SEVEN
Lepanto, October 7, 1571
Accumulated capital, not forced exactions, is what sustains wars.
—THUCYDIDES, The Peloponnesian War (1.141.5)
GALLEY WAR
No Quarter
WERE THEY MERCHANT BARGES? The Ottoman admiral, Müezzinzade Ali Pasha, had never seen anything like the six bizarre ships floating a few hundred yards in front of his attacking galleys. Perhaps they were some sort of supply vessels? Clearly, they were both new and huge— and drifting right toward his flagship, the Sultana! In truth, the six colossal oddities were recently constructed Venetian galleasses. Each carried nearly fifty heavy guns—bristling from starboard and port, shooting over the bow and from the poop deck, guns it seemed booming everywhere. Each of these novel monstrosities could deliver more than six times as much shot as the largest oared ships in Europe—and in terms of firepower alone were worth a dozen of the sultan’s standard galleys.
On such calm seas they were mobile too and with sails and oars could maneuver and turn to fire in every direction. Now four of the six bobbing behemoths methodically began to blast apart Ali Pasha’s galleys—“tanta horribile et perpetua tempesta,” a contemporary account recorded. Grapeshot and five-pound balls tore through the Turkish decks. The rarer thirty- or even sixty-pound iron projectiles blew apart entire sections of the Turkish ships at the waterline—men, planking, and oars obliterated altogether.
“Big ships, big ships with big cannon,” the Turkish crews reportedly screamed of the murderous incoming fire. Two of the galleasses’ commanders, Antonio and Ambrogio Bragadino, had just heard of the ghastly torture and murder of their brother, Marcantonio, on Cyprus a few weeks earlier. Now the brothers urged hundreds of their gunners to fire continuously, determined this Sunday morning to take no prisoners in revenge.
If Ali’s ships could not get past the galleasses to close quickly with the Christian armada, the entire Ottoman fleet, despite its far greater size, would be systematically torn apart at sea:
The sea was wholly covered with men, yardarms, oars, casks, barrels, and various kinds of armaments, an incredible thing that only six galleasses should have caused such great destruction, for they had not hitherto been tried in the forefront of a naval battle. (K. M. Setton, The Papacy and the Levant, 1056)
Most of the Christian observers believed that a third of the Ottoman armada was scattered, disabled, or sunk before the battle proper between galleys had even commenced. As many as 10,000 Turkish seamen were thrown into the sea when their galleys were obliterated in thirty minutes of firing from just four European ships—two of the six galleasses on the right wing drifted out of position and saw little action. Ali Pasha had seen in these strange galleasses some glimpses of the future of naval warfare, and it rested not with rams, boarders, or rowers, but with mass-produced iron cannon, high decks, and large vessels.
Nevertheless, a portion of the center of the Ottoman fleet, ninety-six galleys and escorts led by Ali Pasha’s Sultana, headed through and finally around the blistering gunfire toward Don Juan’s La Reale— an enormous galley in its own right, launched from the dockyards of Seville and adorned by the artistic hand of Juan Bautista Vázquez himself. The prince’s gaudy embroidered banner of the Crucifixion and the combined arms of Spain, Venice, and the Holy See marked for all to see the center of the Christian line, where Don Juan was flanked by the papal captain Marcantonio Colonna—to die bravely in the battle to come—and the Venetian septuagenarian Sebastian Veniero. Thanks to Don Juan’s singular genius and magnanimity, the shaky confederation fleet was under the shared tactical command of a Genoese, Venetian, and Spaniard.
As the battered Turkish ships approached the armada of the Holy League, priests scurried across the decks, blessing the crews in the final seconds before the collision of galleys; many of them were armed and had every intention of offering material as well as spiritual comfort to their flocks. “My children,” Don Juan had told his men in the minutes before the collision, “we are here to conquer or to die as Heaven may determine.” Crucifixes adorned every ship in the fleet at Lepanto. The Christians, not the supposed “fanatical” Muslims, would fight like men possessed. All were enraged over rumors of the most recent Ottoman atrocities on Cyprus and Corfu, and convinced this was the best and last chance that they might have to engage the Turkish fleet in a decisive battle and thus seek retribution for decades of Islamic raiding of their shores.
Soon eight hundred Christian and Turkish soldiers mixed it up on the Sultana, itself an ornate galley with decks of polished black walnut. But for all its beauty, the Sultana lacked the protective boarding nets of the Reale and thus became the central slaughter place of the two lines, a veritable floating battlefield between cross and crescent. The Christians, most of whom wore steel breastplates and fired harquebuses, twice nearly forced their way to the center of Ali Pasha’s ship before swarms of Turks fought them back. Smaller Ottoman galliots that had survived the galleasses’ initial broadsides docked constantly beside the two locked flagships and unloaded reinforcements, in hopes that the sheer manpower and skill of the Janissaries might cancel out the superior firearms, armor, and group cohesion of the Spanish and Italian infantry. More Christian ships were also pulling up beside the Sultana and unloading fresh harquebusiers to join the fight for Ali Pasha’s ship.
Many of the European galleys, particularly the Spanish vessels, were larger than their Ottoman counterparts. Their higher decks allowed boarding parties to jump down into the Turkish ships, while hundreds more of the Christian gunners remaining on board poured shot downward with impunity on the beleaguered enemy archers. The Christians— the Spanish especially—were also comfortable with mass charges, in which discipline, cohesion, and sheer weight might overwhelm the individual bravery and martial skill of the Janissaries.
At last a final rush led by Don Juan himself, brandishing battle-ax and broadsword, overwhelmed the Sultana’s crew. Ali Pasha, shooting arrows from his small bow, fell with a harquebus bullet in his brain. Soon his head was on a pike and posted on the Reale’s quarterdeck, as his treasured gilded and green flag from Mecca was ripped from the mast, the papal pennant raised in its place. Panic engulfed what was left of the ninety-six ships at the center of the Ottoman fleet once their crews saw that their admiral was decapitated and the sultan’s flagship now the property of Don Juan himself. The Spaniards pulled their vessels away from the death ship and sought out additional prey to their beleaguered right.
Meanwhile, the Christian left wing under Agostino Barbarigo—a few days after the battle he would perish from a ghastly wound to the eye— was outflanked and being driven onto the Aetolian mainland by the longer Ottoman right under the wily Mehmed Siroco (“Suluk”). Indeed, the three wings of Don Juan’s fleet constituted a battle line of only some 7,500 yards; the admirals of the Holy League were thus rightly worried that the longer Ottoman front might circumvent their wings and sweep them from the rear. But in a brilliant feat of seamanship Barbarigo backwatered, kept most of the enemy ships in front of his own line, and then began driving them onto the shore as he raked their decks with gunfire and awaited the inevitable boarding by the numerically superior Turkish galleys. Barbarigo had under his command the best galleys from the Arsenal at Venice—among them Christ Raised, Fortune, and Sea Horse— and both his outnumbered ships and crews were qualitatively superior to their Ottoman counterparts.
Once the Turkish soldiers had exhausted their supply of arrows— many of them poison-tipped—the struggle between Siroco and Barbarigo became another land battle of sorts between infantry. The frenzied Christians, wearing armor, equipped with firearms, and advancing over the decks in dense lines and columns, found they could systematically slaughter the Turkish peasants, most of whom soon ran out of arrows and were without metal body protection, harquebuses, or the succor of the Janissaries. At close ranges on the decks of the galleys, fire from the harquebuses tore right through the unarmored Turks, killing and wounding with almost every shot. Mehmed Siroco would also soon lose his head, his truncated corpse thrown ignominiously overboard. The Christians sank or captured most of his fifty-six ships, killed the crews, and spared neither the surrendering nor the wounded. Later they claimed that not a single galley or its crew escaped.
Salamis (above) was one of the largest, most confused—and deadliest— engagements in naval history. European artists reinvented it as a struggle between high-prowed Mediterranean galleys, but they at least capture the congestion of a quarter-million sailors in hundreds of triremes, rowing, boarding, killing, and drowning—all within a few thousand square yards of sea. Themistocles (below left) created the Athenian fleet, engineered the Persian defeat, and laid the foundations of Athenian imperialism before being ostracized and sentenced to death in absentia by the very citizenry he had saved. On this relief from Persepolis (below right), Darius and Xerxes, who would both invade Greece and be defeated, appear as near divinities—stiff and unapproachable, with none of the realism of classical Greek sculpture.
East meets West (above) in a Roman floor mosaic from Pompeii. In Alexander’s rush toward Darius III, their antithesis is striking: Darius is frightened although perched on his imperial chariot amid bodyguards, while a solitary Alexander strives to plunge into the melee. Sometimes associated with the Battle of Issus (333 B.C.), the scene seems to be a mélange, incorporating moments from all four of his great fights. At left, a Hellenistic bust reflects the Olympian divinity of Alexander, emphasizing his youth, beauty, and farseeing gaze.
In the majestic canvas above by Charles Le Brun (1619–90), Alexander’s men mop up a battlefield full of captives and booty at Gaugamela. The reality was far worse: Over 50,000 corpses were left to rot in the October sun. Persian reliefs like the one below were meant to suggest the uniformity and anonymity of imperial soldiers. Notice the absence of metal body armor, helmets, and heavy shields.
Classical sculptors and authors alike were fascinated with Hannibal Barca (left). While he was imbued with all the stereotypical traits of non-Western enemies—perfidy, arrogance, and cruelty—there was also a grudging admiration for his skill, courage, and tenacity in a hopeless cause. It is notable that all surviving art and literature surrounding Hannibal—much of it sympathetic and romantic— derive from the very culture that destroyed his country, family, and himself. An illustrated manuscript of the late fifteenth century (below) attempts to capture the sheer magnitude and hand-to-hand fighting of Cannae. Yet the rather tame nature of Renaissance warfare paled in comparison; even the most imaginative illustrators had no conception of battles involving well over 100,000 combatants, in which hundreds might be killed every minute.
Carl von Steuben’s romantic painting of the Battle of Poitiers (above) suggests the power of the Frankish “mass of ice,” the wall of tough mailed spearmen who broke the repeated mounted attacks of Islamic horsemen. The battle was viewed as a major event in the preservation of Christianity, in which faith trumped numbers— hence the prominent religious iconography. Often seen as a battle of horsemen, as below in The Pursuit of the Defeated , in reality most Frankish knights probably dismounted during the fight. While the artist has typically represented the Franks as mounted, the density and position of their spears suggest the onset of a classical phalanx.
This map of Mexico City (above), often attributed to Cortés himself, suggests its size and wealth. The enormous population—estimated at over 200,000—was fed by a vast fleet of lake-borne canoes. Hernan Cortés (above right) was often portrayed as a triumphant knight of a grateful monarchy; in fact, he died poor, disillusioned, and ignored by those he had enriched. While this Spanish woodcut (right) presents Montezuma in warrior dress, he took no part in the fighting and was killed months before the destruction of his imperial city.
Later Mexican drawings stressed the deadly effect of Spanish steel on unprotected flesh. At the festival of Toxcatl (above), 120 Spaniards massacred over 3,000 unarmed Aztec nobles at the cost of a few wounded. This image of the subsequent siege of the Spanish (below) shows them superbly armed, arrayed in dense formation, and vastly outnumbered, as more numerous lighter-clad Aztecs attempt to storm their redoubt. All contemporary Spanish and Mexican observers felt that European weapons were the key to the conquistadors’ victory.
To sixteenth-century Europeans, the sudden muster and vast size of the Christian fleet at Lepanto were proof of the power of Christ to resist the Muslim onslaught. In this haunting canvas of Giorgio Vasari (1511–74), the supernatural forces of good and evil watch as the six enormous galleasses lead out the Holy League’s massive armada. The dense formation of his galleys conveys an accurate impression that the fighting resembled more a land than a sea battle, as hundreds of ships quickly became interlocked in the confused fighting.
