CHAPTER XVII
The failure of the Cyprus expedition had been, both for Venice and for the Papacy, a humiliating blow; but already negotiations were under way for a firmer and more effective alliance. The prime mover of this new initiative was the Pope. Pius V had thought long and hard about the Turkish threat, and had realised that the principal obstacle to any close understanding between Venice and Spain was that Venice saw the problem in terms of her colonies in the Levant, while Spain was a good deal more anxious about the danger presented by the Sultan’s Moorish vassals to her own possessions in North Africa. He had therefore concluded that the primary aim of Christendom should be to reestablish control of the central Mediterranean, cutting off the Sultan’s African territories from those in Europe and Asia and thus effectively splitting his empire into two. In July 1570 he accordingly called a conference to draft the charter of a new Christian League, and over the following months, by patient argument and with active Venetian help, he gradually won King Philip round.
The resulting treaty was formally proclaimed on 25 May 1571 in St Peter’s. It was to be perpetual, offensive as well as defensive, and directed not only against the Ottoman Turks but also against their Moorish vassals and co-religionists along the North African coast. The signatories–Spain, Venice and the Papacy (the way was left open for the Emperor and the Kings of France and Poland to join if they wished)–were together to furnish 200 galleys, 100 transports, 50,000 foot soldiers and 4,500 cavalry, with the requisite artillery and ammunition. These forces were to foregather every year, in the month of April at the latest, for a summer campaign wherever they thought fit. Every autumn there would be consultations in Rome to determine the next year’s activity. If either Spain or Venice were attacked, the other would go to her assistance; both undertook to defend papal territory with everything they had. All fighting would be under the banner of the League; important decisions would be taken by a majority vote of the three generals commanding: Sebastiano Venier for Venice, Marcantonio Colonna for the Papacy, and for Spain the Captain-General of the combined fleet, the King’s half-brother Don John of Austria.
Don John was the bastard son of Charles V by a German lady called Barbara Blomberg. Twenty-six years old, outstandingly good-looking and a natural leader of men, he had already gained a degree of fame–or notoriety–in the previous year by putting down a serious Morisco rising in Spain.151 The Venetians expressed themselves delighted at the appointment–as well they might have been, since the King’s first choice, about which he had luckily had second thoughts, had been Gian Andrea Doria. They would have felt rather less pleasure had they known that Philip, who suspected that the young prince’s courage was apt to override his judgement, had ordered him on no account to give battle without Doria’s express consent.
Although it was clearly too late to observe the timetable stipulated in the treaty, the allies had agreed that the summer of 1571 should not be wasted, and that the forces for the first year’s campaign should muster as soon as possible at Messina, from which they would sail in search of the Ottoman navy. By August all had arrived, and Don John drew up his sailing orders. He himself, with Venier and Colonna, would take the centre, with sixty-four galleys. The right wing, with fifty-four, would be under Doria; the left, with fifty-three, under the Venetian Augustino Barbarigo. In addition there was to be a small vanguard of eight galleys and a rearguard of six, to be respectively commanded by Don Juan de Cardona and the Marquis of Santa Cruz. To each group were allotted six galleasses. The galleons and heavy transports, which–not being oared like the galleys–were considerably less manoeuvrable, were to form a separate convoy.152
Emboldened by the fall of Famagusta and by the departure of virtually the whole Venetian fleet for Messina, the Turks had by now entered the Adriatic in strength; their landings in Corfu and along the Dalmatian coast had aroused increasing fears in Venice of a sudden invasion which would find the city almost without defence. At the approach of the combined fleet, however, they had rapidly withdrawn to their bases in Greece; they had no wish to be blockaded within the narrow sea with the enemy all around them. Thus it was from Lepanto (the modern Naupactos on the Gulf of Patras) that they sailed out, on 6 October, to meet the advancing Christians.
The Christians were in a fighting mood. Two days before, at Cephalonia, they had heard of the fall of Famagusta and, in particular, of the death of Marcantonio Bragadin; rage and vengeance were in their hearts. On the same day, however, there occurred an incident which almost proved disastrous. A Spanish officer and a few of the men on Sebastiano Venier’s galley insulted some Venetians, and in the ensuing fight several of them were killed. Venier, without consultation and on his own initiative, had all those implicated hanged at the masthead. When this was reported to Don John he flew into a rage and ordered the captain’s arrest–a command which, had it been obeyed, might well have torn the whole fleet apart. Fortunately, wiser counsels–probably those of Colonna–prevailed and he was persuaded to countermand his order, but he never forgave Venier. Henceforth all his communications with the Venetian contingent were addressed to the second-in-command.
The two fleets met at dawn on 7 October, a mile or two east of Cape Scropha at the entrance to the Gulf of Patras. The galleons had not yet arrived, but Don John was determined to engage the enemy at once. Only slightly revising his order of battle–Barbarigo and Doria received ten more galleys each–he drew his ships into formation and sailed to the attack. The Turks were ready for him, with a fleet that almost precisely matched his own, describing a huge crescent that extended from one shore of the gulf to the other. The admiral, Ali Pasha, commanded the central squadron, with eighty-seven galleys; on his right was Mehmet Saulak, governor of Alexandria, with fifty-four; on his left, opposite Doria, was Uluch Ali with sixty-one.
