Empires of the Sea

by Crowley, Roger

  Contents

  TITLE PAGE

  DEDICATION

  EPIGRAPH

  PROLOGUE: PTOLEMY’S MAP

  MAP: THE MEDITERRANEAN C. 1560

  MAP: THE SIEGE OF MALTA

  MAP: THE BATTLE OF LEPANTO

  Part One: CAESARS: THE CONTEST FOR THE SEA

  CHAPTER 1: The Sultan Pays a Visit

  CHAPTER 2: A Supplication

  CHAPTER 3: The King of Evil

  CHAPTER 4: The Voyage to Tunis

  CHAPTER 5: Doria and Barbarossa

  CHAPTER 6: The Turkish Sea

  Part Two: EPICENTER: THE BATTLE FOR MALTA

  CHAPTER 7: Nest of Vipers

  CHAPTER 8: Invasion Fleet

  CHAPTER 9: The Post of Death

  CHAPTER 10: The Ravelin of Europe

  CHAPTER 11: The Last Swimmers

  CHAPTER 12: Payback

  CHAPTER 13: Trench Wars

  CHAPTER 14: “Malta Yok”

  Part Three: ENDGAME: HURTLING TO LEPANTO

  CHAPTER 15: The Pope’s Dream

  CHAPTER 16: A Head in a Dish

  CHAPTER 17: Famagusta

  CHAPTER 18: Christ’s General

  CHAPTER 19: Snakes to a Charm

  CHAPTER 20: “Let’s Fight”

  CHAPTER 21: Sea of Fire

  CHAPTER 22: Other Oceans

  Epilogue: Traces

  AUTHOR’S NOTE AND

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  SOURCE NOTES

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ALSO BY ROGER CROWLEY

  COPYRIGHT

  To George,

  who also fought in this sea, and who took us there

  The inhabitants of the Maghreb have it on the authority of the book of predictions that the Muslims will make a successful attack against the Christians and conquer the lands of the European Christians beyond the sea. This, it is said, will take place by sea.

  —IBN KHALDUN, FOURTEENTH-CENTURY ARAB HISTORIAN

  PROLOGUE

  Ptolemy’s Map

  LONG BEFORE THE OFFICE BLOCKS across the Golden Horn, before even the mosques, there was the church. The dome of Saint Sophia stood alone against the skyline for a thousand years. If you had made your way up onto its roof anytime in the Middle Ages, you would have been afforded an unimpeded view of “the city garlanded by water.” From here it is quite clear why Constantinople once ruled the world.

  On the afternoon of May 29, 1453, Mehmet II, sultan of the Ottoman Empire, made this ascent. It was the end of a momentous day. His army had just taken the city by storm in fulfillment of Islamic prophecy and destroyed the last vestiges of the Christian empire of Byzantium. Mehmet climbed, in the words of the Ottoman chronicler, “as the spirit of God ascending to the fourth sphere of heaven.”

  The sultan gazed upon a scene of melancholy devastation. Constantinople had been wrecked and thoroughly looted, “despoiled and blackened as if by fire.” The city’s army had been routed, the churches ransacked; its last emperor had perished in the massacre. Long lines of men, women, and children were being roped together and herded off. Flags fluttered from empty buildings, a sign to looters that the spoils had already gone. Above the pitiful wailing of the captives, the call to prayer rose in the spring air. It signaled the emphatic end of one imperial dynasty, the legitimization of another by right of conquest. The Ottoman Turks, a nomadic, tribal people from the heart of Asia, had now consolidated the presence of Islam on the European shore in the city they called Istanbul. Its capture confirmed Mehmet both as heir to Byzantium and as the undisputed leader of holy war.

  From his vantage point the sultan could contemplate the past and future of the Turkish people. To the south, beyond the Bosphorus straits, lay Anatolia, Asia Minor, the road up which the Turks had made their long migration; to the north, Europe, the object of their territorial ambitions. But it was the prospect to the west that was to prove most challenging to the Ottomans. In the afternoon sun, the Sea of Marmara glittered like beaten brass; beyond lay the wide expanse of the Mediterranean, the place the Turks called the White Sea. With the conquest of Byzantium, Mehmet was not just inheriting a landmass; he was also heir to a maritime empire.

