonderful sculpture in
southern Italy that gets produced around this time, 1509 and
in the years just after that, representing Ferdinand in marble
in the capacity of being a defender of Christendom against the Turk. And, you know, in Italy I think that
the discourse is really much more about the Turks because
they're closer to the Turks. Whereas in Iberia proper, the
discourse is much more about Muslims in North Africa and
there's a distinction drawn between these different
types of Muslims. The Turks are recent
arrivals relatively speaking in Mediterranean. But at any rate, yeah, in Italy, the way that this is
represented visually is as Ferdinand protecting Italy
from the Turkish expansion. And in Iberia proper, again, there
is wonderful imagery of this. Ferdinand actually participates
in a number of triumphal entries into Iberian cities, into
Valladolid, into Seville, and there's been some really good
work done analyzing the kinds of visual representations that are
deployed in those triumphal entries. They have these manufactured
archways that are temporary archways. They don't survive, they're made of
cardboard, something like cardboard, and there would be 12 Roman
archways, for instance, used in one of these entries, and
they're adorned and ornamented with all kinds of imagery
representing cardinal virtues, biblical and Spanish heroes,
and so on and so forth, and trying to equate the ruling
monarch with some of those heroes. Thank you. >> Jason Steinhauer: I think
we'll have to stop it there. But Andrew can stick
around for a few minutes to take additional questions,
so please join me in thanking. [ Applause ] >> Jason Steinhauer: Like
I said, Andrew can stick around for a few minutes to
take additional questions. For the Kluge Center, we are not
back here again for a program until the middle of July actually. July 14th, Bastille
Day, we have a lecture by Michael Sizer [assumed spelling]
about populist politics in Paris. And then towards the end of July,
we have three additional lectures by Kluge fellows and residents,
so please do sign our list to stay informed about those. And thank so much [inaudible]
and thank you to Andrew for a brilliant talk [applause]. >> This has been a presentation
of the Library Of Congress. Visit us at loc.gov.
I think this would be more fitting on /r/eu4 but it's still pretty neat.