Emboldened by the fall of Famagusta and by the departure of virtually the whole Venetian fleet for Messina, the Turks had by now entered the Adriatic in strength; their landings in Corfu and along the Dalmatian coast had aroused increasing fears in Venice of a sudden invasion which would find the city almost without defence. At the approach of the combined fleet, however, they had rapidly withdrawn to their bases in Greece; they had no wish to be blockaded within the narrow sea with the enemy all around them. Thus it was from Lepanto (the modern Naupactos on the Gulf of Patras) that they sailed out, on 6 October, to meet the advancing Christians.
The Christians were in a fighting mood. Two days before, at Cephalonia, they had heard of the fall of Famagusta and, in particular, of the death of Marcantonio Bragadin; rage and vengeance were in their hearts. On the same day, however, there occurred an incident which almost proved disastrous. A Spanish officer and a few of the men on Sebastiano Venier’s galley insulted some Venetians, and in the ensuing fight several of them were killed. Venier, without consultation and on his own initiative, had all those implicated hanged at the masthead. When this was reported to Don John he flew into a rage and ordered the captain’s arrest–a command which, had it been obeyed, might well have torn the whole fleet apart. Fortunately, wiser counsels–probably those of Colonna–prevailed and he was persuaded to countermand his order, but he never forgave Venier. Henceforth all his communications with the Venetian contingent were addressed to the second-in-command.
The two fleets met at dawn on 7 October, a mile or two east of Cape Scropha at the entrance to the Gulf of Patras. The galleons had not yet arrived, but Don John was determined to engage the enemy at once. Only slightly revising his order of battle–Barbarigo and Doria received ten more galleys each–he drew his ships into formation and sailed to the attack. The Turks were ready for him, with a fleet that almost precisely matched his own, describing a huge crescent that extended from one shore of the gulf to the other. The admiral, Ali Pasha, commanded the central squadron, with eighty-seven galleys; on his right was Mehmet Saulak, governor of Alexandria, with fifty-four; on his left, opposite Doria, was Uluch Ali with sixty-one.
The battle began at about half past ten in the morning at the north end of the lines, where Don John’s left wing under Barbarigo engaged Ali’s right under Saulak. The fighting was fierce, Barbarigo’s own flagship being at one moment set upon by five Turkish vessels which simultaneously loosed a hail of arrows, one of them wounding the Venetian admiral mortally in the eye. His nephew Marco Contarini took over the command, but within five minutes he too was dead. Yet the engagement ended in a total victory for the Christians, who eventually succeeded in driving the entire Turkish right wing into the shore. The Turks abandoned their ships and tried to escape into the surrounding hills, but the Venetians pursued them and cut them down as they ran. Saulak was taken prisoner, but he was already seriously wounded and did not long survive.
The focus now shifted to the centre where, at eleven o’clock or thereabouts, Don John’s galleys, advancing in line abreast at a steady, even stroke, closed on those of Ali Pasha, the two flagships deliberately making straight for each other. They met, and entangled; to each side of them along the line the other galleys did the same, simultaneously closing in towards the middle until the sea was scarcely visible and men were leaping and scrambling from ship to ship, fighting hand to hand with swords, cutlasses and scimitars. Twice Ali’s force of 400 picked janissaries boarded Don John’s flagship, the Real; three times the Spaniards returned the attack, the last time under heavy covering fire from Colonna, who had just incapacitated the galley of Pertau Pasha, Ali’s second-in-command. It was on this third occasion that Ali was struck on the forehead by a cannonball. Scarcely had he fallen before his head was sliced off by a soldier from Malaga, who stuck it on a pike and waved it aloft to give courage to his comrades. With their admiral killed and their flagship captured, the Turks rapidly lost heart. Many of their ships were destroyed in the melée; those that managed to extricate themselves turned and fled.
To the south, meanwhile, things were going less well. From the very beginning of the advance, at about ten o’clock that morning, Gian Andrea Doria had been uneasy about his position. The Turkish left wing under Uluch Ali which confronted him was longer and stronger–ninety-three vessels to his sixty-four–and, extending as it did further southward, threatened to outflank him. It was to avoid this danger that he had altered his course towards the southeast, a decision which left an ever-widening gap between Don John and himself. He should have known better. Uluch Ali saw the gap and instantly changed his plans, altering his own direction towards the northwest with the object of cutting straight through the Christian line and falling upon it from the rear. This new course led him against the southern end of Don John’s squadron, which consisted of a few ships contributed by the Knights of Malta. The Knights fought bravely, but they had no chance against the overwhelming odds and were massacred to a man. Their flagship was taken in tow, and Uluch Ali raised their captured standard on his own.
By now Don Juan de Cardona, whose eight galleys had been held in reserve, was hurrying to the relief of the Knights. As he approached, sixteen Turkish galleys fell on him. There followed the fiercest and bloodiest encounter of the whole day. When it was over, 450 of the 500 fighting men of Cardona’s galleys had been killed or wounded, and Cardona himself was on the point of death. Several ships, when boarded later, were found to be manned entirely by corpses. Others, meanwhile, were hurrying to the rescue: the second reserve force under Santa Cruz and–as soon as he could leave his own area of the battle–Don John himself. Uluch Ali stayed no longer, ordering thirteen of his galleys to quicken their stroke and heading with them northwest at full speed towards Leucas and Preveza. The remainder broke away in the other direction and returned to Lepanto.