The last minutes of thousands of Ottoman sailors at Lepanto were a favorite topic of European illustrators. Eyewitness accounts provided lurid descriptions of robed survivors clinging to the flotsam of wrecked galleys before sinking beneath the waves or being harpooned by Christian pikemen. Most Ottoman fatalities occurred after the actual fighting was over; and we should assume the majority of the 30,000 lost either drowned or were executed at sea.
Rorke’s Drift (above) had almost no defensive advantages; yet within a few hours the British crafted a redoubt of bags and boxes that proved unassailable. The chief mistake of King Cetshwayo (below left) was underestimating the strength of his enemies; only later when he visited London himself did he appreciate England’s enormous resources. The three-pronged attack on Zulu power centers conceived by Lord Chelmsford (below right) resulted in the complete destruction of a vast kingdom in less than a year.
Nearly the entire 24th Regiment was wiped out at Isandhlwana, but B company was assigned to “easy duty” at Rorke’s Drift. Above, fifty survivors of B company a few days after their harrowing ordeal. Lieutenant Bromhead is at lower right. The Zulu warriors below were the terror of southern Africa, but proved incapable of breaking even small numbers of British riflemen in squares or behind fortifications.
In Griffin Baily Coale’s watercolor of Midway, both the Kagi and the Akagi are set afire by the first wave of American dive bombers. Japanese Zeros plunge into the sea, gunned down by the surprise appearance of high-flying Wildcat fighters far above. The gassed and armed planes on the wooden Japanese decks ensured that even a few American bomb hits could envelop the carriers in flames. Pilots later reported that the rising suns painted on the Japanese decks made natural targets.
Wounded by Japanese dive and torpedo bombers, the Yorktown (above) was finally doomed by torpedoes from a Japanese submarine. Earlier, the miraculous repair of the Yorktown—severely damaged at the Battle of Coral Sea—at Pearl Harbor (below) ensured that there were three, not two, American carriers at Midway. Had the Japanese shown similar ingenuity, they would have had six carriers, an overwhelming force.
By 1942, American SBD and TBD bombers were both obsolete. Yet at Midway the screeching dives of the SBDs (above) proved lethal and went unopposed—due to the unplanned and tragic sacrifice of the TBD torpedo planes far below. Rear Admiral Tamon Yamaguchi was probably the most capable leader in the imperial fleet. He is shown below, thanking his staff as he prepares to go down with his flagship, the Hiryu.
None of the pilots in Torpedo Squadron 8 of the Hornet (above) had flown a combat mission before Midway. All were killed in the first minutes of fighting except Ensign George Gay (front row, fourth from left), who was shot down and watched the battle from a small raft on the water. Of the eighty-two TBD Devastator crewmen who took off from the three American carriers, only thirteen survived, and not a single torpedo hit a target. The torpedo planes approached the fleeing enemy carriers at no more than seventy miles an hour and were riddled by Zero fighters diving from above at speeds of over 300 miles an hour.
Fighting under close media scrutiny in dense urban centers, unable to distinguish the enemy from neutral civilians, American soldiers like those at left nevertheless crushed local communist resistance during the Tet Offensive of 1968. Keys to the American success were devastating armor and artillery attacks, constant air support, and the discipline and ferocity of small companies of marines. Above, marines hold a tower position in the stone fortress of Hué.
Barbarigo’s troops made it a point to butcher every dumbfounded and by now mostly defenseless Ottoman sailor and soldier they found, as they freed thousands of shackled Christian galley slaves—15,000 in all were eventually liberated at Lepanto. Italian and Spanish accounts repeatedly glorify the salvation of the European slaves, yet only in passing acknowledge that most of the Turkish dead at Lepanto were probably killed in cold blood as they begged for mercy on deck or floated helpless among the debris on the water. Still, the cost of preserving Don Juan’s left wing was high. Most of the cream of the Venetian naval leadership—Marino Contarini, Vincenzo Querini, and Andrea Barbarigo, nephew of Agostino—were shot down in the ordeal.
Only on the right wing, under the veteran Genoese Gian Andrea Dorea, were the Christians still in any danger. As he drifted far to the right, Dorea appeared dilatory and sluggish in maintaining the Christian front intact. The Holy League’s admirals would swear that Dorea was heading laterally, more away from Don Juan’s center than forward toward the Turkish fleet. Was the crafty Venetian, as was later alleged, hoping to save his own ships from possible destruction? In any case, the Christian galleys that had just engaged Ali Pasha’s center were alarmed that if Dorea kept rowing to the right to prevent his national contingent from being outflanked and attacked by the legendary and dreaded corsair Uluj Ali, their own flanks would soon be exposed.
Within minutes their worst fears were realized. A gap opened in the Christian front between the right and center. Uluj Ali and a dozen Ottoman galleys, reminiscent of Alexander at Gaugamela, immediately streamed into the chasm and headed for the flanks and backs of the exhausted Christian center. Here occurred most of the Christian losses in the battle. The surprised galleys were hit broadside without opportunity to turn and fire. Uluj’s corsairs greedily began to tow away his prizes; the decks of the outnumbered Venetian and Spanish galleys—among them three manned by the Knights of Malta under the command of the legendary Pietro Giustiniani—were littered with killed and wounded. But unfortunately for the Ottomans, Uluj’s last-ditch effort was governed by greed as he paused to tow prizes rather than press on to ram and blast apart more enemy galleys.
Two of the League’s bravest admirals—Juan de Cardona and Alvarode Bazán, the marquess of Santa Cruz, leading the uncommitted Christian reserve of over forty galleys—were ready for just such a contingency. With help from the victorious galleys in the Christian center, the reserve ships began firing away at Uluj. Within minutes the Christian cannon drove the corsair off. Had he not cut his towlines and fled, his contingent would have been blown apart. Still, Dorea’s timidity cost the Christians dearly. The escape of Uluj was more grievous still: he was the last veteran Turkish admiral in the Mediterranean still alive, and would supervise the rebuilding of the sultan’s fleet the next year and oversee the successful capture of Tunis in 1574.
Center, right, and left—the Christians now achieved success across the battle line. The victory was partly because of the opening murderous barrages of the galleasses that were posted nearly a mile in front of the fleet, and partly because of the superior quality and number of cannon on the individual European galleys that shot right over their truncated prows into the waterlines of the Turkish ships. The return fire was aimed too high, slower, and finally nonexistent. In almost every case, Christian ships literally destroyed their enemies in exchanges of gunfire. Once the galleys were locked, and it was a question of infantry fighting on deck, the Europeans—especially the 27,800-man Spanish contingent, of which 7,300 were German mercenaries—proved superior to Turkish foot soldiers. The harquebuses of the Spaniards weighed fifteen to twenty pounds and could shoot a two-ounce ball four hundred to five hundred yards, shredding all flesh in its path. The Ottomans found success only when they could swarm isolated Christian galleys, bury them under a sea of arrows, and overwhelm the wounded defenders. They had little experience with the shock warfare of heavy infantry in a confined setting, where group solidarity and discipline, not personal heroism or maneuver, brought victory.
By 3:30 Sunday afternoon, a little more than four hours after the galleasses opened fire, the battle was over. More than 150 Muslims and Christians had been killed every minute of the fighting, ranking Lepanto’s combined 40,000 dead—thousands more were wounded or missing— with Salamis, Cannae, and the Somme as one of the bloodiest single-day slaughters on land or sea in the history of warfare. When it was over, two-thirds of all the galleys in the great Mediterranean fleet of the Ottoman Empire were either floating junk or in tow behind Christian galleys headed westward.
Floating Sewers
Nearly 180,000 men were present at Lepanto, rowing, firing, and stabbing each other under conditions that modern soldiers can scarcely imagine. War galleys on both sides were filthy, ghastly ships, as dirty on inspection as they were elegant at a distance. Once they were locked in mortal combat, they became little more than grisly floating platforms of death, no longer the sleek boats of ancient fable that glided through the whitecaps of the Mediterranean. The radical changes of the last two millennia in naval combat were not so much due to advances in technology or nautical design. Classical Greek triremes and Venetian galleys were not that dissimilar in size, construction, and propulsion. Rather, there were alterations in the conditions of the later ships’ service or operation, specifically the forced labor of chained rowers, the larger contingents of on-board marines, and voyages of much greater distances on the open sea.
Whereas the Athenians’ invasion fleet of 415 B.C. had beached their much lighter craft each night onshore in their circuitous and weeks-long voyage from the Piraeus to Sicily, by the sixteenth century galleys could on occasion cut directly across the Mediterranean. Such ships in theory could have on board twenty days’ supply of water—and thus sail overnight without adequate shelter for their servile oarsmen. In addition, cross-Mediterranean voyages between Asia Minor and Spain and France—practically unheard-of in antiquity—were commonplace by 1571 and often lasted for days on end without nightly stops at safe ports.
The great Venetian war galleys at Lepanto were often 160 feet and more in length and as much as 30 feet wide at the beam. From twenty to forty banks of oars pulled from each side of the ship, five men handling together an enormous forty-foot “sweep,” resulting in crews that were twice and three times the size of those of classical antiquity. Sails were raised only during transit to and from battle—or for brief periods during combat when a sudden onslaught might be enhanced by a tailing wind. As many marines, bowmen, and harquebusiers as possible crammed onto the decks, sometimes nearly sinking the galley under the combined weight of four hundred to five hundred rowers and soldiers. Besides the firepower of the boarding parties—nearly two hundred independent infantrymen per ship—each galley attacked its prey with a ten- to twenty-foot iron beak and up to twenty cannon: larger ones in the poop and prow, more numerous three- to four-pounders arranged haphazardly along the decks to issue broadsides. The main gun of many galleys was a vast bronze 175-millimeter cannon of several tons that could hurl a sixty-pound ball well over a mile.
If the galley was a rather frail ship, vulnerable to capsizing in even small storms (the Christian states lost nearly forty a year to bad weather on the Mediterranean in the late sixteenth century), it was an easy vessel to construct. The sleek standardized designs resulted in a galley achieving twenty-minute bursts of speed of eight knots and more, its low sides allowing marines to scurry throughout the ship and leap onto a captured vessel. The overcrowding of the rowing crews and the proximity of man to sea, however, made the ships wretched in transit and a charnel house in battle. Galleys and their crews were rammed, peppered with cannonballs and grapeshot, torched by fire grenades, and raked by small-arms fire and arrows. The absence of high decks, armor, and heavy roofing guaranteed terrible fatalities with almost every barrage.
The contemporary historian Gianpiertro Contarini said the waters around Lepanto were “tutto il mare sanguinoso”—a sea of blood—as thousands of Christians and Turks bled to death in the water. Thousands more of the wounded clung to the junk of battle among the bobbing corpses. Eye witnesses record that the trapped Janissaries—easy targets due to their size, gaudy clothing, and bobbing plumes—were huddling and seeking shelter under the rowing benches as the Turkish galleys were smashed apart by cannon fire and raked by harquebuses from the higher Christian decks. Finally, out of ammunition, the Janissaries resorted to throwing anything they found on deck, including lemons and oranges, at the murderous Christian gunners.
So many combatants were confined within such a small space—often as many as four hundred rowers and soldiers occupying 3,000 square feet—that few shots could miss, whether powered by muscle or powder. Whereas in ancient trireme ramming, most fatalities were due to drowning, in sixteenth-century sea fights men just as often died from arrows and cannon fire, if not frequently butchered by boarding parties as they rowed chained and immovable. Galleys were ingeniously designed for relatively calm waters—there is essentially little tide in the Mediterranean—and their firepower and speed made them terrible predators of merchant ships. But once galley met galley, their assets were often neutralized, and the resulting battle more resembled a confused free-for-all on land than a contest of seamanship.
The maximum range of most smaller galley cannon was not more than five hundred yards. Given the slow rates of fire—especially in the Ottoman fleet—most ships could shoot off only one volley before their target had closed the distance and was either ramming or boarding as the attackers desperately reloaded. A real European advantage at Lepanto lay in having more numerous and heavier cannon throughout the fleet— Venetian artillery was the most finely crafted in the world—that could concentrate their fusillades on the Ottoman galleys as they approached to board, ensuring that a single volley from dozens of heavy guns could annihilate the entire first wave of skirmishers.
