13

Secret Diplomacy and the Grand Vizier

The serious tensions that would trouble the mission of Giovanni Margliani and Bartolomeo Bruti began long before they reached Ottoman soil. Most probably the arguments started while they were still at the Spanish court. Evidence for this comes in a long letter written in 1580 by Bartolomeo to Philip II, in which he said that the problems they encountered on their arrival in Istanbul vindicated all the doubts he had expressed at the outset. ‘At Your Majesty’s court I told the secretary Antonio Pérez that what Don Martín [Acuña] said about a secret truce could not be true; I declared that Don Martín had altered the translation of the letter which Mehmed [Sokollu] Pasha wrote to Your Majesty, but no one listened to me.’ And when he was instructed that he must act with the utmost secrecy and not even inform the Viceroy in Naples about the true nature of this mission, he had said to Pérez that ‘it is not the practice, nor the desire, of the Ottomans to make any secret negotiation with any ruler, and especially not with Your Majesty.’ It may be understandable that Philip, who had no experience of dealing directly with the Ottomans, did not know this; what is harder to comprehend is his belief that such negotiations, once under way, could ever be kept secret. Most difficult of all to understand is his decision to keep his own Viceroy in Naples in the dark. It is true that Mondéjar had behaved in a hostile way towards Bruti, and he had also advised against negotiating a truce with the Sultan; but he was, after all, subject to Philip’s commands, and could have been ordered to comply with the new policy. Instead, the King sent him a letter telling him to pay a monthly salary of 30 scudi (25 ducats) to Bartolomeo Bruti ‘because, in view of the good account we have received of his person, and of the experience and knowledge which he has of Levantine affairs, we have sent him to go and live in Istanbul. He is to stay there under cover, as he has done up until now, so that he may take care to send such news and warnings of the Sultan’s actions as he may think fit.’¹

A further complication arose while Margliani and Bruti were on their way from Spain to Naples (via Genoa) in early September 1577, when they learned that Aurelio di Santa Croce had arrived in Naples in August, bearing another letter from the Grand Vizier. Margliani, apparently determined to follow the order that he must keep the mission secret, wanted to avoid letting Aurelio know that he and Bartolomeo Bruti were travelling together for the same purpose. On the galley from Genoa, he told Bartolomeo that when they reached Naples he would meet Aurelio first, and that when Aurelio asked after Bartolomeo he would say that he had left the galley at Civitavecchia (the main port for Rome) and was going to complete the journey to Naples overland; Bartolomeo would lie low in Naples for some days, before making his appearance. Margliani was indeed sought out by Aurelio, and he did utter this fiction; but shortly afterwards he found that ‘Bruti told Aurelio how he had arrived, and he came to see him and they went out to dinner together.’ When he complained to Bartolomeo, the answer he received was that Aurelio was travelling with Bartolomeo’s brother Benedetto, ‘whom he had not seen for many years’, that his feelings of fraternal love made it impossible to wait, and that he had tried to impart the news of his arrival only to his brother. (This, incidentally, is the first mention of Benedetto Bruti, an elder brother whose career up to this point is entirely unknown; it seems that he had gone to Istanbul after Bartolomeo’s departure from that city in August 1576.) Margliani thought – correctly, we may presume – that this was mere excuse-making. But, having lost faith in Bartolomeo’s reliability, he then began to suspect that he had ‘revealed everything’ to Aurelio – though Bartolomeo insisted that he had told Aurelio only that he was going to Istanbul to pursue the project of turning Mehmed Bey.²

Reading the long, angry letter which Margliani wrote to Antonio Pérez about all these matters from Naples on 25 October 1577, in which he exclaimed against Bartolomeo’s apparent betrayal of the mission and described him as an ‘evil man’, it is hard to tell whether Margliani was apprised, at this stage, of the real nature of Aurelio di Santa Croce’s role in Istanbul. He certainly knew that he was more than just a Venetian merchant who happened to be bringing a message from the Grand Vizier; he was apparently aware that Aurelio had been involved in the targeting of Mehmed Bey, and he may have known that he had helped Martín de Acuña. Yet we may doubt whether Margliani understood – as Bartolomeo surely did, by the time he left Istanbul – that Aurelio di Santa Croce was the resident head of the entire Spanish network. Giovanni Margliani himself had not been an intelligence operative, and had spent only a short time in the Ottoman capital; if he had in some sense recruited Bartolomeo, it is clear that he did so without having any dealings with Aurelio about the matter. As his encounters with Aurelio in Naples continued during late September and October, he seems not to have realized that the man had a special importance, continuing to treat every contact between him and Bartolomeo as suspicious. When Bartolomeo said that he would not undertake the journey unless he received a safe-conduct, for both of them, from Aurelio, Margliani was merely irritated by that request, because it forced him to tell Aurelio that he was travelling on the same mission with Bartolomeo; but when Bartolomeo said that he wanted not only the safe-conduct itself but also the ‘secret marks’ or ‘secret tokens’, Margliani just told him that Aurelio could not possess any such things.³

