Akdeniz – the Battle for the White Sea, 1550–1571

I

Jean de Valette was a Knight of St John who had led slave raids in the days when the Hospitallers were based on Rhodes. Several years after the evacuation of Rhodes, whose capitulation he had witnessed, he was appointed governor of Tripoli, granted to the Knights along with Malta; then in 1541 his galley, the San Giovanni, had an altercation with Turkish pirates, and he was captured and put to work as a galley slave at the ripe age (for those times) of forty-seven. He survived the humiliation for a year, until the Knights of Malta and the Turks effected a prisoner exchange. Back in Malta he rose up the hierarchy of the Order; he was known for his occasional bursts of temper, but he was also admired as a brave, imposing figure. He was emerging as a potential leader of the Order just as Turkish power edged ever closer to Malta, and indeed Sicily. In 1546, Turgut, or Dragut, one of the most capable naval commanders in Turkish service, captured Mahdia on the Tunisian coast, though the Spaniards recaptured it in 1550. Turgut clashed with Andrea Doria’s fleet off Jerba, but he escaped just when Doria seemed to have trapped him; he sailed to Malta and Gozo, laying waste the home islands of the Knights, before a victorious assault on Tripoli, lost after over forty years of Christian occupation.¹The Spaniards attempted to swing the balance back in their favour, and in 1560 they despatched a fleet of about 100 ships (half of them galleys) in the hope of finally capturing Jerba. Andrea Doria was now elderly, and command was entrusted nepotistically to his heir and great-nephew, Gian Andrea Doria, who was unable to impose on his captains the strict discipline that was needed to hold the line in the face of the Turkish naval counter-attack led by Piyale, a talented young admiral of Christian ancestry. It has been claimed that Piyale’s order to hoist sail and run down the Spanish fleet ‘ranks among the great snap decisions in naval history’.² Few Spanish galleys escaped the destruction that followed at Jerba.³ The Sicilian and papal fleets took years to recover from the defeat. As damaging as the loss of ships was the loss of life among the Spanish and Italian officer class and among skilled seamen and artisans (coopers, boatswains, marines) – about 600 of Spain’s best men.⁴ The victory boosted the confidence of the Turks. They had good reason to feel that they were on the verge of a breakthrough.

What was at stake was command of the entire Mediterranean. Any ruler who aspired to control passage from the eastern to the western Mediterranean had to be able to control the Sicilian Straits. With Tripoli gone, and control of Tunisia in question, the importance of holding Malta became ever more apparent to Christendom. Turkish writers showed their impatience at what they called the ‘cursed rock’, and urged the sultan to take it quickly, so that communication between the Maghrib and the Aegean could flow smoothly.⁵ The urge to capture Malta became more intense following pirate attacks by the Hospitaller fleet. Among commanders in Maltese service, the most notorious was Romegas. In early June 1564, off western Greece, he led an attack on a large Turkish galleon, the Sultana, heading towards Venice; Romegas appropriated merchandise worth 80,000 ducats. Next, he captured the governors of Cairo and Alexandria, as well as an ancient and much loved nurse from the imperial harem, who was said to be 107 years old. Süleyman set out his aims with clarity:

I intend to conquer the island of Malta and I have appointed Mustafa Pasha as commander of this campaign. The island of Malta is a headquarters for infidels. The Maltese have already blocked the route utilised by Muslim pilgrims and merchants in the eastern part of the White Sea, on their way to Egypt. I have ordered Piyale Pasha to take part in the campaign with the Imperial Navy.⁶

A massive Turkish fleet sailed out of Constantinople on 30 March 1565 in the confident expectation that the gates to the western Mediterranean would soon be unlocked; 170 warships and over 200 transport ships, bearing 30,000 men, hove into sight off Malta on 18 May.⁷ This looked like an invincible armada; the horizon was white with sails.⁸ Further ships were on their way under the command of the elderly Turgut, based in Tripoli. The Ottoman pincers would surely seize and crush Malta.

That this did not happen was partly the result of a series of bad decisions by the Turks, and partly the result of the attachment of the Maltese themselves to their new Hospitaller masters. The Maltese nobility bunkered down in their stone palaces in the ancient capital at Mdina, in the centre of the island. But Maltese of lesser standing identified enthusiastically with the cause of Christendom, acting as scouts and swimming across dangerous waters to carry messages to beleaguered garrisons. The conflict centred on the Grand Harbour and its inlets. The modern capital, Valletta, was built only after the siege, and where it now stands there was a rocky promontory, Mount Sciberras, at the end of which stood the fort of St Elmo, defended by a rather low set of walls. Opposite St Elmo, the Knights were based in Vittoriosa, the old port of Malta – now called Birgu – where they replicated their style of life in Rhodes, building headquarters for each of the divisions, or langues, into which the Order of St John was divided (the langue of England, now ruled by a Protestant queen, could muster only a single knight). Beyond the tip of Vittoriosa, the massive castle of St Angelo stood guard over the harbour. Opposite lay its suburb, Senglea, from which it was divided by a narrow inlet. These were mostly well-fortified areas, and not surprisingly the Turks were drawn towards them. An Italian soldier who helped defend Malta, Francisco Balbi di Correggio, wrote a memoir of the siege, and described, apparently accurately, the discussions between the two commanders,Mustafa Pasha, in charge of the land forces, and the much younger Piyale, in charge of the naval forces. Balbi stated baldly that if Mustafa’s advice to take Mdina had been followed, ‘we should certainly have been lost, for all our reliefs reached us by way of Mdina. But Almighty God did not permit that it should be so, for it was his will that the two pashas in their jealousy should disagree violently with one another – as we learned from deserters’.⁹ Instead, the Turks resolved to seize St Elmo, on the grounds that they would then be able to break the Knights’ hold on the Grand Harbour, as well as gaining entry into the northern inlet of Marsamuscetto (the channel between modern Valletta and modern Sliema), where they hoped to dock much of their fleet. They were full of confidence. St Elmo would be theirs in no more than a dozen days.

