The Grand Turk: Sultan Mehmet II - Conqueror of Constantinople and Master of an Empire (34 page)

Charles entered Lucca on 8 November, and on the following day he was welcomed in Pisa by the townspeople, who hailed him as their liberator from Florentine tyranny. Soon afterwards Viterbo surrendered to the French, whose advance was so rapid that Giulia Farnese, the Pope’s mistress, fell into their hands while travelling. She was soon released at the Pope’s request, however, according to Giorgio Brognolo, the Mantuan envoy. Brognolo, in relating this incident, ends his report by saying: ‘The French King will not meet with the slightest resistance in Rome.’

Rome was in a perilous situation, blockaded to seaward by the French-held fortress of Ostia and on land by the Colonna, and food was becoming scarce. The gates of Rome were chained and some were walled up. On 10 December Ferrantino, the Duke of Calabria, led the Neapolitan army into the city, with 5,000 infantry and 1,000 cavalry. Alexander prepared for the worst by moving into Castel Sant’Angelo, the papal fortress on the Tiber, taking Jem along with him.

The port of Civitavecchia was taken by Charles on 17 December, and on the same day the Orsini clan went over to the French and admitted them to their fortress of Bracciano, north-west of Rome, where the king set up his headquarters. French troops had already taken a number of castles along the roads leading into Rome, building wooden bridges over the Tiber. By 10 December they had even reached the walls of Rome, where they challenged the Neapolitan troops to come out and do battle with them. During the next three days French troops broke into the suburbs of Rome by Monte Mario and penetrated as far as the church of San Lazzaro and the fields close to Castel Sant’Angelo, where they seemed poised for an attack on the fortress.

By the end of December food supplies in Rome had just about run out, although Castel Sant’Angelo was still well stocked for a long siege. But the people of Rome had no intention of subjecting themselves to a protracted siege, and they made it known to the Pope that if he did not come to terms with Charles within two days they would themselves admit the king into the city.

Alexander now feared that he would lose the papacy along with Rome. He had hoped that the Holy Roman Emperor, Maximilian I, and Ferdinand of Spain would come to his aid, and even that the Venetians might help him. But all these possible allies were far away, and the French army was almost at the gates of Rome. Thus on Christmas morning Alexander finally decided to submit to Charles, who demanded that the Neapolitan army be withdrawn from Rome before the French entered the city. Ferrantino concurred and led his troops out of Rome under a promise of safe conduct from the French.

That evening three envoys sent by Charles entered Rome, and by the following day they had come to an agreement with Alexander on arrangement for the formal French entry into the city. On 30 December Count Gilbert Montpensier,
marechal
of the French army in Italy, would enter Rome with his troops as military governor of the city. Charles himself would enter Rome on New Year’s Eve and take up residence in the Palazzo San Marco.

Several points of contention remained, but these were put aside to be settled when the Pope and the king met in Rome. One of these was the question of Jem’s custody. Charles demanded that Alexander unconditionally surrender Jem to him, while the Pope was uwilling to give him up until the king was actually ready to embark on his crusade, and even then only for a limited period of time. Charles agreed to respect all the Pope’s rights, both temporal and spiritual. All of Rome on the left bank of the Tiber was to be occupied by the French army, while the Pope’s troops, consisting only of 1,000 cavalry and a few foot soldiers, occupied the Borgo, the quarter between the Vatican and Castel Sant’Angelo.

On 27 December an advance force of 1,500 troops entered Rome with the permission of the Pope. The rest of the French army entered the city during the afternoon of New Year’s Eve, along with King Charles, who took up residence in the Palazzo San Marco as agreed. During the days that followed a succession of cardinals and other dignitaries conferred with Charles and his advisers. Charles had three principal demands, the first of which was the right of free passage for his forces through the papal states, which would include the surrender to him of a number of fortresses, including Castel Sant’Angelo. Secondly, he wanted the Pope to acknowledge his right to the throne of Naples. Finally, he demanded custody of Jem, who, he said, was to be the centrepiece of his forthcoming crusade against the Turks.