Eventually, feeling compromised by Bartolomeo, Margliani decided to explain the true nature of the mission to Aurelio, and to seek his advice. It was at this point that Aurelio revealed what it was that Acuña had actually negotiated with the Grand Vizier; Aurelio had a copy of the letter to Philip which Sokollu had written after that meeting, with an accurate translation of it – unlike the doctored one provided by Acuña himself. On learning from this that Sokollu had never offered the possibility of a secret truce negotiation, Bartolomeo said to Margliani: ‘now you see that what I predicted at court has turned out to be true.’ He urged Margliani to send this information to Madrid and wait for further instructions before leaving Naples, as they would otherwise be in great danger when they appeared in Istanbul; but he was met with a blank refusal. Margliani’s own later account of this argument makes no mention of the real reason for their disagreement, presenting Bartolomeo Bruti simply as a coward who was reluctant to go on a risky mission. According to him, Bartolomeo just said that ‘he was not willing to go to his death for the sake of anyone’; Margliani wrote that he was so enraged that he thought of asking the Viceroy to imprison Bruti and supply a substitute guide for the journey – until he recalled that he was meant to keep the mission a secret from the Viceroy himself.⁴

Whilst Aurelio did give the two would-be negotiators some important and troubling information of this kind, it is doubtful whether he explained to what extent the whole affair was founded upon the forging of documents – something he had actually done more of, as the situation in Istanbul had worsened during the previous months. After Acuña’s departure from Istanbul, the Grand Vizier Mehmed Sokollu had become increasingly mistrustful. Sokollu expected a rapid formal reply from Spain, but heard nothing; Acuña’s first letter from Madrid, vaguely assuring him that Philip was in favour of pursuing the negotiation, was sent in July, and had not been received by the time Aurelio left Istanbul. Another reason for suspicion was that King Sebastian of Portugal was known to be preparing a major campaign against the new ruler of Fez and Morocco, who was a protégé of the Sultan. The Ottoman authorities feared that Spain would be involved in the campaign, or that it might launch a coordinated attack on Algiers; if either or both of those things happened, the apparent Spanish truce initiative would turn out to have been a mere feint. (This fear was strengthened in late July when an Ottoman spy returned from Naples and reported that Acuña was a fraud; according to this source, Acuña had talked about his adventure when he got back to Naples, saying that his real mission was to discover whether the Ottomans would send out a large fleet that year, and that his negotiation with Sokollu was aimed at reducing its strength ‘because his master the King wanted to attack the Moors of Fez and Morocco’.) As early as mid-April, the dragoman Hürrem Bey told Aurelio that the Grand Vizier, determined to get to the bottom of the matter, was planning to open an investigation into the Albanian agents who had accompanied Acuña. There was a danger that the whole Spanish network would be uncovered. So, in desperation, Aurelio forged two more letters from Philip, to Hürrem Bey and to the Grand Vizier, in which the King said that he was keen to pursue the negotiations and asked that a Christian be sent to Spain to advise on how to conduct business with the Ottoman authorities; this Christian – helpfully, the letter put forward the name of Aurelio di Santa Croce as a very suitable person – should also bring a safe-conduct for the envoy who would be sent to negotiate the truce. Sokollu fell for this forgery too, and duly sent Aurelio as the go-between.⁵

On his arrival in Naples in August 1577 Aurelio went to see Mondéjar, who forwarded to Spain copies of all the documents he brought. (Evidently Aurelio kept the original of the Ottoman safe-conduct, which he would fill in with the names of Margliani and Bruti.) A letter of 27 August to his brother in Istanbul, which was intercepted by the Imperial embassy there, shows that he was in high spirits, being well treated by the Viceroy, and confident that he would be nominated ambassador to negotiate the truce: ‘I hope to return victoriously to Istanbul with the task of finishing the negotiation, which I think will be entrusted to me, since there are no other people in Spain with the experience to conduct such business.’ While he stayed in Naples he got on with his usual trade of ransoming Muslims, writing in September that it would bring ‘greater honour and fame to the ambassadorial mission’ to bring them back to Istanbul with him. But his hopes were to be doubly dashed – first because, as he now learned, Margliani and Bruti had been chosen to undertake the mission, and secondly because the contents of Sokollu’s latest letter, which he had brought, made Philip aware that Acuña’s negotiation had been based on a forgery, so that Aurelio himself now fell under a large shadow of suspicion. (Summoned to Spain towards the end of 1577, Aurelio would spend some time in prison there, thanks also to information supplied by Mondéjar that he had grossly over-charged for his expenses.) Yet at the same time Philip was also able to see from the Grand Vizier’s letter that Sokollu was keen to proceed towards a truce, and that it was necessary to choose between supporting King Sebastian’s Moroccan project and going ahead with a truce negotiation. He chose the latter.⁶

