Redbeard's nickname has a special meaning in the Mediterranean, and the pirate Redbeard brothers have been in this business much earlier than Blackbeard, who has only gained fame in recent years for robbing routes to new colonies.

Shortly after Mehmed II's conquest of Constantinople, the sultan, who vowed to conquer the entire continent, launched one attack after another like Europe.

One of these fierce warriors from the East was rewarded for his bravery in battle, and he was given a piece of self-cultivated land and tribute land on an island in the Mediterranean, which, according to Ottoman custom, the Sultan was to recover two-thirds of it after his death, and he could pass the rest to his son.

The Ottoman, named Arifa, gave birth to several sons in the years that followed, and he chose not much land for his offspring.

As a result, his sons became pirates, and as they grew in strength, the family became the most powerful pirate group in the Mediterranean.

Arifa's sons were fierce, and the eldest of them, Sjöne, became a well-known pirate leader, and because of his conspicuous red beard, he also had such a nickname.

However, one of the pirate families was Hayreddin, who was the most ambitious of their brothers.

In his opinion, there was no way out of being a pirate, and he longed to establish a true state and make his family a prominent king on an equal footing with the Ottoman Sultan.

Such ambitions may be too big and too far for a pirate, so even his brothers thought he was too whimsical.

However, Hayreddin apparently did not think so, and he actively assembled his own fleet, while trying to persuade the other brothers to look further, with the goal of crushing the fleets of those who protected their maritime interests in the Mediterranean, and then forcing them to recognize their family's position in the Mediterranean.

The first time he launched an attack on the sea power of Sicily was a few years earlier, in the spring, when the cold February winds raged across the Mediterranean, but this did not dampen the fire of his hunting.

So he ventured and approached the vicinity of Sicily with a few of his ships, and then at sea, not too far from the southern port of Sicily, Caribo, he attacked a ship that had fled from Crete to Sicily.

Most of the ships were carried by remnants from the Eastern Romans, who had fled Constantinople decades earlier, some in Crete, and others who had decided to flee to the Continent with a large number of treasures for fear of war.

At that time, Hareddin seized the opportunity to attack the ship, he robbed the ship's wealth, captured a large number of slaves, and after watching some of the people who jumped into the sea drift away in despair with the broken planks and debris floating on the sea, he proudly left the sea with the loot of the robbery.

It was at that time that Hayreddin began his raids on Sicily, which lasted for many years.

Highly persuasive and impressed by his brothers, the Redbeards gradually changed their way of robbing at sea, consciously establishing their own sphere of influence, and relentlessly attacking enemies who tried to invade their territory.

This includes Aragon and Sicily.

In the past few years, Hayreddin has become one of the largest forces on the southern shore of the Mediterranean, they have established a number of open and covert bases on the Mediterranean coast in North Africa, with rich maritime experience and cunning wisdom, the Redbeard family has not only evaded the encirclement and annihilation of strong enemies again and again, and even repeatedly attacked their enemies at sea.

The Redbeards' audacity and accomplishments made the Mamluk dynasty, which was already in danger in Egypt at the time, look at it differently, and they saw the pirates as a good move to contain the increasingly difficult Ottomans.

So they gave the Redbeard brothers all kinds of support in order to help them contain Ultraman's sea power.

However, unlike his brothers, who saw this as a godsend, Hayreddin did not want to leave his fate entirely in the hands of the Mamluks, and while he unceremoniously received a large amount of funding from the Mamluks, he secretly looked at the Ottomans and occasionally joined them in attacking the Europeans across the Mediterranean.

However, the Ottomans were not something that Hayreddin could trust, and his eyes were still fixed on Sicily, because he saw Sicily as a huge obstacle to the establishment of his own pirate kingdom in the future.

Hayreddin was clearly a man of his word, and in the intervening years he had masterfully maneuvered with the fledgling trade alliance without losing sight of his original plan.

Hayredding has always believed that if he wants to establish his own state on the western shores of the Mediterranean, the only option is northern Africa.

This forced him to inevitably clash with Sicily, so he always seized every opportunity to strike hard at Sicily's strength, because he knew that once he faced those strong enemies at sea one day, Sicily's unique position on the west coast of the Mediterranean Sea was likely to be the key to the enemy's containment of him.

Only this time the attack on Sicily was a little too intense, and the fleet sent by Sicily to Aragon to transport the tax money for half a year was devastating to Hyreddin, and the crew who barely escaped back to Sicily reported their fate to Flomenza, and after determining that the pirate fleet of Hyreddin had almost cut off the shipping route from Sicily to Aragon, the governor of Sicily, Flomenza, had to send someone to the king for help.