Despite the confusion and the appalling losses sustained as a result of the cowardice and sheer bad seamanship of Gian Andrea Doria–and there were plenty of his colleagues after the battle to accuse him of both–the Battle of Lepanto had been an overwhelming victory for Christendom. According to the most reliable estimates, the Christians lost only twelve galleys sunk and one captured; Turkish losses were 113 and 117 respectively. Casualties were heavy on both sides, as was inevitable when much of the fighting was hand-to-hand, but whereas the Christian losses are unlikely to have exceeded 15,000, the Turks are believed to have lost double that number, excluding the 8,000 who were taken prisoner.153 In addition there was enormous plunder; Ali Pasha’s flagship alone was found to contain 150,000 sequins. Finally comes the most gratifying figure of all: that of the 15,000 Christian galley slaves set at liberty. For all this the lion’s share of the credit must go to Don John himself, whose handling of his unwieldy and heterogeneous fleet was masterly and whose brilliant use of his firepower was to have a lasting effect on the development of naval warfare. In future, sea battles would be decided by guns rather than by swordsmanship. This in turn would mean bigger, heavier ships, which could be propelled only by sail. Lepanto was the last great naval engagement to be fought with oared galleys, ramming each other head on. The age of the broadside had begun.
It was 18 October before the galley Angelo reached Venice with the news. The city was still mourning the loss of Cyprus, raging against the bestial treatment of Bragadin and fearful as to what further reverses the future might have in store. Within an hour of the Angelo’s appearance, trailing the Turkish banners in the water behind her stern, her deck piled high with trophies, the whole mood had changed. Venice had had her revenge; nor had she had to wait long for it. Suddenly jubilation was in the air, as everyone hastened to the Piazza to learn the details of the battle and to celebrate. The gates of the debtors’ prison were opened in an act of spontaneous amnesty, while the Turkish merchants, with a contrary motion, barricaded themselves for safety inside the Fondaco dei Turchi until the excitement was over. In St Mark’s, a Te Deum was followed by a High Mass of thanksgiving; that night th
ere was scarcely a building in the city that was not illuminated inside and out by candles and torches. In more permanent celebration of the event, the great entrance portal of the Arsenal was enlarged and adorned by the addition of a winged lion of St Mark (with appropriate inscription) and two winged victories. A year or two later the pediment was to be surmounted by a statue of St Justina, on whose feast day the great battle had been won, and from 1572 to the fall of the Republic in 1797 that day, 7 October, was annually celebrated with a procession by the Doge and Signoria to the church of that same fortunate patron, outside which the captured Turkish standards were displayed.
And so Lepanto is remembered as one of the decisive battles of the world, the greatest naval engagement between Actium–fought only some sixty miles away–and Trafalgar. In England and America, admittedly, its continued fame rests largely on G. K. Chesterton’s thunderous–if gloriously inaccurate–poem, but in the Catholic countries of the Mediterranean it has broken the barriers of history and passed, like Roncesvalles, into legend. Does it, however, altogether deserve its reputation? Technically and tactically, yes; after 1571 sea battles were never the same again. Politically, no. Lepanto did not, as its victors hoped, mark the end of the pendulum’s swing, the point where Christian fortunes suddenly turned, gathering force until the Turks were swept back into the Asian heartland whence they had come. Venice did not regain Cyprus; only two years later she was to conclude a separate peace with the Sultan relinquishing all her claims to the island. Nor did Lepanto mean the end of her losses; in the following century, Crete was to go the same way. As for Spain, she did not appreciably increase her control of the central Mediterranean; only seventeen years afterwards, the historic defeat of her Great Armada by the British was to deal her sea power a blow from which it would not quickly recover. Nor was she able to break the links between Constantinople and the Moorish princes of North Africa; within three years the Turks were to drive the Spaniards from Tunis, make vassals of the local rulers and reduce the area–as they had already reduced most of Algeria to the west and Tripolitania to the east–to the status of an Ottoman province.
But for all those Christians who rejoiced in those exultant October days, the real importance of Lepanto was neither tactical nor political; it was moral. The heavy black cloud which had overshadowed them for two centuries and which since 1453 had grown steadily more threatening, to the point where they felt that their days were numbered–that cloud had suddenly lifted. From one moment to the next, hope had been reborn. It was, perhaps, the Venetian historian Paolo Paruta who best summed up the popular feeling, in the course of his funeral oration in St Mark’s on those who had been killed in the battle:
They have taught us by their example that the Turks are not insuperable, as we had previously believed them to be…Thus it can be said that as the beginning of this war was for us a time of sunset, leaving us in perpetual night, now the courage of these men, like a true, life-giving sun, has bestowed upon us the most beautiful and most joyful day that this city, in all her history, has ever seen.