Giovanni Margliani and Bartolomeo Bruti left Naples at the end of October 1577. With them went Giovanni Stefano de Ferrari, a young man from a well-known Milanese family, who had previously served as Margliani’s ‘alfiere’ or lieutenant at Tunis, and had been captured and freed together with him. They sailed to Brindisi, and embarked on a frigate (a small, fast, oared vessel) on 4 November. Their first attempt to cross the Adriatic was defeated by strong contrary winds, and they returned to Brindisi. Setting off again, they were caught by a severe storm; when they finally saw land, on 8 November, the sailors thought at first that they were off Ulcinj, or even further north, but then they recognized the little island of Sazan (Ital.: Saseno) and realized that they were just outside Vlorë. This caused serious disquiet among the crew, who recalled that in the previous year some official frigates from the Kingdom of Naples had been attacked and robbed when they had escorted a trading ship to that port. The reputation of Vlorë as a nest of violent corsairs was well developed by this time – and, it seems, well deserved. Less than two years later, a Frenchman and a German travelled on a Venetian ship which stopped a few miles off Vlorë to let some merchants do business there. When the merchants set off from the ship in a frigate they were pursued by corsairs; they beached the frigate and fled inland, but were chased and captured, regaining their liberty only on paying an instant ‘ransom’ of 50 or 60 ducats. The travellers then went to Vlorë to find out what had happened to those men. As the Frenchman noted, this was a dangerous thing to do; he and his companion were not dressed in the Venetian style and might have been mistaken for Spanish subjects, who ‘were seized and enslaved, or indeed executed, if they were suspected of being spies’. While they were there they observed a captured merchant vessel being escorted into the port by three foists, and the French traveller recorded that ‘you see booty brought there every day.’⁷

After discussing the idea of sailing up the corsair-infested coast to Lezhë, Margliani and Bruti decided after all to go straight to Vlorë. Two miles from the town, they picked up a local man from the coast and used him as a pilot. On their arrival, as Margliani wrote in a letter from Vlorë on 11 November, they were quickly surrounded by a mass of people; ‘signor Bruti and my lieutenant immediately disembarked, and went together to the kadi [judge] with the safe-conduct which we got from signor Aurelio.’ The kadi sent them to the nazır (superintendent) of the port, whom Margliani described as the deputy or representative of the sancakbeyi (district governor); the nazır invited them to his house, and sent an armed guard to watch over their frigate. At this point Margliani must have felt the advantage of travelling with someone who not only spoke Albanian but knew how to deal with this sort of local Ottoman official. According to Bartolomeo’s own account, the advantage was even greater than that: in Vlorë, he wrote, ‘we were in danger, were it not for the fact that I found the Viceroy of that province, who was a relative of mine; he received us very politely, and rescued us from the fury of the levends, who had risen up against us, Vlorë being a nest of corsairs.’ As it happens, we know the nazır’s name, Mustafa Çelebi; unfortunately there is no independent information about his family background. This claim of relatedness may have been an exaggeration, as was the description of the nazır as a ‘Viceroy’, but Margliani himself recorded in his letter from Vlorë that Bartolomeo Bruti ‘has friends to visit everywhere’. From this it would seem either that Bartolomeo had spent some time in Vlorë in his early teens, probably with Venetian traders, or that he was able quickly to reactivate some of his father’s personal contacts.⁸

As Margliani saw it, however, the fact that Bartolomeo had many local friends was a liability, not an asset: his worry was that the secret of their mission would be leaked. He was taken aback to find that some people in Vlorë had already been expecting a Spanish ambassador to arrive; this was the first sign that the Ottoman authorities adopted a very different line on the question of the secrecy of the negotiations. On Aurelio’s advice, Margliani asked the nazır to say that he was an emissary of the Grand Duke of Tuscany. Arriving several days later at the town of Berat, he met the sancakbeyi of Vlorë there and had to reveal the true nature of his mission to him, while also asking him to go along with the Tuscan story. By 25 November Margliani and Bruti had reached the Macedonian town of Bitola (Alb.: Manastir), and from there the brother of the sancakbeyi of Vlorë set off to Istanbul bearing a confidential letter from Margliani to Hürrem Bey. In it he explained that he had come to ‘finish the business that was started a few months ago with signor Don Martín de Acuña’; he begged Hürrem to treat the news as strictly confidential, and he asked him to find a place where he could live in secret, either in Hürrem’s own house or near to it. (He also wrote that Bruti had arrived by chance in Naples when he was there, and had joined the mission only at that stage.) After a slow journey through the snows of Macedonia and Bulgaria, the travellers finally reached Küçük Çekmece (Ital.: Ponte Piccolo), the last way-station before Istanbul, on 14 December. Hürrem Bey sent a messenger to take them into the city in the dead of night; when they reached the house which had been arranged for them, the landlady refused to let them stay, so they were forced to go to the messenger’s own house and wait there. It was not a good beginning, and things were about to get much worse.⁹

