JOHN OF AUSTRIA

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'Juan of Austria' (February 24, 1547 - October 1, 1578), in English traditionally known as Don John of Austria, and in Spanish as Don Juan de Austria, was an illegitimate son of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, also King Carlos I of Spain, who became a military leader best known for his naval victory at the Battle of Lepanto in 1571. Note: “Don” is a Spanish honorific, equivalent to English “Sir,” not a name.

Contents

Childhood and Youth

Mediterranean Naval Command and Don Carlos

The War of Cypru and Battle of Lepanto

The Mediterranean after Lepanto

Governor Generalship of the Low Countries and Death

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Footnotes

Childhood and Youth

Born in Regensburg, Bavaria, he was the progeny of a liaison between Emperor Charles V and Barbara Blomberg, a burgher’s daughter and singer. (The date assigned, February 24, was Charles’s birthday.) Barbara was promptly married to Jerome Kegel, a court functionary in Brussels, and her child became known as Jeromín. At age three Jeromín was taken from his mother and put in the care of a Flemish court musician and his Spanish wife. Given money for their travel and his keep, they took him to Spain and settled in Leganés, her village just outside Madrid. There Jeromín (Gerónimo in Spanish) played with village boys and started school with the priest at nearby Getafe. When he turned seven, a courtier appeared and took him from his now-widowed foster mother to the castle of Charles’s majordomo, Don Luis de Quijada, in Villagarcía de Campos, not far from Valladolid. Quijada’s strong-willed wife, Doña Magdalena, took charge of Jeromín, who became a page in her household. He was given a solid curriculum of studies and learned Latin and French.
When Charles abdicated his Spanish crowns in 1556 to his son and heir, Philip II of Spain, he retired from Brussels to the remote monastery of Yuste in Spain. There he summoned Quijada to return as majordomo. In the summer of 1558 Quijada brought Magdalena and Jeromín to Yuste, where Charles, on several occasions before his death that September, saw his son, now a trim blond youth of eleven. Though he did not acknowledge him at the time, in a codicil to his will Charles had made provision for Jeromín and expressed hope that he would follow a career in the Roman Catholic Church, though he left the final choice to him.
Philip II returned from Brussels in 1559, aware of his father’s will. Settled in Valladolid, he summoned Quijada to bring Jeromín to a hunt. When Philip appeared, Quijada told Jeromín to dismount and make proper obeisance to his king. When Jeromín did so, Philip asked him if he knew who his father was. When the boy did not know, Philip embraced him and explained that they had the same father and were brothers. He would ever after address him as “mi muy querido y amado hermano,” (my very dear and beloved brother). Philip renamed him Juan, after a brother who died in infancy.
While they were dear as brothers, Philip was strict with protocol and did not accord Juan royal status. He was not considered an “Infante” (Spanish royal prince), nor was he to be addressed as “highness,” a form reserved for royals and sovereign princes. In formal style he was “your excellency,” the form for a Spanish grandee, and known as Señor (in the sense of Lord) Don Juan de Austria. “Of Austria” was then the family name of the dynasty we now call Habsburg. Don Juan was not to live in royal palaces or quarters, but maintained a separate household, with Luis and Magdalena Quijada now heading his service. Philip did allow Don Juan the incomes allocated to him by Charles so that he might maintain the status proper to the son of an emperor and brother of a king. In public ceremonies, Don Juan stood, walked or rode behind the royal family, but ahead of the grandees.
But in many ways Don Juan, with his good looks and gracious personality, was an intimate part of the royal family. Philip’s new queen, Elisabeth de Valois, was only a year older, and his ill-fated son by his first marriage, Don Carlos, only two years older. Often in the company of the lively young set was Don Juan’s half-sister Juana, Princess of Brazil, a dozen years his senior. At the baptisms of his nieces, Elisabeth’s daughters Isabel Clara Eugenia and Catalina Micaëla, it was the agile Don Juan who carried the infants to the baptismal font.
Philip, hoping that Don Juan would take up an ecclesiastical career, sent him to the University of Alcalá de Henares in the company of Don Carlos and Alexander Farnese, Prince of Parma and son of Charles V’s other acknowledged bastard,Margaret of Austria, Duchess of Parma (1522-86). At Alcalá in 1562 Don Carlos suffered a fractured skull that had a deleterious effect on his erratic personality. In 1565, Farnese left to marry in Brussels, where his mother was Regent of the Low Countries, which Philip II inherited from Charles. From Farnese Don Juan learned womanizing and soon excelled at it in his own right. In time, he would acknowledge two illegitimate daughters, one in Spain, the other in Naples. The former became an abbess, the latter, after years in a convent, married an Italian nobleman. A son was rumored to exist.