Finally, on 15 January 1495, the Pope agreed to the king’s demands, which had been modified during the course of the negotiations. By the terms of the agreement Cesare Borgia was to accompany the French army as ‘cardinal legate’ (though really as a hostage) for the next four months. Jem was to be handed over to Charles for the expedition against the Turks, though the Pope would continue to receive the 40,000 ducats that Beyazit sent each year for his brother’s custody. The Pope was to keep Castel Sant’Angelo, and, on the king’s departure, the keys to the city were to be returned to Alexander. Charles was to profess obedience to the Pope, to impose no restraint upon him either in matters temporal or spiritual, and to protect him against all attacks.

On 18 January Charles and Alexander met to settle one last point of disagreement, namely the guarantees to be given by the king for the restoration of Jem to the Pope after an interval of three months. Three days later, after the agreement had been signed, the king accompanied the Pope to Castel Sant’Angelo.

There Charles met Jem for the first time, speaking to him at length through an interpreter, Alexander acting as an intermediary. According to the Venetian diarist Marino Sanudo, the Pope said to Jem, ‘Monseigneur, the King of France is to take you with him, what do you think about it?’ Jem answered bitterly, ‘I am only an unhappy slave, deprived of freedom, and I do not give any importance to whether the King of France takes me or if I remain in the hands of the pope.’

On 27 January Jem, accompanied by his companions, was formally handed over to Charles. The following day Charles bade farewell to the Pope and departed from Rome with the French army, heading for Naples, accompanied by Jem and Cesare Borgia. They spent the night at Marino, where Charles received word that King Alfonso had renounced his throne five days earlier and fled from Naples, leaving the throne to his son Ferrantino. They spent the next night at Velletri, where Cesare Borgia made his escape and disappeared, and when the Pope was questioned about this he said he knew nothing of his son’s whereabouts. According to Marino Sanudo, Charles concluded from this that ‘the Italians were a pack of rogues and the Holy Father the worst of all!’.

The French had been advancing south-eastward, capturing Montefortina on 31 January and San Germano on 3 February. When Charles entered San Germano he wrote to the Duke of Bourbon saying that he had conquered ‘the first town and city of my Kingdom of Naples’.

After the surrender of several other towns King Ferrantino fled from Naples, and on 21 February the people of the city sent a deputation to lay their submission at the feet of King Charles. The following day Charles rode into Naples at the head of his army through the Porta Capuana, acclaimed by the townspeople as their liberator from Aragonese tyranny.

Jem had fallen ill on the march from Rome to Naples, where he was taken to the Castel Capuana, a fortified palace at the Porta Capuana. Charles was very concerned and sent his personal physicians to look after Jem, who lapsed into a coma on 24 February. He clung to life during the night, but then early the following morning he passed away, as his grieving Turkish companions repeated the Islamic prayer for the dead: ‘Truly we belong to God and we will come back to Him, this is the fate of the world.’ Jem was two months past his thirty-fifth birthday when he died, having spent a third of his life as an exile and prisoner of the Christians.

Charles ordered that Jem’s death be kept a secret, but soon everyone in Naples knew that the Turkish prince had passed away. There were rumours that Jem had been poisoned by the Pope, but modern historians generally agree that he died of pneumonia or erysipelas, an acute streptococcal infection of the skin.

After the news reached Venice, Andrea Gritti was sent to Istanbul to inform Beyazit of his brother’s death. Beyazit told Gritti that he wanted to secure Jem’s body, and that he would send an envoy to discuss this matter with King Charles, who in the meanwhile had been crowned King of Naples.

After Jem’s death Charles gave up his quixotic dream of a crusade, and the formation of an anti-French league forced him to abandon Naples on 20 May 1495 and take his army back to France. King Ferrantino reoccupied Naples on 6 July, but he died of malaria on 7 October of that same year. The former King Alfonso II died in exile on 10 November 1495, so that the succession passed to his brother Federigo d’Aragona, who thus became the fifth king to occupy the throne of Naples within three years, including Charles VIII.

Beyazit then entered into negotiations with King Federigo for the return of Jem’s body, which was entombed in a coffin kept in the Castel dell’ Ovo in Naples, guarded by the prince’s faithful Turkish companions. The negotiations dragged on for nearly four years, until finally Beyazit’s patience was exhausted to the point where he threatened war against Naples unless Jem’s body was turned over to his representatives without further delay. Federigo was terrified, and on 29 January he submitted to Beyazit’s demand, whereupon the remains of Jem, still guarded by his companions, were shipped back to Turkey.