The Turks underestimated the determination of their opponents, and they were taken aback by the desolate setting in which they found themselves: a rocky island, denuded of tree cover, which would be able to support their vast army only with great difficulty. Fort St Elmo was defended by 800 troops, amply supplied with meat (including live cattle), biscuits, wine and cheese.¹⁰ It was battered relentlessly; the Knights answered Turkish attempts to storm the citadel with deadly hoops that were set ablaze and sent into their midst. The Turks began to see that Malta was far less vulnerable than they had supposed. St Elmo held out, remarkably, until 23 June. In part this was due to the dedication of the Knights to the Christian cause they sought to defend. They were willing to fight to the death amid appalling scenes of carnage; Balbi testifies that the water of the Grand Harbour was red with blood. Eighty-nine Knights were killed during the siege, but they were only the elite of a much larger force: 1,500 French, Italian and Spanish soldiers died with them. Ottoman losses were even more severe: about four Turkish soldiers for each western European one.¹¹ Jean de Valette, now Grand Master, boosted morale by appearing, as it seemed, everywhere, and never apparently sleeping. Christian relief ships from Sicily managed, as yet, to achieve little, though by early July 700 men from the relief force were able to enter Vittoriosa. Much greater assistance would be required if the Turks were to be chased away from the island, and yet the European courts only gradually saw the implications of an Ottoman victory. De Valette was constantly sending messages to Sicily appealing for aid, but the Spanish king was afraid he would lose his fleet at sea, as had already happened at Jerba. Sometimes Philip viewed the conflict with the beady eyes of an accountant, even though he was thoroughly convinced that it was his duty to throw the Ottoman advance back into the eastern Mediterranean. The king finally agreed to the proposal by Don García de Toledo, viceroy of Sicily, that a large navy should at once be sent to Malta; but poor communications between Madrid and Palermo accentuated the delay, as did the shortage of available galleys in Sicily (Don García could call on twenty-five in late June, 100 two months later).¹²

The fall of St Elmo enabled the Turks to launch a much delayed assault on the Knights’ strongholds of Senglea and Vittoriosa, using cannon Mustafa Pasha had drawn up on higher ground behind these towns. There followed weeks of intense bombardment and hideous slaughter. Quite simply, the defenders were lucky or rather, in their view, God saved them and the island. At a desperate point in early August a Maltese detachment ravaged the Turkish camp near Senglea. Those they killed were already too sick to fight, but the havoc they created was enhanced by the assumption that they were the long-awaited relief force from Sicily. In fact, they had ridden out from Mdina, to which they returned; and when the Turks sent their own detachment to Mdina, they were shocked to see how well defended the ancient capital was. This and other events led to further quarrels between Piyale and Mustafa Pasha, reported by Balbi. Piyale insisted that he had heard of the arrival of a great Christian relief force. ‘If such were the case, he felt it was his duty to save the fleet. “The sultan”, he said, “thinks much more of the fleet than he does of an army like this one.” With this reply he walked off.’¹³ The ruthless slaughter continued for another month, as the Turks tried to mine Vittoriosa and turned the town into a pile of rubble; Mustafa was embarrassed by letters from Süleyman demanding information about the siege, which, the sultan insisted, should have drawn to a victorious conclusion by now.

For a brief moment, it seemed that luck favoured the Turks: late summer storms sent the relief force from Sicily in a vast arc from Syracuse past the island of Pantelleria to Trapani, after which it at last made headway towards Gozo, reaching Malta on 6 September 1565. The news of the landing from Sicily set off further disagreements between Mustafa Pasha and Piyale:

After a bitter and protracted argument, Mustafa gave it as his opinion that, since they were sure a strong relief force had landed, the best thing was to leave immediately. But Piyale said: ‘What excuse will you give, O Mustafa, to the sultan? If you leave without even seeing the enemy, will he not cut off your head? If you have not seen them, you cannot even tell him from what forces you have fled.’¹⁴

So Mustafa agreed to stand and fight, but his troops were not of a like disposition: 10,000 men from the relief force routed Mustafa’s army near Mdina, and the Turkish army fled towards Piyale’s ships. By 12 September those Turks who were still alive had all gone. Many thousands had been left behind in makeshift graves on Mount Sciberras. Balbi reported that 35,000 Turkish troops had died in the siege, which would be a larger number of men than the initial invading force.¹⁵

The impact of the siege of Malta on morale in the West should not be underestimated. The news of the Turkish defeat reached the papal court in about a week. The pope announced at an audience that the victory had been achieved by God and the Knights, giving no credit to King Philip.¹⁶Victory in Malta broke a cycle of defeats at the hands of Süleyman and the Barbary pirates: the loss of Rhodes; the battle of Preveza; the embarrassment at Jerba. The Spaniards felt rejuvenated and started to build a new fleet in Catalonia, southern Italy and Sicily, for they were convinced that the Ottomans would return in force; but they now had the energy and confidence to try to block rather than evade a Turkish counter-assault. The Ottomans seem to have regarded the defeat as an inconvenient reversal, rather than as the end of a period of Turkish ascendancy in the Mediterranean. The sultan could still call on massive reserves of manpower. He had not actually lost his fleet. Neither Piyale nor Mustafa Pasha lost his head, though Mustafa was deprived of his command. But, against all expectations, the Hospitallers had managed to prevent the Ottomans from breaking decisively into the western Mediterranean. Of course, the Turks already possessed allies there, among the Barbary emirs who recognized Ottoman sovereignty. The Ottomans hoped, too, to find allies on the very soil of Spain, among the converted Muslims, or Moriscos, many of whom still adhered to Islam and deeply resented attempts to suppress ‘Moorish practices’ in religion and daily life. The Moriscos erupted in rebellion at the end of 1568, and were defeated only after two blood-filled years, during which aid was supplied by the Barbary states – easily done, since ‘in Spain at this time there were no galleys at all, for the king’s forces were fully occupied in many distant places’.¹⁷ An Ottoman breakthrough might well have forced the Spanish monarchy on to the defensive in what it still, despite the presence of the Muslim corsairs, regarded as its own maritime space. Instead, the Sublime Porte turned its attention to the eastern Mediterranean, contemplating the fact that three of the most important islands, Chios, Cyprus and Crete, still lay in Genoese and Venetian hands.

