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368 María José Rodríguez Salgado, Rubén González Cuerva, Miguel Ángel de Bunes Ibarra

Francis I of France – The Most Christian King – and Süleyman the
Lawgiver who was the leader of Sunni Islam. This collection of articles
arises from the international research project designed to explore and
extend our knowledge of contacts between Christian and Muslim
powers in the early-modern period . It focuses on one of the most
3
spectacular and complex events in those two centuries: the struggle for
control of Tunis between the Ottoman sultan and his North African
allies on the one hand, and Tunisian supporters of Mulay Hassan
backed by Charles V on the other.
As the articles published here emphasise, the aura of success that
clings to the emperor’s campaign in 1535 and its enduring reputation
as a Catholic Crusade are largely due to an over-reliance on the part of
historians on the voluminous propaganda generated by the
imperialists, both at the time and especially in the 1540s and 1550s.
The wide-ranging literary and visual output extolling the virtues of the
Habsburg monarch was also of such high quality that it could not fail
to have a lasting impact, from Titian’s equestrian portrait and
Vermeyen’s tapestry cartoons, to less familiar but much more widely
circulated engravings and medals, chronicles, sermons and laudatory
poems. Charles V – and subsequently the Habsburg dynasty and their
successors – considered the conquest of what they still thought of as
ancient Carthage to be one of his most outstanding deeds and used all
available media to project this message. In the emperor’s triumphant
progress through Italy in the autumn of 1535 Charles V was
represented as the new Scipio, succeeding where Louis IX of France, St.
Louis, had failed – and paid for his failure with his life. In the short
term, such representations facilitated the raising of funds, particularly
in Sicily and Naples. It would be further elaborated subsequently. From
the outset, Spanish and Italian writers vied to ascribe full credit for the
success on their “nation” which led to distorted and contradictory
accounts of key events but which largely succeeded in presenting the
campaign as a hispano-italian enterprise, a Catholic crusade to
reconquer Muslim territories. In fact, they fought as part of a coalition
that included Tunisian Muslims, orthodox Christian horsemen from
Albania, German infantry – the landsknecht accounted for a quarter of
the military forces and was made up of Lutherans, Anabaptists and
other Evangelicals as well as Catholics – and men from the emperor’s
own lands, mostly but not exclusively Catholic.
The Hafsi kingdom of Tunis did not present a danger to the Christian
Mediterranean states. It had made commercial and political agreements

3 Tratar con el Infiel: Diplomacia hispánica con poderes musulmanes (1492-1708)”/
“Negotiating with the Infidel: Diplomatic contacts between Spain and Muslim powers
(1492-1708) (PGC2018-009152-B-I00).

Mediterranea - ricerche storiche - Anno XVII - Agosto 2020
ISSN 1824-3010 (stampa) ISSN 1828-230X (online)