At two hours before dawn, Hürrem Bey came to see them. When he learned of the terms on which Margliani had been sent to negotiate, he exclaimed: ‘If I were a Christian I would make the sign of the cross! Where did Don Martín [Acuña] dream up such falsehoods? The Grand Vizier is expecting an ambassador, as that is what he wrote in the letter sent with Don Martín. The Grand Vizier will strongly resent this turn of events, and I hope to God that he does no irreparable harm to your persons.’ The next day Hürrem Bey returned, saying that he had spoken to Sokollu; the Grand Vizier was, as he had expected, very angry, insisting that if Margliani was not a proper ambassador he should go back to Spain immediately. When Margliani said that Sokollu had given the King of Spain a choice between open negotiations and ‘dissimulated’ ones, Hürrem said that he absolutely denied having done that. Nevertheless, Sokollu did offer Margliani and Bruti an audience on 16 December. On their way to his house – their first venture into the streets of Istanbul in daylight – they happened to encounter Melchior (or ‘Marchiò’) Spinelli, a young Venetian dragoman who had trained as a giovane di lingua in 1574–5 and knew Bartolomeo Bruti well; so the secret of their mission had already begun to be compromised, so far as the other European representatives in Istanbul were concerned. At the entrance to Sokollu’s house they met Hürrem with Solomon Nathan Ashkenazi, whom Margliani had previously got to know at the bailo’s house when he was staying there after his release from captivity. Sokollu was too busy to see them that day, so Margliani returned home, while Bartolomeo (a more recognizable figure in the city) waited until nightfall so that he could do so unobserved.¹⁰

Finally, on 17 December, the promised audience took place. Mehmed Sokollu was an imposing figure, now in his early seventies; a Serb from south-eastern Bosnia, he had been taken by the devşirme (the ‘collection’ or so-called ‘blood tribute’) at the age of eighteen, when he was serving as an altar-boy at the Orthodox monastery of Mileševa. After a distinguished career as both an administrator and a military commander, he had been promoted to the position of vizier (senior minister and member of the Sultan’s small divan or governing council) in 1555, and had become Grand Vizier in 1565. The relatively inexperienced Sultan Selim II, who succeeded his father, Süleyman the Magnificent, in the following year, tended to leave more decision-making to his Grand Vizier, so that Sokollu’s power to determine strategic policy increased significantly. When the bailo Marcantonio Barbaro returned to Venice in 1573, he included in his report an admiring portrait of Mehmed Sokollu. ‘He alone takes care for and orders all things, especially the most important things, and in fact all civil matters, criminal matters and state affairs pass through his hands; in dealing with them, he has no other adviser than his own mind. He is pious, sober-minded, inclined to peace, and neither vindictive nor grasping. He is in good health, with a good complexion, a solemn presence, tall, with a good figure, and an excellent memory.’ The next bailo, Antonio Tiepolo, commented three years later that ‘he seems extremely skilful, since he listens quietly and then replies without any change in his manner’; negotiating with him, Tiepolo observed, ‘you might think you were dealing with a Christian ruler rather than with an Ottoman one.’ Not every Western diplomat agreed with this characterization, however. The Imperial Ambassador, Joachim von Sinzendorf, complained in 1579 that ‘when you negotiate with him about something today, he categorically promises, accepts, and comes to an agreement; but the next day, or even the same day, he denies, contradicts or changes it.’ The idea that he was not ‘grasping’ was not universally held; Gerlach noted that when a vizier died he would appoint a successor on payment of a bribe of 50–60,000 ducats, and even Tiepolo, who admired him, commented on ‘the extremely strong desire he has to accumulate treasure’. Sokollu also became famous for his nepotism: one Ottoman chronicler totted up seven viziers and ten beylerbeyis who were members of his family. Perhaps the main reason for the positive portrayal of him in the Venetian reports was that he was regarded as sympathetic to Venice; the Ragusans similarly thought well of Sokollu, as they saw him (with better reason, probably) as their friend and protector. But the idea – expressed by one Venetian envoy – that he was generally pro-Christian was surely based on nothing more than his own skills in diplomacy and opinion-management; all the evidence indicates that he was a devoted servant of the long-term interests of the Ottoman Empire.¹¹