The advent of cannon, harquebusiers, and shackled slave rowers brought to the ancient idea of oared warships unprecedented death and suffering at Lepanto, torment unimagined by the crews at Salamis two millennia earlier, despite the greater aggregate losses at the ancient battle. Often the crews of whole ships—rowers and skirmishers in the hundreds—were slaughtered when hooked, boarded, and raked at point-blank range with antipersonnel cannon and musket fire. Gianpietro Contarini says that at Lepanto there was an enormous confusion of swords, scimitars, iron maces, knives, arrows, harquebuses, and fire grenades on every ship. One Spanish source mentions a galley on the right wing on which after the battle every single man was found dead or wounded. It was a truism that European navies in the Mediterranean— the Venetians especially—were without the manpower of the Ottoman fleet and therefore increasingly counted on gunpowder to do what muscle could not. Galley warfare also left the combatants far more vulnerable than on land: on the overloaded boats there was scarcely enough room to turn around, and the surrounding sea cut off all avenues of retreat. The armor of the Christians and the robes and purses of the Ottomans ensured that there was little chance to keep afloat once a soldier was thrown or fell into the water. Most decks were deliberately waxed and oiled to undermine footing and topple intruders.
Ramming was still frequently employed by the Ottomans, as well as boarding by swordsmen and archers. But the introduction of cannon that could hurl iron or stone projectiles of thirty and more pounds right through the side of a low-lying galley also meant that the onrushing seas could swallow chained rowers in a few minutes. Many Turkish galleys were sunk or abandoned at Lepanto, not hauled away as prizes, since cannon fire, not boarding parties, had brought on their demise. The classical protocols of attacking in unison with beaks outward, ship by ship, to prevent enemy inroads was not so important when the new European ships were bristling with cannon on all sides and could fire in any direction. To save powder and lead, the Christians in small boats used long pikes to spear any Turks they found still alive in the sea.
Ramming was eventually doomed by the advent of relatively plentiful bronze-cast cannon: the mounting of each 5,000-pound gun meant that additional oarsmen were necessary to recover an overburdened galley’s original speed. But the increase in rowers added more weight to the ship, required ever more deck space, and ultimately revealed that the laws of physics limited how large and heavy a galley might grow and still find itself seaworthy—quite apart from questions of how to feed and support four hundred rowers, crew, and gunners.
Larger, three-masted galleons, not even the novel and well-armed galleasses, were the answer. The former had no oars; but with higher decks and broad sails, galleons alone possessed the requisite on-ship surface area, smaller crews, and locomotive power to support an ever-increasing number of heavy cannon and tons of stored shot and powder. Larger ships could also navigate the rough Atlantic and Pacific and stay at sea for weeks, unlike the Mediterranean galley. In contrast to Spain and France, the Ottomans had no ports on the Atlantic and so by the seventeenth century lacked transoceanic navigational experience and the sheer technological know-how to build topflight galleons. It was more common to see European warships than Ottoman galleys in the Islamic waters of the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea.
The name of Lepanto conjures up clean images of gaudy Renaissance banners, vast oil canvases of the European masters, and a variety of fascinating Christian spiritual and material commemoratives. Yet life aboard a sixteenth-century Mediterranean galley was nearly unbearable. Most ships in continual service rotted and were unseaworthy within five years. Unlike the ancient trireme, which was less often powered by servile rowers and allowed more space for each oarsman, the galley slave was usually chained to his rowing bench alongside four others. He urinated, defecated, and in rough seas often vomited where he was bound. Clothed in a brief loincloth, he had no protection from seawater, rain, or frost—or the scorching heat of the Mediterranean summer that constituted the greater portion of the sailing season. The sixteenth-century rower was also not free, like his ancient counterpart was, to forage onshore. Nor did his ship seek shelter on land at nightfall—so that on occasion he worked, slept, and ate at his bench for days on end. Dry biscuits and a cup of wine were standard, not the cakes and adequate provisions characteristic of the rations for freemen in the ancient Athenian navy. When a fleet of a hundred such ships pulled into port, a veritable floating city of 40,000 hungry mouths quickly exhausted the local municipal food reserves, as the noisome cargo of tons of raw sewage spread disease and a lingering miasma throughout the port.
Contemporary accounts also relate a number of bizarre details that only confirm the horror. Sailors, marines, and rowers all wore scented scarves—purportedly the origin of the Mediterranean male’s propensity to use strong perfumes—to mask the stench and prevent vomiting. When flies, roaches, lice, fleas, and rats had overrun a galley, and its four-inch-thick boards became inundated with offal, captains—particularly the more fastidious Knights of Malta—sometimes temporarily sank the boats right offshore, in hopes that a few hours of total submersion in seawater might rid them of their cargo of vermin. Plagues—most often cholera and typhus—could wipe out entire flotillas, and understandably so, when four or five men were chained day and night alongside each other, stewing in each other’s lice, fleas, excrement, urine, and sweat. Such were the conditions of service for the nearly 200,000 desperate seamen who collided on October 7, 1571.
Culture and Military Innovation at Lepanto
Lepanto, situated off the western coast of Greece, was a likely place for a sea battle between Europe and its enemies, being on the general fault line between the Ottoman-held Balkans and the Christian western Mediterranean. Whenever East met West in the Mediterranean, the waters off the Gulf of Corinth made a logical nexus of battle, as the two great sea fights nearby at Actium (31 B.C.) and Prevesa (1538) attest. Salamis itself lay not more than two hundred miles to the east across the isthmus at Corinth. The Ottoman fleet, after a successful season of conquest on Cyprus, was planning to winter in the small bay of the present-day tourist community of Naupactus, on the northwestern shore inside the gulf. Once the spring weather came and his crews were rested and refitted, Ali Pasha, the Sultan’s admiral, looked forward to a season of raiding far from Istanbul—and perhaps an invasion itself of European shores to cap off the capture of Cyprus the prior August.
In response to the attack on Malta (1565), the Turkish massacre of Christians at Famagusta in August 1571, and the subsequent appearance of Ottoman raiders off European coastlines, the confederation of Venice, Spain, and the Papal States had at last formed a grand, if somewhat shaky, alliance. By early fall 1571 the combined fleet of the newly christened Holy League had made its way across the Adriatic from Sicily. The Christians were desperately searching for the Ottoman armada before the winter season set in and the Mediterranean turned too rough for a decisive battle between oared ships. The alliance’s fear was that such a large Ottoman fleet wintering close to western Europe would race throughout the Adriatic, plundering, kidnapping, and killing at will among Italian coastal communities, even sacking Venice itself.
Rather than be caught and defeated in small flotillas by the sultan’s enormous predatory navy, Pope Pius V had at last convinced Philip II of Spain and the Venetian Senate to stake their combined fleets in a do-or-die gamble to rid once and for all the western Mediterranean of the Turkish menace. If they did not find the Ottomans this autumn, the pope warned, there was every likelihood that the rare unanimity of action would be lost. Each Christian state would be forced once more to resist by itself or make terms with the sultan on its own. Word had reached the Holy League’s fleet in Corfu as early as the evening of September 28 that the Turkish armada was anchored not far away on the non-Western shores of the Gulf of Corinth. Once his fleet arrived off the coast of Aetolia a week later, Don Juan convinced his squabbling admirals to attack the Turks the next day, the Sunday morning of October 7. He cut off debate with a terse “Gentlemen, the time for counsel is past and the time for fighting has come.” As at Salamis, squabbling Europeans met a unified though autocratic Asiatic command.
What the Holy League lacked in manpower and ships (the Ottomans enjoyed a numerical advantage of at least thirty galleys, even more lighter ships, and more than 20,000 soldiers) was more than made up by superior Christian tactical leadership and numerous subtle advantages in nautical technology. The confederates’ admiral, Don Juan of Austria, the illegitimate son of Charles V of Spain and half brother to the reigning king, Philip II, was one of the more remarkable and gifted captains of a sixteenth-century Mediterranean world characterized by an array of brilliant and headstrong Venetian and Genoese sailors and generals: Sebastian Veniero, governor of Crete and future doge of Venice, Pietro Giustiniani, prior of Messenia, Marcantonio Colonna, commander of the papal contingent, and Agostino Barbarigo, admiral of the left wing at Lepanto.
Contemporary accounts remark on Don Juan’s selflessness and his single-minded zeal in uniting the disparate nations of southern Europe to deny the Turks any further inroads in the West, especially along the coastal cities on the western Mediterranean. We need not believe all the romance about the twenty-six-year-old prince—tales of his pet marmoset, his tame lion, his dancing a jig on the deck of his flagship, Reale, moments before the fighting—to acknowledge that few men of the time could have held together such an ill-sorted coalition of rivals. Commercially minded Venetians fought their former Ottoman trading partners reluctantly and only when threatened with annihilation. Imperial Spaniards were as ready to battle the Italians, Dutch, English, and French as the Turks. The Papal States’ shrill warnings about the Mediterranean becoming an Islamic lake were seldom taken seriously, especially given the popes’ intrigue in the dynastic wars of European succession. In any case, for the first time in decades Christendom found at its helm a magnanimous leader—one more interested in checking the spread of Islam than enriching himself or even gaining advantage for his native state at the general expense of Europe. (Don Juan turned over his one-tenth share of the prize money from Lepanto to the impoverished and wounded in the fleet, as well as a gift of 30,000 gold ducats from the grateful city of Messina.)
The Christians approached the seas off Lepanto with nearly 300 Venetian, Spanish, Genoese, and other assorted European ships of all sizes: 208 galleys, 6 galleasses, 26 galleons (which were late and played no role in the actual fighting), and another 76 smaller craft, all comprising an armada of more than 50,000 rowers and 30,000 soldiers—a pan-Christian force in size not seen since the Crusades. Still, this force was smaller than the nearly 100,000-man fleet of 230 major warships of the sultan, with another 80 assorted gunships. But the quality of the Christian galleys, not the superior number of Ottomans, would prove the critical factor at Lepanto. Venetian galleys were the best-designed and most stable craft on the Mediterranean, serving as models for the Turkish fleet itself. The Spanish vessels, too, were better built and stouter than those of the Ottomans. Don Juan, in consultation with his Venetian admirals, had provided the allied galleys with innovations unknown to the Ottoman fleet, which had ironically confirmed that at the greatest galley battle since Actium, the age of the oared ship was already over. Lepanto would be the last large galley fight in naval history.
First, the Christians had sawed off the beaks of their galleys, surmising that the age of ramming was past and that their ships could be better supplied with additional cannon. Rams also obstructed cannon placed on the forecastles, and caused the gunners to shoot high to clear their own prows. But with a clear view and more room for additional artillery, the Christian galleys could fire directly in the path of their own advance. At Lepanto their blasts tore through the sides of the Ottoman galleys, while most of the enemy’s volleys were high, harmlessly striking the outrigging and masts of the Christians. Credit Don Juan and his admirals with realizing that cannon fire, not a galley’s bronze beak, could sink more Ottoman ships.
The Arsenal at Venice and the expertise of Spanish craftsmen had also ensured that the Christian galleys were far better armed. Not only were there more cannon per galley—1,815 total guns on the ships of the Holy League against 750 in the much larger Ottoman armada—but each weapon was better cast and maintained than its Ottoman counterpart. After the battle the Venetians found hundreds of captured Turkish cannon to be unsafe and worthless—a judgment borne out by modern metallurgical analysis of extant Ottoman guns. The only uses the victorious Europeans had for them were as trophies or scrap for recycling; under a free market such inferior weapons had no real value other than as raw material. They might as well have been anchors or ballast for all the profit their sale would bring in a competitive European market, replete with cannon crafted from the latest designs of Italian, English, German, and Spanish workshops.
