Chapter 3: 1516-1543 Lead Us Not Into Temptation, Part One
Chapter 3: 1516-1543 Lead Us Not Into Temptation (Part One)
Next to knowing when to seize an opportunity, the most important thing in life is to know when to forego an advantage.
Benjamin Disraeli (Primary Timeline 1804 - 1881)
The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it.
Oscar Wilde (Primary Timeline 1854 - 1900)
Things started to slip out of my control almost immediately. We’d been through twelve years of warfare broken by intervals of peace just long enough to convincingly declare total victory. The need to properly develop and administer our many new lands had increasingly been pressing upon me, the proverbial itch that must be scratched. I was firmly convinced that we needed a quiet decade of consolidation, growth, and planning. Sadly, the political realities were quite different.
“It is the beginning of your reign, Excellency, and will set the tone for years to come. Will you be known as the man who sat content atop the achievements of his family, or will you aspire to greater heights and exceed those achievements with your own?” The speaker that humid spring day was Agustin Alcon, newly elevated Duque de Valencia. His father had grown rich from the prosperity and stability generated in his lands by the Royal Refinery, and had abetted his causes with sharp political maneuvering. As the reasonable sounding words caused our King to shift slightly and uneasily in his throne, I thought unhappily that the young Duque looked to take after his father.
“And what would our most esteemed Duque have us do? I have quite conflicting advice from sources that I will say are quite reliable. After all, we can barely sketch accurate maps of our new lands, let alone generate proper tax reports or manpower estimates. Shall I be the King who ignored his own country to go on endless foreign adventures?” The words Carlos spoke were gently reproving, but intoned with such quiet confidence that most would simply have dropped the argument then and there.
“No Your Majesty, of course not. But by the same token, it is not the army who does such things. Let the clerks and scribes to their scribblings and countings. Our neighbors continue to bicker among themselves, leaving us an opportunity. We should push on while our troops are fresh and theirs exhausted. We all know that it was Ferdinand and Isabela’s fondest wish to recapture the Holy Land. Why should you, their heir, not make that dream a reality? In the rolls of history, I would like to see Carlos I be titled ‘the Bold’ or ‘the Conqueror’ rather than ‘the Efficient Administrator’!” The Duques words had scored tangible hits among the small audience of advisors and nobles present, and a quick check on the mutterings made it clear to me that the balance had shifted.
It must have been clear to Carlos as well. Though I know that some part of him longed to follow the advice given him by Archangel Michael himself, it had after all only been advice and not an order. That was a line I dared not cross. And so once again our European patrols were stripped bare. General Colonna, now affectionately known by his troops as “El Viejo Capitan” (the Old Captain), set sail for the Nile with 27,000 infantry.
The war was everything the good Duque de Valencia had wanted and promised: short, victorious, and enriching. By 1517 the Mamelukes were crying out for peace. Once again, however, the quite reasonable and by now somewhat irksome Duque had some advice for the King: make a separate peace with the Mamelukes, leaving their allies and vassals the Hedjaz out of luck. With a few quick strikes from the newly available army, they too could be brought low.
By now, the Duque had assembled something of a “War Party”, a coalition of like-minded individuals. Some were nobles, some merchants, and some Church leaders. All had in common a burning desire to continue this insane frenzy of acquisition, and whether financially, politically, or spiritually, all were reaping great profits from it. His own subjects had outmaneuvered poor Carlos, and he knew it.
In January, almost by reflex, we declared war on the Aztecs. Within a few days our garrison in Gascogne revolted, shutting the gates to us and forcing us to lay siege to our own territory. Not, I hoped, an omen of things to come. In February the Aztec war ended with the offer of Tehuantepec for peace, leaving only the capital in Aztec hands. That month the King also signed a separate treaty with the Mamelukes for Syria, Sinai, and Samaria. A brutal offensive against the Hedjaz followed in which essentially the entire original army was destroyed by attrition and rapid, desperate assaults against enemy fortifications and gradually replaced by new recruits. The enemy could not be bothered (or perhaps had not the means) to wage war in open fields of combat, and yet there we lost more men than we had in combat with France in the last great wars!
Still, in the end, with almost no limit to the amount of our own blood the War Party was willing to shed, the Hedjaz capitulated that September. With all of their lands in our possession, they were forced to sign away Jordan, Arabia, and Tabuk. Of the most vital targets in the region, only Egypt, Lebanon and Judea remained.
Not two months later, our local forces recaptured Gascogne. For a fleeting moment, we were once again utterly at peace, untroubled by enemies from within or without. And without exaggeration I tell you that the next day, the garrison in Nice revolted, forcing our weary besiegers to simply shift their camp eastwards.