The battle began at about half past ten in the morning at the north end of the lines, where Don John’s left wing under Barbarigo engaged Ali’s right under Saulak. The fighting was fierce, Barbarigo’s own flagship being at one moment set upon by five Turkish vessels which simultaneously loosed a hail of arrows, one of them wounding the Venetian admiral mortally in the eye. His nephew Marco Contarini took over the command, but within five minutes he too was dead. Yet the engagement ended in a total victory for the Christians, who eventually succeeded in driving the entire Turkish right wing into the shore. The Turks abandoned their ships and tried to escape into the surrounding hills, but the Venetians pursued them and cut them down as they ran. Saulak was taken prisoner, but he was already seriously wounded and did not long survive.
The focus now shifted to the centre where, at eleven o’clock or thereabouts, Don John’s galleys, advancing in line abreast at a steady, even stroke, closed on those of Ali Pasha, the two flagships deliberately making straight for each other. They met, and entangled; to each side of them along the line the other galleys did the same, simultaneously closing in towards the middle until the sea was scarcely visible and men were leaping and scrambling from ship to ship, fighting hand to hand with swords, cutlasses and scimitars. Twice Ali’s force of 400 picked janissaries boarded Don John’s flagship, the Real; three times the Spaniards returned the attack, the last time under heavy covering fire from Colonna, who had just incapacitated the galley of Pertau Pasha, Ali’s second-in-command. It was on this third occasion that Ali was struck on the forehead by a cannonball. Scarcely had he fallen before his head was sliced off by a soldier from Malaga, who stuck it on a pike and waved it aloft to give courage to his comrades. With their admiral killed and their flagship captured, the Turks rapidly lost heart. Many of their ships were destroyed in the melée; those that managed to extricate themselves turned and fled.
To the south, meanwhile, things were going less well. From the very beginning of the advance, at about ten o’clock that morning, Gian Andrea Doria had been uneasy about his position. The Turkish left wing under Uluch Ali which confronted him was longer and stronger–ninety-three vessels to his sixty-four–and, extending as it did further southward, threatened to outflank him. It was to avoid this danger that he had altered his course towards the southeast, a decision which left an ever-widening gap between Don John and himself. He should have known better. Uluch Ali saw the gap and instantly changed his plans, altering his own direction towards the northwest with the object of cutting straight through the Christian line and falling upon it from the rear. This new course led him against the southern end of Don John’s squadron, which consisted of a few ships contributed by the Knights of Malta. The Knights fought bravely, but they had no chance against the overwhelming odds and were massacred to a man. Their flagship was taken in tow, and Uluch Ali raised their captured standard on his own.
By now Don Juan de Cardona, whose eight galleys had been held in reserve, was hurrying to the relief of the Knights. As he approached, sixteen Turkish galleys fell on him. There followed the fiercest and bloodiest encounter of the whole day. When it was over, 450 of the 500 fighting men of Cardona’s galleys had been killed or wounded, and Cardona himself was on the point of death. Several ships, when boarded later, were found to be manned entirely by corpses. Others, meanwhile, were hurrying to the rescue: the second reserve force under Santa Cruz and–as soon as he could leave his own area of the battle–Don John himself. Uluch Ali stayed no longer, ordering thirteen of his galleys to quicken their stroke and heading with them northwest at full speed towards Leucas and Preveza. The remainder broke away in the other direction and returned to Lepanto.
Despite the confusion and the appalling losses sustained as a result of the cowardice and sheer bad seamanship of Gian Andrea Doria–and there were plenty of his colleagues after the battle to accuse him of both–the Battle of Lepanto had been an overwhelming victory for Christendom. According to the most reliable estimates, the Christians lost only twelve galleys sunk and one captured; Turkish losses were 113 and 117 respectively. Casualties were heavy on both sides, as was inevitable when much of the fighting was hand-to-hand, but whereas the Christian losses are unlikely to have exceeded 15,000, the Turks are believed to have lost double that number, excluding the 8,000 who were taken prisoner.153 In addition there was enormous plunder; Ali Pasha’s flagship alone was found to contain 150,000 sequins. Finally comes the most gratifying figure of all: that of the 15,000 Christian galley slaves set at liberty. For all this the lion’s share of the credit must go to Don John himself, whose handling of his unwieldy and heterogeneous fleet was masterly and whose brilliant use of his firepower was to have a lasting effect on the development of naval warfare. In future, sea battles would be decided by guns rather than by swordsmanship. This in turn would mean bigger, heavier ships, which could be propelled only by sail. Lepanto was the last great naval engagement to be fought with oared galleys, ramming each other head on. The age of the broadside had begun.