The Christians also had a far greater number of smaller swivel cannon that could pepper Ottoman galleys and clear them of boarders. European soldiers on deck wore heavy breastplates, making thousands of them nearly invulnerable against Turkish arrows. Far more Christian infantrymen were armed with harquebuses, clumsy weapons but deadly at ranges of up to three hundred to five hundred yards when fired into masses of confined soldiers. For that reason, the Turkish vice-admiral Pertau Pasha had cautioned his commanders to avoid battle altogether; his men were feudal conscripts without firearms and were not up to battling mailed harquebusiers. While primitive muskets were scarcely accurate in the modern sense, they could be rested on deck and aimed into the mass of the Turkish crews as the Christian gunners were safe behind boarding nets. Given the crowded conditions of galleys and the crashing and locking together of ships, it was hard for a harquebusier to miss his target.
European troops had longer experience with and better training in the use of firearms, and so could shoot their more reliably manufactured cannon and muskets with more dependable gunpowder at rates three times faster than their much fewer Ottoman counterparts. True, the composite recurved bow of the Ottomans was a deadly weapon—possessing greater range, accuracy, and rates of fire than the crossbow—but it required months of training, exhausted the bowman after a few dozen shots, and could not be fabricated as quickly or plentifully as either crossbows or firearms. The European emphasis was typically to put as many deadly weapons into as many hands as quickly as possible, worrying little about the social position of the shooter or the degree of status and training necessary to employ a weapon effectively.
In Europe the social ramifications of military technology were far less important than its simple efficacy; the sultan, however, was careful that weapons in and of themselves—like printing presses—should not prove to be sources of social and cultural unrest. Even when the Janissaries and less well trained Ottoman troops adopted European firearms, they often failed to embrace the appropriate tactics of mass infantry warfare, which went against the heroic code of the Muslim warrior and the elite status of that professional corps. “Instead of using musketry en masse, as was developing in the West, or massed pikemen acting in unison, the Ottomans looked upon each musketeer or sharpshooter as a warrior risking his life for a place in paradise” (A. Wheatcroft, The Ottomans, 67).
At Lepanto heavier and more plentiful firearms, greater rates of fire, more reliable ammunition, and better-trained gunners added up to enormous European advantages—if the captains would not panic but sail directly into the heart of the dreaded Turkish fleet. Since European seamen had for decades been caught in small groups on the Mediterranean by Islamic corsairs and had their seaside villages often devastated by sudden onslaught of the Ottoman galleys, it was Don Juan’s singular achievement to convince his admirals that for the first time in memory the advantages were all with the Europeans. The Ottomans were trapped and forced to fight in daylight and head-on against the combined might of the best of European military seamanship, which at last could bring its overwhelming firepower to the collision.
North African and Turkish ships were more numerous, lighter, and less well armed than their European counterparts, and relied on numbers, quickness, surprise, and agility to raid coastal waters and outmaneuver enemy flotillas. They were designed to guard merchant ships, engage in amphibious operations, and support sieges—not to square off in cannon duels with Europeans. Unfortunately, Ali Pasha forgot those innate strengths and waged a decisive naval shoot-out against massive Christian firepower, a set battle that no fleet in the world—except one comprised of English galleons and gunners—could have won. Yet in a sense Ali had no choice, for history was on the side of neither galleys in general nor the Ottoman military in particular: within twenty years after Lepanto two or three British galleons alone might mount as many iron cannon as the entire Turkish fleet in the Mediterranean.
In addition to the presence of the six galleasses, themselves originating from the abstract studies of ship design dating back to Hellenistic Greece, and the greater number of cannon and firearms, the Christians had rigged up steel boarding nets designed to protect their own galleys, as gunners targeted the enemy. Don Juan later claimed that thanks to his nets not a single Christian ship was boarded by the Ottomans—an astounding declaration, if true. The oarsmen of the respective fleets were also qualitatively different. Much of the sixteenth-century naval policy at Venice had been characterized by a great debate over the composition of the republican fleet’s crews. For decades the Venetians were slow to accept the idea that to match the size of the Ottoman armada, their own fleet required thousands of additional rowers of all kinds—far more oarsmen than available among the republic’s free citizenry. At first the Venetians hired foreign oarsmen, then turned to their own destitute, finally to convicts—and on rare occasions to captives and slaves as well. The same exigencies were true of the other Italian states and Spain, which all came to the use of slave rowers rather late and with real reluctance. While there were servile crews on both sides at Lepanto, the oarsmen of the Holy League still included free rowers, and the coalition was more likely to free those slaves it did employ. In contrast, the Christian slaves on Turkish galleys were threatened with death before the battle should they raise their heads, and there is some indication that at least on a few ships they mutinied in the midst of the battle.
In effect, there was not a single free fighter in the Turkish fleet—not the shackled oarsmen, not the Janissaries, not those peasants mustered under feudal service, not the renegade admirals and seamen, and not even Ali Pasha himself. Across the water, the Christian admirals at the battle were free aristocrats; many of them were not even professional military men—civilians like seventy-six-year-old Sebastian Veniero, the Venetian lawyer who shared command of the center with Don Juan, or the Italian noble and landowner Marcantonio Colonna, who commanded the papal contingent. None of these proud and often headstrong individuals could be arbitrarily executed by the pope, the doge at Venice, or King Philip II for simple failure to win at Lepanto. In contrast, Ali Pasha and his commanders knew that an embarrassing defeat required a sufficient number of heads for the sultan.
LEGENDS OF LEPANTO
More than 15,000 Christian slaves were freed at Lepanto and more than two hundred galleys and nearly one hundred lesser craft were mostly destroyed or lost to the sultan. Italy itself was saved from Ottoman maritime invasion. In the battle’s aftermath Europe flirted with the idea of sailing right up the Golden Horn or freeing the Greek-speaking populations of the Morea, Cyprus, and Rhodes. The Christian fleet—the largest European armada in the Mediterranean until modern times—lost around 8,000 to 10,000 killed, 21,000 wounded, and ten galleys. In contrast, there were 30,000 Ottomans slain at Lepanto, many of them skilled bowmen who would not be replaced for years. Thousands were simply executed when their galleys were taken in tow, and even more were left to drown or to be finished off by scavengers. In the battle’s aftermath Christians in small boats shot and speared any Ottomans still alive in the water; plunderers hunted for private purses, clothes, and jewelry of the defeated Turkish elite. Christian annals report that only 3,458 Turkish prisoners were taken, an astoundingly low figure given the almost 100,000 of the enemy present before the battle. Most of the 6,000 Janissary shock troops also perished; the historian Gianpietro Contarini believed thousands of that elite corps had been killed. There are no records of the thousands of Ottoman wounded, many of whom must have suffered horrific gunshot wounds. One hundred eighty ships of all types—most of them later found to be beyond repair—were towed to Corfu. Dozens more washed up on the shores of Aetolia. A mere handful returned to Lepanto.
The losses were doubly grievous for the sultan, since unlike the Europeans he had neither the capacity to fabricate thousands of new harquebuses nor the ability to draft a new army of conscripts. Rowers—not to mention munitions fabricators and designers—had to be brought in as mercenaries, renegades, or slaves from European shores. Most quality-manufactured guns would need to be imported, given this singular European propensity to fabricate cheap, plentiful, and easily used firearms:
The main impact of the development of efficient small arms upon warfare at sea came not, as we would suppose, directly through an increase in fire power, but indirectly through a sharp reduction in training requirements. This gave the nations which depended upon the arquebus greater resilience in the face of heavy manpower losses than those which depended upon the composite recurved bow. While it was fairly easy to turn Spanish villagers into musketeers, it was virtually impossible to turn Anatolian peasants into masters of the composite recurved bow. (J. Guilmartin, Gunpowder and Galleys, 254)
The loss of 34 Ottoman admirals and 120 galley commanders ensured that even the sultan’s massive replacement program—150 ships of green timber and shoddily fabricated cannon built within the next twelve months—would be short of experienced seamen, archers, and seasoned galleys.
Non-Westerners rightly complain about Europe’s monopoly of commemoration, and its hold on the art of history itself. Nowhere was this imbalance more true than in the aftermath of Lepanto, a Western “victory” soon known as such to millions, through published histories, commissioned art, and popular literature. In none of those genres was there any consideration of the battle from the Ottomans’ point of view. Instead, we hear only of the sultan’s postbellum threats to execute Christians in Istanbul, the grand vizier’s scoff that the Ottoman’s beard “was only shaved,” not cut, and various accounts of lamentation among the families of the lost. The few Turkish accounts of the battle were not literary and not widely published, but dry, government-sanctioned, and rigidly formal accounts that had little or no likelihood of appealing to any readership other than a tiny screened government elite in Istanbul. The parameters of inquiry in such court chronicles of Selânki, Ālī, Lokman, and Zeyrek were carefully delineated—if the scribe was not to be exiled or executed. Ottoman sources attributed the Turkish loss to the wrath of Allah and the need for punishment for the sins of wayward Muslims. Vague charges of general impiety and laxity only enhanced the government’s anger at its own people; there was to be little exegesis and analysis concerning the shortcomings in the sultan’s equipment, command, and naval organization.
In contrast, dozens of highly emotive firsthand narratives in Italian and Spanish—often at odds with each other in a factual and an analytical sense—spread throughout the Mediterranean. We know as little of the Turkish experience at Lepanto as we do of the plight of Abd ar-Rahman at Poitiers or the Mexicas at Tenochtitlán. What we do learn of the non-West in battle is secondhand, and most often a result of European investigation and publication. Thus, nearly all of the names of the soldiers of Xerxes, Darius III, Hannibal, Abd ar-Rahman, Montezuma, Selim II, and the Zulu king Cetshwayo are lost to the historical record. The few that are known survive largely to the efforts of an Aeschylus, Herodotus, Arrian, Plutarch, Polybius, Livy, Isidore, Díaz, Rosell, Contarini, Bishop Colenso, or Colonel Hartford, who wrote in an intellectual and political tradition unknown among the Persians, Africans, Aztecs, Ottomans, and Zulus.
Things have changed little today in terms of the exclusive Western monopoly of military history. Six billion people on the planet are more likely to read, hear, or see accounts of the Gulf War (1990) from the American and European vantage points than from the Iraqi. The story of the Vietnam War is largely Western; even the sharpest critics of America’s involvement put little credence in the official communiqués and histories that emanate from communist Vietnam. In the so-called Dark Ages of Europe, more independent histories were still published between A.D. 500 and 1000 than during the entire reigns of the Persian or Ottoman Empire. Whether it is history under Xerxes, the sultan, the Koran, or the Politburo at Hanoi, it is not really history—at least in the Western sense of writing what can offend, embarrass, and blaspheme.
Such is the nature of societies that allow dissenting voices and free expression. Even when European and American citizens openly attack the military conduct of their own governments, candor often has the ironic result only of enhancing Western credibility and furthering its dominance of the dissemination of knowledge. So it was at Lepanto: most readers in Europe, the Americas, Africa, and even throughout Asia are more likely to know of the battle through an account in English, Spanish, French, or Italian—or an allusion in Cervantes, Byron, or Shakespeare—than a sympathetic Ottoman chronicle written in Turkish.
Christendom had never seen such a celebration as the aftermath of Lepanto. Crowds all over Italy and Spain sang Te Deum Laudamus, the church’s traditional hymn of praise and thanks to God. A special October Devotion of the Rosary was inaugurated by the Vatican, still celebrated today in a few churches of Italy. For most of the subsequent winter, captured Turkish rugs, banners, arms, and turbans lined the streets and shops of Venice, Rome, and Genoa. Special commemorative coins were struck with the inscription “In the year of the great naval victory by the grace of God against the Turks.” Hundreds of thousand of woodcuts, engravings, and medals circulated even in Protestant northern Europe. The winged lion of St. Mark appeared on victory monuments throughout Venice. The great Venetian painters Veronese, Vicentino, and Tintoretto produced vast canvases of Lepanto; the latter’s stunning depiction focused on the taking of Ali Pasha’s flagship and the mortal wounding of Barbarigo. A remarkable fresco of the battle by Vasari still adorns the Vatican. Dozens of other monuments and paintings in the pope’s palace celebrate the astounding victory. Titian painted a commemorative portrait for Philip II, in which the monarch is seen standing at an altar holding up to heaven his son Don Fernando as Victory descends from the clouds; a captive Turk is in the foreground, a burning fleet in the distance.