The sea route from Aragon to Sicily was cut off by pirates, and Ferdinand was deeply shocked by this unexpected news.

He had heard all kinds of rumors about the pirates that ravaged the Mediterranean, and he had suffered many losses, but none had they suffered such great losses.

The destruction of an entire fleet made Ferdinand, in addition to the loss of money, more worried that the pirates had apparently formed a large scale, and that the cut off shipping lanes made it more difficult for him to communicate with Sicily, which was dangerous at this time.

Ferdinand did not hesitate to express his anger, and he immediately summoned his Aragonese generals to find out what they intended to do about the sudden troubles that arose in front of him.

Most Castilians could not gloat over the sudden accident of the Aragonese nor worry about them, and some did want to watch the excitement, and some even thought that the pirates had a wonderful time to find trouble, at least so that Ferdinand could take care of Castile affairs because of his scramble.

Although not as powerful as Castile in terms of sea power, the Kingdom of Aragon still had a fairly strong fleet, but it was a little overwhelmed by this near-sudden enemy.

Although they knew that the pirates were rampant, they had never attacked the entire fleet head-on before, so Ferdinand did not have a good way to deal with them for a while, and the threat from the Portuguese at sea prevented him from pulling the Aragon fleet, which was confronting the Portuguese near the Azores with the Castilian navy, from the Atlantic. If not Manuel

If Manuel was not an unusually religious person, Ferdinand even suspected that the Portuguese might have colluded with the pirates, otherwise how could the pirates attack the Sicilian fleet at this time.

There was another reason for Ferdinand to be equally troubled, sending the Aragon fleet to the coast of North Africa to entangle with pirates at this time would inevitably lead to the extreme weakening of his power in Iberia, which was quite unfavorable for him now.

Ferdinand finally decided to send his fleet to North Africa, he could not afford to lose contact with Sicily, even if only for a short time, at this time it was extremely dangerous, in addition to the possibility that the Ottomans could attack from the sea at any time, the French alliance with Naples had already made him sleep, and now he was even more afraid that the loss of contact could make Sicily difficult.

"Send our fleet to find the hateful pirates, tell them that we must discourage them even if we can't destroy them, and let them know that there is a price to pay for approaching the continent, and then build a line of defense on the sea between Aragon and Sicily."

Once he knew what he wanted, Ferdinand's orders became clear and concise, and he did not interfere with the officers what they wanted, but simply told them what he wanted, thus ensuring that his men had the greatest flexibility to command their fleets, and in this respect Ferdinand was much more enlightened than his own emperor, Maximian.

News of the withdrawal of the fleet by the Aragonese soon spread in the Barriadodes, to which the Castilian received mixed reviews.

It was undoubtedly a very bad decision to withdraw the fleet at a time when the great war with the Portuguese was on the verge of breaking out, but the timing was so ingenious that the disadvantage inflicted on Castile by the Aragonese on the battlefield was seen at court as a rare opportunity to weaken Ferdinand, and it was in this rather contradictory mood that the Castilians watched as Aragonese their fleet slowly descended from the Strait of Gibraltar into the Mediterranean.

In Malaga, too, there was a man watching this passing fleet.

In fact, many Aragonese captains and sailors knew this man, Christopher Columbus, the famous adventurer in the world of sailing, was a hero in the minds of many people, but as he fell out of favor in front of the queen and his wife, this man gradually disappeared from people's eyes.

Even those who knew that he had been freed after a short prison sentence believed that Columbus had been snubbed by the queen and had no chance of returning to sea, after all, he could not have assembled a large fleet of ocean-going expeditions on his own.

So the Aragonese didn't know that Columbus was now in Málaga, where they had just passed, and were still watching the shadows of their ships disappearing into the sea.

In October, two pieces of news, one good and one bad, reached Barriariddod.

Don Bavi, who had always been arrogant and unreasonable, somehow suddenly became respectful, although he had repeatedly attacked the royal army in Andalusia, and even showed signs of driving the counterinsurgency army out of Andalusia, but he showed some signs of excitement about the negotiations proposed by the queen.

Although he is still reserved in the correspondence, as long as you look closely, you can detect the meaning of "there is something to discuss" that is vaguely revealed between the lines.

Isabella couldn't understand Don Bavi's somewhat surprising move, the advantage on the battlefield did not make him more unscrupulous, but instead showed signs of dancing negotiations, which made the sick queen vaguely speculate that something might have happened to Don Bavi's side.

