Henry VII, Ferdinand of Aragon, and the African Crusade that Never Was
This extraordinary correspondence shows how central the promise of crusading was to Henry VII’s foreign policy.
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In 1507, King Henry VII of England wrote a series of extraordinary letters to Pope Julius II and to King Ferdinand of Aragon promising to send English archers to support Ferdinand’s crusading efforts to annexe additional territories along the Mediterranean coast of North Africa, if only he could marry Ferdinand’s daughter Joanna of Castile. This extraordinary correspondence shows how central the promise of crusading was to Henry VII’s foreign policy, even though neither the marriage nor the crusade ever came to fruition.

Henry’s eldest son Arthur Tudor died in April 1502, and his wife Elizabeth of York followed in February 1503. Left with only one living son, Henry needed to do something to secure the succession. His first nuptial overtures to the recently widowed Queen Joanna of Naples in 1504–05 progressed no further than Henry sending ambassadors to draw up a personal description detailing her complexion, personality, habits, and the size of her breasts.[1] An attempt at winning Margaret of Savoy’s hand was subsequently shot down by the lady herself.[2]

When Queen Joanna of Castile was widowed in 1506, Henry decided to pursue her – seemingly by any means necessary. It didn’t matter that Joanna was the older sister of Catherine of Aragon, who had briefly been married to Arthur Tudor before his death and was then betrothed to Henry’s surviving son (later Henry VIII). Joanna was wealthy, fertile, and – though rumours circulated that she was mentally unstable – a queen. Henry threw himself into the diplomatic activity needed to win Ferdinand of Aragon’s consent for the marriages of his daughters to Henry and his son, and to obtain the necessary dispensations from the pope.

One way to interest both Ferdinand and Pope Julius in furthering the marriages was to dangle the prospect of a crusade in front of them. In May 1507, Henry began a series of letters to Julius, with the stated aim of planning a general crusading expedition for the recovery of the Holy Sepulchre and the revenge of several centuries of wrongs Christendom had suffered at the hands of Muslim ‘infidels’. Pope Julius was delighted. The pontiff’s July 1507 reply to Henry’s first letter said that Henry’s missive pleased him so much that – having himself read it ten times – he then had it read out in a secret consistory, where all the cardinals present extolled Henry's virtue and magnanimity.[3]

In September or October 1507, Henry showed the Spanish ambassador de Puebla his correspondence with Pope Julius, promising that once the marriage to Joanna of Castile was solemnised, he would finance a crusade to Africa if Ferdinand wished it or – if that were not desirable – a crusade against the Ottomans in Hungary. Henry spoke at great length about the Turks and the projected crusade to Hungary or Africa, according to the account de Puebla sent to Ferdinand.[4] North Africa was ‘an area of strategic and symbolic importance’ to Ferdinand, who had spent much of his reign expanding his territorial holdings there, by 1510 annexing a string of possessions along the Mediterranean coast from Santa Cruz de la Mar Pequeña (on the mainland coast of what is now Morocco, opposite the Canary Islands) to Tripoli in modern Libya. Ferdinand wished to expand his conquests eastward as far as Alexandria, so an offer of English archers for a further crusading campaign was a judicious choice as a bargaining chip.[5]

To reinforce his message, Henry had Catherine of Aragon (who had remained in England since Arthur’s death) write in July and again in October 1507 to her father Ferdinand and her sister Joanna to extol Henry’s virtues and say how speedily Ferdinand and Henry could conquer Africa together once the marriage with Joanna took place.[6]

However, the crusade and Henry's marriage with Joanna both came to nothing; by December 1507, Henry's ambitions had been transferred to another proposed marriage – of his daughter Mary to Charles, prince of Spain (Joanna's son, later Emperor Charles V). Negotiations had been ongoing in parallel since at least September 1507, which shows how double a game Henry had been playing with his crusading overtures.[7]

Image: Late 16th century copy of a portrait of Henry VII, accessed here

[1] Bernard André, Historia regis Henrici Septimi, ed. James Gairdner (London: Longman, 1858), 223–59; S. B. Chrimes, Henry VII (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 278, 287–88.

[2] Chrimes, Henry VII, 289–91.

[3] Archivo General de Simancas, PTR,LEG,54,59, ff. 139r–­140v.

[4] G.A. Bergenroth, Calendar of Letters, Dispatches, and State Papers Relating to the Negotiations between England and Spain, Preserved in the Archives at Simancas and Elsewhere (London: Longman, 1862), 433–41.

[5] Andrew W. Devereux, ‘North Africa in Early Modern Spanish Political Thought’, Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies 12, no. 3 (September 2011): 275–91.

[6] Mary Anne Everett Green, Letters of Royal and Illustrious Ladies of Great Britain (London: 1846), 1:145–54.