The Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean

by John Julius Norwich

  It was indeed. In spite of all the jubilation, the cheering and the shouting and the building up of the great Lepanto legend that still persists today, the truth is that one of the most celebrated naval battles ever fought proved to be of no long-term strategic importance whatever. And those who lamented loudest had only themselves to blame.

  After the Battle of Lepanto a curious calm descended upon the Mediterranean. It was as if the whole vast basin had somehow exhausted itself. Until the last quarter of the sixteenth century–though the countries of northern Europe might latterly have disputed the fact–the Middle Sea had been, in a very real sense, the centre of the western world. It was the centre no longer.

  For Spain, Christopher Columbus and his successors had opened new and exciting horizons. With her possession of Naples and Sicily in the south and Milan in the north154 no longer disputed, with the island of Sardinia also hers and the city of Genoa now effectively a Spanish port, the rest of Italy and the Mediterranean had ceased to interest her. True, in 1601 she and a group of Italian states–but not Venice–despatched a powerful force of seventy galleys and 10,000 men to surprise and capture Algiers (since it was commanded by Gian Andrea Doria its failure was assured), but her real attention was now fixed on the west and the north, where her constant problems in the Low Countries and her rivalry with England were taking up almost all her time.

  As for France, she was no longer the kingdom that she had been under Francis I. Foreign adventure in the south was now for her a thing of the past; instead, she was being almost literally torn apart by the Wars of Religion, which were to continue for more than thirty years and bring the country to the brink of disintegration. Even Italy was quiet–at least by Italian standards. Apart from Naples and the Papacy there was only one major power in the peninsula, and the Republic of Venice was always too keen on commerce to make war unless it absolutely had to. Between the various north Italian city-states internecine fighting went on as it always had, but most of it was of little if any lasting significance to the Mediterranean world.

  Then there was the Ottoman Empire, and even the Turkish juggernaut now seemed to be running out of steam. The great days of Süleyman the Magnificent were long since over, and his successor Selim the Sot died in 1574–appropriately enough, after consuming a whole bottle of strong Cyprus wine at a single draught and then slipping on the wet floor of the baths. It is true that in that very same year the old corsair admiral Kilij Ali recaptured Tunis from the Spanish–the city and its hinterland became an Ottoman province–but this was the sum total of the Turkish gains in the Mediterranean. Selim’s son Murad III–he had come to the throne only after ordering the strangulation of his five brothers–was more interested in what lay beyond his eastern borders, and preferred to concentrate his attention on Georgia and the Caucasus. His successors seem to have felt much the same way, and so it was that for very nearly a century the Turks were to do little to alter the map of the Middle Sea.

  The only attempt to do so after the capture of Tunis came from an unexpected quarter. In 1578 Philip II’s nephew, the headstrong young King Sebastian of Portugal, responded–for reasons that are still not entirely clear–to an appeal for help from the Sherif of Fez, who had recently been expelled from his city by a rival claimant. Sebastian had appealed in his turn to his uncle, who had somewhat grudgingly agreed to support him; he had thus been able to cross the straits of Gibraltar with an army of Spanish and Portuguese numbering some 15,000. On 3 August he reached the town of Alcacerquivir, to find on the following day a vastly greater Moroccan army drawn up against him. He had no choice but to fight, and in the ensuing battle he and both the rival sherifs were killed, as were over 8,000 of his men. Of the remainder nearly all were captured; barely 100 managed to make their escape.

  The only real victor of the Battle of the Three Kings, as it was called, was Philip of Spain. Single-handedly, Sebastian had reduced Portugal to such a state of weakness and demoralisation that two years later Philip was able quite simply to swallow it up–doubling at a stroke his colonial empire and gaining valuable Atlantic harbours and shipping besides. Not until 1640 was Portugal to recover her independence.

