As a young slave Rüstem, a Croatian pig farmer’s son, had riskily jumped out of a window to grab a trinket Suleiman had dropped. Hürrem had favoured a more handsome man for Mihrimah, but Rüstem paid the sultan’s Jewish doctor to declare that the man had syphilis. His enemy counterclaimed that Rüstem had leprosy, which was disproved by the presence in his robes of a louse – lice were believed to avoid lepers. In 1539, Rüstem, nicknamed Lucky Louse given his rise to power, and by now in his mid-forties, married the seventeen-year-old Mihrimah, becoming a
Suleiman was directing a global war, long neglected by European historians. In 1538 he sent eighty vessels and 40,000 men through the Red Sea to the Indian Ocean – probably the largest to ply those seas since the Ming treasure fleets. The Admiral of the Indian Ocean was an enslaved Hungarian eunuch and future grand vizier, Hadım Suleiman Pasha, now sixty-nine, who sailed from Jeddah, seized Aden (Yemen) from the Portuguese and then rendezvoused with the sultan’s Gujarati ally in an unsuccessful attack on Portuguese Diu (western India). In the Horn of Africa, Suleiman invaded Habesh (Eritrea) and captured Massawa, which remained Ottoman into the nineteenth century. He also sent troops and cannon to his allies, the sultans of Adal in Ethiopia and Ajura, in Somalia, to help their attack on local Christian enemies. These conquests brought a new intoxicant, derived from beans, long favoured by Yemenite sufis, to Cairo then to Constantinople: coffee. Coffee became a global commodity, with coffee houses contributing to the new sociability in cities. Barbarossa was the one of the first to add a coffee house to his mansion.
In the Mediterranean, Barbarossa seized Otranto as Suleiman threatened northern Italy; the admiral captured many of the last Venetian islands and strongholds, driving the republic to join the Holy League arranged by Pope Paul III against the Ottomans. In September 1538, near Preveza (Greece), Charles’s admiral Doria led 112 galleys and 50,000 troops against Barbarossa’s fleet of 122 as the latter’s Jewish-born admiral Sinan landed troops on the coast, covering the Ottoman rear. Barbarossa destroyed thirteen ships and captured thirty-six along with 3,000 prisoners, winning domination of the Mediterranean.
Charles was distracted by the decline of Isabella. Pregnant for the seventh time and possibly consumptive, she was ‘the greatest pity in the world, so thin as not to resemble a person’. In May 1539, she gave birth to a stillborn son, then died of postnatal fever at thirty-five. Charles collapsed – ‘Nothing can console me,’ he told his sister Maria – sending their son Philip to oversee her burial in Granada and commissioning Titian to paint her from existing portraits, thereafter always travelling with her image. He soon returned to his womanizing ways, secretly fathering a son, Geronimo, by a teenaged German servant girl. The boy was taken away from her and raised by courtiers – to emerge later.
Recovering from these blows, Charles planned a powerful attack on Algiers, but as usual he was impoverished – until the arrival from America of a dazzling fleet of treasure, dispatched by captain Pizarro, whose brother Hernando presented Charles with his first tranche of Peruvian gold and news of its conquest.
THE HABSBURG BROTHERS AND THEIR CONQUISTADORS
The emperor disapproved of Pizarro’s murders – ‘The death of Atahualpa displeased me because he was a sovereign’ – but added, ‘Since it seemed to you necessary, we approve it for now.’ Later he granted him the grandiloquent title marquess of the Conquest while agreeing ‘permanent allocations of indigenous inhabitations’ as effective slave labour.
The conquistadors were fortunate in their timing: Xauxa and Wanka tribes, who resented the Incas, served as Spanish auxiliaries, as did the anti-Atahualpa Incas. Without these allies, Pizarro’s coup would have been impossible.
