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In June 1582, amidst the upheaval of the French Wars of Religion, an armed fleet of up to sixty ships set sail from Belle-Isle, in Brittany, bound for the Azores, with as many as 7,000 men on board. Many of those involved in the organization of the fleet had been part of other privateering expeditions in the past and had an established, related interest further afield in Brazil. Yet this, 'the largest French force sent overseas before the age of Louis XIV', was exceptional.1 It was the climax of a short series of long-range operations to the islands in the early 1580s, which were a more direct challenge to the authority and naval strength of Philip II, commanded by a relative and favourite of the queen mother, Catherine de Medici, and conducted in the name of her rival legal claim to the Portuguese crown. Although the French challenge quickly unravelled with heavy defeat at the battle of Ponta Delgada off the island of São Miguel in July 1582, this remains an extraordinary enterprise. The question of French motivation, however, that is to say of the strategic purpose of the Azores campaigns, has not been adequately addressed.
The determination with which Philip II sought, and finally secured, the islands himself by the end of the summer of 1583 suggests that, for Spain, the stakes had been very high indeed. This had not just been a French attack on Spain's overseas empire but an intervention in a civil war, of sorts, which had started with the death of the childless Portuguese cardinal-king, Henry I, in January 1580 and in the closing stages of which the Azores came to play a key role. Very quickly, the duke of Alba led a Spanish army across the border into Portugal and marched on Lisbon. At the same time, a fleet was dispatched along the coast, and together they took the capital late in August 1580, forcing the Portuguese pretender, Don Antonio, into hiding. The Azores, however, held out against the authority of the new king, and plans were thus also laid for a force to sail out into the Atlantic to secure their obedience.2 Subduing the islands, therefore, was the final,...