II

The Knights were remote from the people over whom they ruled. They were French, Spanish and Italian noblemen; officially at any rate they did not procreate; it has been remarked that the lowliest Knight was regarded as more important than the most noble Maltese.¹⁸ After 1565 they were lauded as the saviours of Christendom, for their grit and determination in horrific circumstances had earned them respect as far away as Protestant Europe and even, grudgingly, in Ottoman Constantinople. However, Malta’s strategic position at the heart of the Mediterranean was expressed in other ways than as the target of Ottoman armies and navies. The coming of the Knights and their choice of Vittoriosa rather than Mdina as their centre of government greatly stimulated the life of what had previously been a small fishing port. Piracy had been a major source of income for the Knights since their days in Rhodes, but they also encouraged Maltese captains to apply for privateering licences; they were allowed to fly the flag of the Order (a white cross on a red field), and had to pay 10 per cent of their profits to the Grand Master. Still, fitting out a ship, which would need to be armed with efficient cannon, was an expensive business; a pirate flotilla might contain a combination of ships owned by the Grand Master and vessels owned by local pirates.¹⁹ Corsairs such as Romegas often brought captured ships to Malta and put them up for auction.²⁰ And among the booty brought back from raids, the most precious was often the cargo of slaves who, if male, could be put to work in the galleys of the Knights. There was a massive slave market in late sixteenth-century Malta. As the port of Vittoriosa developed into an important stopping-point on trans-Mediterranean voyages, Christian navigators increasingly relied on its slave market to replace captives who had died or escaped earlier in their voyage. As in previous centuries, there was also profit to be made from ransoming those slaves about whom someone cared back in their homeland.²¹

In times of relative peace, the Maltese conducted trade in the surrounding waters, mainly to Sicily, which accounted for 80 per cent of voyages from the island between 1564, the eve of the Great Siege, and 1600. Since this amounts to nearly 4,700 voyages to Sicily, the intensity of this activity is clear. But there were also nearly 300 recorded trips to Marseilles and nearly 250 to Naples, as well as occasional trading visits to Egypt, Syria, Libya, Constantinople, Algiers, Dalmatia and out into the North Sea as far as England and Flanders. Meanwhile, the presence of the Knights made Malta into a pole of attraction for settlers from across the Mediterranean. There were Greek merchants from Rhodes, following in the wake of the Knights themselves. Further down the scale there were local Maltese businessmen who would have counted for little in international affairs, small cogs in the great machine that distributed food around the Mediterranean. Villagers from Naxxar, Zebbug and other places in the interior invested small sums of gold in trading ventures whose aim was to bring Sicilian grain to Malta. Another product in very short supply on Malta was wood, and the presence of the Knights vastly increased demand for timber, for they were above all a naval power.²² Their ability to keep the island supplied with timber is almost as impressive as the massive building projects initiated by de Valette, which resulted in the creation of the Grand Harbour as it is today. As the heirs to the Hospitaller Order of St John of Jerusalem, the Knights of Malta did not forget their duty to care for the sick: the great ward of their infirmary was the largest hall in early modern Europe. Care for their patients demanded a ready supply of often expensive and exotic spices, and even of luxury metals: the practice of serving food on silver plates reflected not inordinate luxury but a sense that silver was more hygienic than earthenware.

Malta was not the only location in the central Mediterranean that experienced an economic boom in the sixteenth century. This was the age when ‘free ports’ came into existence on either side of Italy. Two types of free port developed: ports where people of all religions and origins were made welcome, and protected from the interference of the Inquisition; and ports that were free in the modern sense, places where taxes were reduced or abolished in order to encourage trade. A good example of the former is the western Adriatic port of Ancona, within the Papal States.²³ Despite concentrating on trans-Adriatic exchanges, notably with Dubrovnik, Ancona managed to maintain a limited trans-Mediterranean trade during the later Middle Ages, jealously observed by the monopolistic Venetians but protected by Ancona’s papal overlords. Around 1500 two or three ships were sent each year to the Levant, bringing back raw silk and cotton as well as spices, which were then distributed outwards both from Ancona and Dubrovnik. Among the goods sent from Ancona to the East were soap, oil and wine, but cloths sent overland from Florence and Siena were also loaded, as well as a famous by-product of the cloth business, Fabriano paper, made from rag according to techniques the Italians had learned from the East – evidence for the way the technology of western Europe supplanted that of the East by 1500.²⁴ By that date the Florentines were concentrating their eastbound cloth traffic through Ancona; this consisted not simply of silks and velvets produced in Florence, but of goods acquired from right across western Europe: linen arrived from Rheims, whence it was carried along rivers and roads to Lyons, now a flourishing business centre linking northern and southern Europe. The aim was to supply the rich markets of Constantinople and the Ottoman Empire. From the 1520s the Florentines were able to meet their Balkan clients closer to home, as Turkish, Ragusan, Greek and Jewish merchants congregated in Ancona, which rapidly developed into a free port for all nations and religions. The Jewish merchants consisted of two groups: the Ponentini, Sephardim of the western Mediterranean largely descended from Marrano converts (and in some cases still notionally Catholic, under the ambiguous label ‘Portuguese’); and the Levantini, Sephardim who had settled in the Ottoman Empire and traded out of Constantinople, Salonika and Smyrna. One group had acculturated more to western styles of living, the other to Turkish manners.