When Giovanni Margliani met Mehmed Sokollu on 17 December 1577 his experience of the man was far from that of the admiring Venetian baili. The Grand Vizier made clear his extreme displeasure, saying that he was ‘amazed and offended’ by the nature of this surreptitious mission, and demanded to know why they had not brought the usual lavish presents. (It also did not help that Margliani was disfigured by the arquebus shot he had received at Tunis, and wore a large black patch under one eye to hide the scarring; Sokollu would later say that the Sultan wanted an ambassador who was not hideously blemished.) Margliani tried hard to defend his position, insisting on King Philip’s bona fide wish for an armistice, and pointing out that not only had the Spanish fleet remained in its ports during that year, but also the King had refused to send soldiers from Flanders to join Sebastian’s proposed Moroccan campaign. Sokollu’s scornful reply was that the Ottoman Empire enjoyed such military strength that it needed no concessions from Spain: he boasted that it had restored its entire fleet in one year, and forced Venice to make a humiliating peace with the sacrifice of Sopot, Ulcinj, Bar and much of the territory of Zadar. And yet there was, beneath all this bluster, a genuine desire on Sokollu’s part to reach an agreement. A further meeting was held on 23 December, and another on the 28th. While the Grand Vizier still affected to believe that Spain was a desperate suitor in these matters – at one point he said that Venice had paid 300,000 ducats for its peace agreement, and that if Philip did not want to give such a sum of money, he should hand over the Algerian port of Oran instead – he was in fact patiently working out what the limits of Spain’s negotiating position might be. On 3 January 1578, at his request, Margliani wrote a document setting out the Spanish terms. It specified that the other powers to be included in the armistice were the Papacy, the Empire, Portugal, Venice, Malta, Genoa, all Spanish territories in Italy, and a number of smaller Italian states; and it also made clear Philip’s desire to maintain, in the eyes of the world, a sort of cold war between Spain and the Ottoman Empire. ‘His Majesty also requires that no communication or traffic of any kind should follow such a truce, except with a permit or safe-conduct from both sides.’¹²

Gradually, and surprisingly, a provisional deal was hammered out. Margliani was helped both by Hürrem Bey and by Sokollu’s confidant Solomon Ashkenazi, whom he invited to talk to him on the pretext that he needed his medical advice. At one point in January the Grand Vizier threw a large spanner into the works by proposing that the Prince of Orange – leader of the revolt against Philip in the Netherlands – should also be included in the truce; but this seems to have been little more than a piece of psychological warfare. The final document on the Spanish side was drawn up by Margliani with the help of Hürrem Bey and Solomon Ashkenazi on 4 February; three days later those two intermediaries told him that the Grand Vizier had accepted a modified version of its terms. The countries to be included in the truce would be the Papacy, Malta, Genoa and the smaller Italian states on the Spanish side, and Fez, France, Poland, Venice and the Empire (those last two being, in the Sultan’s eyes, Ottoman tributaries) on the Ottoman side. The Grand Vizier promised that the Ottoman fleet would not be sent on an offensive campaign during 1578. In return, he required both a promise not to deploy the Spanish fleet against any Ottoman possession in that year, and an undertaking that a proper ambassador from Madrid would come to Istanbul, with due public ceremony and presents, to finalize the armistice within three months. Margliani was not in fact empowered to make either of those pledges, and he was doubtful about whether any embassy could be sent within that time-limit; nevertheless he gave his word, and offered himself as a hostage until the new ambassador arrived. On 8 February Sokollu wrote a formal letter to King Philip, setting out his terms and complaining that ‘undercover negotiations are contrary to the practice of our great and magnificent sultans.’ Four days later, Margliani’s loyal assistant, Giovanni Stefano de Ferrari, was sent to Madrid with this and his master’s own despatches. It seemed that Giovanni Margliani had triumphed – thus far, at least – over all the odds.¹³