It was 18 October before the galley Angelo reached Venice with the news. The city was still mourning the loss of Cyprus, raging against the bestial treatment of Bragadin and fearful as to what further reverses the future might have in store. Within an hour of theAngelo’s appearance, trailing the Turkish banners in the water behind her stern, her deck piled high with trophies, the whole mood had changed. Venice had had her revenge; nor had she had to wait long for it. Suddenly jubilation was in the air, as everyone hastened to the Piazza to learn the details of the battle and to celebrate. The gates of the debtors’ prison were opened in an act of spontaneous amnesty, while the Turkish merchants, with a contrary motion, barricaded themselves for safety inside the Fondaco dei Turchi until the excitement was over. In St Mark’s, a Te Deum was followed by a High Mass of thanksgiving; that night there was scarcely a building in the city that was not illuminated inside and out by candles and torches. In more permanent celebration of the event, the great entrance portal of the Arsenal was enlarged and adorned by the addition of a winged lion of St Mark (with appropriate inscription) and two winged victories. A year or two later the pediment was to be surmounted by a statue of St Justina, on whose feast day the great battle had been won, and from 1572 to the fall of the Republic in 1797 that day, 7 October, was annually celebrated with a procession by the Doge and Signoria to the church of that same fortunate patron, outside which the captured Turkish standards were displayed.
And so Lepanto is remembered as one of the decisive battles of the world, the greatest naval engagement between Actium–fought only some sixty miles away–and Trafalgar. In England and America, admittedly, its continued fame rests largely on G. K. Chesterton’s thunderous–if gloriously inaccurate–poem, but in the Catholic countries of the Mediterranean it has broken the barriers of history and passed, like Roncesvalles, into legend. Does it, however, altogether deserve its reputation? Technically and tactically, yes; after 1571 sea battles were never the same again. Politically, no. Lepanto did not, as its victors hoped, mark the end of the pendulum’s swing, the point where Christian fortunes suddenly turned, gathering force until the Turks were swept back into the Asian heartland whence they had come. Venice did not regain Cyprus; only two years later she was to conclude a separate peace with the Sultan relinquishing all her claims to the island. Nor did Lepanto mean the end of her losses; in the following century, Crete was to go the same way. As for Spain, she did not appreciably increase her control of the central Mediterranean; only seventeen years afterwards, the historic defeat of her Great Armada by the British was to deal her sea power a blow from which it would not quickly recover. Nor was she able to break the links between Constantinople and the Moorish princes of North Africa; within three years the Turks were to drive the Spaniards from Tunis, make vassals of the local rulers and reduce the area–as they had already reduced most of Algeria to the west and Tripolitania to the east–to the status of an Ottoman province.
But for all those Christians who rejoiced in those exultant October days, the real importance of Lepanto was neither tactical nor political; it was moral. The heavy black cloud which had overshadowed them for two centuries and which since 1453 had grown steadily more threatening, to the point where they felt that their days were numbered–that cloud had suddenly lifted. From one moment to the next, hope had been reborn. It was, perhaps, the Venetian historian Paolo Paruta who best summed up the popular feeling, in the course of his funeral oration in St Mark’s on those who had been killed in the battle:
They have taught us by their example that the Turks are not insuperable, as we had previously believed them to be…Thus it can be said that as the beginning of this war was for us a time of sunset, leaving us in perpetual night, now the courage of these men, like a true, life-giving sun, has bestowed upon us the most beautiful and most joyful day that this city, in all her history, has ever seen.
To every patriotic Venetian, it seemed essential that the glorious victory must be followed up at once. The Turk must be given no rest, no time to catch his breath; he must be pursued and brought to battle again, before he had a chance to repair his shattered forces and while the allies still maintained their forward impetus. This was the message that the government of the Republic now propounded to its Spanish and papal allies, but its arguments fell on deaf ears. Don John himself, one suspects, secretly agreed and would have been only too happy to press on through the winter, but his orders from Philip were clear. By the terms of the League, the allied forces would meet again in the spring; until then, he must bid them farewell. He and his fleet returned to Messina.
By the spring of 1572 it was plain to the Venetians that their instincts had been right. Spain was, as usual, prevaricating and procrastinating, raising one objection after another. Pope Pius did his utmost to spur them to action, but he was already a sick man and on 1 May he died. With his death the spirit went out of the League. At last, despairing of Spanish help, Venice decided to launch an expedition of her own, which Marcantonio Colonna willingly joined with his squadron of papal galleys. Only then were the Spaniards goaded into action. They had no wish to be left out if there was indeed another victory to be won. Philip’s objections fell away and in June Don John was finally given permission to join his allies.
The fleet assembled at Corfu and sailed south in search of the enemy. The allies had learned with some dismay that in the eight months since Lepanto Sultan Selim had managed to build a new fleet of 150 galleys and eight galleasses–these latter being an innovation for the Turks, who had obviously been impressed by the brilliant use Don John had made of them at Lepanto. Rumour had it, however, that the shipwrights, aware of the fate that awaited them if they failed to meet the Sultan’s deadlines, had been obliged to use green timber; that the guns had been so hurriedly cast that many of them were useless; and that the crews, press-ganged into service after the appalling losses at Lepanto, were scarcely trained. It was unlikely, in short, that they would give the allies much trouble. The principal problem would be to bring them to battle.
