Analyze and discuss Charles V war with the Ottoman Empire - Essay Example

As Goffman puts it, Selim had ‘exposed the Ottomans, more directly than ever, to powerful empires’ (99). Overland to the east, Suleiman was confronted with the Persian Safavids on his frontiers in Mesopotamia and Anatolia; in the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean, he dispatched fleets against the ships of Catholic Portugal, busily building a commercial empire on the coasts of the Africa, the Arabian Gulf and India. Mehmed II, the conqueror of Constantinople, had only really faced a much enfeebled Byzantium, a shrunken state which showed little sign of its former glory.

Selim himself had gone to war with major neighbors, but in toppling the Mamluks in Egypt, he was destroying a dynasty who were already unstable in power. However, Suleiman, in confronting Charles V in the West, faced an empire which ‘included almost all of Catholic Europe’ (Goffman, 99). The scale of the ensuing struggle, and the near-constant state of warfare in some arena or another, is thus little to be wondered at. It is worth examining the symbolic level of the conflict between the Habsburgs and the Ottomans, given that the struggle was in many ways one for the succession to the Roman emperors.

For Imber, ‘rivalry between Suleyman I and Charles V was a dominant theme of the mid-sixteenth century’ (113). Ever since Mehmed II had taken Constantinople from the last of the Byzantine emperors in 1453, the Ottomans had been able to brand themselves as the legitimate successors to Rome. However, it was only in the reign of Suleiman I that much emphasis was put on this notion. During one of the military campaigns in Eastern Europe in the 1530s, Suleiman wore a crown which he had commissioned from Venetian artisans, and which employed elements of the official regalia of both Charles V and Pope Clement VII, the latter being, significantly, the pontiff who had crowned Charles as Holy Roman Emperor.

Goffman considers that ‘no Western observer could have missed the Ottoman sultan’s challenge to the emperor’s universalist claims in this choice of headgear’ (107). At the same time, Charles was busy reasserting his own imperial credentials in the West. In 1530, he travelled to Bologna where the Pope invested him with the crown of a renewed Holy Roman Empire, thus recalling the occasion on Christmas Day 1800, when Charlemagne became the first Holy Roman Emperor to receive a crown from the Pope.

Finkel suggests that for Charles, this occasion was not merely symbolic, but that he saw his enthronement as ‘reinforcing his moral authority to press forward with the consolidation of Spanish power’ (126), and thus seek military confrontation with the Islamic Ottoman Turks. Suleiman, also, made use of religious titles in an attempt to strengthen his position. Having become the guardian of Islam’s most holy cities – Mecca, Medina and Jerusalem – he commonly used the title ‘Caliph’, which Imber pertinently describes as ‘an Islamic counterweight to Charles V’s Christian title of Holy Roman Emperor’ (114).

A deeply significant moment in this rivalry, especially as far as Suleiman was concerned, came in 1547, as the two emperors made a treaty for a 5-year peace. The Turkish text of this treaty, for the first time, no longer accorded Charles the dignity of an imperial title, referring to him merely as the ‘