At Messina Andrea Calamech sculpted a grandiose statue of Don Juan—still impressive today—in appreciation of the prince’s salvation of the city from the Turkish fleet. Fernando de Herrera’s Canción de Lepanto remains today a selection of modern anthologies of Western literature. Miguel Cervantes, a veteran of the battle who lost the use of his hand, years later immortalized Lepanto in his Don Quixote: “Those Christians who died there were even happier than those who remained alive and victorious.” The boy prince who would be King James I of England composed several hundred lines of an epic in commemoration of Lepanto. At Stratford the young Shakespeare was also apparently deeply affected: in his later plays his duke is called Prospero after notable Italian nobles at the battle, and his Othello is made to serve with the Venetians at Cyprus to defend the island against Turkish attack.
Most of the paintings and popular songs attributed the remarkable Christian victory to divine intervention. But even more secular contemporary historians who sought tactical exegeses were not sure how the Holy League had halted centuries of Turkish aggression in a few hours. Why, in fact, did the Europeans win, when they were outnumbered, discordant, and fractious until the moments before the battle, in unfamiliar enemy waters, far from their home bases, their governments in mortal hatred of one another? Was it luck—the sudden change in winds that gave Don Juan’s galleys added speed as they sailed into the Ottoman center or the gentle breezes that blew their cannon smoke into the enemy’s eyes? Or was it the relatively calm seas and absence of rain that ensured the plodding galleasses could easily maneuver and take aim right before the Turkish fleet—and that thousands of Christian harquebuses had dry firelocks? Surely critical to the outcome was the Ottoman foolhardiness in accepting a challenge of decisive battle with heavier and better-armed Christian ships. Once the galleasses unleashed their opening salvos and were seen to approach firing from all sides, contemporaries on both sides noted that even the indomitable Turks “became afraid.” All narratives attribute much of the Christian success to the six floating fortresses and their initial shelling of the Ottoman front lines.
Or perhaps the edge was spiritual? Lepanto was fought on a Sunday morning, and the crews were given mass by priests on deck even as they prepared to kill. A few days earlier on Corfu the Christians had received the gruesome news of the fall of Cyprus, and the Ottoman perfidy in slaughtering all the hostages and prisoners of Famagusta. The most repeated tale among the crews of Lepanto was the horrific account of the torture and disfigurement of Marcantonio Bragadino, leader of the brave garrison there, who was flayed alive and stuffed after being promised safe passage on capitulation. Don Juan’s crews had seen the Ottomans’ most recent sacrilege on Corfu—Christian graves desecrated, priests tortured, civilians kidnapped, and churches defiled. All contemporary sources remark that once Christian infantrymen boarded the Turkish galleys, they fought with an almost inhuman savagery.
Or was the verdict at Lepanto due to the brilliant battlefield leadership of Don Juan, who had mixed the Italian, Spanish, and Venetian galleys throughout the armada to maintain harmony? No less important was the rare statesmanship of both the pope and Philip II. Yet what most nullified Ottoman courage and numbers was the presence of so many topflight European ships, equipped with superior firepower and better-armed soldiers—a testament to the Western manner of designing, producing, and distributing armaments that operated only within the confines of capitalist economies. The abundance of cannon, harquebuses, crossbows, and finely crafted ships trumped Ottoman numbers, the reputation of the dreaded Turkish soldier, and the convenience of home waters in a single stroke, and so gave the Holy League a good chance of victory—if its cohesion, generalship, and tactics were competent—when victory was unforeseen.
EUROPE AND THE OTTOMANS
A Fragmented Continent
Sixteenth-century middle and eastern Europe, as had been true since the sixth century A.D., felt itself besieged by the East. Whereas northern Africa and Asia Minor had become unified by Islam, and were for the most part provinces or protectorates of a vast Ottoman hegemony, Europe was ever more wracked by religious strife. Christendom, split asunder by Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy, was by the sixteenth century to fragment further with the schism of Protestantism and the growth of nation-states in England, France, Holland, Italy, and Spain, founded on principles of ethnic, cultural, and linguistic affinity, not monolithic allegiance to the Vatican.
France, having rid itself of the last Islamic attackers in the early tenth century, was more or less in alliance with the Ottomans for much of the sixteenth century. The friendship was not always passive: the French had used Ottoman help to take Corsica from Genoa in 1532 and had allowed the Turkish admiral Barbarossa to winter his galley fleet—manned by Christian slaves, no less—in French ports (1543–44). No wonder that on the morning of the battle, the Ottoman admiral Hassan Ali confidently urged the Turks to leave the harbor and row out to battle outside the Gulf of Corinth, since the Christians were “of different nations and had different religious rites.”
As the Ottomans increasingly looked westward, not merely for additional slaves and plunder but also for European weaponry and manufactured goods, the West itself turned farther to the west and south. The newly discovered Americas and the trade routes along coastal Africa offered riches without struggle with the Turks or the stiff tariff charges of the long caravan routes through Ottoman-occupied Asia. By the sixteenth century a disunited western Europe was not merely beset by a hegemonic East but had itself grown powerful at a variety of new mercantile centers—Madrid, Paris, London, and Antwerp—which had increasingly little interest in the backwaters of the eastern Mediterranean.
The Balkans and the islands of the eastern Mediterranean were considered costly sideshows not worth confrontation with the Turkish fleet, given the general stagnation of the Ottoman Empire in comparison to newer avenues of trade and commerce elsewhere. Most enslaved Christians were Orthodox anyway, and western Europeans had feuded with the Byzantines well before the fall of Constantinople. The absolute fault lines of Christian versus Muslim, or East against West, were also eroding. England and France sometimes ignored and at other times aided the sultan, while Venice became increasingly dependent on trade along the Turkish coast. Lepanto would be one of the last great battles in history in which a few Western powers united solely on the basis of shared culture and religion against Islam.
Still, the Ottomans in particular, and Islam in general, were in theory more powerful in terms of population, natural resources, and territory occupied than any one Mediterranean Christian state. But by the same token, Islamic power was clearly inferior to southern Europe as a whole should it ever unite for a grand expedition. On the rare occasions of even partial alliances—the great First Crusade (1096–99) during the Middle Ages is the best example—Western success even far from Europe was not uncommon well before the Reformation, gunpowder, and Atlantic exploration. European military dynamism was a continuum from classical antiquity, not a later fluke of the gunpowder age and the discovery of the New World. The First Crusade had ended with Franks in occupation of the Holy Land and revealed a singular ability to move and feed armies by land and sea not matched in the Islamic world. In rare cases of foreign attacks inside Europe—Xerxes, the Moors, Arabs, Mongols, and Ottomans—foreign dynasts found themselves at the heads of unified imperial or religious armies, their Western opponents isolated, divided, and often squabbling among themselves. But Christendom’s rare collective efforts soon waned, and by 1300 the Crusades were not to be followed by any comparable pan-European expedition across the Mediterranean. Yet even in a state of religious and political fragmentation Europe was relatively safe from Islamic invasion, since such invasions required logistical expertise and heavy infantry beyond even the sultan’s resources. The fifteenth-century Ottoman unification of much of Asia, the Balkans, and northern Africa, and the general acceptance of one god who put a high value on the advancement of religion by the sword, placed a divided Europe at an enormous disadvantage. As in the eighth century at the dawn of Islamic conquest, once again many small warring Christian and Western states were to be attacked continuously and individually by a vast religious and political unity.
Ottoman intellectuals and mullahs did not see war as innately wrong. Nor were there objections by the intelligentsia to the idea of a jihad— nothing at all comparable to a growing Western interest in pacifism or even “just war” theory. No Islamic tract was similar to the idea promulgated by Erasmus and others that war itself was somehow intrinsically evil and might be waged only under the narrowest moral circumstances. Europe’s citizens might have inherited a notion of personal freedom from classical antiquity and of spiritual brotherhood from Christ, but the survival of the West lay in how well they ignored the idea that killing was always sinful.
So Europe combined the earlier Western traditions of decisive battle to annihilate the enemy, of capitalism to craft plentiful and effective weapons, and of civic militarism to bring out the population en masse to resist the Ottomans. Fortunately, there was little in Christianity as it evolved in the Middle Ages that was antithetical to private profit or capitalism in general. If for a time priests worried about the taking of life, they had no compunction in allowing their brethren to profit while they could.
By the time of the battle of Lepanto, long gone from European control were the old Roman provinces of northern Africa, the Near East, Asia Minor, and most of the Balkans as well as the coastal waters of the eastern Mediterranean, which had become firmly Muslim and were increasingly under the control of Istanbul. For the expansion of an enormous multicultural empire, the Ottomans found useful a unifying religion that advocated aggressive war against nonbelievers—presenting non-Westerners with enemies of moral and religious fervor not seen earlier even in the deadly onslaughts of the Carthaginians, Persians, and Huns, who all likewise had invaded Europe and for a time threatened to annex Greece and Rome into their domains.
The discordant Christians, however, still retained enormous advantages over the sultan’s armies. Despite the erosion of hegemonic Western military power with Rome’s fall, most states in Europe proper for more than a thousand years had managed to retain in latent form the cultural traditions of classical antiquity—rationalism, civic militarism, forms of capitalism, ideas of freedom, individualism, reliance on heavy infantry and decisive battle—which allowed them greater military power than their individual populations, resources, or territory would otherwise suggest. The chief problem for Europe was no longer a prevailing pacifism, but near continuous war: the absence of central political control in the Middle Ages after the end of Charlemagne’s kingdom had allowed Western warfare to be used suicidally, in constant internecine and extremely bloody fights between European princes.
The technology of galley construction was far more advanced in the republican city-states of Italy and imperial Spain than in Asia, and far more flexible and likely to evolve to meet new challenges at sea. The entire organization and even terminology of the Turkish fleet was copied from either Venetian or Genoese models, in the same manner as earlier medieval Islamic fleets had emulated Byzantine nautical engineering and naval administration. Both sides rowed ships that were strikingly similar—and exclusively of Italian design. All military innovation—from the cutting off of the galley rams to the creation of the galleasses and the use of boarding nets—was on the European side. Military science—the rebirth of abstract notions of strategy and tactics in the new age of gunpowder—was a Western domain; it was thus no accident that the leading captains of both fleets were European. The sultan himself preferred renegade Italian admirals who were acquainted with European customs and language and therefore far more likely to adapt his galleys to the latest innovations of the enemy.
The soldiers in the Christian fleet were not all free voting citizens— only Venice and a few Italian states were republican. Yet the crews of the Holy League were not exclusively servile either, as was true of the Ottoman armada, in which elite Janissaries and galley slaves alike were political nonentities. A Turkish galley slave was more likely to flee than a Christian, and European common soldiers were free persons and not the property of an imperial autocrat:
Throughout the fleet the Christian slaves had their fetters knocked off and were furnished with arms, which they were encouraged to use valiantly by promises of freedom and rewards. Of the Muslim slaves, on the contrary, the chains which secured them to their places were carefully examined and their rivets secured; and they were, besides, fitted with handcuffs, to disable them from using their hands for any purpose but tugging at the oar. (W. Stirling-Maxwell, Don Juan of Austria, vol. 1, 404)
In addition, the Christians, plagued by constant raiding from North African corsairs and Turkish galleys, deliberately sought decisive battle. It was the armada of the Holy League that wished to collide head-on with the sultan’s fleet and kill every Ottoman on the water. The latter army was docked in its winter quarters and somewhat reluctant to fight. Moreover, in the Christian fleet, a variety of individual minds and personalities was at work. Spanish, Italian, French, English, and German adventurers— Knights of Malta, nobles of various other religious orders, even Protestants and at least one woman under arms—argued and bickered until seconds before the first fusillade, ultimately bestowing upon the armada the advantages of diverse opinion and the free reign of commanders to react as they felt best to the changing conditions of battle. Even the autocracy of Christian monarchy in Spain—operating as it did in a labyrinth of civic and judicial oversight and audits—usually did not ham-string the liberty of the individual to the same degree as the totalitarianism of the sultan’s rule.