The War Party had the gall to play the revolts for political benefit. Having a constant background of war, they said, gave the masses something to cheer for, a common cause to rally round. Not to mention that drafting the worst malcontent youth into the army often does wonders for the state of domestic tranquility. Frustrated and outmaneuvered, I settled for another quick and clean war. The Incas received our declaration on the 6th of November, and our prepositioned cavalry forces rolled over their lands stopping just long enough to plant the flag. On December 20th, barely a month after it had begun, the war ended with us the new rulers of Lima, Arequipa, and Moquega.
My vision of peaceful growth was buoyed briefly by the arrival in January of a new Conquistador named Cortes in our city of Guantanamo. But the quiet satisfaction of exploration in pursuit of knowledge seemed to have been lost on the court. That February, word reached Spain that the Turks had declared war on the Mamelukes. The Persians, who had been in uneasy alliance with Turkey for years, declined to make war on their neighbor. This was an opportunity that even started my own heart racing. Persia and Turkey together dominated the region, and would have been far too much for us to handle without an intensive and costly war. Persia on its own, though, was a far different matter. And unlike the Turk, who had little territory of interest to me, the Persians had provinces that were both rich and situated so as to open the gateways to eventual expansion both east through the Mughal and north through the Uzbeks and Sibir.
War fever had claimed me as a victim; the temptation had been too much even for me to bear. The declaration was sent, and that October we took the strategically crucial provinces of Kirkuk and Tabriz in peace. The pace, the tempo of our expansion was getting away from me, dictated now by the always voracious War Party rather than my own strategies.
Those were heady days, events propelling us all forward at a frantic pace, barely able to digest a bit of news from one corner of the world before being faced with another.
--In January ’19, our beloved explorer Balboa died in Jalisco.
--That July, Russia began its own move for regional power by annexing Pskov.
--In September the explorers Magellanes and Elcano appear together in Port Zeeland. Remembering the bizarre happenings of our previous explorers, we issue strict orders that the two are to maintain separate fleets at all times.
--On October 8th, we score a diplomatic coup. After slowly building a groundwork of mutual trust and admiration, our ambassador brings Austria into the alliance!
--In March of 1520, we are saddened but not surprised to hear that Turkey has annexed the Mamelukes. Attaining our goals in the area has increased in difficulty tremendously, as Turkey now has quite a bit of land there and an excellent fortress in Egypt to use as a base.
Once again, the politically savvy Duque de Valencia manipulates world events to suit his own agenda. With the threat of the Turk now looming large in the Spanish mind, he successfully agitates for the outright diplomatic annexation of our longtime vassal Naples. This would, in theory, allow Spain to pursue a credible war on two fronts against the Turks. In practice it will tie another army down for the next three decades suppressing revolts. And yet, in October 1520, the King of Naples bows before Carlos I and is reborn as the Grand Duke of Naples.
Within mere weeks, the War Party elevates the Neapolitan Antonio De Leyva to Major General, and presents him with a ceremonial sword and an honor guard of 1,000 infantry in Naples. De Leyva gives a moving speech, promising to be “Spain’s shield against Turkish aggression.” Not having met the man, nor possessing much information about him, I wonder whether he is really that naïve or actually astute enough to realize that while he is far more likely to be sword than shield, defending the homeland sounds much better than raiding the neighbors. No matter, Carlos wisely raises a modest patrol for the General and puts him on rebel suppression duty in our new possessions of Naples and Apulia.
April 30, 1521 Magellanes dies. We’d barely had time to get him into position to explore on our behalf. However, this quiet moment of reflection on lost opportunities is quickly broken by a declaration of war against Turkey less than two months later. This was madness, and I told the King so. But popular support was broad and deep for the move, and the King himself supported it.
“We will fight them eventually,” King Carlos said as we spoke quietly in the palace Cathedral. “Why not fight them now, at a time of our choosing rather than theirs?”
Having long been an advocate of violent reapportionment of territory, I was not well situated to argue against the War Party’s message or to point out to the King the dangers of him parroting it. In truth, there was perhaps precious little difference in our positions, excepting of course motive and means. There was nothing further I could do beyond registering my disappointment to the King and offering my blessing to the business as our armies went into action.
But this was different from any war we had fought before. We were still faced with the enormous grinding heat of the desert and its lack of sustenance and provision. But we were also faced with an enemy possessed of the manpower and resources of a great European power—perhaps more since the Turks had not been foolishly wasting lives and treasure in endless (and fruitless) rounds of war with all their neighbors. Moreover, as many of our Muslim opponents had shown us, this enemy was possessed of a fanatical morale beyond anything we could instill in our own troops with faith, discipline, or both. To put a final point on it, the Turkish army was led by Selim I, a general of perhaps as exalted a reputation as our own dear departed Gran Capitan.