It was only because she could not find any specific information that Isabella had to send envoys to Don Bavi to express her goodwill to Don Bavi while asking for more information about the Andalusian side.

If Don Bavi's outlandish behavior bodes well, the news from Toledo is clearly bad.

According to Isabella's intentions, the envoy who went to Toledo to announce the so-called "trip to the old capital of Princess Juana Toledo" not only did not see Juana, but even the city of Toledo was not able to enter.

Upon learning of the emissary's intentions, the Council of Nobles announced the official recognition of Juana's regency overnight, and they took the initiative to declare Juana the official heir of the Astamara family in Castile, as fellow Castilian nobles.

It was all done in one night, and the time was so short and the rush of the situation seemed too shabby for any such ritual.

But all these ceremonies were performed in the presence of Pope Alexander VI, and this alone is enough to prove that all ceremonies are legal and valid.

So when the messenger, who had been traveling almost day and night, finally hurried to Toledo, the representative of the Council of Nobles, who had been waiting outside the city, told him very easily: "It is all over. ”

After arguing and not answering, and even being forcibly expelled, the envoy had to return to Barriaridod overnight to report the terrible news.

In response to this accident, according to the words of some of the people who served the Queen, it was learned that the Queen had sent everyone out after hearing the messenger's report, and that for the rest of the day she had been turned away by all but the Moorish attendant beside her, even Ferdinand.

Toledo's move meant that the Noble Council had completely left Isabella behind and declared Juana's rights on its own, which was completely in opposition to Barriaride.

Don Juliomando stands side by side with Alexander in front of a stone house made of local lazurite.

The house was large, the upper and lower floors were not much shorter than the other three, and the windows were small, typical of the Iberian structure, and one can imagine that in the early years there were always vigilant soldiers with bows and arrows, ready to give an account to the incoming enemy.

The doors of the house are also narrow, and even if both doors are opened, only one person can enter.

The door was closed, and people could be heard moving inside, but no one opened the door.

"They haven't come out since they got here," Don Juliomando said to Alexander, somewhat helplessly, "and I'm worried that she'll make us all embarrassed when the official ceremony comes, because she does look crazy sometimes." ”

"Crazy Juana."

Alexander whispered to himself in a voice that only he could hear, in fact, he did not want to come to see this poor woman, it can be said that the only innocent person in this era is probably Juana.

It is hard to believe that in such an era, such a woman of such status can produce such pure love, Juana is like an obsessed with a priceless treasure and regards Philip as her only value, this pure and unreal love happens in such a complete political marriage.

So Alexander knew that this was destined to be a tragedy, both in history and in reality.

Stepping forward and knocking on the door again, the footsteps that seemed to be walking back and forth inside stopped, and then finally a slightly nervous voice came: "Who are you and what are you going to do?" ”

"Princess, don't you want to heal the prince?" As Alexander asked, he saw Don Juliomando shaking his head at him, but he ignored the chief senator and continued to say to Juana, who seemed to be clinging to the door, "Believe me, princess, I can make Philip at least feel better." ”

"Who are you?" Juana asked urgently.

"Combrae, Duke of Roman Thesia." Alexander said.

There was silence in the door again, and Don Juliomando spread his hands helplessly, he had already encountered this kind of thing before.

Alexander waited patiently, believing that Juana would open the door, and that she would do whatever it took to do anything to do with Philip, even if it was something that worried and scared her.

Sure enough, a crack opened in the closed door, and a large, shining eye peeked through the gap.

"I know you, I've seen you in Barriariddod." Juana first said with certainty, then looked at Don Juliomando on the side vigilantly, and then quickly showed a wary look in her eyes, "I have seen you too, and you are going to separate me from my husband." ”

"That's for ......"

"Can you cure my husband?" Juana directly interrupted the Chief Patriarch, her eyes fixed on Alexander waiting for his answer.

"At least I can make him less miserable," Alexander said, seeing Juana's hesitation, he tentatively stretched out his hand and pressed it against the door, "May I go in, Your Highness, I think I can take a look at the prince's situation first." ”

Juana finally made an "um" as if determined, and stepped back, the door opening softly.

"Duke, can you really cure Philip?"

Alexander noticed the strange look on Don Juliomando's face when he asked him this, but instead of answering, he walked through the door.

"No one has been able to cure him of that strange disease so far, maybe you happen to have some way, but as with those pirates attacking Sicily, it may all be just a coincidence." Don Juliomando said as he frowned.

Alexander stopped suddenly, he turned back to the senator and smiled softly, "Do you really think it's a coincidence, those pirates? ”