From the Balkans, hides arrived in great quantities; and, as Ancona grew and flourished, the city had to turn beyond the Italian Marches for supplies of grain, which the Ragusans willingly provided from their sources of supply in Sicily, southern Italy, the Aegean and Albania (a source of millet).²⁵ Grain supplies came under increasing pressure in the late sixteenth century: land was being given over to vines and olives, in reaction to local population decline in Italy and Iberia, but the inevitable result was that estates produced grain for local consumption only, and lost interest in supplying the international market. This posed a problem for those city communities that could survive only by importing surplus food from elsewhere in the Mediterranean. The problem formed part of a wider series of difficulties that was changing the character not just of trade across the Great Sea, but of the cultivation of the lands close to its shores.²⁶ When Florentine cloth supplies dwindled in the late sixteenth century, following political strife in central Italy, Ancona reached further afield and imported woollen cloth from as far away as London, which it then passed on to Dubrovnik, Herceg Novi and Kotor, for distribution within the Balkans.²⁷ The rise of Ancona was not, then, simply a phenomenon of a small corner of Italy. A whole network of Anconitan ‘connectivities’ came into being; it was densest in the Adriatic but extended far beyond. Ancona was a ‘true frontier’ between Islam and Christendom, where merchants from many nations met face to face.²⁸

Ancona’s business partner Dubrovnik reached the high point of its fortunes precisely during this period of bitter tension between the Ottomans and the Spaniards, for its Senate steered with agility between the opposing navies. Tribute continued to flow to the Sublime Porte, and yet Ragusan ships were content to join the Spanish Armada in its disastrous attempt to invade England in 1588; the ‘Tobermory wreck’ found in Scotland is thought to have been a ship of Dubrovnik.²⁹ It was an extraordinary achievement that a republic whose territory consisted mainly of a compact walled town was able to maintain a fleet of 180 ships as early as 1530. Its total capacity by the 1580s has been estimated at 40,000 tons.³⁰ Dubrovnik drew full benefit from being both a Catholic city and an Ottoman vassal. But it also began to open its doors to non-Christian merchants. The city fathers had at first wanted to ban Jewish settlement, as the number of Jews in the city increased following expulsion from Spain and southern Italy either side of 1500. Then, by 1532, they began to see the Jewish merchants as a vital link on the route to Ancona, where Jewish settlement had been strongly encouraged. Now the city fathers lowered customs duties for Jewish merchants, in the hope of stimulating business. Among the influx of Sephardic settlers were a number of physicians. A small ghetto was established in 1546, but the area in which it was placed was not unpleasant or remote, like the ghetto of Venice: it lay close to the Sponza Palace, which was the customs house, just off the Stradun or Placa, the attractive main street of Dubrovnik. Although a massive earthquake in 1667 led to the reconstruction of much of this area, the ghetto can still be identified, with its ancient synagogue.³¹

Dubrovnik became a cosmopolitan city. This was a period of cultural efflorescence, in which the study of Latin texts was matched by the growth of literature in Croatian – the dramatist Marin Držić was influenced by the ancient Roman playwright Plautus, and has attracted much attention, not just from nationalist Croatians but from Titoist Yugoslavs who saw in him a harbinger of socialism. Meanwhile, the Franciscans and Dominicans accumulated sizeable libraries, which still survive; and artistic styles, rather dependent on those of the Italian Marches and Venice, are further testimony to the profound influence of Italian culture alongside Croatian.³² Italian, indeed, continued to be the language of government. The port cities of the Adriatic (including Venice) were places where the cultures of East and West created a kaleidoscopic mix.

Dubrovnik looked both to the sea and to the land. It was a source of skins from the Bosnian interior, importing hides from the nearby town of Trebinje, and further afield from Mostar and Novi Pazar, but the Ragusans also brought hides down from the coast of Bulgaria through the Sea of Marmara, the Aegean and the Ionian Sea.³³ The Ragusans were great specialists in the trade in European woollen cloths during the early sixteenth century (including their own, manufactured from Balkan wool), although in the second half of the century they found they had to divert much of their wool trade to overland routes across the Balkans. This was partly the result of competition with the Venetians, who directed their own business away from Dubrovnik and towards their new outpost at Split, of which more shortly. The other difficulty faced by both the Ragusans and the Venetians was the arrival of competitors from the North Sea: the Dutch and the English, of whom more in a moment.³⁴ The flourishing Ragusan colony in London withered in the second half of the sixteenth century as the sea route through the western Mediterranean became increasingly insecure; even their neutral status could not protect the Ragusans against prohibitive charges for maritime insurance.³⁵ And, as will be seen, the piracy of their fellow-Croatians, the Uskoks, based in narrow inlets and islands a little way to the north of Dubrovnik, was a constant irritation.

There was, however, a decline in traffic by sea during the sixteenth century, and land routes acquired greater importance instead.³⁶ Fernand Braudel saw this largely as a late sixteenth-century development, but the trend began rather earlier, as Ancona, Dubrovnik and a few other centres became the interface between the Ottoman world and western Europe, for each side, even in times of conflict, remained hungry for the other’s goods. Braudel insisted that one factor was the mass breeding of mules in Cyprus, Andalusia, Naples and elsewhere; but that might be (to mix metaphors) to put the cart before the horse. Why should mules rather than ships have become the preferred means of transport? One answer is that the security of the seas had declined to a point where land transport, long regarded as slow and costly, gained a comparative advantage over sea transport. For instance, at the end of the sixteenth century raw silk was sent from Naples to Livorno and then on to Germany and Flanders by land. Dubrovnik became more involved in Balkan business through Bosnia-Hercegovina and less enthusiastic about its long-distance sea trade as far as England, the Black Sea and the Levant.³⁷ Even the emergence of new trading centres on the shores of the Mediterranean was seen by Braudel as evidence for the vitality of land rather than sea routes: the rise of Smyrna, at the start of the seventeenth century, giving access across Anatolia to the riches of Persia; the attempts by Venice to develop its trade through Kotor and then across the ‘black mountain’ of Montenegro. Most remarkable was the proposal of the Marrano Daniel Rodriguez that Split should became Venice’s staple town on the eastern coast of the Adriatic, which led to the rebuilding of this ancient city and the creation by 1600 of a vigorous centre of trade that specialized in eastern products such as silks, carpets and wax.³⁸ The Ottomans complied enthusiastically with such schemes, setting guards along the roads through the Balkans. The Venetian great galleys were now sent on a modest journey one third of the way down the Adriatic to Split, rather than out of the Adriatic towards Alexandria and Southampton; but even the brief voyage they now undertook was liable to interruptions from Croatian pirates.³⁹ This trend towards shorter, more local sea routes had already begun after the Black Death (cases from Spanish waters have been cited already). The eclipse of the long-distance routes was a gradual process; the importance of the Mediterranean Sea as a means of communication was beginning to wane.⁴⁰