General Colonna, still in action at the rather venerable age of 59, ordered our rarely utilized navy out of dry dock in Alexandria. They performed a quick transport of his troops into enemy territory, hoping to keep him clear of the never-ending stream of Turkish troops with Selim at the vanguard. Their job done, they immediately ran for the closest port in mortal dread of the formidable and innumerable Turkish navy.
For once, the desert sands worked in our favor as Selim’s army bled away on the march. Still, at one point in his travels, he numbered over 80,000 troops in that single army. That compared to our good Colonna with barely 27,000—all of whom were wall-crawling infantry rather than the cavalry he would have needed to engage Selim head-on. No, Colonna was correct, this had to be a war of maneuver and misdirection.
While Colonna debarked into Judea, Selim left a trail of burning provinces in his march through Sinai and Jordan, finally stopping to besiege Syria. Meanwhile, we frantically recruited and shuffled troops around hoping to get together a force large enough to breach the walls of Egypt.
Colonna was able to ram through the walls at Judea, and moved on to try his luck on Lebanon’s larger walls. But his efforts there were fruitless, and whatever reinforcements we had were bound for the walls of Egypt. In the end, with Syria on the verge of surrender to Selim, we accepted an offer of peace for Judea alone and privately counted ourselves fortunate to get that much from the affair. An exhausted Colonna moved to consolidate the survivors of the two armies into one, which still could not match their pre-war muster.
At this point, however, nothing could stop the exultant War Party. Turning the meat grinder that had been the First Turkish Campaign into a gloriously successful Crusade to recover Judea and restore the Holy Land to Christian hands was but a minor bit of sophistry for them. And on the strength of that success, they were able to convince Carlos to declare yet another war on the Aztecs in April 1522. As our previous two campaigns against them had left them with no army and only one province, the war was brief and its outcome a foregone conclusion. Their last and fabulously wealthy province of Zacatecas was quickly annexed into the empire and a staunch War Party supporter appointed Tax Collector for the region.
At last the War Party had begun to run out of easy targets. And so we were at peace for almost six full months, during which time they managed to convince the King to appoint even more of their darlings as Generals—Joffre de Loaise in Zeeland and Condestable Borbon in Languedoc. But in February, as soon as the treaty with the Inca expired, our troops were on the march again. By May, the scattered Inca leaders sued for peace, yielding Guyaquil, Arica, and Atacama.
That year, 1523, was also a time of near indescribable sadness as the beloved General Colonna passed on at the age of 61 while on maneuvers near his headquarters in the Nile. It had been Gran Capitan and Colonna from the beginning, shepherding the country along in much the same way that beloved Ferdinand and Isabela had done. Here too, while the loss of one was keenly felt, the loss of the second in the pair was tragedy. And while we still possessed three generals, none had the wisdom and skill of our two Titans. Not to mention that each of the three was at least for me, irredeemably tainted with the reek of the War Party and its insatiable appetite.
Meanwhile, it was rapidly becoming clear that we had unwittingly been the foolish boys who stir up a hornet’s nest. Selim and his Turkish hordes had never demobilized from our campaign. They had quickly identified their weakest neighbors and acted decisively, in a fashion that would make our own War Party quite proud. In November 1522, they annexed the Hedjaz. In May of 1523 Hungary and Turkey went to war, and in January 1524, the Turks summarily annexed the Hungarian vassal-state of Ragusa.
I watched all of these events with growing disquiet. By forcing the hand of the Turks early, we had increased their resolve to consolidate their holdings in the mideast immediately. Moreover, by presenting a barrier to their further expansion in the region, we had driven their hunger west into Europe, where constant bickering had left most of the nations exhausted and broke. Earnestly, insistently, I made my case to Carlos that we must stay out of that madness.
That April our Gold Convoy, the fabled treasure fleet that brought the riches of the New World back to Europe, simply disappeared. It was immediately blamed on storms off the Florida coast, and to be sure, such storms exist in plenty. But deep down, I feared the worst. If our fleet had truly been diverted rather than lost to weather, it would have required an extensive conspiracy by very well placed and already wealthy individuals. Such a group not only existed but immediately made political capital from it by suggesting that we recoup some of the loss by further foreign adventures. The War Party and the Duque de Valencia had always struck me as being greedy and selfish, but essentially still patriots who cared for the welfare of Spanish interests. If somehow they had been behind this, then my entire appraisal of them was flawed, and they could be capable of just about anything.
[OOC: Random Event—Gold Convoy Lost, No Gold Income for 12 months.]