Yet what gave the much smaller states of the Christian federation a fighting chance for victory was their remarkable ability—given their limited populations and territory—to create capital, and thereby to fabricate excellent vessels, mass-produce advanced firearms, and hire skilled crews. Although Europe was represented in force by only three real Mediterranean powers at Lepanto—the pope, Spain, and Venice—their aggregate economies were far larger than the national product of the entire Ottoman Empire. Before the fleet had even sailed, papal ministers had calculated the entire cost of manning two hundred galleys, with crews and provisions, for a year—and had raised the necessary funds in advance.
A Most Remarkable City-State
A good example of the vast differences in economic life between the adversaries is that of the Venetian republic—its output of goods and services far smaller than that of the French, Spanish, or English economy. At the time of Lepanto the population of Venice itself was less than 200,000. Its territory was confined to a small circuit of a few hundred square miles in northern Italy and some commercial outposts in the eastern Mediterranean, Greece, Crete, and the Adriatic coast. In contrast, the sultan ruled a population a hundredfold greater than Venice, with far more reserves of wood, ores, agricultural products, and precious metals. He also controlled a territory literally thousands of times larger that served as a lucrative mercantile nexus between East and West. Yet in terms of military assets, trade, commerce, and influence on the Mediterranean, Venice by itself throughout the sixteenth century was the near rival of the Ottomans.
Ostensibly, Venetian power lay in its uncanny ability to craft weapons of war according to modern principles of specialization and capitalist production—500,000 ducats of the annual 7 million in revenue were reserved to finance the operations of the great Arsenal, where thousands of muskets, harquebuses, and cannon, plus supplies of dry timber, were fabricated and then kept in a constant strategic reserve. Besides dozens of small private shipwrights, there was also a public council that ensured ready-made ships in time of crisis—not unlike the American War Production Board of World War II that marshaled industry and labor under the auspices of private enterprise to create near instantaneous lines of weapons production. Three years after Lepanto, Henry III, the French monarch, was entertained in Venice by a firsthand inspection of the Arsenal, which purportedly assembled, launched, and outfitted a galley in the space of an hour! Even under normal conditions the Arsenal was able to launch an entire fleet of galleys within a few days, utilizing principles of ship construction, financing, and mass production not really rivaled until the twentieth century:
Under the order of the Council of Ten, twenty-five of the galleys were to be kept in the basins armed and equipped to sail. The rest were to be kept on land complete in hull and superstructure, ready to be launched as soon as the caulkers should have filled their seams with tow and pitch. Both the docks on which they were stored and water in front were to be kept cleared so they could be quickly launched. Each galley was to be numbered, and its rigging and other furnishings were to be marked with the same number, so that they might be assembled as quickly as possible. (F. Lane, Venetian Ships and Shipbuilders of the Renaissance, 142)
The Arsenal itself was copied by the sultan with a facsimile near the Golden Horn, where shipwrights from Naples and Venice were hired to duplicate the Venetian success (with mixed results: foreign visitors saw scores of artillery pieces lying randomly about, for the most part stolen and plundered from Christian forces rather than fabricated on the premises). But if the Turkish ability to build a modern galley fleet was predicated on its efforts to import or steal Western products and expertise—in that manner it would nearly replace its losses at Lepanto within two years—Venetian power was an independent outgrowth of a larger intellectual, political, and cultural prowess not found to the east and not predicated on population, natural resources, territory, or even the ability to acquire plunder, forced taxes, or foreign talent.
The Arsenal was a natural expression of Venetian capitalism and constitutional government that operated in a way unimaginable at Istanbul. Venice was ruled as a republic with an elected chief executive (the doge) and a Senate of largely aristocratic merchants who allowed capital from commerce to go relatively untaxed and to be legally immune from confiscation. In addition, corporations in Venice were allowed legal protection that made them abstract, meritocratic entities, businesses that might transcend any one individual and find success or failure on the basis of profit. A Venetian corporation was not dependent on the life, health, or status of any particular person or clan, but solely on its efficiency to operate on abstract business principles such as investment and return, with the corollary financial instruments of stock, dividends, insurance, and maritime loans. Since the state undertook the expensive investments of producing merchant ships and providing naval protection, small traders with little capital could compete with larger corporations in bidding on the rights to the use of ships and commercial routes under the aegis of public auctions. By the time of Lepanto more than eight hundred commercial voyages a year were arriving at and departing from Venice’s port—more than two new ships docking in its harbor every day.
When such state-sanctioned capitalism operated in a rather free society overseen by the elected public councils of the republic, the talented of all classes found a hospitable business climate like none other in the Mediterranean. Added to the mix of consensual government, free markets and investment was a devotion to rationalism and disinterested inquiry that explains why the Venetian galleys were the best designed and armed on the Mediterranean. There was nothing in Asia like the European marketplace of ideas devoted to the pursuit of ever more deadly weapons—the published empirical research on bronze and iron cannon effectiveness, for example, found in Vannoccio Biringuccio’s Pirotechnia (Venice, 1540), Niccolò Tartaglia’s La nova scientia (Venice, 1558), and Luigi Collado’s Practica manual de artiglierra (Venice, 1586 [Italian]; Milan, 1592 [Spanish]). Such formal treatises were often supplemented by annual published reports by commissions and boards in Venice and Genoa and more informal tracts from master shipwrights themselves, like Theodoro’s 1546 report on galley construction at the Arsenal. The freedom to exchange ideas and the classical heritage of rationalism—evident in Don García de Toledo’s treatise on seamanship, ship propulsion, and armament (Madrid, ca. 1560) or in Pedro de Medina’s Regimento de navegación(Seville, 1563)—meant that Europeans were incorporating firsthand experience with abstract theory to advance the science of nautical construction and navigation. Military research was part of higher learning at Venice centered at the nearby University of Padua, where scientific and medical training, under the direction of the renowned Gabriello Falloppio (1523–62) and Fabricus Aquapendente (1537–1610), was unrivaled. In painting, Tintoretto, Giorgione, and Titian kept alive the Hellenic-inspired excellence of the Italian Renaissance, while printers like Aldus Manutius (1450–1515) soon established the greatest publishing center in Europe, focusing on its famous Aldine editions of Greek and Roman classics.
In contrast, printing presses were not introduced at Istanbul until the late fifteenth century, and even then for a long time were forbidden due to fears that information harmful to the state would be distributed. Islam itself would never come to terms with unfettered printing and the idea of free mass dissemination of knowledge. Most well-known Ottoman art and literature were court-inspired, subject to imperial and religious censorship far beyond anything found in the West. Rationalism was felt to be at odds with the political primacy of the Koran, which lay at the heart of the sultan’s power. Knowledge gained from galley warfare was thus found only from hands-on training and the oral tradition that circulated among Mediterranean seamen, since there were no real Ottoman universities, publishing houses, or widespread readership to facilitate abstract speculation.
Venice’s strength vis-à-vis the Turks lay not so much in geography, natural resources, religious zealotry, or a commitment to continual warring and raiding as in its system of capitalism, consensual government, and devotion to disinterested research. Only that way could skilled nautical engineers, pilots, and trained admirals trump enormous Ottoman advantages in territory, tribute, a cultural tradition of warrior nomadism, and sheer manpower. The sultan sought out European traders, ship designers, seamen, and imported firearms—even portrait painters—while almost no Turks found their services required in Europe.
Ottomanism
Perhaps the most marked example at Lepanto of the difference in the economies of the belligerents was the 150,000 gold sequins found in the captured flagship of Ali Pasha. Treasures nearly as large were also discovered in the galleys of the other Ottoman admirals. Without a system of banking, fearful of confiscation should he displease the sultan, and always careful to keep his assets hidden from the tax collectors, Ali Pasha toted his huge personal fortune to Lepanto. There it was plundered after the battle when the admiral was killed at sea and his ship sunk. If a member of the highest echelons of Ottoman society—he was brother-in-law to the sultan, and on a great jihad for his ruler—could neither safely invest nor hide his capital in Istanbul, then thousands of less fortunate subjects could scarcely hope to.
Wealthy Ottoman traders and merchants often stealthily invested money in Europe and chose to import costly European luxury items; or they hid or buried their savings rather than risk seizure of their stored coined money in the future. The result was a chronic shortage of investment capital in the Ottoman Empire for education, public works, and military expenditure. Perhaps Adam Smith had Ali Pasha in mind when he wrote that “in those unfortunate countries, indeed, where men are continually afraid of the violence of their superiors, they frequently bury and conceal a great part of their common stock, a common practice in Turkey, in Indostan, and I believe, in most other governments of Asia” (The Wealth of Nations). In any case, the thousands of Venetians and other Italians and Greeks who lived in Istanbul facilitated, along with Jews and Armenians, a vast East-West trade network. Value-added products such as European firearms, manufactured goods, and textiles were commonly exchanged for raw Asian cotton, silk, spices, and agricultural produce. In contrast, Venice saw no need to welcome an elite trading and banking cadre of Turkish specialists to enhance its own economy.
The political and religious organization of the Ottomans behind their rather closed economy was at once both enlightened and horrific, efficient and static, logical and backward—and in most every way antithetical to market capitalism. Traditional portraits of a corrupt, inept bureaucratic Ottoman government are as misleading as recent revisionist attempts to portray the empire as little different from, if not more progressive than, its European counterparts. At the time of Lepanto, Ottoman political, economic, and military practice could not have been more different from European custom. First, the bureaucracy of the army and government was staffed by slaves—to the number of 80,000 or more—either bought from slave traders, conquered in war or raids, or collected as forced “taxes” under the devshirme, the inspection every four years of the conquered Christian provinces to select suitable Christian youths for forced conversion to Islam. The best of the young Christian captives were educated in the language and religion of the Ottomans, given high posts in government and the military, and became the lifelong loyal and prized slaves of the sultan himself.
The result was a continual revolving governmental and military elite. It was not readily open to native-born Muslims and not replicated through hereditary or dynastic succession. The children of the devshirme were not promoted on criteria of birth or wealth. Thus arose a meritocracy of sorts—a nightmarish version of the model proposed by Plato in his Republic— under which youths would be separated from their parents, publicly educated, advanced on merit, and thereby motivated to serve the state. The devshirme ensured the sultan a loyal cadre of followers, who had no parents and no vision of upward mobility for their own children: the latter were born Muslims and thus ineligible to follow as government interns or Janissary recruits. While the theft of Christian youth was bitterly resented by most conquered subjects in the Balkans, the parents of the kidnapped could on occasion confess that imperial service in the sultan’s government might give their children a better future than the impoverishment of their own local serfdom.
The use of former Christians removed some of the threat of native-born Turks’ acquiring power and threatening insurrection, while it provided proof throughout the empire of the dynamism of Islam in its ability to transmogrify the best of Christian youth into the most loyal and devout of the sultan’s Muslim subjects. Millions of Christians were captured and converted during the centuries of the empire. At Lepanto most of the military command, the bureaucrats who handled the logistics of the fleet, the Janissaries, and the chained galley slave rowers were former Christians, who were forced slave converts to Islam.
The devshirme also illustrated the degree to which religion permeated all aspects of Ottoman life. The greatest admirals in the sixteenth-century Ottoman fleet—Khaireddin Barbarossa, Uluj Ali (“Occhiali”), and Turghud Ali Pasha (“Dragut”)—had all been born European Christians. The sultan’s mother herself, Hürrem Sultan, wife of Süleyman the Magnificent, was a Ukrainian Christian, daughter of a priest. The grand vizier, or chief minister of state, of the empire during the battle of Lepanto, Mehmet Sokullu, was a Slav from the Balkans. Part of the secret of the Ottomans’ martial success was its ambivalent relationship to Europe, which it both courted and hated, robbed and traded with—all the time as it welcomed in Western traders, kidnapped European adolescents, and hired renegade criminals. That the capital of the Ottomans was the venerated European city of Constantinople, and no longer in the East, was itself acknowledgment of the financial advantages inherent in proximity to the West.
