Peter Martyr's mission to Egypt
In 1501–1502, Peter Martyr d'Anghiera, an Italian humanist, was sent on a diplomatic mission to Mamluk Egypt by Isabella I of Castile and Ferdinand II of Aragon, in order to convince Sultan Qansuh al-Ghuri not to retaliate against his Christian subjects in response to the fall of Granada to the Spanish and the subsequent persecution of Moors.
Martyr was instructed by the Catholic Monarchs to deny reports of forced conversions of their Spanish Muslim subjects. He began his voyage in August 1501, reaching Venice in October. The ambassador later sailed for Alexandria and reached the port city on December 23. He toured Alexandria after being initially denied an audience with the Sultan. When the approval finally came, he traveled to Cairo and met with al-Ghuri on February 6, 1502. The Sultan received Martyr well in his Cairo palace, amid local unrest fueled by envoys from other Muslim states. Another secret meeting was arranged, during which Martyr was inquired about the forced conversions. He told the Sultan that the Granadan Moors had chosen the Catholic faith by their own will and blamed the tension on Jews. Martyr promised Spanish naval assistance to al-Ghuri should war break out with the Ottoman Empire. The ambassador's arguments appeared to have convinced the Sultan, who assured Martyr that Christians would be protected and allowed the renovation of their places of worship in the Holy Land. Martyr visited a number of ancient sites in and around Cairo, including the pyramids of Giza. He was given a farewell ceremony on February 21 and sailed back to Venice on April 22.
The mission was an overall success. Martyr wrote about the events in his Legatio Babylonica, one of the earliest Western European accounts of Egypt, in which he also recorded his sightseeing in the country.
Background
Peter Martyr, generally believed to have been born in 1457 in the town of Arona, was a well-connected Italian humanist who was educated in Milan, and who came under the protection of powerful lords throughout his life in Italy. After moving from Lombardy to Rome, in 1477, he managed to penetrate Papal and academic circles, including the infamous Accademia Romana. In 1484, he became the secretary of Francesco Negro, Rome's governor under Pope Innocent VIII. In 1486, he met Íñigo López de Mendoza, Conde of Tendilla, who was on a diplomatic mission to Rome on behalf of the Catholic Monarchs. Martyr and Mendoza became friends, and the latter persuaded him to return with him to Spain, which he agreed to.By the time Martyr arrived in Spain, in 1487, the country was involved in the Granada War. Having settled there, he came under the protection of Queen Isabella I of Castile and may have been assigned the task of tutoring the young nobles of her court. In 1489, Martyr became involved in the Spanish campaign against the Moors, during which he divided his time between the battlefield, as a soldier, and Isabella's court, as a war historian. He accompanied the troops of King Ferdinand II of Aragon, participating in the siege of Baza and witnessing the eventual capitulation of Nasrid Granada and completion of the Reconquista in 1492. He later occupied a canonical post in the newly reconquered city, and in 1493 he began writing about the discoveries of Christopher Columbus upon the latter's first return from the New World.
Spanish and Nasrid diplomacy in the eastern Mediterranean
Throughout the Reconquista, rulers of al-Andalus would traditionally send emissaries with distress calls to powerful Muslim states in the region, often to western Islamic kingdoms like those of the Maghreb. Internal division among the Maghrebis, however, tended to limit the extent of their assistance to the Moors during the final decades of Muslim Spain. The first time Mamluk Egypt received a Nasrid request for aid was through four Granadan ambassadors who arrived in Egypt around December 1440. Sayf ad-Din Jaqmaq, the Mamluk Sultan, told the embassy that he would refer their request to the Ottomans and that he could not provide the required military assistance. Following pressure by the emissaries, the sultan eventually promised them financial aid. Nasrid diplomatic engagements with other Muslim states increased over the years. Their letters and appeals were sent to Morocco, Egypt and even to Constantinople. During the 1480s, senior Aragonese officials, including King Ferdinand himself, grew increasingly suspicious of the intentions of the Mudéjars, their Muslim subjects who had a more favorable status in the Crown of Aragon than they did in neighboring Castile. The king ordered in 1480 an investigation into alleged Mudéjar activity in the Mamluk state and their attempt to pressure its sultan to persecute his Christian subjects. The Catholic Monarchs were, since 1484, heavily investing in the revival of Barcelona's ailing economy, which highly depended on trade. This initiative came to involve the 1485 restoration of a Catalan consulate in the port city of Alexandria, which the Aragonese considered a vital component in their Mediterranean trade network. Well-established commercial ties also existed between Egypt and the Granadan cities and, according to the Mamluk chronicler Muhammad ibn Iyas, the Egyptian public was being regularly updated on the many developments affecting their co-religionists in Iberia, including the infighting among Nasrid leaders. Despite reluctance by the Mamluks to assist them militarily, the Moors continued to perceive the Egyptian sultanate as one of the few powerful Muslim states in the Mediterranean capable of intervening on Granada's behalf when the latter could no longer resist the Christian armies. What posed a bigger threat to Ferdinand, however, were the recent Ottoman advances in the Mediterranean, particularly in Otranto, which lied close to Italian possessions of the Crown of Aragon.File:Liberación de los cautivos de Málaga por los Reyes Católicos.jpg|thumb|left|Liberación de los cautivos de Málaga por los Reyes Católicos, by José Moreno Carbonero, depicting the aftermath of the capitulation of Málaga to the Catholic Monarchs.