The physical conditions in which Margliani had been working were peculiarly uncongenial. An obscure lodging had been found for him and his two companions; as Bartolomeo Bruti wrote in a letter to Antonio Pérez on 11 February, ‘we have spent all the time in one small room, where we had to prepare food and sleep in the same place – a pitiful situation, since we could not light a fire because of the smoke, and without a fire we were dying of cold.’ (When Margliani summoned Solomon as a doctor, he told him that he was ill from the cold, ‘not having the possibility of making a fire, nor of taking exercise’.) It is hard to understand why such an effort to maintain secrecy was still being made, when Sokollu’s distaste for it was already fully apparent. If Margliani thought that he was keeping his activities from the prying eyes of the other Western diplomats in Istanbul, he was being woefully naïve. On 26 December 1577 the Imperial Ambassador wrote a report including a detailed account, given to him by Sokollu himself, of Margliani’s mission and its aims – and since one of those aims was to include the Empire in the truce, it is not surprising that the Grand Vizier had discussed it with him. Two days later the new bailo, Nicolò Barbarigo, wrote to the Venetian government about the recent arrival of Margliani and Bruti, saying that it was rumoured that they had come as ambassadors for Spain. While the bailo did not yet know the details of their quasi-embassy, the authorities in Venice did: they had recently received an anonymous intelligence report from Spain which described Margliani’s mission very accurately, saying that he carried papers describing him as an ambassador but was under orders never to use that title in practice.* And on the same day that the bailo sent his despatch, the French Ambassador, Gilles de Noailles, the abbé de Lisle (brother of the Bishop of Dax), wrote to Paris with the news of Margliani and Bruti’s arrival; in a later report, of 22 January, he commented also on the Grand Vizier’s desire to include France in the truce. By this stage, Margliani seems to have been almost the only person to think that his negotiations were still a secret affair.¹⁴

While he was cooped up with Bartolomeo Bruti in a small, freezing room, Giovanni Margliani’s hostility to his companion intensified and festered. As we have seen, the fundamental breach between them had occurred in Naples, when he decided that Bartolomeo was cowardly and treacherous. Writing to the secretary of state Antonio Pérez on 11 February, he exclaimed that ‘Bruti is the greatest traitor, the greatest coward, the most insolent and most spineless man alive. Is this not one of the worst calamities in the world, that a well-intentioned knight should have to live for years on end with a man of such wicked and evil quality, and, in order not to breach the terms of his service, that he should have to yield to him all the time, and be patient?’ He continued: ‘When I had to send this despatch, he was so insolent as to tell me to my face that it was his job to take it, and that he had as great a role in this business as I did, and that he would speak to the Grand Vizier in such a way as to ensure that he would take it’ – which, since we know that the despatch was taken by Giovanni Stefano and not by Bartolomeo, shows that Margliani did not in fact yield to the latter all the time. As he later wrote to Philip, Margliani was convinced that in his own luggage he had unwittingly brought some kind of secret message from Aurelio to Hürrem Bey; having been suspicious of Bartolomeo’s closeness to Aurelio ever since the first days in Naples, he persuaded himself that all three of those people were jointly conspiring against him. A version of this story appears also in a report by the two Imperial ambassadors, Ungnad and Sinzendorf, of 17 January, who had been told that Aurelio had hidden in Margliani’s luggage a letter to Hürrem written in lemon juice. Motivated allegedly by jealousy, as he thought he should have been made ambassador himself, Aurelio was said to have informed Hürrem that Margliani’s mission was ‘merely fraudulent’ and that he was there ‘only to gain time with the Ottomans, and to prevent the deployment of this year’s fleet’. Even if Aurelio had sent such a message, it seems highly unlikely that Hürrem acted on it, since all the evidence shows that he worked hard to salvage the negotiation. But the belief in a conspiracy obviously became well entrenched. The Imperial ambassadors also noted: ‘Apparently someone called Bartolomeo Bruti, who came with Margliani, is likewise manoeuvring to get himself sent to the King of Spain, with Margliani staying here; it is thought that Bruti is also working surreptitiously with Aurelio and Hürrem Bey. So Margliani keeps his negotiations very secret from Bruti, and because Bruti is a Venetian citizen, it seems that he absolutely refuses to let him go to the King.’¹⁵

Some of Margliani’s suspicion towards Aurelio may have been justified. It is very likely that the long-established intelligence chief resented the fact that he had not been put in charge of these negotiations. Another cause of resentment comes to light in one of Margliani’s later reports, where he wrote that Aurelio warned Hürrem Bey in a letter that Margliani had been given the task of reforming the intelligence system in Istanbul and investigating its finances. It is certainly possible that Aurelio was working for Venice too; such parallel service was not unusual in the world of early modern espionage. But Venetian allegiance would not in itself have given Aurelio a reason to sabotage this project, so long as he knew that Venice would also be covered by the truce. (Two years later, when the French Ambassador in Istanbul asked the Venetians to help obstruct the truce negotiation, they answered that they had not worried about it previously since they assumed it would fail, and that now they thought it would go ahead, they were simply asking Spain to make sure that they were included in it.) The Venetian archives do not supply any evidence that Bartolomeo Bruti was working for Venice in this period; so there is no apparent reason to doubt his statement, in his letter to Pérez of 11 February, that ‘I am being persecuted by the Venetians, who cannot stop persecuting me out of their displeasure at the fact that I abandoned their service.’¹⁶