  Philip was to live another twenty years, dying at seventy-one in 1598. No king had ever taken his duties more seriously; none had ever worked harder. Trusting no one, he had spent the last forty years in Madrid or at his palace of the Escorial attending personally to every detail of government and administration, never giving himself time to look up from his desk and take a longer, broader view of the world around him. Morbidly pious, he was determined to perform what he believed to be the divinely appointed task of preserving the true Catholic religion, in the cause of which he could be ruthless, tyrannical and cruel; but he was a lover of books and pictures and–when he was allowed to be–an affectionate husband and father. He was four times married–his wives were respectively Portuguese, English, French and Austrian–and four times widowed; they had given him, however, only two sons. The first was a lunatic, who died under mildly suspicious circumstances in prison at the age of twenty-three; the second–by his last wife–was to survive him as Philip III. His principal achievement from our point of view was to have built up his country as a serious military and naval power; by the 1570s his navy was at least four times stronger than it had been in his father’s time. But he was a sad, lonely man, and his subjects were not sorry to see him go.

  The unwonted inactivity of the great Mediterranean powers left the field free for the pirates, who as the new century opened became ever more of a menace. They consisted by no means only of Muslims from Barbary; included among them were plenty of European seamen like the infamous Captain John Ward, who in 1605 or thereabouts arrived in Tunis. There he came to an agreement with the Bey, by which he undertook to attack all Christians except Englishmen and to share the profits. Such was his success–particularly against the Venetians and the Knights of St John–that he was soon able to build himself in Tunis a palace ‘beautified with rich marble and alabaster’, second only in magnificence to that of the ruler himself. In 1609 he even acquired a noble second-in-command: Sir Francis Verney of Claydon in Buckinghamshire, who had left his distinguished family in disgust the previous year and was soon, in the words of an English historian, ‘making havoc of his own countrymen…the merchants of Poole or Plymouth’.155 Algiers, not to be outdone, then secured the services of a certain Simon Danzer or Dansker–of whose nationality we cannot be sure–who enjoyed a similar success. From these men the Barbary corsairs, who had hitherto used only galleys, learned the art of sail, greatly increasing their effectiveness. A dashing raid in 1609 by the Spanish admiral Don Luís Fajardo on the pirate fleet of Ward, Verney and their colleagues as they lay in Tunis harbour dealt them a serious blow, but the admiral was prevented from following up his advantage; at the critical moment he received orders from Madrid to participate in the wholesale expulsion of the Moriscos from Spain.

  This–one of the major disasters of all Spanish history–was the brainchild theoretically of King Philip III but in fact of his favourite adviser, the Duke of Lerma. Philip had succeeded his father in 1598 at the age of twenty. Brought up entirely by monks and priests, he knew nothing of the world and was possessed of no great intelligence; he was therefore an easy prey to the Duke, who quickly became his éminence grise. This short-sighted bigot was a nobleman from the former Kingdom of Valencia (it had been incorporated into Castile in 1479) which was at that time very largely peopled by Moriscos: Spaniards whose families had been Muslim for centuries, many of whom–even though theoretically converted to Christianity–had retained their Moorish sympathies. The Moriscos were prosperous and hardworking, and by their own efforts had made the plain of Valencia one of the most fertile areas of the entire country; but their very prosperity had aroused the jealousy of their neighbours, and for half a century or more they had been the object of a campaign of vilification–led, it need hardly be said, by the Inquisition, which maintained (possibly with some reason) th
at they were still infidels at heart. In 1566 Philip II had issued an edict forbidding the Moriscos of Granada their language, costumes and culture; three years later, plagued and persecuted beyond endurance, they had rebelled and given the King many an anxious hour before their rebellion had been ruthlessly put down by Don John of Austria, but this had only increased their unpopularity. Lerma detested them, and had little difficulty in persuading the foolish young King that it was his duty to rid Spain of them once and for all.

  To depopulate what had once been an entire kingdom was a major undertaking, and many of those, ecclesiastical and secular alike, who had been happy to oppress the Moriscos shrank from the idea of wholesale deportation. But Lerma was determined to carry his policy through to the end. On 22 September 1609 the dreadful edict was published; with the exception of six of ‘the oldest and most Christian’ Moriscos of each large village–who were to remain in order to teach others their system of cultivation–every one of them, male and female alike, was to be deported to Barbary, taking with them no money and only such personal property as they could carry. Ever since the spring, great fleets of galleys had been assembling in the Mediterranean ports; now at last the people knew why.