  THE EVENTS OF 1453 were part of a larger ebb and flow in the struggle between Islam and Christianity. Between the eleventh and the fifteenth centuries, Christendom, on the impetus of the Crusades, had dominated the Mediterranean. It had created a patchwork of small states on the shores of Greece and the islands of the Aegean, which linked the enterprise of crusading to the Latin West. The direction of conquest had begun to reverse when the Crusaders lost their last major foothold on the shores of Palestine in 1291 at the fall of Acre. Now Islam was poised to strike back.

  No one since the Romans had possessed sufficient resources to organize this sea, but Mehmet conceived himself as the inheritor of the Roman emperors. His ambitions were limitless. He was determined to create “one empire, one faith and one sovereignty in the world,” and he styled himself the “sovereign of two seas”—the White and the Black. This was alien territory for the Ottomans. The sea is not solid ground. There are no natural frontiers, nowhere for nomads to pitch camp. It is uninhabitable. It remembers nothing: Islam had established footholds in the Mediterranean before and then lost them. But Mehmet had already set down a clear declaration of intent: he brought a large, if inexperienced, fleet to the siege of Constantinople, and the Ottomans were quick learners.

  In the years after the conquest, Mehmet commissioned a copy of a map of Europe by the ancient geographer Ptolemy, translated for him into Arabic by Greeks. Here he studied the configuration of the sea in predatory detail. He ran his finger over Venice, Rome, Naples, Sicily, Marseilles, and Barcelona; he traced the Gates of Gibraltar; even faraway Britain fell under his gaze. The translators had prudently ensured that nowhere was marked as prominently as Istanbul, and Mehmet was as yet unaware that the Catholic kings in Spain were in the process of constructing a matching set of imperial ambitions at the map’s western edge. Madrid and Istanbul, like giant mirrors reflecting the same sun, were initially too far apart to be mutually visible. Soon hostility would focus the light. Even Ptolemy’s map, with its unfamiliar misshapen peninsulas and distorted islands, could not conceal an essential fact about the Mediterranean: it is really two seas, pinched at the middle by the narrow straits between Tunis and Sicily, with Malta sitting midstream, an awkward dot. The Ottomans would quickly dominate the eastern seas, the Hapsburgs of Spain the western. In time both would converge on the dot.

  NOWADAYS YOU CAN FLY the length of the Mediterranean, from southern Spain to the shores of Lebanon, in three hours. From the air it is a peaceful prospect; the orderly procession of ships moves tamely over the glittering surface. The thousands of miles of crenellated coast on the northern shore reveal holiday villages, yacht harbors, and smart resorts, as well as the great ports and industrial complexes that provide the economic muscle of Southern Europe. Every vessel in this calm lagoon can be tracked from space. Ships travel at will, immune to the storms that wrecked Odysseus and Saint Paul. To our ever-shrinking world the place the Romans called the center of the world seems tiny.

  Five hundred years ago people experienced the sea quite differently. Its shores were coasts of hunger, stripped early of trees, then soil, by men and goats. By the fourteenth century, Crete was able to furnish Dante with an image of ecological ruin. “In mid-sea sits a waste land,” he wrote, “which once was happy with water and leaves. Now it is a desert.” The sea is also barren. The Mediterranean has been formed by dramatic geological collapse, so that the entrancing transparent waters at its edge plunge away sharply into deep submarine gulfs. There are no continental platforms to rival the rich fishing grounds o
f Newfoundland or the North Sea. To those living on the shore, the million square miles of water, broken up into a dozen separate zones, each with its own particular winds and coastal irregularities and scattered islands, were intractable, vast, and dangerous—so big that the two halves of the Mediterranean were different worlds. A sailing ship might take two months to make the voyage from Marseilles to Crete in good weather, in bad six. Boats were surprisingly unseaworthy, storms sudden, pirates numerous, so that sailors generally preferred to creep around the sea’s coastal margins rather than cross open water. Peril attended the voyage: no sane person would step up the gangplank without committing his soul to God. The Mediterranean was a sea of troubles. And after 1453 it became the epicenter of a world war.

