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Muhammad XI, departed the ancient province and left Spain to the Christians. January 2 remains a black day in the minds of Islamicists today.
    Ferdinand and Isabella had fought a religious war in the context of empire (or, equally true, a war of empire in the context of religion). It was a template that fit Alexander’s view of the battle to come. The Spaniards had overcome the fatal disease that struck their armies primarily by luck and persistence: The battles were being fought on their territory, meaning their commanders could quickly replace troops lost in the epidemic. Alexander, whose religious mania exceeded that of the Spanish king and queen, would have the same advantage against the despoiler from France.
    F ORTY YEARS LATER, THE MALADY that would meet the emperor on the road to Moscow emerged from the shadows to fulfill its role as an arbiter of empires.
    The conflict drew together the depressive King Charles of Spain, the greatest power on the Continent; King Francis I of France, a young ruler who wished to retrieve ancestral lands claimed by Charles (and his two sons, held for ransom in a previous war); and King Henry VIII of England, who had territorial ambitions in the war but also sought, by taking control of Italy and Rome, to gain control over Pope Clement VII and to obtain a divorce from Catherine of Aragon so that he could marry Anne Boleyn. Drawing in the continent’s three most powerful monarchs, this was a war for control of Europe’s future.
    King Charles expressed the ethos of the war they would fight. It was a contest between honorable knights, and Charles longed to live up to the code they shared:
Therefore I cannot but see and feel that time is passing, and I with it, and yet I would not like to go without performing some great action to serve as a monument to my name. What is lost today will not be found tomorrow and I have done nothing so far to cover myself with glory.
    It was a passage that Napoleon could have written nearly three centuries later.
    In 1527 the forces of King Francis (bolstered by a contingent from Henry VIII) met Charles’s mercenary army at the Italian port city of Naples, the French army with 30,000 men, the Imperial army of Charles with 12,000. If Francis could destroy the army inside the walls, Spain’s power, so dominant for so long, would be broken at least for the near future and perhaps for centuries.
    But then a pathogen appeared in the ranks and began to kill wantonly. “There originates a slight internal fever in the person’s body,” wrote one ambassador, who later died of the illness, “which at first does not seem to be very serious. But soon it reappears with a great fervor that immediately kills.” It was the same inscrutable microbe that had emerged at the Spanish siege of Granada.
    Bodies began to pile up. The Italian sun beat down on men who had fallen into stupors or raving fevers. Each day brought more cases, and soon the sick began to die in terrible numbers. “The dangers of war are the least we have to think about,” wrote one commander. The French lieutenants, convinced the air in the plain had turned bad, urged their commander to retreat to the hills, where the atmosphere was cooler and fresher. But he refused and the epidemic “literally exploded.” Desertions increased; men faked illness to get out of the death zone. Out of a force of 30,000, only 7,000 were fit for duty. Soon two out of every three of the soldiers had died, most of them from the nameless pathogen.
    At the end of August, the French forces broke from their camps and fled in panic, leaving their artillery and their sick comrades behind. The siege was broken. Charles’s forces ran them down on the road from Naples to Rome, stripping, robbing, and killing the remnants. “Without a doubt,” one observer wrote, “one would not find in all of ancient and modern history so devastating a ruin of such a flourishing army.” Francis’s men were skeletal, sick, some of them