Late in the summer of 1499 Beyazit interred Jem’s remains in the Muradiye at Bursa, the imperial mosque complex that their grandfather Murat II had built in 1426, and where he was buried in 1451. The place chosen by Beyazit for Jem’s burial was the tomb of their brother Mustafa, which had been built by Mehmet II after his second son had died in 1471. Beyazit could finally reign without the fear that his brother would be used against him in a crusade; he was now the last surviving son of Mehmet the Conqueror, ready to resume his father’s march of conquest.

16

The Tide of Conquest Turns

Now that Beyazit no longer had to be concerned about Jem he was free to resume the campaigns of conquest that had been interrupted by the death of his father eighteen years before.

At a consistory held in Rome on 10 June 1499 Pope Alexander VI had a letter read to the College of Cardinals from Pierre d’Aubusson, dated 30 April. The Grand Master wrote that the Turk himself (Beyazit) was outfitting a huge fleet of 300 sail to lay siege to the city of Rhodes, where he was expected to arrive sometime in May. D’Aubusson expected the siege to be a long one, ‘because the Turk was coming in person to the nearby province of Lycia, where vast preparations were being made of all things essential to a siege’.

But it soon became clear that the target of the Ottoman expedition was not Rhodes but Lepanto, the Venetian fortress town at the north-west end of the Gulf of Corinth. Beyazit had prepared a fleet of some 240 warships, which set sail from the Sea of Marmara in June 1499, just about the time that Jem’s coffin was on the last stage of its journey back from Italy to Turkey. The sultan had also mustered two armies, one under his own command and the other led by Mustafa Pasha, both of which were to move in coordination with the fleet. On 14 August 1499 the Ottoman forces attacked Lepanto, and fifteen days later the garrison of the fortress surrendered, a severe blow to Venetian prestige.

The Venetians tried to make peace with Beyazit, sending Alvise Manenti to the Ottoman court at Edirne, where he was received by several of the sultan’s pashas on 17 February 1500. Manenti spoke of Venetian love for the ‘Signor Turco’ and reminded the pashas of the Serenissima’s long-standing good relations with the Ottomans. He emphasised that during all the years that Jem had been in exile Venice ‘had never tried to make a move against His Excellency [Beyazit], and had always wanted friendship and peace with him more than with any other ruler in the world’.

One of the pashas responded by saying that Venice was responsible for the war, because its citizens in the Morea and Albania had been attacking Ottoman subjects, ‘and we have written to the Signoria to punish them, but it has never done so’. Manenti was then told that the pashas had all urged the sultan to make peace with Venice, ‘which they all knew to have been a good and faithful friend of their lord, in the time of Jem Sultan as at other times’. The price of peace would be the cession to the Ottomans of the remaining Venetian fortresses in the Morea - Navarino, Koroni, Methoni, Monemvasia and Nauplia - as well as an annual tribute to the sultan of 10,000 ducats, ‘as was given in the time of his father’. It was then clear to Manenti that the sultan had ‘decided to have the sea as his boundary with the Signoria’, meaning that Beyazit wanted Venice to abandon all her possessions within the Ottoman Empire. Manenti replied that such heavy demands could not possibly be met, and the pashas replied that there was no further point in continuing the discussions.

The Ottoman attacks on the Venetian fortresses in Greece continued relentlessly. The Turkish forces took Methoni in August 1500 after a six-week siege led by Beyazit himself, the first time that he had commanded his troops in battle as sultan. The fall of Methoni soon led the garrisons at Koroni and Navarino to surrender as well, defeats from which Venetian power in the Morea never recovered. The Venetians were forced to sue for peace, on terms dictated by Beyazit, in mid-December 1502, a date long remembered in Venice as the beginning of the decline of the Serenissima’s maritime empire.

The fall of Lepanto and the Venetian fortresses in the Morea led Pope Alexander to make a desperate plea for a renewed crusade against the Turks. But the internal conflicts in Christian Europe once again made this impossible. The Pope himself became involved in one of these disputes, when he gave approval to the Kings of France and Spain to depose King Federigo and divide the Kingdom of Naples between themselves. The French and Spanish then quarrelled over their Neapolitan possessions and went to war with one another in the summer of 1502, a severe setback for Alexander’s hopes for a crusade against the Turks.