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golden age would be tarnished by the troublesome Knights of Saint John: forty years later, they would return to haunt him, in the person of La Valette. The sultan’s youthful act of generosity at Rhodes was to prove a costly mistake. And if after 1522 Suleiman claimed to be advancing under the legitimate banners of heaven, he was not alone. At the far western edge of Ptolemy’s map, there was a Christian counterweight.

CHAPTER 2
     
A Supplication
     
1517–1530
     
    Five years earlier. Fifteen hundred miles west. Another sea.
     
    I N NOVEMBER 1517, a fleet of forty sailing vessels was dipping and plunging across the Bay of Biscay in dirty weather. They were Flemish ships from Vlissingen in the Netherlands bound for the north coast of Spain. These stout carracks were built to withstand the long Atlantic rollers. Each one carried yards of canvas; their mainsails swelled in the fierce winter blow. Fists of squally rain whipped across the gray water, blotting out the vessels, then revealing them again in the dull light. A coastline slowly formed through the mizzle.
    Even from a distance, one ship stood out from the rest. The
Real
was carrying the young Charles, duke of Burgundy, to claim his crown as king of Spain, and its sails were elaborately decorated with symbols of religious and imperial power.

On its mainsail was painted a picture of the crucifixion, between the figures of the Virgin Mary and St John the Evangelist, the whole enframed between two pillars of Hercules which appear on the royal arms, together with the king’s motto “Further,” written on a scroll twined around the said pillars. On the topsail was painted a representation of the Holy Trinity, and at the mizzen that of St Nicholas. On the foresail was a picture of the Virgin with her Child, treading on the moon, and surrounded by the rays of the sun, with a crown with seven stars above her head; and over it all there was painted the figure of St James, the lord and patron of Castile, slaying the infidels in battle.

    CHARLES WAS SEVENTEEN YEARS OLD. Through the complexities of dynastic succession, he was the inheritor of the largest domain in Europe since the time of Charlemagne. His realms were the mirror image of the Ottoman Empire, and he claimed a litany of titles to equal Suleiman’s. It took scribes two long-winded pages to record them: king of Aragon, Castile, and Navarre, Naples and Sicily; ruler of the Burgundian territories; duke of Milan; head of the house of Hapsburg, of Franche-Compte, Luxemburg, and Charolais; and so on. His territories, dotted across Europe like the black squares on a chessboard, stretched from Hungary in the east to the Atlantic in the west, from Amsterdam to the shores of North Africa, and beyond—to the newfound Americas.
    The imagery on the sails had been carefully chosen by the young king’s Flemish advisers both to appeal to his new Spanish subjects and to declare their king’s claim to empire and leadership of holy war. In the Spanish age of discovery, Charles’s domains would extend far beyond the Gates of Gibraltar—they would encompass the earth. With the crown, he inherited the honorific title of the Catholic King and the commitment to crush the moon of Islam and trample its soldiers underfoot in the name of Saint James.
    From the start his advisers promoted the idea that their sovereign had been chosen by God to be emperor of the world. He inherited from the Austrian Hapsburgs the motto “It is for Austria to rule the entire earth.” Two years later, in 1519, he would be elected, not without heavy bribes, to the office of Holy Roman Emperor. It was a purely honorific title, to which neither lands nor revenue attached, but in an age of imperial epithets, it conferred enormous prestige. It designated Charles as the secular champion of Catholic Europe against Muslims and heretics. And Charles would soon be described as the ruler of the empire on which the sun never sets. In the year of his election