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Magellan departed on the voyage that would throw a Spanish girdle around the earth.
             
     
    UNFORTUNATELY, NONE OF THIS imperial splendor was apparent in Charles’s farcical landfall in November 1517. As the ships drew near the Spanish coast, the Flemish navigators were mortified to discover that they were a hundred miles west of their true objective. They made an unannounced arrival at the small port of Villaviciosa, where the local inhabitants failed to read the majestic symbols on Charles’s sails and mistook them for pirates. The townspeople panicked and fled into the hills with their belongings and prepared for battle. Shouts of “Spain, it’s the king” failed to clarify the situation—it was well known that pirates would descend to any ruse to lull the unwary—and it was a good while before the banners of Castile were recognized by someone braver than the rest, “approaching covertly through the bushes and hedgerows.” Charles’s thunderstruck subjects finally pulled themselves together and laid on an impromptu bullfight.
    It was not a glorious start. Nor did the seventeen-year-old groggily setting foot on Spanish soil cut any kind of figure. Where the young Suleiman’s calculated imperial demeanor struck all who saw him, Charles just looked an imbecile. Generations of inbreeding within the Hapsburg dynasty had bequeathed an unkind legacy. His eyes bulged; he was alarmingly pale. Any redeeming physical features that he did possess—a well-formed body, a broad forehead—were immediately offset by the long protruding lower jaw that frequently left his mouth hanging open, which to those impolite enough or royal enough to remark on it, lent the young man an aspect of vacant idiocy. His grandfather Maximilian bluntly called him a heathen idol. Facial deformity made it impossible for Charles to chew food properly, so that he was troubled all his life by digestive problems, and the deformity left him with a stammer. The king spoke no Spanish. He seemed grave, tonguetied, stupid—hardly the prospective emperor of the terrestrial globe. The Venetians considered him the pawn of his advisers. But appearances would prove deceptive. The unprepossessing exterior hid an independence of mind, the taciturn silence an unblinking commitment to imperial duty and the protection of Christendom. “There is more at the back of his head,” a papal legate judiciously observed, “than appears in his face.”

    The young Charles

    Charles’s landfall was symbolic of all the difficulties that instantly confronted him. It was said that only those regions that had not set eyes on their French-and Flemish-speaking king refrained from revolt at the start of his reign. And in addition to the internal problems of the Iberian Peninsula, Charles was almost immediately plunged into the whole entangled history of Christian Spain’s relations with Islam. The Gates of Gibraltar that featured so prominently on Charles’s sails were not only the portal to the Americas and the Indies; they were also the frontier with an increasingly hostile Muslim world, just eight miles across the straits. Soon after Charles’s arrival, the situation was laid out in detail by the marquis of Comares, the military governor of Oran on the North African shore. He came in the company of a man in Arab dress to pay homage and present a petition that promptly tested the king’s ambitions.
             
     
    THE ROOTS OF COMARES’S suit lay centuries deep, in the Arab occupation of southern Spain and the long Christian counter-crusade, the
reconquista,
but it also involved the Knights of Saint John. The watershed year was well within living memory—1492, the year of Columbus—when Isabella and Ferdinand, monarchs of Aragon and Castile, had dislodged the last Moorish kingdom in Granada. The Muslims who had lived peacefully on the Iberian Peninsula for eight hundred years were at once out of place. Many crossed the straits to North Africa.