The empire, as in the case of the earlier Achaemenid rulers of Asia Minor, was completely in the hands of the sultan, in theory himself a slave by virtue of his birth to a member of his father’s servile harem and also as a servant of Allah. Reminiscent of a Darius or Xerxes, in 1538 Süleyman the Magnificent had inscribed at Bender the following:
I am God’s slave and sultan of this world. By the grace of God I am head of the Muhammad’s community. God’s might and Muhammad’s miracles are my companions. I am Süleyman, in whose name the hutbe is read in Mecca and Medina. In Bagdad I am the shah, in Byzantine realms the Caesar, and in Egypt the sultan; who sends his fleets to the seas of Europe, the Maghrib and India. I am the sultan who took the crown and throne of Hungary and granted them to a humble slave. The Voivoda Petru raised his head in revolt, but my horse’s hoofs ground him into the dust, and I conquered the land of Moldavia. (H. Inalcik, The Ottoman Empire, 41)
Succession passed to the most ambitious of a ruler’s many sons, aided by the degree to which mothers in the harem and full siblings might eliminate rival claimants who could number in the dozens. Most male offspring of the sultan’s daughters were killed at birth. Court intrigue, poisonings, and gratuitous execution proved every bit as macabre as anything in Suetonius’s account of the twelve Caesars. Autocracy, Eastern or Western, is bad enough, but it could prove ruinous when combined with a succession ritual of bloodletting among the elite to determine the new strongman. Consequently, the two fleets at Lepanto represented opposite poles of political and religious organization—the Ottoman navy, an entire cadre of slaves of the sultan; the Christian fleet an alliance of autonomous states, a few of which were ruled by elected governments.
The spectacular growth of the Ottomans in the fifteenth century had hinged on two phenomena: the ability of nomadic peoples to unite and ride west and southward to capture and plunder the older and more settled wealthy states in its environs—Byzantines, Christian fiefdoms in the northern Balkans, Mamluks in Egypt, and Islamic regimes in eastern Anatolia and Iran—and their skill in taxing and transporting the wealth of the Orient such as cotton, spices, silk, and agricultural produce to Europe in exchange for weapons, ships, and manufactured goods. As long as Ottoman armies could acquire fresh lands and new plunder, find new sources of slaves, and monopolize the trade routes from East to West, the empire could spread and prosper, despite intrinsic inefficiencies in its economy and political instability in its imperial administration.
In principle the sultan owned all the land in the empire; in actual practice the best estates were allotted to military and government grandees. All property was subject to sharp taxes. There was no large landholding class of voting citizens. Local appointments went solely to the aristocracy who collected tribute or owned estates, while national offices, including the viziers, were mostly staffed by Christian slaves brought in through the devshirme. The majority of Ottoman military manpower came not from the Janissaries, but from the timar system under which a military lord was given conquered land and near absolute control of its environs. After collecting imperial taxes, the timariot kept what remaining profit he could exact from his indentured peasants and then promised to muster his retainers in time of war. If the Janissaries were foreign-born slave soldiers, the rest of the Ottoman military was primarily an army and navy of serf farmers, beholden to their local lord. Such a system of unfree labor was in sharp contrast to the European militaries, which either conscripted many of their fighting men and oarsmen from their own populace (as in the case of Venice) or hired soldiers on the open market with clear and understood contractual obligations. At first glance the Ottoman system of military conscription had the advantage of being “cost-free” and predicated on local trust and comradeship rather than wages. But on closer examination the entire timarmethod of mustering depended on a continual supply of new land, wise battle leadership of an autocratic timariot, relatively brief campaigns to prevent disruptions in agricultural production, and constant victories to provide plunder for what was essentially a coerced soldiery.
All despotic rule is subject to some checks on power either through religious stricture or as a result of the rise of a necessary commercial or intellectual class. Under the Ottomans, however, the political power of the state was never separate from Islamic control. This general ubiquity of Muslim ideology had the effect of placing most commercial and intellectual life ostensibly under the auspices of the Koran. While Muslim scholars were able to create centers of religious teaching and exegesis revolving around the Koran, no real research in universities that might lead to military innovation, technological progress, or an economic renaissance was possible:
Ottoman scholarship was bounded by traditional Islamic concepts which saw religious learning as the only true science, whose sole aim was the understanding of God’s word. The Koran and the traditions of the Prophet formed the basis of this learning; reason was only an auxiliary in the service of religion. The method of the religious sciences was to seek proof for an argument first in the Koran, then in the traditions of the Prophet, then in recorded precedent, and only as a last resort in personal reasoning. (H. Inalcik, The Ottoman Empire, 173)
Despite the efforts of recent revisionist scholars to deny the nineteenth-century view of a “stagnant” Ottoman economy, there is little doubt that Islam had a far more deleterious effect on free market activity than did Renaissance Christianity on European capitalism. First, there was never a real system of supply and demand or profit and loss, much less interest under the empire: “Islam categorically disapproves of the existence of interest in all economic transactions. The Quranic concept of riba is not limited to loan interest. Literally, riba means over and above a thing, be it in money terms or in physical units of good” (M. Choudhury, Contributions to Islamic Economic Theory, 15).
True banking was nonexistent. European investors, in fact, founded the first Ottoman bank in 1856. Personal fortunes in coinage were more likely buried or sequestered than put on deposit or invested. Prices were regulated by government decree and fiercely watched by guilds. Private property was not protected by constitutional stricture, but subject to imperial confiscation. Taxes were arbitrarily set—high, and capricious in their enforcement. Landowners could never guess when and how frequently the tax collectors might arrive—or how much they would demand. The huge Ottoman bureaucracy and military devoured the budget and absorbed available capital. Literacy was low; not more than 10 percent of the population could read. There were no real secular universities to educate a financial or diplomatic class. Estates owned by mullahs were large and tax-exempt, and Islam itself was often able to curtail lending and borrowing as usurious and against the tenets of the Koran.
Consequently, when radical shifts in the world economy transpired, such as the wholesale importation of bullion from the New World and the opening of alternative trade routes to the East by western European galleons, the Ottomans found themselves relatively powerless to adjust. Any individual, smaller European state—a Venice, Spain, England, France, or the Netherlands—could produce a fleet the size of the sultan’s without the huge territory and manpower of the Ottoman Empire. In short, a disastrous but logical sequence of events overtook the Ottomans right around the time of Lepanto, once the empire reached its maximum point of easy growth:
With military expansion brought to a halt, the state came under severe stress. Revenues sank and the army and navy could not be properly maintained, which in turn reduced the military options. The system turned to prey on itself with a quite indecent haste. Taxes were raised so high as to depopulate. The road to personal wealth for officials and military officers was quickly perceived as the purchase and exploitation of public posts. The rot began to set in as early as the mid-sixteenth century when Süleyman permitted the sale of offices and the accumulation of private fortunes by Turkish élite within the imperial bureaucracy, the members of the so-called Ruling Institution. (E. Jones, The European Miracle, 186)
The Meaning of Lepanto
Scholars tend to see Lepanto as a tactical victory that led to strategic stalemate. After the crushing defeat of the Turkish fleet—for nearly a year there were few Ottoman warships on the Mediterranean—the Holy League failed to press home its advantage. Cyprus was not retaken, Greece not freed. In but two years Venice, struggling under lost revenues due to the cutoff of its Asian trade, had made peace with the sultan. The Ottoman advance in the next two centuries would overwhelm Crete, sweep into Hungary, and end at the gates of Vienna. Within a year the sultan’s shipyards, copied from the Arsenal at Venice and manned by European engineers, built an entirely new fleet, albeit one of questionable quality.
Lepanto, like Poitiers, was nevertheless a watershed event in the history of East-West relations. The western Mediterranean was to be secure, and the galleys of Islam would rarely venture across the Adriatic—in the same manner that the Muslims in Spain after Poitiers would offer no more threat to northern Europe. Once the Ottomans were stopped at Lepanto, the continued long-term autonomy of the western Mediterranean would never again be in doubt. Lepanto ensured that the growing Atlantic trade with the Americas would continue, as Europeans not only became enriched by New World treasure but found the Ottoman Empire increasingly irrelevant to their growing commercial interests in the Orient via routes around the Horn of Africa. In 1580 Emir Mehmet ibn-Emir es-Su‘udi wrote, “The Europeans have discovered the secret of oceanic travel. They are Lords of the new world and of the gates to India. . . . The people of Islam are without the latest information in the science of geography and do not understand the menace of the capture of the sea trade by the Europeans” (W. Allen, Problems of Turkish Power in the Sixteenth Century, 30).
Lepanto had also demonstrated that Europe need not be entirely united to beat the Turks: an ad hoc coalition of just a few southern Mediterranean states was enough to check a cumbersome Ottoman state based on theocracy and despotism. The East-West imbalance would only grow worse, as population and economic activity increased at far greater rates under European free markets, Protestantism, and global trade. In contrast, the military culture of the Ottomans, originating in the steppes of eastern Asia Minor and having reached the limits of its easiest extension, found itself for the first time up against states more formidable than the enervated Byzantines and other isolated kingdoms in the Balkans— nations whose continual improvements in gunpowder weapons, advanced fortifications, superior ships, and sophisticated military tactics could easily outweigh the martial prowess of individual Turkish warriors.
There is also an irony in the galley fighting on the Mediterranean between cross and crescent, inasmuch as the North Atlantic states of England, France, and Holland by 1571 possessed better and more numerous ships than the archaic galleys that collided at Lepanto. Even as the Ottomans and the southern European states fought for what they thought was world military supremacy, the oceangoing navies to the north cemented their hold on New World and Asiatic colonies and trading routes, proving that the real strategic prizes were no longer to be found in the Mediterranean. In the new era of guns and sails it made no sense to put between two hundred and four hundred men on an oared vessel that could easily be blown apart at a distance by a man-of-war that had half a galley’s crew. By 1571 the Spanish were the most sophisticated sailors on the Mediterranean, and yet in less than twenty years the galleons and cannon of its armada would prove in all ways inferior to a British fleet that had uniformly superior guns, crews, officers, and sails.
Finally, Don Juan had proved at Lepanto that the southern Europeans no longer need fear the dreaded Turks, whose century-long advance through the Balkans had so terrified Christendom. With the reconquest of Spain (1492) and the victory at Lepanto, the future of military dynamism was no longer with horsemen, nomads, or corsairs, but returned to the old paradigm of classical antiquity: superior technology, capital-creating economies, and civic militias. The Ottomans had fashioned a brilliant military empire based on the courage of nomadic warriors, the purchase of European firearms and military expertise, and the great schisms in Christendom between Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant. At last, however, there was to be a reckoning once the easy source of Ottoman capital dried up with the collapse of Byzantium and the European opening of maritime commerce with Asia. The sultans would find imported technology increasingly expensive to buy or emulate, and they would learn in the process that European military science was not static, but evolving even as it was sold abroad. “All the world learned,” wrote Cervantes of Lepanto in Don Quixote,“how mistaken it had been in believing the Turks were invincible.”
CAPITALISM, THE OTTOMAN ECONOMY, AND ISLAM
Why was the Ottoman fleet at Lepanto the product of booty, raiding, tariffs on trade with the West, and tribute, while the ships of Venice and the Papal States were more the dividends of the capital found in banking, industry, colonization, and exploration? Why as a rule did the Ottomans and other Islamic states trade raw materials for manufactured goods with the Europeans? Why were there renegade European fabricators, munitions and ship designers, and mercenary commanders in Istanbul, but relatively few Turkish counterparts employed in the West? Why did Europe not learn of the mass fabrication of cannon and galleys from the Ottomans? And why were not the novel galleasses in the Turkish rather than the Christian fleet?
True market economies never fully developed in the Muslim world because they were in jeopardy without freedom and antithetical to the Koran, which made no distinction between political, cultural, economic, and religious life, and therefore discouraged unfettered economic rationalism. Scholarly controversy still rages about the nebulous relationship between Islam and free markets, as historians and economists for centuries have attempted to explain why Europe in the past was able to project its power into the heart of the Islamic world, and why today the economies of Islamic states are so much smaller than their Western counterparts—why, for instance, the gross national product of a tiny Israel exceeds the aggregate economic output of all Islamic nations along the northern coast of Africa.