Mediterranean Naval Command and Don Carlos

Philip’s hopes that Don Juan would enter the Church were fully dispelled in 1565, when the eighteen-year-old bolted from court for Barcelona to join the armada for the relief of Malta, besieged by the Ottoman Turks. A military career was clearly more to his liking. In 1568, when Don Juan turned twenty-one, Philip appointed him Captain General of the Sea, commander of Spain’s Mediterranean galley fleet. Before he embarked, the matter of Don Carlos came to a head. The Prince’s behavior was such that Philip was almost alone in believing he might yet be worthy of the throne. The Prince’s confessor confided that the Prince admitted a desire to kill his father, alarming the King. Don Carlos thought to flee court, with the idea that he might bring peace to the Low Countries where rebellion against Philip’s rule brewed. He sought the aid of Don Juan, who informed Philip. The King put his son under arrest.
Don Juan embarked in Spain’s galley fleet that spring, under the guidance of Philip’s confidant Don Luis de Requeséns, Grand Commander of Castile and assisted by veterans such as Don Álvaro de Bazán, soon to become Marquis of Santa Cruz. He patrolled Spain’s coast and chased Barbary corsairs, his first foray into combat. During the summer he was distressed to learn of Don Carlos’s death and devastated when, on coming ashore at the end of the campaigning season, he learned of the death of the Queen. While he joined Philip at prayer by the Queen’s bier, he seems to have had a falling out with the King over his place in the funeral. Perhaps at Philip’s command, he withdrew to a monastery near Valladolid to meditate.
== Morisco Revolt in Granada ==
When news reached him at Christmastide of the revolt in Granada of the Moriscos (Moors who had technically converted from Islam to Christianity to avoid expulsion from Spain), he volunteered to serve in any capacity. The local grandees in charge, the Marquis of Mondéjar in Granada and the Marquis of los Vélez in Murcia, soon fell out over matters of tactics, strategy and the place of clemency. The revolt spread and aid came from Barbary and the Turks. In April 1569 Philip appointed Don Juan commander-in-chief over the feuding marquises, with Quijada his chief adviser. In Granada Don Juan built his forces with care, learning about logistics and drill and dealing with jealous local authorities. Requeséns and Santa Cruz patrolled the coast with their galleys, limiting aid and reinforcements from Barbary. In December Don Juan unexpectedly took the field with a large and well-supplied army. First clearing rebels from near Granada, he then marched east through Gaudix, where veteran troops from Italy joined hi, bringing his numbers to 12,000 men. In late January he assaulted the rebel stronghold of Galera. Fighting was long and hard and causalties heavy. When Galera fell, Don Juan had it leveled and salt ploughed into its soil. Its surviving inhabitants were sold into slavery.
As the campaign continued, Quijada was fatally wounded at Don Juan’s side in a skirmish, while a musket ball grazed Don Juan’s helmet. Philip sympathized with Don Juan’s distress at the loss of Quijada, who had been like a father to him, but admonished Don Juan that generals should not be in the thick of combat, but take a safe position from which to direct the battle. Fighting men, however, came to see Don Juan more like his father Charles V, who was also drawn to combat, than his famously desk-bound brother Philip. More and more, despite Philip’s order to the contrary, they addressed Don Juan as “Your Highness.” It would be years before Philip relented and let it be.
The example of Galera and Don Juan's determined advance began to intimidate other Morisco villages, which soon began to surrender to Don Juan’s superior forces. Through 1570 the revolt gradually sputtered out as its leaders quarreled, sought individual advantage, and murdered each other, while the Turks and their Barbary allies turned to the invasion of the Venetian colony of Cyprus. To eliminate the possibility of further revolts in Granada, Philip dispersed its Morisco population in small groups among the Old Christian towns and villages of the Castilian hinterland, and hoped for their assimilation into Spanish society and true observance of Christianity. Watching Morisco men, women and children leaving their ancestral homes on a cold November day, Don Juan admitted little seemed sadder than the depopulation of a kingdom. (Philip’s plan in the long run failed and in 1609, Philip III ordered the expulsion of all Moriscos from Spain.)