Ferdinand's fears were further aggravated by reports of an alliance between his generally well-armed Mudéjar subjects and the Ottoman Turks, allegedly being formed to assist the Granadans. In 1486–87, another wave of Nasrid embassies was sent to Cairo and Constantinople. Bayezid II, the Ottoman sultan, reacted to the Granadan appeals later on, in 1490, by dispatching a corsair fleet led by Kemal Reis that based itself in different locations along the Barbary coast to make contact with the Moors and to harass Christian shipping. On the other hand, Qaitbay, the sultan of Egypt, was reluctant to comply with the Nasrids' request that involved sending an army detachment to assist their cause, possibly in fear that this might compromise Mamluk military readiness in the face of an impending Ottoman incursion from the north. Qaitbay had even accepted Ferdinand's assistance during the Ottoman-Mamluk war, despite the Christians' campaigning in Granada. So instead of providing military assistance to the Moors, as requested by the Nasrid embassy, Qaitbay warned the Catholic Monarchs that Eastern Christians could face persecution in Jerusalem if the Granada campaign did not stop. This short-lived cooperation between the Spanish and the Mamluks lasted from 1488 to 1491, during which Ferdinand supplied the Egyptian state with wheat in order to finance the Granada War and later offered to assist the Mamluks on the naval front with fifty Spanish caravels. It came to an end when Qaitbay allied with the Ottomans at the conclusion of their war. Under Ferdinand, the Crown of Aragon had been observing a policy that involved maintaining diplomatic channels with the Islamic east so as to establish itself as protector of Christianity in the Holy Land. In his response to Qaitbay's threat, in 1489, Ferdinand justified the war on the grounds that he was merely reclaiming land that was originally Spain's, explaining that the Spanish motives were political rather than religious. He also assured the Sultan that Aragon never challenged the right of its Mudéjars to freely practice their Muslim faith during his war with Granada, which was in contrast to Castile's reputation in the Islamic world for mistreating its conquered Muslim subjects throughout the centuries-long Reconquista.
Prelude to the embassy
Qaitbay's death in 1496 was followed by a violent interregnum. This coincided with other developments in the region and beyond, including the discovery of gold in the New World, and Portugal's penetration into the Indian Ocean, placing it on collision course with Mamluk Egypt. And with the onset of the Italian Wars, Spain's interest in Egypt and the eastern Mediterranean began to decline, with the focus shifting towards strengthening its positions in the western Mediterranean to be able to challenge the French presence in Italy. The civil war in Egypt concluded with the ascent to power of Sultan Qansuh al-Ghuri, who now ruled over a weakened state that was under constant threat of invasion by its militarily superior Ottoman rival. By this time, the Catholic Monarchs had used a Muslim uprising in the Alpujarras as an argument against the treaty that guaranteed the Moors' right to freedom of worship. The Mamluk Sultanate, while desiring to maintain friendly ties with the Spanish, also wished to prevent the Ottoman Empire from taking over its status as a center of Islam, since Cairo was the ceremonial seat of the Abbasid Caliphate. The Catholic Monarchs have been receiving information that the Sultan was threatening retaliatory measures against Christian communities and pilgrims in the Levant. Ferdinand tended to play down such threats, even when one such threat by the Mamluk Sultan was referred to him by the Pope. But they started taking the matter much more seriously following the 1501 suppression of the Alpujarras rebellion, after which the news of forced conversions of Muslims and Granadan appeals for help had spread to the rest of the Islamic world. This may be due to the influence that Egyptian-based Granadans had in the Sultan's court, notably Ibn al-Azraq, who was received by Qaitbay some years earlier, and probably even Jewish refugees.One of the Moorish appeals that may have eventually led to the Spanish counter-embassy came in the form of a long and emotional qasida by an anonymous Granadan poet that made it to the Egyptian court in 1501, describing different forms of persecution in Spain targeting Muslims of all ages. Isabella and Ferdinand, for unknown reasons, chose Martyr as their envoy to Egypt. His mission was to deter the Sultan from possible retaliation, so the Catholic Monarchs instructed him to deny the forced conversions should the Sultan bring up the subject and to further explain that "no was done by force and never will be, because our holy faith desires this not be done to anyone." Martyr was also tasked with delivering a message to the Doge of Venice on his way to Egypt.