That May, Navarre regained its independence from France, who in turn had ripped it from Portugal. The French divert nearly their entire navy into ferry duty to land a huge siege force to retake Navarre. The outcome is never in doubt. Thankfully, the War Party does not manage to use this as a pretext for declaring war on the French alliance. Perhaps this is due to the fact that they had already managed to embroil us in a war with Morocco.
The Moroccan War plays out a bit like the Turkish Campaign. We don’t have enough men in place to do the job, and several times are forced to ferry in reinforcements from our garrisons on the continent. Meanwhile the rather sizable (39,000) Moroccan army, which we had struggled mightily to avoid, lay siege to Orania. In the end, after some six months of campaigning and a ludicrous butchers’ bill, we hold the entire country but have lost 40,000 infantry and 5,000 cavalry. Normally, our policy would be to take as many provinces as possible but leave the capital to be annexed in a future war. This time, however, Valencia makes the case that we should not be eager to repeat such a bloodbath. Annex the whole nation at one go, he argues, that we need not take the same land a decade hence.
Some time after that stirring speech had persuaded all to the cause of Annexation, I noticed that there had been a somewhat higher than normal number of fresh infantry units brought into that campaign. Yes, it made more sense to recruit new troops just across the Straits of Gibraltar than to ferry the veterans of the Turkish Campaign all the way across North Africa, but something gnawed at me. It wasn’t until years later when I read Jimenez’ stirring history of the period that it hit me. Most of those new units were accompanied by new officers. And of those officers, the vast majority were the younger sons of nobility. Not an uncommon practice on its own, but as I skimmed the roster of names I felt a chill. de Aguirre, de Briones, Montero, de Vergara, Mexia, Ozalla, Sarmiento. By God, it was a veritable roll call of the moderate nobility, those who would ordinarily counsel a calm and reasoned expansion. In short, those on my side of the issue. And after most of them had lost a son to the war, there was not a man among them who would call for calm and the careful consideration of political consequences.
So it was that in August 1524, we annexed all of Morocco, including the capital and the provinces of Toubkal and Sahara. Unfortunately, this did not bring us peace. Just before the treaties were drafted, word had reached us that our beloved Austrian allies had reached their limit of fear and uncertainty. Seeing their longtime friends the Hungarians slowly stretched out on the rack had brought home what the Turks could do in the region if left unchecked. And by God, the Austrians weren’t going to sit idly by and watch them do it!
I was cornered by my own diplomacy. With one of our key allies and all of the rest of the alliance going to war, we could hardly refuse the call to arms. And yet once again, it would be Spain doing the lion’s share of the dying. England would be unlikely to provide more than moral support, and the most we could ask of Austria would be to keep the Turks tied down on the western front while we assaulted the east.
For once, we had been caught unprepared. With Borbon and what was left of our expeditionary forces still in Morocco, we were hideously out of position. With only a Colonel to lead them, our Nile forces started marching, still somewhat at a loss from the recent passing of their beloved Colonna. They had just reached position in Syria when word came that the Persians, Georgians and Nubians had declared war on us as well, and the Persians were bearing down on Syria with overwhelming forces. Our men scramble to get out of the province, and escape just in time to avoid being caught between Turkish hammer and Persian tongs as the two powers eagerly besiege Syria together.
It was a near thing and a mad dash as our forces jockeyed for position. In the end, Borbon met up with a flood of raw recruits from Alexandria and the Nile to assault the walls of Egypt yet again. And the Colonel whose name I have since forgotten miraculously threaded the maze into Lebanon and scaled their walls. Combined, their victories enabled us to make a face-saving offer of Lebanon for peace (with some prompting from me). Our allies were not thrilled, but as we had scored the only victories in their war, were hardly in a position to complain too loudly. This separate peace, in January 1525, left us free to focus on fighting the more manageable combination of Persia and Nubia.
That July, General De Leyva passed away in his headquarters in Naples. It was said that he was heartbroken over the Crown’s unwillingness to “risk him” in adventures against the Turks. He passed on never having left his homeland of Naples and Apulia.
In October, the War Party pushed through another declaration, this time against the Iroquois, who had been discovered recently by Cortes. That worthy led the charge himself, against a decidedly better fortified opponent, as these Iroquois actually had crude fortifications established, unlike their Inca and Aztec brethren. It did them little good, however, as they were forced to make peace for Irondequoit and Onandaga by January.
By September, the cumulative strain of wars had taken their toll. For the first time we were faced with significant war exhaustion among our populace. This even led to revolts in our formerly Incan lands. Armed with concrete evidence that they had finally gone too far, Carlos took back the initiative from the War Party. That month, we successfully sued for peace with Nubia for batn Al Hajar and Nubia. Several months later, we were finally able to close the war with Persia and Georgia in exchange for Kars and Iraq and at last Spain was at peace.