  On this terrain was played out one of the fiercest and most chaotic contests in European history: the struggle between Islam and Christianity for the center of the world. It was a drawn-out affair. Battle rolled blindly across the water for well over a century; the opening skirmishes alone, in which the Ottomans eclipsed Venice, lasted fifty years. The struggle assumed many forms: little wars of economic attrition, pirate raids in the name of faith, attacks on coastal forts and harbors, sieges of the great island bastions, and, rarest of all, a handful of epic sea battles. The struggle sucked in all the nations and special-interest groups that bordered Mediterranean waters: Turks, Greeks, North Africans, Spaniards, Italians, and Frenchmen; the peoples of the Adriatic Sea and the Dalmatian coast; merchants, imperialists, pirates, and holy warriors. All fought in shifting alliances to protect religion, trade, or empire. None could fly a neutral flag for long, though the Venetians tried hard.

  The landlocked arena provided limitless possibilities for confrontation. North to south it is surprisingly narrow; in many places only a small strip of water separates alien peoples. Raiders could appear over the horizon at a moment’s notice, and vanish again at will. Not since the lightning strikes of the Mongols had Europe experienced so abruptly the sudden terror of enemies. The Mediterranean became a biosphere of chaotic violence where Islam and Christianity clashed with unmatched ferocity. The battlegrounds were water, islands, and shores, where events were conditioned by wind and weather, the key weapon the oared galley.

  FOR CHRISTENDOM, THE OTTOMANS, whose empire was multiethnic, were always simply the Turks, “cruellest enemy of Christ’s name.” Western Europe saw the contest as the source of ultimate war, and experienced it as trauma, a psychic struggle against the powers of darkness. Within the Vatican, they knew about Ptolemy’s map. They imagined it as the template for Ottoman conquest and pictured the scene in the Topkapi Palace, high above the Bosphorus, in excruciating detail. The generic figure of the sultan, the Grand Turk, turbaned and caftanned, hook-nosed and genetically cruel, sits within the barbaric splendor of his tiled pavilion, studying the sea-lanes to the west. He thinks of nothing but the destruction of Christendom. To Pope Leo X in 1517, the menace of the Turk was as close as breathing. “He has daily in his hand a description and a painted map of the shores of Italy,” he wrote with a shudder. “He pays attention to nothing but collecting artillery, building ships, and surveying all these seas and the islands of Europe.” For the Ottomans and their North African allies it was payback time for the Crusades, the opportunity to reverse the flow of world conquest and control of trade.

  This contest would be fought over a huge front, often far beyond the sea. Europe battled their enemy in the Balkans, on the plains of Hungary, in the Red Sea, at the gates of Vienna, but eventually, in the sixteenth century, the concentrated resources of the protagonists would converge on the center of the map. It would be a sixty-year struggle, directed by Mehmet’s great-grandson Suleiman. War broke out in earnest in 1521 and reached its climax between 1565 and 1571, six years of unparalleled bloodshed that saw the two heavyweights of the age—the Ottoman Turks and the Hapsburgs of Spain—hold up the battle standards of their faiths and fight to the death. The outcome would shape the boundaries of the Muslim and Christian worlds and condition the future direction of empires.

  It began, if anywhere, with a letter.

  The Siege of Malta:

  MAY TO SEPTEMBER 1565

  The Battle of Lepanto:

  OCTOBER 7, 1571

  CHAPTER 1

  The Sultan Pays a Visit

  1521–1523

  10 September 1521, from Belgrade

  FIRST THE DRUMROLL of imperial titles. Then the threat:

  Suleiman the sultan, by the grace of God, king of kings, sovereign of sovereigns, most high emperor of Byzantium and Trebizond, very powerful king of Persia, of Arabia, of Syria, and of Egypt, supreme lord of Europe, and of Asia, prince of Mecca and Aleppo, lord of Jerusalem, and ruler of the universal sea, to Philip de L’Isle Adam, Grand Master of the island of Rhodes, greetings.