And so indeed it was. The two fleets met off Modone–for 250 years one of Venice’s principal trading posts in the Peloponnese, until it had fallen to the Sultan in 1500–and immediately the Turks ran for harbour. The allies followed them, took up their positions in the roadstead off Navarino (the modern Pylos) and settled down to wait. Modone, they knew, could not maintain a fleet of such a size for long. The mountainous hinterland was barren and without roads; all supplies must come in by sea. It was only a question of time before the enemy would be forced to emerge, and a second Lepanto would follow.
But once again Venice saw her hopes dashed, and once again the Spaniards were the cause. On 7 October–the first anniversary of the great battle–Don John suddenly announced that he could no longer remain in Greek waters and was returning to the west. The Venetian Captain-General Giacomo Foscarini, dumbfounded, asked why and, when the prince unconvincingly replied that his provisions were running low, at once offered to supply him from his own stock and order more from Venice as necessary. But Don John, clearly acting on new orders from Spain, could not be shaken. Colonna unaccountably took his side. Foscarini had to face the fact that his fleet was not strong enough to challenge the Turks alone. Fuming at the thought of the opportunity lost, he had no choice but to give the order to return.
All that winter the Venetian ambassador in Madrid worked on King Philip. The Turks, he argued, were bent on world domination; they had been constantly extending their territories for some five hundred years and were continuing to do so; the longer they were allowed to advance, the stronger and more irresistible they would become. It was surely the King’s duty to Christendom–and to himself, if he wished to keep his throne–to take up arms against them, and not to rest until the work that had been so gloriously begun at Lepanto was thoroughly finished. But Philip refused to listen. He hated and mistrusted Venice; as far as the Turks were concerned he had done his duty the previous year, and with considerable success; after such a victory it would be some time before they raised their heads again. Meanwhile, he was fully occupied with William the Silent’s revolt in the Low Countries. He did not go whining to Venice to help him with his problems; he saw no reason why he should assist her any further with hers.
Moreover, in those same winter months, Charles IX of France was also busy, intriguing against Philip on three separate fronts. In the Low Countries he was giving all possible support to the rebellion; in the Mediterranean he was manoeuvring to gain control of Algiers, where his machinations may well have been responsible for Don John’s recall from Navarino; in Venice and Constantinople his ambassadors were working hard to bring about a peace between the Sultan and the Republic. By early spring they had succeeded. Venice had not wished for anything of the kind; since Lepanto she had done everything in her power to hold the League together and to persuade her fellow members to join her in an out-and-out offensive, stopping–with God’s help–only at Constantinople itself. But she had failed. Philip was frankly not interested, the new Pope Gregory XIII scarcely more so. Deserted by her allies, knowing full well that to continue the war alone would be to invite new Turkish invasions of the Adriatic and, in all probability, the seizure of Crete–her last stronghold in the Levant–she had no choice but to accept the terms which were offered her. On 3 March 1573 the treaty was signed. Venice undertook, inter alia, to pay the Sultan 300,000 ducats over three years, and to renounce all her claims to Cyprus.
In the dominions of the Most Catholic King, there were cries of horror and disgust. In Messina, a furious Don John tore the League banner from his masthead and ran up that of Spain. How right Philip had been, said his subjects, not to trust those Venetians; they were bound to betray him sooner or later. It was, they protested, as if the Battle of Lepanto had never been won.
It was indeed. In spite of all the jubilation, the cheering and the shouting and the building up of the great Lepanto legend that still persists today, the truth is that one of the most celebrated naval battles ever fought proved to be of no long-term strategic importance whatever. And those who lamented loudest had only themselves to blame.
After the Battle of Lepanto a curious calm descended upon the Mediterranean. It was as if the whole vast basin had somehow exhausted itself. Until the last quarter of the sixteenth century–though the countries of northern Europe might latterly have disputed the fact–the Middle Sea had been, in a very real sense, the centre of the western world. It was the centre no longer.
For Spain, Christopher Columbus and his successors had opened new and exciting horizons. With her possession of Naples and Sicily in the south and Milan in the north154 no longer disputed, with the island of Sardinia also hers and the city of Genoa now effectively a Spanish port, the rest of Italy and the Mediterranean had ceased to interest her. True, in 1601 she and a group of Italian states–but not Venice–despatched a powerful force of seventy galleys and 10,000 men to surprise and capture Algiers (since it was commanded by Gian Andrea Doria its failure was assured), but her real attention was now fixed on the west and the north, where her constant problems in the Low Countries and her rivalry with England were taking up almost all her time.
As for France, she was no longer the kingdom that she had been under Francis I. Foreign adventure in the south was now for her a thing of the past; instead, she was being almost literally torn apart by the Wars of Religion, which were to continue for more than thirty years and bring the country to the brink of disintegration. Even Italy was quiet–at least by Italian standards. Apart from Naples and the Papacy there was only one major power in the peninsula, and the Republic of Venice was always too keen on commerce to make war unless it absolutely had to. Between the various north Italian city-states internecine fighting went on as it always had, but most of it was of little if any lasting significance to the Mediterranean world.