  Over the next six months some 150,000 Valencian Moriscos were driven from the land that they and their ancestors had made fertile, herded down to the waiting ships, carried across the Mediterranean and dumped unceremoniously on the North African shore. And what had begun in Valencia was continued throughout Spain. In Castile and Aragon, in Andalusia and Extremadura, suspected Moriscos–it was often impossible to distinguish the new Christians from the old–were rounded up, dispossessed and expelled. Numbers are impossible to assess, but the total cannot have been much less than half a million and may have been substantially more. Nor, from these regions, were the victims primarily agriculturalists; they included large numbers of artists and craftsmen who had made immense contributions to the Spanish economy. Philip III and his evil counsellor cannot be accused of genocide, only because they did not deliberately decree the mass murder of those whom they expelled; but as an example of what might now be known as ethnic cleansing, it would be over three centuries before Europe was to witness its equal.

  It would have been better for Spain if the Duke of Lerma had never been born; there was however another duke, Lerma’s near-contemporary, to whom his country owes an enormous debt. He was Don Pedro Tellez Giron, third Duke of Osuna, who almost single-handedly transformed the Spanish navy. In 1603 as a young man Osuna had visited England, where he had captivated King James I by the elegance of his Latin conversation, and had settled down to a serious study of the English navy. Returning to Spain in 1607, he was made a member of the Privy Council, which found itself a year or two later discussing the appointment of a new viceroy in Sicily. Osuna spoke up. In the past thirty years, he pointed out, the Barbary corsairs had raided the island more than eighty times, on each occasion with complete impunity. Such a situation could not be allowed to continue. The King had only two courses before him: either he bought the pirates off with protection money or he made Sicily the base for a new, reformed navy that could sweep them from the seas. Philip, impressed, duly awarded him the viceroyship, and Osuna set to work.

  Arriving on the island in 1611, he found a total of thirty-four galleys–twelve from Naples, ten from Genoa, seven Sicilian and five Maltese–all under the uninspired command of the Marquis of Santa Cruz, son of the luckless commander of the Great Armada. His first action was to commission six more to sail under his own personal flag, vessels which he could use as he liked, independently of the Admiral; he then turned his attention to his crews, increasing their pay, improving their diet and living conditions, giving them new drill and new discipline so that they soon stood out in impressive contrast to their fellows. A lightning raid on Tunis was a complete success, with ten corsair ships burned at their moorings and several more captured. This was only the beginning; the next few years saw a succession of similar victories, and the resulting exhileration spread to the whole fleet. But Osuna was not yet satisfied. That fleet was still exclusively composed of oared galleys; and the future, as he well knew, lay with sail. He now laid down two galleons of his own, and eventually persuaded his government to send him twenty more under Prince Philibert of Savoy–a fleet which would, under a competent commander, have been enough to clear the whole sea of corsairs. Alas, Philibert proved to be a commander in the Doria mould, incapable of decisive action and tending always to return to harbour a few days after he had left, without having fired a shot. Even with his huge fleet he failed utterly to block the harbour of Navarino, in which a number of corsair ships had taken refuge; all were allowed to escape.

  As always, Osuna knew exactly what he needed. In the Low Countries he had seen the little Dutch sailing ships lying just outside the Spanish ports and effectively sealing them off; but the government in Madrid refused all his requests. At least, however, he had his own two galleons, one of twenty guns and the other of forty-six; these he sent south to Egyptian waters, where they almost immediately captured a squadron of ten Turkish transports bound for Constantinople. It was a remarkable achievement, which should have been applauded in Madrid, but the Spanish government remained as unsympathetic as ever, merely pointing out that Osuna had infringed a century-old regulation forbidding the fitting out of sailing ships–as opposed to galleys–for privateering. In vain he pointed out that naval warfare was no longer what it had been a hundred years before; they continued to ignore him.