  I congratulate you upon your new dignity, and upon your arrival within your territories. I trust that you will rule there prosperously, and with even more glory than your predecessors. I also mean to cultivate your favour. Rejoice then with me, as a very dear friend, that following in the footsteps of my father, who conquered Persia, Jerusalem, Arabia and Egypt, I have captured that most powerful of fortresses, Belgrade, during the late Autumn. After which, having offered battle to the Infidel, which they had not the courage to accept, I took many other beautiful and well-fortified cities, and destroyed most of their inhabitants either by sword or fire, the remainder being reduced to slavery. Now after sending my numerous and victorious army into their winter quarters, I shall myself return in triumph to my court at Constantinople.

  To those who could read between the lines this was not an expression of friendship. It was a declaration of war. Suleiman, great-grandson of Mehmet the Conqueror, had just inherited the Ottoman throne. According to custom and tradition, he was obliged to mark his accession with victories; each new sultan had to legitimize his position as “Conqueror of the Lands of the Orient and the Occident” by adding fresh territories to the world empire. He could then distribute booty, secure the loyalty of the army, and indulge in the ritual forms of propaganda. Victory letters—assertions of imperial power—were sent out to impress the Muslim world and intimidate the Christian one, and the new sultan could then start building his mosque.

  An accession also had to be accompanied by death. The sultan was required by law to kill all his brothers “in the interest of the world order,” to scotch the possibility of civil war. A mournful line of children’s coffins would be carried out of the palace harem to the muted sobbing of women, while stranglers with bowstrings were dispatched to distant provinces to hunt down older siblings.

  In Suleiman’s case there were no such deaths. He was the sole male heir. It is likely that his father, Selim, had executed all his other sons six years earlier to snuff out preemptive coups. The twenty-six-year-old was uniquely blessed in his inheritance. He acquired a powerful, unified empire possessed of unrivaled resources. To pious Muslims, Suleiman was the harbinger of good fortune. His name—Solomon—chosen by opening the Koran at random, presaged a ruler dedicated to wisdom and justice. In an age of portents, all the circumstances of Suleiman’s accession were significant. He was the tenth sultan, born in the tenth year of the tenth century of the Muslim era. Ten was the cipher of perfection: the number of the parts of the Koran, the number of disciples of the Prophet, the commandments in the Pentateuch, and the astrological heavens of Islam. And Suleiman stepped onto the world stage at a moment of imperial destiny.

  His reign would overlap and compete with the claims of a jostling crowd of rival monarchs: the Hapsburgs, Charles V and Philip II of Spain; the French Valois kings, Francis I and his son Henry II; in England the Tudors, Henry VIII and Elizabeth I; in Muscovy, Ivan the Terrible; in Iran, Shah Ismail; in India, the Mogul emperor Akbar. None would have a keener sense of imperial mission or make for themselves more lofty claims.

  From the start Suleiman made a powerful and calculated impression on the foreign ambassadors admitted to his court. “The sultan
is tall and slender but tough, with a thin and wiry face,” wrote the Venetian Bartolomeo Contarini. “Rumour has it that Suleiman is aptly named…is knowledgeable and shows good judgement.” His countenance was sober, his gaze steady, his caftans simple but magnificent. His height and physical presence were enhanced by the size of the enormous spherical turban pulled low over his forehead, and by his pale face. He meant to impress with the splendor of his person and his court. Soon he would lay claim to the title of Caesar and envisage control of the Mediterranean.

  He had two immediate victories in mind. Keenly aware of the achievements of his forebears, Suleiman had dreamed, since boyhood, of completing the twin conquests that had eluded his great-grandfather Mehmet. The first was the storming of the fortress of Belgrade, the gateway to Hungary. Within ten months of his accession, the sultan was encamped before the city walls; by August 1521 he was saying prayers in its Christian cathedral. The second conquest was intended to advance his claim to be “Padishah of the White Sea.” It was to be the capture of Rhodes.