Then there was the Ottoman Empire, and even the Turkish juggernaut now seemed to be running out of steam. The great days of Süleyman the Magnificent were long since over, and his successor Selim the Sot died in 1574–appropriately enough, after consuming a whole bottle of strong Cyprus wine at a single draught and then slipping on the wet floor of the baths. It is true that in that very same year the old corsair admiral Kilij Ali recaptured Tunis from the Spanish–the city and its hinterland became an Ottoman province–but this was the sum total of the Turkish gains in the Mediterranean. Selim’s son Murad III–he had come to the throne only after ordering the strangulation of his five brothers–was more interested in what lay beyond his eastern borders, and preferred to concentrate his attention on Georgia and the Caucasus. His successors seem to have felt much the same way, and so it was that for very nearly a century the Turks were to do little to alter the map of the Middle Sea.
The only attempt to do so after the capture of Tunis came from an unexpected quarter. In 1578 Philip II’s nephew, the headstrong young King Sebastian of Portugal, responded–for reasons that are still not entirely clear–to an appeal for help from the Sherif of Fez, who had recently been expelled from his city by a rival claimant. Sebastian had appealed in his turn to his uncle, who had somewhat grudgingly agreed to support him; he had thus been able to cross the straits of Gibraltar with an army of Spanish and Portuguese numbering some 15,000. On 3 August he reached the town of Alcacerquivir, to find on the following day a vastly greater Moroccan army drawn up against him. He had no choice but to fight, and in the ensuing battle he and both the rival sherifs were killed, as were over 8,000 of his men. Of the remainder nearly all were captured; barely 100 managed to make their escape.
The only real victor of the Battle of the Three Kings, as it was called, was Philip of Spain. Single-handedly, Sebastian had reduced Portugal to such a state of weakness and demoralisation that two years later Philip was able quite simply to swallow it up–doubling at a stroke his colonial empire and gaining valuable Atlantic harbours and shipping besides. Not until 1640 was Portugal to recover her independence.
Philip was to live another twenty years, dying at seventy-one in 1598. No king had ever taken his duties more seriously; none had ever worked harder. Trusting no one, he had spent the last forty years in Madrid or at his palace of the Escorial attending personally to every detail of government and administration, never giving himself time to look up from his desk and take a longer, broader view of the world around him. Morbidly pious, he was determined to perform what he believed to be the divinely appointed task of preserving the true Catholic religion, in the cause of which he could be ruthless, tyrannical and cruel; but he was a lover of books and pictures and–when he was allowed to be–an affectionate husband and father. He was four times married–his wives were respectively Portuguese, English, French and Austrian–and four times widowed; they had given him, however, only two sons. The first was a lunatic, who died under mildly suspicious circumstances in prison at the age of twenty-three; the second–by his last wife–was to survive him as Philip III. His principal achievement from our point of view was to have built up his country as a serious military and naval power; by the 1570s his navy was at least four times stronger than it had been in his father’s time. But he was a sad, lonely man, and his subjects were not sorry to see him go.
The unwonted inactivity of the great Mediterranean powers left the field free for the pirates, who as the new century opened became ever more of a menace. They consisted by no means only of Muslims from Barbary; included among them were plenty of European seamen like the infamous Captain John Ward, who in 1605 or thereabouts arrived in Tunis. There he came to an agreement with the Bey, by which he undertook to attack all Christians except Englishmen and to share the profits. Such was his success–particularly against the Venetians and the Knights of St John–that he was soon able to build himself in Tunis a palace ‘beautified with rich marble and alabaster’, second only in magnificence to that of the ruler himself. In 1609 he even acquired a noble second-in-command: Sir Francis Verney of Claydon in Buckinghamshire, who had left his distinguished family in disgust the previous year and was soon, in the words of an English historian, ‘making havoc of his own countrymen…the merchants of Poole or Plymouth’.155 Algiers, not to be outdone, then secured the services of a certain Simon Danzer or Dansker–of whose nationality we cannot be sure–who enjoyed a similar success. From these men the Barbary corsairs, who had hitherto used only galleys, learned the art of sail, greatly increasing their effectiveness. A dashing raid in 1609 by the Spanish admiral Don Luís Fajardo on the pirate fleet of Ward, Verney and their colleagues as they lay in Tunis harbour dealt them a serious blow, but the admiral was prevented from following up his advantage; at the critical moment he received orders from Madrid to participate in the wholesale expulsion of the Moriscos from Spain.