From Bartolomeo’s point of view, there were many reasons for dissatisfaction with Margliani’s mission. He had warned of the severe problems they would encounter, and had been disregarded. He believed that he had an equal role in the enterprise, but was treated as something more like a servant. (Later he would complain to the King that he could not write confidentially to him because ‘I do not have the cipher, and Margliani has refused to let me have the one which, on Your Majesty’s orders, was given to both of us together.’) His own mission to turn Mehmed Bey had had to be abandoned, since he found in Naples that the Viceroy had told Acuña about it, and Acuña had ‘revealed it to many people’. His request to act as courier for the despatches and documents relating to the provisional agreement was rebuffed – not so much, we may suppose, because he was a Venetian as because Margliani did not wish the King to briefed by someone whom he regarded as his personal enemy. In a later letter to Philip, Bartolomeo mentioned another cause of disagreement: when he learned that two galleys of the Sicilian fleet had been seized by Barbary corsairs, he wanted to present a formal protest to the Ottoman authorities, but Margliani refused to do so. ‘After that’, Bartolomeo wrote, ‘his suspicions towards me grew larger every day, perhaps as he suspected that I was writing secretly to Your Majesty about what happens and was happening here; seeing how suspicious he was, I thought it best to leave his company.’¹⁷

There was one other reason for the growing estrangement between Bartolomeo Bruti and his companion: unlike Margliani, he seems not to have believed that the mission had any chance of success. Some of the grounds for such disbelief can be guessed at. It was obvious that Philip would be very reluctant to send out a high-level embassy, with the eyes of the world upon it, to plead for peace at Istanbul. It was hard to imagine that the Ottomans, having invested so much effort after 1571 in developing a huge war-fleet, would agree to lay it up for many years – especially when they had such a dynamic naval commander, Kılıç Pasha (who did in fact lobby hard against the truce). On the other hand, it was easy to suppose that the well-known Portuguese plan to conduct a major war in North Africa – against a Moroccan ruler who was a protégé of the Sultan – would draw in the Spanish. If that happened, any Spanish–Ottoman armistice would quickly become a failure or an impossibility. But what Bruti may not have known was that since at least the beginning of 1577 Mehmed Sokollu had been planning a war against Persia; so when the Shah, Ismail II, died in November of that year, the Grand Vizier saw a not-to-be-missed opportunity to intervene there before the next ruler had time to consolidate his power. Historians have long understood that the ‘great powers’ of early modern Europe were locked in a system which set the two Habsburg powers, the Holy Roman Empire and Spain, against the two anti-Habsburg ones, France and the Ottoman Empire. Yet they often forget the involvement of a fifth great power in what was, in reality, a Eurasian dynamic: power-relations in Europe could at times be decisively influenced by Ottoman concerns about Persia. What Sokollu now envisaged was a large-scale, multi-year campaign, which would seize territory from the Persians and build fortified positions in it, creating an entire new geopolitical settlement on the Ottoman Empire’s eastern flank. This would involve sending armies to occupy broad stretches of land continuously, not just sallying forth each spring for a limited campaigning season; in such conditions, security against any large-scale military threat on the European side of the empire would become much more important. It was this requirement, arising from Sokollu’s ambitious vision of the future of the empire in Asia, that made the Grand Vizier stick with the policy of the Spanish truce, even when the King of Spain gave him more than enough reasons to renounce it.¹⁸

The three-month time limit, set in early February 1578, came and went. More months went by, without any news from Madrid. In mid-July the Portuguese army, led by a stubborn young king whose head was filled with ideas of crusading piety and chivalric glory, landed on the Atlantic coast of Morocco. It consisted of between 8,000 and 10,000 inexperienced Portuguese soldiers (including much of the nation’s nobility, dressed in all their finery), a few thousand northern European mercenaries, a force of 6–700 English and Irish Catholics and Italian bandits who, recruited by Thomas Stucley in Italy to launch an invasion of Ireland, were fatefully diverted by Sebastian when they reached Lisbon, and, finally, between 1,600 and 2,000 Spaniards – whose participation Sokollu either did not know about or chose to overlook. On 4 August, at the Battle of Alcazar (Arab.: El-Ksar el-Kebir), King Sebastian and his local ally, a claimant to the throne of Fez, engaged with the forces of Abd el-Malek, the ruler of the country, and were crushingly defeated; Sebastian and the other two leaders died in the battle, and thousands of Portuguese survivors were taken off for slavery or ransom. News of these developments took some time to reach Istanbul. So, throughout the summer, Margliani remained in his lodging, isolated and apprehensive. As he later wrote to Philip: ‘I stayed about fifteen months in two rooms, having no other pastime than going to a window. When the King of Portugal went over to Africa, because I had appeared at that window, my house was stoned. Every time Your Majesty sent out the fleet, I found myself in danger, because the French Ambassador persuaded them that you were planning a campaign against Algiers.’ On 4 September 1578 he wrote to Antonio Pérez that he had still heard nothing from Spain, seven months after sending Giovanni Stefano, and that meanwhile he had learned that Bartolomeo Bruti was taunting him with the words: ‘what excuse will Giovanni [Margliani] give to Mehmed [Sokollu] for this voyage to Barbary by the King of Portugal?’¹⁹