Quite apart from the effects of warfare and piracy, the opening of the Atlantic stimulated into new life the economies of the northern European lands; Baltic rye became the great article of trade in the North. The scourge of inflation in Spain and western Europe has sometimes been attributed to the massive influx of American silver at this period.⁴¹ The Fourth Mediterranean was not merely fractured, as a result of the conflict between Habsburgs and Ottomans; it was also marginalized, as a result of the vigorous expansion of the Atlantic economy. Yet the picture was not all bleak. Barcelona, for instance, had not been wiped off the trading map, even though most histories of the city seem to lose interest once its medieval glory days come to an end. Shipbuilding contracts abounded, to meet the needs of the fleets launched against the Turks and the Barbary corsairs. Catalan cloths found a new market in a New World. The trade of Barcelona may well have expanded during the sixteenth century, though it turned more towards the Spanish interior and focused less on the sea, fitting into the general pattern of a shift from sea to land routes. At sea, it was the merchants of Genoa and southern France who increasingly took the lead in trade out of Barcelona, and the Genoese came to dominate the commerce of the western Mediterranean islands, where the Catalans had occupied the first place for three centuries. There were calls for the expulsion of the Genoese from Barcelona in 1591, though hostility to Italian merchants in Spain was nothing new. On the other hand, large numbers of French settlers came to Barcelona, so that, according to one estimate, 10 per cent of the population was of French origin by 1637.⁴² In southern Italy, the Genoese took charge of long-distance contacts as well as running the finances of Spanish Naples.⁴³Indeed, Genoa became banker to the Spanish empire, advancing loans on which the Spanish Crown finances heavily depended, against anticipated receipts of American silver.⁴⁴

III

Those who found a new vocation on the surface of the Mediterranean included the exiled Jews from Spain and Portugal. Two of them achieved international fame, and became directly involved in the sequence of events that culminated in the loss of Cyprus to the Ottomans and the great sea battle of Lepanto. Beatrice Mendes de Luna was born in Portugal around 1510, several years after the mass conversion of the Portuguese Jews in 1497. Living in Flanders, which shared its ruler, Charles V, with Spain, her family fell under suspicion of heresy, even though several members consorted with the imperial family; the problem in accumulating so much wealth was that it brought false security – whether for holy or unholy reasons wealthy Marranos became easy targets.⁴⁵ Charles V was convinced that all these dubious converts from Judaism must have something to do with the spread of Protestantism in his German realms. In 1545 Beatrice de Luna and her close relatives precipitately left Flanders for Venice, though there too she fell under suspicion of judaizing, and then found a more secure haven in Ferrara, where the Este princes adopted an easy attitude to the New Christian settlers, who had brought prosperity, medical skills and fine music to their increasingly magnificent city. Beatrice de Luna restored her fortunes and reinvented, or rediscovered, herself as Gracia Nasi, living openly as a Jew, and supporting Marrano refugees from the Inquisition; the first Spanish translation of the Hebrew Bible to be printed, the ‘Ladino Bible of Ferrara’, was dedicated to her, and was aimed at both Jewish and Christian readers.⁴⁶ By 1552 she had once again attracted enough attention from Inquisitors to feel uncomfortable in Italy; she set off in great style for Constantinople, with a retinue of forty horsemen to accompany her across the Balkans. The Ragusan government showed foresight in welcoming her, for once she was in Constantinople her commercial agents in Dubrovnik brought plenty of business to the town.⁴⁷ The sultan permitted her and her entourage to continue to dress in Venetian style, rather than requiring them to adopt the costume accorded to the Jews. She had not turned her back on the West, however; Doña Gracia maintained an interest in Italy and the Mediterranean, informed by her determination to defend her co-religionists.

How strong this determination was became obvious when the Papal Inquisition descended on Ancona in 1555, searching out heretics among the hundred-odd ‘Portuguese’ who traded through the city and who had been encouraged to settle there in the past. The persecution of the Marranos signalled a newly aggressive policy under Pope Paul IV, who also enclosed the Jews of Rome in a narrow ghetto; he was shocked at the spread of what he saw as unbelief in a trading city that lay under papal jurisdiction. In this spirit, his agents arrested the Portuguese, confiscated their goods (said to be worth 300,000 ducats) and burned twenty-six of them at the stake. Doña Gracia gained access to the sultan’s ear, and in March 1556 Süleyman the Magnificent sent a resounding letter to Pope Paul by way of an emissary of his ally the French king, in which he demanded the release of those Jewish prisoners who were his subjects; the sultan insisted that his treasury had lost 400,000 ducats, but he expressed himself politely enough, describing himself as ‘Great Emperor of all other emperors’, and conceding that the pope was ‘High and Mighty Lord of the Generation of the Messiah Jesus’.⁴⁸ The pope, in reply, said he was prepared to save the lives and property of Turkish subjects, but the burnings of other New Christians would continue; he argued that his good disposition to unconverted Jews was to be seen in his creation of a ghetto specially for them in Ancona (no irony was intended). As news of this reached Constantinople, the circle of Doña Gracia began to coordinate a boycott of trade with Ancona. A number of Marranos had fled northwards to the port of Pesaro, in the dominions of the duke of Urbino; so, to the intense irritation of the Anconitans, business was diverted away from their own port, which had been so successful over the last half-century, to a previously insignificant rival.⁴⁹

Pesaro, however, had much inferior harbour facilities, and those Jews in Ancona who were not Marranos were seriously afraid that they would suffer along with their Christian neighbours from a Turkish boycott. Arguments also erupted within the Ottoman Empire, where the Sephardic rabbis refused to be guided by a wealthy, domineering woman who had been brought up as a Portuguese Christian. They did not see her as a new Esther who would protect and save Jewish merchants, despite all her munificence in setting up synagogues and schools across the empire. The boycott fizzled out. Ancona survived. One woman could not strangle Ancona; but the city fathers knew that a Turkish boycott led by the Sephardic merchants would mean the end of their prosperity. They recognized the great influence that this worldly-wise group exercised, with its ability to cross political, cultural and religious boundaries, despite the risk of becoming trapped in local bouts of persecution. The exiles from Spain and Portugal had moved eastward (and in some cases northward to the Low Countries), but their diaspora took the form not just of new settlements in lands far from Iberia. A whole maritime network came into existence, which at its peak reached as far as Brazil and the West Indies in one direction, and Goa and Calicut in the other.⁵⁰ They inhabited a larger trading world than their forebears the Genizah merchants five centuries earlier. The expulsion of the Jews from Spain had been a tragedy and disaster for those who experienced it; the next generation turned destruction into regeneration.