This–one of the major disasters of all Spanish history–was the brainchild theoretically of King Philip III but in fact of his favourite adviser, the Duke of Lerma. Philip had succeeded his father in 1598 at the age of twenty. Brought up entirely by monks and priests, he knew nothing of the world and was possessed of no great intelligence; he was therefore an easy prey to the Duke, who quickly became his éminence grise. This short-sighted bigot was a nobleman from the former Kingdom of Valencia (it had been incorporated into Castile in 1479) which was at that time very largely peopled by Moriscos: Spaniards whose families had been Muslim for centuries, many of whom–even though theoretically converted to Christianity–had retained their Moorish sympathies. The Moriscos were prosperous and hardworking, and by their own efforts had made the plain of Valencia one of the most fertile areas of the entire country; but their very prosperity had aroused the jealousy of their neighbours, and for half a century or more they had been the object of a campaign of vilification–led, it need hardly be said, by the Inquisition, which maintained (possibly with some reason) that they were still infidels at heart. In 1566 Philip II had issued an edict forbidding the Moriscos of Granada their language, costumes and culture; three years later, plagued and persecuted beyond endurance, they had rebelled and given the King many an anxious hour before their rebellion had been ruthlessly put down by Don John of Austria, but this had only increased their unpopularity. Lerma detested them, and had little difficulty in persuading the foolish young King that it was his duty to rid Spain of them once and for all.
To depopulate what had once been an entire kingdom was a major undertaking, and many of those, ecclesiastical and secular alike, who had been happy to oppress the Moriscos shrank from the idea of wholesale deportation. But Lerma was determined to carry his policy through to the end. On 22 September 1609 the dreadful edict was published; with the exception of six of ‘the oldest and most Christian’ Moriscos of each large village–who were to remain in order to teach others their system of cultivation–every one of them, male and female alike, was to be deported to Barbary, taking with them no money and only such personal property as they could carry. Ever since the spring, great fleets of galleys had been assembling in the Mediterranean ports; now at last the people knew why.
Over the next six months some 150,000 Valencian Moriscos were driven from the land that they and their ancestors had made fertile, herded down to the waiting ships, carried across the Mediterranean and dumped unceremoniously on the North African shore. And what had begun in Valencia was continued throughout Spain. In Castile and Aragon, in Andalusia and Extremadura, suspected Moriscos–it was often impossible to distinguish the new Christians from the old–were rounded up, dispossessed and expelled. Numbers are impossible to assess, but the total cannot have been much less than half a million and may have been substantially more. Nor, from these regions, were the victims primarily agriculturalists; they included large numbers of artists and craftsmen who had made immense contributions to the Spanish economy. Philip III and his evil counsellor cannot be accused of genocide, only because they did not deliberately decree the mass murder of those whom they expelled; but as an example of what might now be known as ethnic cleansing, it would be over three centuries before Europe was to witness its equal.
It would have been better for Spain if the Duke of Lerma had never been born; there was however another duke, Lerma’s near-contemporary, to whom his country owes an enormous debt. He was Don Pedro Tellez Giron, third Duke of Osuna, who almost single-handedly transformed the Spanish navy. In 1603 as a young man Osuna had visited England, where he had captivated King James I by the elegance of his Latin conversation, and had settled down to a serious study of the English navy. Returning to Spain in 1607, he was made a member of the Privy Council, which found itself a year or two later discussing the appointment of a new viceroy in Sicily. Osuna spoke up. In the past thirty years, he pointed out, the Barbary corsairs had raided the island more than eighty times, on each occasion with complete impunity. Such a situation could not be allowed to continue. The King had only two courses before him: either he bought the pirates off with protection money or he made Sicily the base for a new, reformed navy that could sweep them from the seas. Philip, impressed, duly awarded him the viceroyship, and Osuna set to work.
Arriving on the island in 1611, he found a total of thirty-four galleys–twelve from Naples, ten from Genoa, seven Sicilian and five Maltese–all under the uninspired command of the Marquis of Santa Cruz, son of the luckless commander of the Great Armada. His first action was to commission six more to sail under his own personal flag, vessels which he could use as he liked, independently of the Admiral; he then turned his attention to his crews, increasing their pay, improving their diet and living conditions, giving them new drill and new discipline so that they soon stood out in impressive contrast to their fellows. A lightning raid on Tunis was a complete success, with ten corsair ships burned at their moorings and several more captured. This was only the beginning; the next few years saw a succession of similar victories, and the resulting exhileration spread to the whole fleet. But Osuna was not yet satisfied. That fleet was still exclusively composed of oared galleys; and the future, as he well knew, lay with sail. He now laid down two galleons of his own, and eventually persuaded his government to send him twenty more under Prince Philibert of Savoy–a fleet which would, under a competent commander, have been enough to clear the whole sea of corsairs. Alas, Philibert proved to be a commander in the Doria mould, incapable of decisive action and tending always to return to harbour a few days after he had left, without having fired a shot. Even with his huge fleet he failed utterly to block the harbour of Navarino, in which a number of corsair ships had taken refuge; all were allowed to escape.
As always, Osuna knew exactly what he needed. In the Low Countries he had seen the little Dutch sailing ships lying just outside the Spanish ports and effectively sealing them off; but the government in Madrid refused all his requests. At least, however, he had his own two galleons, one of twenty guns and the other of forty-six; these he sent south to Egyptian waters, where they almost immediately captured a squadron of ten Turkish transports bound for Constantinople. It was a remarkable achievement, which should have been applauded in Madrid, but the Spanish government remained as unsympathetic as ever, merely pointing out that Osuna had infringed a century-old regulation forbidding the fitting out of sailing ships–as opposed to galleys–for privateering. In vain he pointed out that naval warfare was no longer what it had been a hundred years before; they continued to ignore him.