  Until 1615. Then, suddenly, the whole situation changed: Osuna was appointed viceroy in Naples. Here he had far more independence–and far more money to spend–than he had had in Sicily, and he immediately ordered five new galleons–the Five Wounds, he called them–together with five other, lighter vessels and a pinnace. All but the last were heavily armed, more heavily indeed than any that the English navy could boast, but were otherwise organised entirely on English lines. He also put an end to the principle of dual captaincy–for long the bane of the Spanish armed forces–whereby all the soldiers in a given expedition were responsible to one commander and all the sailors to another. Henceforth a single officer would have command of the whole ship. In July 1616 his junior admiral Francisco de Ribera, with a squadron of six galleons, fought a a tremendous battle with a Turkish fleet of forty-five galleys. It lasted three full days, but when dawn broke on the fourth, there was no longer any sign of the enemy; the Turks had admitted defeat and, with what was left of their shattered ships, had retired to safer waters.

  Here, by any standards, was a memorable victory, but it carried a lesson. It had been won by a fleet constructed and commanded not on Spanish but on English lines. That fleet had proved its superiority over the Turks. Could it not now be employed against Spain’s most formidable enemy on the Italian peninsula, the Republic of Venice?

  The fact that the Duke of Osuna reasoned thus should come as no surprise. He may well have been the architect of Spain’s remodelled navy, but he was also a patriot, dedicated to the destruction of her enemies, and it was in large measure thanks to him that, as the seventeenth century got under way, the Spanish shadow began once again to loom ever more dangerously over the central Mediterranean. For a century or more, Spanish ambitions had been held in check by France, but the assassination of Henry IV in 1610, which left the throne to his nine-year-old son Louis XIII and the regency to his determinedly pro-Spanish widow Marie de’ Medici, had ensured that the Most Catholic King would encounter no further opposition from that quarter. Spain was still supreme in Milan and Naples; in Florence Marie’s cousin, the Grand Duke Cosimo II, was largely under Spanish control; so too, thanks to the influence of the Jesuits and the Spanish cardinals, was the Pope in Rome. Only two Italian states were determined to resist the growing threat. One was the Duchy of Savoy, where Duke Charles Emmanuel II had amassed an army of over 20,000 and was perfectly ready to take on any force that the Spanish governor of Milan might send against him. The other was Venice.
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br />   While Milan made trouble for Savoy (and vice versa), Venice was facing even greater difficulties with the other, eastern arm of the Spanish pincers: the Habsburg Archduke Ferdinand of Austria. The underlying cause was the piratical Uskoks, a heterogeneous but exceedingly troublesome community largely–but by no means entirely–composed of Christian fugitives from the Turkish advance, who had settled at Segna (now Senj) and elsewhere along the Dalmatian coast and had given themselves over to the traditional occupation of so many of its inhabitants. The problem was hardly new; piracy based on the innumerable islands and hidden creeks along the eastern shores of the Adriatic had constituted a threat to Venetian commerce for almost as long as the Republic itself had existed. With the Uskoks, however, there was an additional complication: their activities called down the wrath of the Turks, who after every Uskok attack on their own shipping would make a formal complaint to Venice, pointing out that as the power who claimed dominion over the Adriatic it was her duty to keep it efficiently policed. Since Dalmatia was now the territory of the Empire and the offenders technically imperial subjects, Venice in her turn would make ever more pressing representations to Ferdinand for effective measures to be taken against them; but despite repeated promises the Archduke did nothing, and the Uskoks remained a perennial anxiety.

  Their culminating atrocity had occurred in 1613, with the beheading of a Venetian admiral, Cristoforo Venier. Still Ferdinand refused to lift a finger; indeed, as Venetian–imperial relations deteriorated he began to view the Uskoks with a steadily more sympathetic eye and, while feigning a few gentle remonstrations, gave them secret encouragement in every way he could. Finally Venice–not for the first time–took the law into her own hands and launched a punitive expedition. Ferdinand protested in his turn; and the resulting war, while it remained on a fairly desultory level, grumbled on until the autumn of 1617 when Venice, Savoy and the Empire patched up an uneasy peace, after which the fate of the Uskoks could be settled once and for all. Their harbours and fortresses were destroyed, their ships were burned, and all those who escaped a more disagreeable fate were transported with their families to the Croatian interior where, gradually over the years, they intermarried with the local populations and lost their separate identity.