The debate makes strange bedfellows. Progressive Western scholars have tried their best to suggest that Arab economies are merely “different” from, rather than less efficient than, their Western counterparts, since European and American observers do not factor into the equation the salutary benefits of Islamic culture—reduced crime, stronger families, less gratuitous consumerism, and more charitable giving. They add that for centuries Muslim states found ingenious ways to circumvent formal religious strictures against compound interest—forgetting that such stealth and cumbersome procedures in themselves harmed easy capital creation. Oddly, Islamic economists have sometimes taken a much different—and more honest—approach in acknowledging the moral impediments to capital formation inherent in Islamic religion. Many take pride that in Muslim countries today there are religious and ethical checks to materialism and sheer economic rationalism.
If the Ottoman fleet at Lepanto was less advanced than its European counterpart, and if a single European state had the ability to construct and finance a near equal number of ships as the sultan’s empire, so today the entire Islamic world of well over 1 billion people—albeit hardly monolithic—finds itself at a clear military disadvantage against individual Western militaries, despite the enormous wealth created by oil production and exportation. Just as Venice might match the Ottomans in galleys, so now a France, England, or America singly possesses air forces, ships, and nuclear weapons beyond the aggregate strength of the entire Islamic world. Twenty-four hundred years after Cyrus the Younger hired the Ten Thousand to win his kingdom, and five hundred years after the Ottoman emulation of the Arsenal at Venice, Saddam Hussein was buying all his arms from Western merchants with the profits from oil revenue, an industry created and maintained by hired Western technological expertise.
Free capital is the key to war making on any large scale, what Cicero called “the sinews of war,” without which an army cannot muster, be fed, or fight. Capital is the wellspring of technological innovation, which is inextricably tied to freedom, often the expression of individualism, and thus critical to military success throughout the ages. That capitalism was born in the West, expanded through Europe, survived the alternate Western-inspired paradigms of socialism and communism, and found itself inextricably tied with personal freedom and democracy in its latest global manifestation explains in no small part Western military dominance from the age of Salamis to the Gulf War. There is past and present a vast difference between Western and Islamic approaches to capitalist economies:
Whereas democratic capitalism is a development of human experience, the basis of the economic doctrine of Islam is divinely inspired. Therefore, the economic life of a Muslim is not entirely a materialistic or this-worldly vocation. Its stimulus is derived both from the individual’s drive to gain wealth and from his wish to be an obedient servant of God. Thus intent counts, and the type of economic activity a Muslim engages in must be legitimate (M. Abdul-Rauf, A Muslim’s Reflections on Democratic Capitalism, 60).
The purpose of capitalism, even sixteenth-century Mediterranean capitalism, was not social justice or “intent” or the desire to be “legitimate,” but, as it has always been, the acknowledgment of the eternal greed of man—critical in crafting a system that recognizes natural self-interest. What made seventeenth-century Cypriots and Greeks despise the Turks was not merely ethnic and religious hatred but the gradual destruction of their own economic and material life under Ottoman rule. As absentee landowners Venetians in the eastern Mediterranean had been every bit as merciless to their Greek-speaking sharecroppers and peasants as their later Ottoman successors—the rich palaces still seen today in Venice are proof enough of their eastern Mediterranean extortion—but their knowledge of export trade, their ability to sell agricultural produce at the highest prices in Mediterranean ports, and their propensity to set up some industries all resulted in a trickle-down prosperity.
For oppressed peasants to be better off in the long run under Ottoman rule, taxes would have to be markedly lower than under the Europeans, since the latter created far more capital, some of which eventually enhanced the population at large. The great hatred of capitalism in the hearts of the oppressed, ancient and modern, I think, stems not merely from the ensuing vast inequality in wealth, and the often unfair and arbitrary nature of who profits and who suffers, but from the silent acknowledgment that under a free market economy the many victims of the greed of the few are still better off than those under the utopian socialism of the well-intended. It is a hard thing for the poor to acknowledge benefits from their rich moral inferiors who never so intended it.
For a capitalist system to work, the state had to protect, not regulate or interfere with, free markets. Both for political and religious reasons, this the sultan could not do: The Ottomans had then no idea of the balance of trade. . . . Originated from an age-old tradition in the Middle East, the Ottoman trade policy was that the state had to be concerned above all that the people and craftsmen in the cities in particular would not suffer a shortage of necessities and raw material. Consequently, the imports were always welcomed and encouraged, and exports discouraged. (H. Inalcik, in K. Karpat, ed., The Ottoman State and Its Place in World History, 57)
Capitalism is not merely commerce, but brings with it a sophisticated infrastructure of insurance, corporations, bookkeeping, dividends, interest, freely accessed information, and official government protection of property and profit. Without free prices and free markets that best judge what people need and want, efficient production is impossible, since the appetites and requirements of millions are not immediately known, but only poorly guessed at and then often ignored by a coercive central state.
Lepanto bought time for a beleaguered Mediterranean West to replace its lost power of classical political unity with the much stronger force of a transoceanic market. If the Middle Ages (A.D. 500–1500) had seen a holding action in Europe, as small squabbling monarchies kept out a series of Arabs, Vikings, Mongols, and Ottomans from central Europe and conducted the Crusades and Reconquista, so the new nation-states of the West would move to the offensive against not merely the Islamic world but indigenous peoples in Africa, Australia, and the New World as well. It was not that there was not innate, even superior genius at Istanbul: the Turkish lighthouse on the Bosphorus with its leaded-glass windows and lanterns fueled by wicks floating in oil was far superior to European models. There were a number of brilliant Ottoman mathematicians, medical writers, and engineers. But all such thinkers usually worked in isolation from contemporary research in Europe. None enjoyed broad domestic institutionalized support—ever wary about possible counterreaction from Islamic fundamentalists.
Absent was a holistic system that might translate individual brilliance into mass-produced items that would benefit and enrich the population without regard to state, religious, or cultural interests. The result was that while the sultan could hire a Venetian ship designer and set up dockyards patterned after the Arsenal of Venice, there was no indigenous theory or practice to advance Ottoman ship construction or to ensure continual nautical innovation apart from Western emulation. To do so would require competitive bidding, unrestricted profits, a monetized economy integrated with the Mediterranean, and a publishing, banking, and university presence in Asia Minor. Anything less meant that the sultan had to employ his enormous capital from conquest, taxation, and raiding to buy what he could not fabricate himself—a strategy that guaranteed his soldiers would never have as many or quite as effective weapons as their Western enemies. Thousands would die at Lepanto for those very reasons.
WAR AND THE MARKET
Capitalism in its most basic form was born in ancient Greece; that heritage helps to explain why the postclassical Europeans in their centuries of religious and political cannibalism nevertheless protected their autonomy from non-Westerners and were as wealthy as their more unified Islamic rivals. The word for profit, kerdos, is ubiquitous in the Greek language. Although classical scholars are still divided between “modernists” and “primitivists” who disagree about the extent of unfettered markets and an abstract appreciation of capitalist theory, there is a growing consensus that by the fifth century B.C. Greek economic activity—especially at imperial Athens—was decentralized, governed by supply and demand, and characterized by sophisticated notions of markets, profit, banking, and insurance, with government assurance of the sanctity of private property and rights of inheritance.
By the mid-fifth century B.C. the Greeks themselves were sensitive to the role that money and markets were beginning to play in warfare. Subsequent conservatives like Plato and Aristotle lamented that battle was no longer a contest of courage waged by hoplite phalanxes, but had become an unfettered enterprise on land and sea where money allowed armies to travel far from home, to be paid and maintained in the field, and to be augmented by mercenaries and sophisticated weaponry such as fleets, siege engines, and artillery. Capital, not courage, would determine who lived and who died. In the West during the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. ethical restraints on war making and economic activity seem to have been abandoned about the same time, ending for good the nascent idea of limited wars fought according to protocol, martial hierarchies, and moral economies that operated on principles other than the purely commercial. The impetus was largely capitalistic and democratic: designers were free to profit by building better weapons than their competitors, while rulers sought to arm as many of their subjects as cheaply and lethally as possible.
In the first book of Thucydides’ history the great democratic statesman Pericles reminds his fellow Athenians about the innate military advantages their own market economy offered in a war against the more parochial agrarian states of the Peloponnese. Pericles concluded:
Those who are yeomen farmers are more likely to risk their own lives than their property, for they believe that while they might survive the fighting, they are not sure that their capital will. Thus, although the states of the Peloponnese could defeat all of Greece in a single pitched battle, they would have no luck against a military organization so vastly different from their own. (Thucydides 1.143.2–3)
The sentiment that war was a question of money was grudgingly acknowledged even at Sparta, where King Archidamus at about the same time (431 B.C.) warned his blinkered comrades that “war was no longer a matter of hoplite arms, but of money” (Thucydides 1.83.2).
During the subsequent Hellenistic age, this novel notion that money won wars became unquestioned. The looting of the Achaemenid treasuries by Alexander the Great spurred a military renaissance in the eastern Mediterranean for more than two centuries as relatively small cadres of Greek-speaking dynasts ruled vast Asiatic populations in Seleucid Asia and Ptolemaic Egypt because of their ability to establish sophisticated trading regimes, corporate agriculture, and vast mercenary armies equipped with elaborate siege engines, catapults, and ships—all based on the conversion of the old Achaemenid treasuries to minted coinage. Rome was the capitalist war machine par excellence of the ancient world, as military activity was first gauged in terms of economic feasibility—illustrated by the rich record of imperial papyri and inscriptions that attest to the intricate system of logistical supply contracted out to private businessmen. The classical cultures, unlike their adversaries in the eastern Mediterranean and to the north, predicated their military success in part on the ability to coin money, respect private property, and operate free markets.
In the twilight of the empire, observers were quick to point out that Roman military impotence was a result of a debased currency, exorbitant taxation, and the manipulation of the market by inefficient government price controls, corrupt governmental traders, and unchecked tax farmers —the wonderful system of raising capital operating in reverse as it devoured savings and emptied the countryside of once-productive yeomen. But even during the collapse of the empire and the subsequent Dark and Middle Ages, Europeans were adept in fabricating a variety of superior military goods in great numbers, from plate armor to matchless double-edged swords, crossbows, and Greek fire, prompting many states to publish decrees forbidding their merchants from exporting such arms to potential enemies.
The alternative to capitalist-financed warfare was either simple coercion—the forced impressment of warriors without pay—or tribal musters fueled by promises of booty. Both systems could result in enormous and spirited armies: Vercingetorix’s quarter-million-man Gallic army that nearly defeated Caesar at Alesia (52 B.C.) and the nomadic invasions of Genghis Khan (1206–27) and Tamerlane (1381–1405), who overran much of Asia, are the most notable examples. Cetshwayo, as we shall see, mustered 20,000 Zulus, who massacred the British at Isandhlwana (1879). But even the most murderous hordes could not really sustain—feed, clothe, and pay—a military force with sophisticated weaponry for a lengthy period of time. At some point farmers, traders, and merchants do not work if they are not paid, and standing armies are nearly impossible to maintain without regular salaries and contracts for supply.
For those states, ancient and modern, that failed to adopt the tenets of capitalism and private enterprise, if they were to war long enough, they would eventually encounter Western armies that were supplied by an amoral and unfettered market. In such cases, the numbers, brilliant leadership, and battlefield courage of the Other could be nullified by smaller, even poorly led armies that were better fed, equipped, and armed by those who saw profit in war. Ali Pasha’s failure at Lepanto was not his tactical folly; nor was it an absence of courage on the part of the Janissaries, or even a dearth of Turkish bullion. The tragic loss of thousands of Ottoman faithful in the waters off Aetolia was due rather to the Christians’ more or less godless system of market capitalism that produced in plenitude galleasses, harquebuses, cannon, boarding nets, mass-produced galleys—and risk-taking commanders who had no hesitation in sawing off their ships’ prows at a moment’s notice.