Until 1615. Then, suddenly, the whole situation changed: Osuna was appointed viceroy in Naples. Here he had far more independence–and far more money to spend–than he had had in Sicily, and he immediately ordered five new galleons–the Five Wounds, he called them–together with five other, lighter vessels and a pinnace. All but the last were heavily armed, more heavily indeed than any that the English navy could boast, but were otherwise organised entirely on English lines. He also put an end to the principle of dual captaincy–for long the bane of the Spanish armed forces–whereby all the soldiers in a given expedition were responsible to one commander and all the sailors to another. Henceforth a single officer would have command of the whole ship. In July 1616 his junior admiral Francisco de Ribera, with a squadron of six galleons, fought a a tremendous battle with a Turkish fleet of forty-five galleys. It lasted three full days, but when dawn broke on the fourth, there was no longer any sign of the enemy; the Turks had admitted defeat and, with what was left of their shattered ships, had retired to safer waters.
Here, by any standards, was a memorable victory, but it carried a lesson. It had been won by a fleet constructed and commanded not on Spanish but on English lines. That fleet had proved its superiority over the Turks. Could it not now be employed against Spain’s most formidable enemy on the Italian peninsula, the Republic of Venice?
The fact that the Duke of Osuna reasoned thus should come as no surprise. He may well have been the architect of Spain’s remodelled navy, but he was also a patriot, dedicated to the destruction of her enemies, and it was in large measure thanks to him that, as the seventeenth century got under way, the Spanish shadow began once again to loom ever more dangerously over the central Mediterranean. For a century or more, Spanish ambitions had been held in check by France, but the assassination of Henry IV in 1610, which left the throne to his nine-year-old son Louis XIII and the regency to his determinedly pro-Spanish widow Marie de’ Medici, had ensured that the Most Catholic King would encounter no further opposition from that quarter. Spain was still supreme in Milan and Naples; in Florence Marie’s cousin, the Grand Duke Cosimo II, was largely under Spanish control; so too, thanks to the influence of the Jesuits and the Spanish cardinals, was the Pope in Rome. Only two Italian states were determined to resist the growing threat. One was the Duchy of Savoy, where Duke Charles Emmanuel II had amassed an army of over 20,000 and was perfectly ready to take on any force that the Spanish governor of Milan might send against him. The other was Venice.
While Milan made trouble for Savoy (and vice versa), Venice was facing even greater difficulties with the other, eastern arm of the Spanish pincers: the Habsburg Archduke Ferdinand of Austria. The underlying cause was the piratical Uskoks, a heterogeneous but exceedingly troublesome community largely–but by no means entirely–composed of Christian fugitives from the Turkish advance, who had settled at Segna (now Senj) and elsewhere along the Dalmatian coast and had given themselves over to the traditional occupation of so many of its inhabitants. The problem was hardly new; piracy based on the innumerable islands and hidden creeks along the eastern shores of the Adriatic had constituted a threat to Venetian commerce for almost as long as the Republic itself had existed. With the Uskoks, however, there was an additional complication: their activities called down the wrath of the Turks, who after every Uskok attack on their own shipping would make a formal complaint to Venice, pointing out that as the power who claimed dominion over the Adriatic it was her duty to keep it efficiently policed. Since Dalmatia was now the territory of the Empire and the offenders technically imperial subjects, Venice in her turn would make ever more pressing representations to Ferdinand for effective measures to be taken against them; but despite repeated promises the Archduke did nothing, and the Uskoks remained a perennial anxiety.
Their culminating atrocity had occurred in 1613, with the beheading of a Venetian admiral, Cristoforo Venier. Still Ferdinand refused to lift a finger; indeed, as Venetian–imperial relations deteriorated he began to view the Uskoks with a steadily more sympathetic eye and, while feigning a few gentle remonstrations, gave them secret encouragement in every way he could. Finally Venice–not for the first time–took the law into her own hands and launched a punitive expedition. Ferdinand protested in his turn; and the resulting war, while it remained on a fairly desultory level, grumbled on until the autumn of 1617 when Venice, Savoy and the Empire patched up an uneasy peace, after which the fate of the Uskoks could be settled once and for all. Their harbours and fortresses were destroyed, their ships were burned, and all those who escaped a more disagreeable fate were transported with their families to the Croatian interior where, gradually over the years, they intermarried with the local populations and lost their separate identity.