Doña Gracia was joined in Constantinople by her nephew and son-in-law, João Miguez; after circumcision he took the name Joseph Nasi, modestly signifying ‘prince’. His career was even more dramatic than that of his aunt. He had the good fortune to support the winning candidate in the struggle for power that followed the death of Süleyman the Magnificent in 1566, and became a trusted adviser of Sultan Selim II, ‘Selim the Sot’, who, it has been said, preferred bottles to battles.⁵¹ Wine made the fortune of Joseph Nasi, just as it hastened the downfall of his master. Although Süleyman had forbidden the sale of wine in Constantinople, in accordance with Islamic law, Joseph Nasi was granted a monopoly on the carriage of wine from Venetian Crete past Constantinople to Moldavia. This produced handsome taxes of 2,000 ducats per annum for the Ottoman government, and his income grew when the ban on wine in the capital was relaxed in order to permit Jews and Christians to deal in it, which of course meant that it seeped into the wider economy (it already flooded into the Topkapı Palace).⁵² One place that had been celebrated in classical antiquity for its wine was Dionysos’ isle of Naxos in the Cyclades, and it was therefore appropriate that Joseph was granted the title of duke of Naxos when Selim ascended to the throne. The island had remained under loose Venetian suzerainty until 1536, after which the Turks took charge but permitted its Latin duke to remain so long as he paid tribute; the Greek Orthodox inhabitants of Naxos complained to the Sublime Porte about misgovernment, and Selim thought that appointing a Jewish duke would be no less suitable than having a Catholic one. In reality, the Naxians were hostile to any government imposed from outside, though Nasi spent most of his time in Constantinople, where he lived in a very grandiose style and took great pride in his title.

Joseph looked beyond the Aegean. He developed a scheme to encourage Jewish settlement in Tiberias, in Galilee.⁵³ The mystically inclined Sephardic Jews of nearby Safed lacked a solid source of income, though they attempted to promote a textile industry and even printing; the duke of Naxos saw their salvation in silk, and proposed to plant mulberry trees. He also arranged for Spanish wool to be sent across the Mediterranean to Tiberias, in the hope of stimulating a woollen cloth industry in imitation of the expanding cloth industry of Venice.⁵⁴ He wanted to attract settlers from as far away as Italy, for a renewed bout of persecution in the Papal States stimulated hundreds of Jews to set out for the more tolerant Ottoman lands of the East. A letter that circulated among Jewish communities in the Mediterranean stated in rotund language:

We have heard from the corner of the land the songs of glory addressed to the righteous one, the Nasi [prince], the aforementioned lord, that he has lavished money from his purse and arranged in many places, such as Venice and Ancona, ships and help, in order to put an end to the groaning of the captive.⁵⁵

Reaching Tiberias was not easy. One shipload of immigrants was captured by the Knights of St John, and the passengers were enslaved. By repopulating the ancient holy cities of Palestine, Jewish settlers hoped to accelerate the coming of the Messiah; neither they nor Joseph Nasi possessed a coherent notion of building a Jewish state or principality. In the event, the Tiberias initiative withered, for the region was still insecure, and it was only in the mid-eighteenth century that Jewish settlers returned, this time permanently.⁵⁶

IV

The duke of Naxos was able to exert considerable influence at the Ottoman court. In 1568 he became exasperated with attempts to recover massive amounts of his property and funds that had been seized in France, and he persuaded Selim to issue a decree that one third of the goods on board French ships should be expropriated until the duke’s claims were met. Its target was the Levant trade through Alexandria, but the decree caused unexpected disruption when Egyptian tax officials assumed that it also applied to ships from Venice and Dubrovnik. Meanwhile, the French court was shocked by what was seen as a breach in its long-standing alliance with Turkey, all in the private interests of one man (a Jew, to boot) who claimed to have been wronged. Although relations between the French king and the Ottoman sultan were gradually patched together again, Joseph Nasi never received full satisfaction for his claims.⁵⁷ The sultan was prepared to listen to him once again, though, in 1569, while the Ottomans were planning the invasion of Cyprus. When a massive explosion destroyed the powder dump in the Venetian Arsenal in September of that year, along with four galleys, colourful rumours attributed what was almost certainly an accident waiting to happen to the malign machinations of the Jew of Naxos. Still, he had grudges against Venice, which had treated his famous aunt badly, and which aspired to control his islands in the Cyclades. Selim the Sot, in his cups, is said to have promised Nasi the ultimate prize: the crown of Cyprus, which the Ottomans decided to pluck from Venetian hands, and the story was embroidered further with tales that he commissioned a crown for the great day of triumph, and had a banner made bearing the inscription ‘Joseph Nasi, king of Cyprus’. More precisely, Venetian observers considered that Joseph Nasi was pressing for an attack on Cyprus, even though the Grand Vizier, Mehmet Sokollu, advised against.⁵⁸ As usual, Turkish policy took time to be formulated, and there were eloquent war and peace parties. Even so, the rumour of an attack on Cyprus was already being disseminated in January 1566, when the Venetian bailo in charge of his fellow-nationals in Constantinople reported that plans were being drawn up; in September 1568 the Venetians were further alarmed by the arrival of a Turkish fleet of sixty-four galleys in Cyprus, notionally on a goodwill visit. The Turks unselfconsciously examined the fortifications of the two cities they would need to capture: Nicosia in the interior, and Famagusta on the east coast. Among the visitors was the duke of Naxos.⁵⁹