To every patriotic Venetian, it seemed essential that the glorious victory must be followed up at once. The Turk must be given no rest, no time to catch his breath; he must be pursued and brought to battle again, before he had a chance to repair his shattered forces and while the allies still maintained their forward impetus. This was the message that the government of the Republic now propounded to its Spanish and papal allies, but its arguments fell on deaf ears. Don John himself, one suspects, secretly agreed and would have been only too happy to press on through the winter, but his orders from Philip were clear. By the terms of the League, the allied forces would meet again in the spring; until then, he must bid them farewell. He and his fleet returned to Messina.
By the spring of 1572 it was plain to the Venetians that their instincts had been right. Spain was, as usual, prevaricating and procrastinating, raising one objection after another. Pope Pius did his utmost to spur them to action, but he was already a sick man and on 1 May he died. With his death the spirit went out of the League. At last, despairing of Spanish help, Venice decided to launch an expedition of her own, which Marcantonio Colonna willingly joined with his squadron of papal galleys. Only then were the Spaniards goaded into action. They had no wish to be left out if there was indeed another victory to be won. Philip’s objections fell away and in June Don John was finally given permission to join his allies.
The fleet assembled at Corfu and sailed south in search of the enemy. The allies had learned with some dismay that in the eight months since Lepanto Sultan Selim had managed to build a new fleet of 150 galleys and eight galleasses–these latter being an innovation for the Turks, who had obviously been impressed by the brilliant use Don John had made of them at Lepanto. Rumour had it, however, that the shipwrights, aware of the fate that awaited them if they failed to meet the Sultan’s deadlines, had been obliged to use green timber; that the guns had been so hurriedly cast that many of them were useless; and that the crews, press-ganged into service after the appalling losses at Lepanto, were scarcely trained. It was unlikely, in short, that they would give the allies much trouble. The principal problem would be to bring them to battle.
And so indeed it was. The two fleets met off Modone–for 250 years one of Venice’s principal trading posts in the Peloponnese, until it had fallen to the Sultan in 1500–and immediately the Turks ran for harbour. The allies followed them, took up their positions in the roadstead off Navarino (the modern Pylos) and settled down to wait. Modone, they knew, could not maintain a fleet of such a size for long. The mountainous hinterland was barren and without roads; all supplies must come in by sea. It was only a question of time before the enemy would be forced to emerge, and a second Lepanto would follow.
But once again Venice saw her hopes dashed, and once again the Spaniards were the cause. On 7 October–the first anniversary of the great battle–Don John suddenly announced that he could no longer remain in Greek waters and was returning to the west. The Venetian Captain-General Giacomo Foscarini, dumbfounded, asked why and, when the prince unconvincingly replied that his provisions were running low, at once offered to supply him from his own stock and order more from Venice as necessary. But Don John, clearly acting on new orders from Spain, could not be shaken. Colonna unaccountably took his side. Foscarini had to face the fact that his fleet was not strong enough to challenge the Turks alone. Fuming at the thought of the opportunity lost, he had no choice but to give the order to return.
All that winter the Venetian ambassador in Madrid worked on King Philip. The Turks, he argued, were bent on world domination; they had been constantly extending their territories for some five hundred years and were continuing to do so; the longer they were allowed to advance, the stronger and more irresistible they would become. It was surely the King’s duty to Christendom–and to himself, if he wished to keep his throne–to take up arms against them, and not to rest until the work that had been so gloriously begun at Lepanto was thoroughly finished. But Philip refused to listen. He hated and mistrusted Venice; as far as the Turks were concerned he had done his duty the previous year, and with considerable success; after such a victory it would be some time before they raised their heads again. Meanwhile, he was fully occupied with William the Silent’s revolt in the Low Countries. He did not go whining to Venice to help him with his problems; he saw no reason why he should assist her any further with hers.
Moreover, in those same winter months, Charles IX of France was also busy, intriguing against Philip on three separate fronts. In the Low Countries he was giving all possible support to the rebellion; in the Mediterranean he was manoeuvring to gain control of Algiers, where his machinations may well have been responsible for Don John’s recall from Navarino; in Venice and Constantinople his ambassadors were working hard to bring about a peace between the Sultan and the Republic. By early spring they had succeeded. Venice had not wished for anything of the kind; since Lepanto she had done everything in her power to ho
ld the League together and to persuade her fellow members to join her in an out-and-out offensive, stopping–with God’s help–only at Constantinople itself. But she had failed. Philip was frankly not interested, the new Pope Gregory XIII scarcely more so. Deserted by her allies, knowing full well that to continue the war alone would be to invite new Turkish invasions of the Adriatic and, in all probability, the seizure of Crete–her last stronghold in the Levant–she had no choice but to accept the terms which were offered her. On 3 March 1573 the treaty was signed. Venice undertook, inter alia, to pay the Sultan 300,000 ducats over three years, and to renounce all her claims to Cyprus.
In the dominions of the Most Catholic King, there were cries of horror and disgust. In Messina, a furious Don John tore the League banner from his masthead and ran up that of Spain. How right Philip had been, said his subjects, not to trust those Venetians; they were bound to betray him sooner or later. It was, they protested, as if the Battle of Lepanto had never been won.
The Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean Page 43