In the same letter, Margliani also wrote that Bartolomeo Bruti had told Hürrem Bey that he, Margliani, was planning to flee the city. Whether Bruti was acting here on sincere beliefs, or engaged in sheer mischief-making, is hard to tell; what is clear is that relations between the two men had broken down entirely. In late October 1578 Bartolomeo and the Imperial dragoman Matteo del Faro went to see Sokollu at night to warn him about Margliani’s conduct. In the words of Margliani’s later account (which was at second hand, and no doubt deeply biased), Bartolomeo declared ‘that he had been sent jointly with me by His Majesty to negotiate this truce, and that I had excluded him from the business so that I could destroy the negotiation, because, as I had been employed in the navy, I did not want the truce to come about, since, if it did, His Majesty would not maintain a fleet, and if he did not maintain it I would be out of a job’. When Sokollu seemed sceptical, Bartolomeo assured him that his own word could be trusted, as he was planning to settle in Istanbul, where he was going to marry a niece of Matteo del Faro. Asked why he had come at night, he said he had done so to avoid Solomon Ashkenazi, who, on the promise of a large gift from Margliani, was also trying to sabotage the negotiation. At this point the Grand Vizier became angry and dismissed him. On the following day Sokollu asked Solomon if he knew Bartolomeo Bruti, and received, in Margliani’s words, ‘extensive information about him, which was not at all good’. Hürrem and Solomon had joined Margliani in a firm alliance against Margliani’s former colleague.²⁰

It was only in mid-October 1578 that King Philip at last decided to send an ambassador, as Sokollu had requested, and chose the man for the job: Juan de Rocafull, a nobleman with a distinguished military career who had fought at Lepanto. His instructions were to go to Istanbul, give substantial presents to the Sultan and the Grand Vizier, and obtain a truce for up to 20 years. On 22 October Philip sent a letter explaining this to Bartolomeo Bruti – which, since the tone of the letter was perfectly normal, suggests that some of Margliani’s heated criticisms of him may have been discounted at the Spanish court. But travel between Madrid and Istanbul was slow, and it was not until mid-January 1579 that these messages were finally brought to Margliani by the faithful Giovanni Stefano de Ferrari. (Bartolomeo would later complain, however, that Margliani did not pass on the King’s letter to him.) The news was that Rocafull would travel from Naples via Dubrovnik, in order to reach Istanbul within the next two months. Margliani therefore asked the Grand Vizier to send a çavuş to Dubrovnik to wait for him. This was duly done; but in late March word came back from that city that Rocafull was nowhere to be found, and the same was reported two months later. In June 1579 Margliani received a letter from Naples saying that Rocafull was ‘a little indisposed’. During July and early August Margliani’s position in Istanbul deteriorated, as rumours began to spread of Spanish naval preparations for an attack on Algiers; he nervously asked Solomon whether he could expect to enjoy diplomatic immunity. In late August the rumours were dispelled, and another letter arrived promising that Rocafull would soon come to Istanbul. Yet that promise too was broken.²¹

Finally, on 4 October 1579, a Spanish agent appeared: an army officer called Antonio Echevarría, who had previously been a slave in Istanbul and had acquired fluent Turkish. For some time he had been waiting to travel to the Ottoman capital as an assistant to Rocafull. But his task now was to confer the ambassadorial credentials on Margliani, and to give him the King’s instructions, which were that he should conclude the negotiation himself; if he could not persuade the Ottomans to abandon the idea of open diplomacy, he should ask them to have the truce document, once agreed, brought to Dubrovnik for a formal signing ceremony between a Spanish envoy and an Ottoman one. To Margliani’s intense relief, Sokollu accepted this arrangement. The reasons for Philip’s long prevarication – and for the patently fictitious illness of Rocafull – were various; apart from his general tendency to drift or drown in the huge sea of his own administrative paperwork, they included the shifting prospects of military success for the Spanish in Flanders on the one hand, and for the Ottomans in Persia on the other, as well as the problems caused by Pope Gregory XIII’s extraordinarily hostile reaction to the news of these negotiations. The upheavals generated by Philip’s order to arrest his secretary of state Antonio Pérez in July 1579, on a charge of judicial murder, also did not help. Sokollu was probably aware of all these factors. Margliani may not have been. What he did know was that after eighteen months of tension and often severe anxiety he was now back, more or less, where he had started. But he had at least survived, and there was everything still to play for.²²