Cyprus was an obvious target, a Christian possession isolated in the far corner of the eastern Mediterranean. The Turks had recently (in 1566) cleared the Genoese out of their last base in the Aegean, Chios. The presence of these Christian enclaves distracted the Ottomans from other pressing needs, such as the struggle against the Safavid Shahs of Persia and the wish to keep the waters of the Indian Ocean clear of their new rivals, the Portuguese India fleet. Cyprus offered refuge to Christian pirates who preyed on grain ships, and, now that grain production was in decline, the routes carrying grain towards Constantinople and other major centres needed to be protected. Interference by Christian pirates in the pilgrim traffic that led across these waters to the holy cities of Islam in Arabia was another genuine grievance. Islamic apologists for war could argue that there had been earlier occasions when the island was occupied and governed by the Muslims, or at least paid them tribute; it was a fundamental rule that lands that had once formed part of the dar al-Islam should be recovered when possible. Indeed, when the Venetians objected to the growing threat to Cyprus, Sokollu said the matter now lay in the hands of the experts in Islamic law, led by the Grand Mufti, and was not moved by the reminder that the Turks had cultivated good relations with Venice over many decades.⁶⁰ Now, however, the Sublime Porte delivered an ultimatum requiring Venice to hand over the island if it wished to avoid war.

Just as Ottoman attitudes hardened, so did the attitude of Philip II, though as usual he was worried about where he could find the funds to pay for a fleet; his troops were literally bogged down in Flanders, fighting the Protestants and other rebels against the Spanish Crown. Philip hoped the pope could raise money to pay for this war. He could offer half the costs of the campaign, Venice a quarter.⁶¹ Endless bargaining followed, not just about finance but about the chain of command. Philip II became less distracted by events in the Low Countries after the duke of Alva imposed a harsh and uneasy peace there.⁶² Within Spain itself, rebellion among the Moriscos, many of whom remained attached to their ancestral religion, used up Spanish resources and delayed Philip’s response to the appeal for a Holy League; it also made the League seem more urgent, for the danger of a Turkish strike on Spain, supported by the Barbary rulers and the Moriscos, aroused fears that Islamic armies were about to return to Spanish soil.

All this wavering left the Turks free to swoop down on Cyprus. In early July 1570 they brought a massive army of around 100,000 men on a fleet of 400 ships, including 160 galleys.⁶³ The Turks decided that their first target should be Nicosia, in the interior, though the Venetians had set to work repairing and extending its earthworks and stone walls. Nicosia held out for a while, but after desperate fighting within the walls, the Turkish soldiers obtained their distasteful prize: the right to kill, rape and despoil the inhabitants. All the while the western powers were still arguing, in ignorance of events in Cyprus. Eventually a fleet of fewer than 200 warships set out for Cyprus, in mid-September, only to hear the news of the defeat at Nicosia as they sailed east; uncertainty about what to do next led to new arguments between Philip’s admiral, Gian Andrea Doria, and the papal commander, Marcantonio Colonna. Nothing was done to challenge the Turks at Nicosia, and sensibly so, since Doria was surely right: there was no hope of recapturing an inland city without massive armies and a much larger navy. The siege of Malta had concentrated on the outer edge of a small island; Cyprus was a very different proposition.⁶⁴ The one source of hope was Famagusta, not yet taken by the Turks, for it possessed its own sturdy line of defences, and could in theory be supplied from the sea. An opportunity seemed to arise in winter 1571, when the Turkish fleet had largely withdrawn from the waters around Famagusta; a Venetian squadron broke through the weak Turkish defences, but left only 1,319 soldiers behind, making a total of 8,100 defenders. Mehmet Sokollu in Constantinople calculated that this might be a good opportunity to talk peace with the Venetians, though of course they would have to surrender Famagusta. He doubted whether they really had the means or the will to fight.⁶⁵ Venice was in a bullish mood, however – the Venetians even succeeded in capturing Durazzo, which they had lost at the start of the century, and which was strategically as valuable to them as Cyprus was to the Turks. Venice declined an offer of a trading station in Famagusta in return for the cession of the island. In any case, negotiations in another quarter were reaching their end. The Holy League was formed, a highly ambitious crusading force that brought together the pope, Venice and Spain, and that won for Philip an agreement that some of the objectives that were dearest to his heart, notably the war in north-west Africa, should be permanent objectives of the League.⁶⁶ Its commander was to be the youthful but energetic bastard son of Charles V, Don John of Austria.

The building of the great fleet required for the Holy League continued as Famagusta held out. The Turks sent a fleet by way of Venetian Crete, which they raided, into the Ionian Sea and southern Adriatic, diverting the Venetian navy from its wider concerns. Among coastal fortresses that now fell into Turkish hands was Ulcinj, just to the north of the modern border between Montenegro and Albania. Turkish ships harried their foes as far north as Korčula and Dubrovnik (though the Ragusans managed to preserve their neutrality, carefully respected by both sides).⁶⁷ Then the Turks homed in on Zadar, in the northern Adriatic, and dangerously close to Venice itself, where memories of the War of Chioggia 180 years earlier must have been revived. Still, the aim was to scare rather than smash Venice – to convince the Venetians that their empire was fragile and that resistance to Ottoman power was futile. Moreover, after months of bombardment, the wrecked city of Famagusta was ready to surrender. In early August the Venetian commander, Bragadin, presented himself at the tent of the Turkish commander, Lala Mustafa. The mood soured when Mustafa learned that fifty Muslim pilgrims whom the Venetians had incarcerated had now been executed. Lala Mustafa’s displeasure turned into fury. Bragadin’s companions were killed on the spot, Bragadin was mutilated; ten days later, he was flayed alive and his stuffed skin was borne triumphantly around Cyprus, then despatched to Constantinople.⁶⁸ This was as much a message to the Ottoman court, and particularly to Mehmet Sokollu, as it was to Venice: by his foul behaviour, Lala Mustafa hoped to undermine those who thought peace with Venice was still possible.⁶⁹ There was no need for this rough persuasion: the fleet of the Holy League was all but ready to sail. At sea off Corfu the Christian navy learned that Famagusta had fallen. If anything, this news strengthened their resolve.⁷⁰

The great battle of Lepanto that followed, at the entrance to the Gulf of Corinth, has long been regarded as one of the decisive sea battles in history: ‘the most spectacular military event in the Mediterranean during the entire sixteenth century’, according to Fernand Braudel, whose study of the Mediterranean world in the age of Philip II culminated in an account of the battle. ‘There is no doubt that on this occasion Don John was the instrument of destiny,’ Braudel proclaimed, sententiously and mysteriously. A struggle close to the mouth of the Adriatic had different implications from a siege in the Sicilian Straits. The Turks had revealed in the months before the battle that they aspired to win the Adriatic, and had accompanied their sea-raids with land-raids from Turkish Bosnia towards the Venetian possessions at the head of the Adriatic. These raids were not simply motivated by empire-building or the wish to spread Islamic rule. As will become clear, the Turks were also goaded by Slav Christian pirates and bandits in northern Dalmatia, the crusading Uskoks.