The War of Cypru and Battle of Lepanto

The War of Cyprus became the focus of Spain’s attention after Pope Pius V sent an envoy to urge Philip to join with him and Venice in a Holy League against the Turks. Philip, who depended upon papal blessing for perhaps a quarter of his revenues, agreed and negotiations opened in Rome. Among Philip’s terms was the appointment of Don Juan as commander-in-chief of the Holy League armada. While he agreed that Cyprus should be relieved, he was also concerned to recover control of Tunis, where Turks had overthrown the regime of Philip’s client Muslim ruler. Tunis posed an immediate threat to Sicily, one of Philip’s kingdoms. Philip also had in mind the eventual conquest of Algiers, whose corsairs posed a constant nuisance to Spain. Charles V had tried and failed to take it in 1541.
While Don Juan finished the pacification of Granada, negotiations dragged on in Rome. In summer of 1570 an allied fleet of galleys belonging to the Venetians, the Pope and Philip sailed for Cyprus, under the Pope’s admiral Marcantonio Colonna. In charge of Philip’s contingent was the Genoese after Requeséns’s death, its pay in arrears, mutinied and began to maraud for loot and stores in the provinces not under rebel control. The States General of the Low Countries assembled at Ghent while local authorities raised troops for self-defense. Delegates from the rebel provinces met with their fellows to find grounds for a common cause. In early November, mutineers sacked the city of Antwerp in what came to be called “the Spanish Fury.” At Ghent the delegates signed a Pacification that granted limited tolerance and authorized the raising of an army to deal with Philip’s mutinous troops, whom they demanded be removed.
Don Juan got the news of the sack in Luxembourg soon after his arrival, and learned that his acceptance as Governor General depended upon his acceding to the Pacification of Ghent. Don Juan negotiated from , to Spa as an excuse to meet her near Namur. There were stories that on his dash through France they had a secret tryst in Paris. After she resumed her journey, Don Juan and his selected companions seized the citadel of Namur. He sent Escobedo to Spain to explain to Philip the impossibility of gaining an acceptable peace with heretics and calling for the return of the army. The States General declared war on Don Juan.
Philip, his finances only slightly improved, was distressed. Did he believe Don Juan could have succeeded in negotiations without accepting religious toleration or at least through them buy more time? For reasons that have never become clear, Philip’s chief secretary, Antonio Pérez, insinuated that Escobedo was behind Don Juan’s call for the army and had fed Don Juan’s ambitions to liberate the Queen of Scots, maybe more. Whatever his doubts about his brother’s intentions, Philip sent the army back under Alexander Farnese, but in March 1578 either approved or acquiesced in Escobedo’s murder by Pérez’s hirelings.
Don Juan, Farnese and the army had routed the States General’s army at Gembloux that January. On the news of Escobedo’s murder Don Juan was perplexed, and knew not whom to believe. Tired and increasingly ill, he campaigned through the summer with mixed success, but failed in his attempt to take Brussels, after receiving a setback in the Battle of Rijmenam on2 August 1578.He did win more and more of the Catholic nobles and towns to the royal cause. As ever money was a problem, and he felt his life was being doled out in bits and pieces, and complained to friends of the endless rainy weather. In September he pulled the army into camp near Namur to regroup, as his health failed. On October 1, 1578, he died of what contemporaries called camp fever, typhus. His army gave him a funeral due a hero. He had appointed Farnese his successor as Governor General, an appointment Philip confirmed.
His body was dissected, returned to Spain, reassembled and placed by Philip to rest in the unfinished crypt of the Escorial, not far from their father. In time the body had its own niche and a fine nineteenth century marble effigy. Philip, reviewing Don Juan’s papers found no evidence of disloyalty, and put Pérez under arrest.
Dead at thirty-one, Don Juan of Austria was regarded by his contemporaries as one of the great captains of his age, as well as a romantic figure. Lepanto remains his great triumph. G. K. Chesterton in 1911 published a poem titled “Lepanto,” and dubs Don Juan “the last knight of Europe.” Don Juan’s ambitions, above all for the Queen of Scots, tend to obscure his talent for statecraft and ability to lead. He was, however, a prince of his era, to whom religious toleration was unthinkable. Clearly frustrated by the religious factiousness in the Low Countries, he began the policies that Farnese would follow in keeping the ten southern provinces, today’s Belgium, Luxemburg and most of France's Nord-Pas-de-Calais, Roman Catholic and loyal to Philip, and limiting the revolt to the northern seven that became the Dutch Republic.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Braudel, Fernand, ''The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II''. 2 vols. New York, Harper, 1972., translated from ''La Méditérranée et le monde méditerranéan à l'époque de Philippe II'', 2nd ed., Paris, 1966.
Capponi, Niccolò, ''Victory of the West: The Great Christian-Muslim Clash at the Battle of Lepanto'' (2006) Based on the latest research.
Dennis, Amarie. ''Don Juan of Austria''. Madrid, privately printed, 1966. A sensitive study of Don John, by an American long resident in Spain, it rests mainly on contemporary sources and has a lively treatment of Lepanto.
Guilmartin, J.F. ''Gunpowder and Galleys''. (Rev. Ed., 2003). A seminal work that overturns received opinion about galley warfare.
Stirling-Maxwell, William. ''Don John of Austria''. 2 vols. London, 1883. This remains the best book on Don Juan, despite its Victorian biases and old-fashioned approach.
Törne, P. O. de, ''Don Juan d’Autriche et les projets de conquête de l’Angleterre'' (1928)
van der Essen, Léon. ''Alexandre Farnèse, Prince du Parme, Gouverneur Général des Pays-Bas'' (1578-1592), 5 vols., Brussels, 1933-1935

Footnotes

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