This small victory did much to improve the security of the Adriatic, and indeed of all the central Mediterranean, but it did little to change the basic political situation. The overriding threat to the peace of the region remained Spain, and Spain was not looking only to armed force or to artful diplomacy to advance her interests. The late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries were above all the age of intrigue. The idea itself, of course, was nothing new; in the Florence of the Medici, the Milan of the Visconti, the Rome of the Borgias, there had been instances aplenty of plots and poisonings, of spies and counterspies, of the stiletto beneath the cloak. But now, in France and England as well as in Italy, conspiracy became almost a way of life. Within the memory of men still in their middle age, there had been the assassinations of Admiral Coligny and of Henry IV himself, the countless machinations that marked the sad, violent life of Mary Queen of Scots–and then, on 5 November 1605, the Gunpowder Plot.
There was no government in Europe more involved in the dark world of intrigue than that of the Most Serene Republic. Every embassy, every foreign household even, was thoroughly penetrated by Venetian agents, reporting directly back to the dreaded Council of Ten details of comings and goings, of letters steamed open and conversations overheard. A special watch was kept on the leading courtesans, several of whom were paid by the state to pass on any pillow talk that might prove of interest, for purposes of blackmail or otherwise. Normally, however, the Ten preferred to perform its more distasteful duties in secret; it was therefore with some astonishment that early risers, passing across the Piazzetta on 18 May 1618, saw the bodies of two men, each dangling by a single leg–a sure sign that their crime was treason–from a hastily erected gallows between the two columns at the southern end. More astonishing still was the fact that, even after the two bodies had been joined by a third bearing unmistakable signs of torture, no proclamation was made to identify the unfortunates or to explain the reason for their fate. Inevitably, rumours spread, most of them focusing on the likelihood of a major conspiracy against the Republic, of which there could be only one instigator. Hostile demonstrations were staged outside the Spanish Embassy, obliging the ambassador, the Marquis of Bedmar, to ask the authorities for special police protection. Meanwhile, he reported back to Madrid:
The name of the Most Catholic King, and that of the Spanish nation, is in Venice the most odious that can be pronounced. Among the people the very word ‘Spanish’ is an insult…They seem to thirst for our blood. It is all the fault of their rulers, who have always taught them to hate us.
This was not strictly true. For years the Spanish Embassy had been the busiest centre of intrigue in the city, its anterooms and corridors teeming with sinister, slouch-hatted figures whispering together in groups while they awaited audiences with the ambassador. And when, the following October, the Ten finally disclosed in a full report to the Senate the details of what had taken place, the Marquis was revealed–as everyone had known he would be–as one of the leading figures in what came to be known as the Spanish Conspiracy.
It is entirely appropriate that this conspiracy should have indirectly furnished Thomas Otway with the material for his best and most celebrated play, Venice Preserved. The true story has all the elements of seventeenth-century melodrama. Here is the villain Don Pedro, Duke of Osuna and Spanish Viceroy of Naples, determined to destroy the power of Venice in the Mediterranean. Here is the Marquis of Bedmar, Spanish ambassador, cultivated and charming but in reality ‘one of the most potent and dangerous spirits Spain ever produced’, filled with an implacable hostility towards Venice and fully approving of Osuna’s objective. Here are the two chief instruments of the conspirators: Jacques Pierre, Norman adventurer and corsair, now a Spanish secret agent with the Venetian fleet, practically illiterate but one of the most brilliant seamen of his day, and his inseparable antithesis Nicolas Regnault, educated and plausible with his mellifluous Italian and his exquisite handwriting. And here, finally, is the hero: the young Frenchman Balthasar Juven, who has come to Venice to enter the service of the Republic.
The conspiracy itself, too, was ambitious enough to satisfy the most demanding dramatist. It was also, like all its kind, complicated and convoluted in the extreme. A full account of it would be insufferably tedious, and has no place in this book.156 For some weeks before the appointed day, Spanish soldiers in civilian clothes would be infiltrated in twos and threes into Venice, where they would be secretly armed by Bedmar. Then, when all was in readiness, Osuna’s galleons, flying his own personal standard, would advance up the Adriatic and land an expeditionary force on the Lido, together with a fleet of flat-bottomed barges in which that force would be rowed across the lagoon to the city. The Piazza, Doge’s Palace, Rialto and Arsenal would be seized, their armouries ransacked to provide additional arms for the conspirators and for any Venetians who might be prepared to lend them support. The leading Venetian notables would be killed or held to ransom. Venice itself would pass into the possession of Osuna; the loot and ransom money would go to the other conspirators to share among themselves.
Whether so wild an enterprise could ever have succeeded seems improbable; its originators, however, had no chance to put it to the test. The discovery of the plot was due to Juven, who was approached by a compatriot named Gabriel Moncassin, informed of all that was afoot and invited to participate. What Moncassin did not know was that Juven was a Huguenot. Detesting Spain and the religion it stood for, he immediately informed the Venetian authorities, and the Council of Ten swung into action. Jacques Pierre was arrested and summarily dispatched; his body was sewn into a sack and dropped overboard. Regnault and two other conspirators, the brothers Desbouleaux, were seized, tortured and then, after they confessed, hung upside-down in the Piazzetta. As many as 300 minor participants were discreetly liquidated. Only Osuna and Bedmar were too powerful to be touched. They continued their intrigues from behind the walls of their respective palaces, but their grand opportunity had been missed. Venice was preserved.