Ottoman Empire

The Ottoman Empire is presented chiefly as a feared power beyond the immediate action: a force that Catalina of Aragon imagines may repeatedly threaten Christendom, and against which she initially understands royal alliances and war as religious duties. The narrative later unsettles that view by showing her question the assumptions behind crusade and recognize the humanity of people her earlier beliefs had reduced to enemies.

Identity and Narrative Presence

The Ottoman Empire does not appear through a direct encounter or a scene centered on its institutions. Its presence is mediated by reports, political calculations, religious rhetoric, and Catalina’s imagination. The most concrete account of its power comes through her belief that the Ottoman sultan goes to war each spring, as routinely as other men plow fields. She treats the timing of any future attack as unknowable but the attack itself as certain. This is a character’s expectation, not an independently narrated account of an Ottoman campaign.

That distance matters: the empire is initially less a society than a horizon of danger. Catalina associates it with lands beyond the defeats suffered by the Moors in Iberia and with a military strength that, in her view, remains undiminished. The narrative establishes the limits of her knowledge even as it shows how powerfully those expectations shape her political thinking.

Crusade and Political Strategy

In Catalina’s early outlook, the Ottoman Empire belongs to a broad religious and strategic struggle. She believes that an enduring alliance between Spain and England is necessary to resist France and to carry a Christian campaign against Muslim powers beyond Iberia, including the Ottoman Empire. In this vision, English wealth and ships would help extend the campaign into Africa and farther east. The projected war is not confined to defense: it grows into an imagined effort to pursue and defeat a religion across an immense, seemingly unbounded world.

The shifting alliances of European rulers disturb this simple division between Christian allies and enemies. Catalina learns that her father has allied with Louis XII of France to invade Italy and divide its spoils. She is surprised because she had thought France and her father would remain enemies, but she considers an alliance with her father preferable to one with the Ottoman Empire. The episode exposes the strategic flexibility of rulers and the difference between Catalina’s crusading expectations and the contingent calculations of diplomacy.

Fear and the Limits of Victory

The empire’s significance also lies in Catalina’s fear that military victories cannot secure lasting safety. Even after the Moors have been defeated in Iberia, she imagines that Muslim forces may return from elsewhere. The Ottoman Empire supplies a powerful focus for that expectation: the danger is not finished by victory in one region because, as she understands it, the adversary retains strength beyond it. Her early political language turns this prospect into a duty to prepare and fight.

A later dream sharpens the novel’s distinction between perceived threat and actual event. Catalina wakes in pain after dreaming of a rising river and black-sailed ships; in her distress, she first thinks they may be Moors coming for her, then imagines a Spanish fleet as an enemy of both her and England. The episode does not depict an Ottoman fleet or an Ottoman attack. Instead, it shows how fear of invasion has become entangled with uncertainty about allies and enemies.

Reconsidering the Enemy

Catalina’s later reflections challenge the worldview that had made religious difference a sufficient reason for hostility. After receiving compassion from a Moorish physician, she revises her judgment of the people she had regarded as her enemies. She comes to recognize them as fallible, hopeful, and faithful to their own creed, and rejects a crusade against the Moors or anyone else. This change does not arise from a meeting with an Ottoman representative, and the narrative does not assign the empire a separate personal relationship with her. Rather, her encounter with a Muslim individual unsettles the broad categories through which she had understood distant Muslim powers, including the Ottoman Empire.

The empire therefore marks both the reach and the limits of Catalina’s early political imagination. At first it makes a perpetual religious war seem necessary; later, her changed convictions expose the cost of treating whole peoples as permanent enemies. Its role is less to supply a particular military episode than to embody the fear of an endless conflict that the novel’s evolving moral perspective learns to question.