The balance between the rival forces was very delicate. The number of soldiers on board the ships of each side was similar: somewhere around 30,000 troops, though it is possible the Turkish marines had greater experience.⁷¹ There were more Turkish ships than Christian ones: just 200 on the Christian side, and maybe 300 on the Turkish, which the Ottoman admiral, Müezzinzâde Ali, organized in a crescent shape in the hope of wrapping his fleet around the Christian navy, while the centre of his line would attempt to break the Christian navy into digestible chunks.⁷² Western ships, though, were built to last, whereas part of the Ottoman fleet was constructed out of ‘green’ wood and was regarded as disposable – suitable for a couple of seasons before replacement. The Ottoman fleet consisted mainly of light galleys that sat low in the water, increasing their vulnerability but also enabling them to handle shallower in-shore waters in which they could hope to outflank the heavier Christian craft; Venice also favoured relatively light galleys.⁷³ The Christian navy possessed about twice as many cannon as the Turkish, but the Turks had brought along very many archers; guns were devastating, but slow to load, while archers could reload in an instant.⁷⁴ Both sides also used matchlock arquebuses, hand-held guns which were not terribly accurate, but which could be reloaded reasonably fast, and had replaced the deadly crossbows of the late Middle Ages.⁷⁵ The Spanish flagship, the Real, carried 400 Sardinian arquebusiers; the Ottoman flagship, the Sultana, only half that number.⁷⁶ Added to this there were problems created by the tight location, the Kurzolaris islands, to the east of Ithaka, where narrow channels impeded the quick deployment of the Christian galleys.⁷⁷

In these circumstances, it is no surprise that the battle resulted in horrific casualties. The navy of the Holy League was convinced that the crucial moment in the struggle against the Turks had come, and impressive acts of bravery under Turkish fire led to many deaths. The Venetian commander, Agostino Barbarigo, showed almost complete disregard for his vessel’s safety when he directed the flagship of the Most Serene Republic towards advancing Ottoman galleys, and tried to stand in their way. One Venetian captain after another was killed – members of the great Venetian dynasties such as the Querini and the Contarini. Barbarigo pressed on regardless, though he foolishly lifted his visor as a hail of arrows descended on his ship, and he was struck in the eye, dying down below soon afterwards. But papal and Neapolitan galleys attached to the Venetian squadrons came up from behind, and, minute by minute, the Turks were edged back.⁷⁸ Heavy gunfire from the bows of the Venetian galleasses tore Turkish ships apart, and the galley-slaves shackled to their positions were dragged down to the bottom of the sea with the smashed remains of their galley. Smoke from the constant cannon fire impeded Turkish bowmen. The slaughter was relentless, hideous and fanatical.⁷⁹ Finally Christian marines boarded the flagship of Müezzinzâde Ali, who died fighting manfully; his head was raised on a pike to the great benefit of Christian morale.⁸⁰ This did not end the fighting, for Algerian ships also entered the fray. But as dusk fell the fleet of the Holy League pulled away from the blood-coloured waters and took shelter from an approaching thunderstorm. The next morning it became apparent from the sheer evidence of death and destruction that the Holy League had not just won a massive victory, but that the number of Turkish dead was almost beyond counting. Maybe 25,000 or even 35,000 had died on the Turkish side, including not just galley-slaves but captains and commanders, while Christian losses were much lighter, though still very considerable: 8,000 dead and a larger number wounded (of whom a further 4,000 soon died); about two-thirds of the casualties were Venetian, a blow to its skilled manpower the city cannot have found it easy to bear. On the other hand, at least 12,000 Christians found on board the Turkish galleys were freed.⁸¹

Back in Venice the news of the victory, despite the massive casualties, alleviated the despair felt at the loss of Cyprus. The scale of the victory was brought home to the Venetians when a ship arrived from Lepanto trailing the banners of the defeated enemy; victory was celebrated in Venice, Rome and across Italy and Spain, not just by bonfires and fiestas but, more permanently, in vast frescoes and canvases in the Doge’s Palace and other public places.⁸² And yet the victory was, in strategic terms, no more than a stalemate, for in the coming years neither side would have the manpower, timber and supplies to fit out new fleets on this scale, or at least to risk them in great sea battles.⁸³ Don John of Austria, in the flush of success, would have liked to press on towards Constantinople itself, but Philip II, with characteristic caution, thought that it was best if the surviving galleys wintered in Italy.⁸⁴ It is true, as Braudel asserted, that victory at Lepanto helped protect Italy and Sicily from further attack, but the siege of Malta had already preserved Christian mastery over the waters off Sicily. The political map of the Mediterranean had been drawn in the years and weeks leading up to 7 October 1571. Famagusta had fallen and the Venetians had no hope of recovering Cyprus; Malta had stood firm, and the Turks would need to think again before they attacked the stronghold of the Knights, even though they did return to those waters, and secured their position at Tunis in 1574. What was important, Braudel insisted, was that ‘the spell of Turkish supremacy had been broken’.⁸⁵ Lepanto consolidated a position that had already come into being: the Mediterranean was now divided between two naval powers, the Turks in the east, holding all major coasts and islands apart from Venetian Crete; the Spaniards in the west, with the support of fleets from Malta and Italy.