16th-Century Doctrines of Just War & the Origins of the Spanish Empire

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I think this would be more fitting on /r/eu4 but it's still pretty neat.

👍︎︎ 1 👤︎︎ u/Irminsul773 📅︎︎ Oct 05 2016 🗫︎ replies
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>> 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.
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