Empires of the Sea

by Crowley, Roger

  In the heyday of Venetian sea power in the fifteenth century, galleys had been rowed by volunteers; by the sixteenth, the muscle power was generally conscripted. The Ottoman navy relied heavily on an annual levy of men from the provinces of Anatolia and Europe, and everyone employed chained labor—captured slaves, convicts, and, in the Christian ships, paupers so destitute they sold themselves to the galley captains. It was these wretches, chained three or four to a foot-wide bench, who made sea wars possible. Their sole function was to work themselves to death. Shackled hand and foot, excreting where they sat, fed on meagre quantities of black biscuits, and so thirsty they were sometimes driven to drink seawater, galley slaves led lives bitter and short. The men, naked apart from a pair of linen breeches, were flayed raw by the sun; sleep deprivation on the narrow bench propelled them toward lunacy; the stroke keeper’s drum and the overseer’s lash—a tarred rope or a dried bull’s penis—whipped them beyond the point of exhaustion during long stretches of intensive effort when a ship was trying to capture or escape another vessel. The sight of a galley crew at full stretch was as brutal as any a man could wish to be spared. “That least tolerable and most to be dreaded employment of a man deprived of liberty,” wrote the eighteenth-century English historian Joseph Morgan, conjuring up the vision of “ranks and files of half-naked, half-starved, half-tanned, meagre wretches, chained to a plank, from whence they remove not for months at a time…urged on, even beyond human strength, with cruel and repeated blows, on the bare flesh, to an incessant continuation of the most violent of all exercises.” “God preserve you from the galleys of Tripoli,” was a customary vale-diction to men putting to sea from a Christian port.

  Men at the rowing benches

  Disease could decimate a fleet in weeks. The galley was an amoebic death trap, a swilling sewer whose stench was so foul you could smell it two miles off—it was customary to sink the hulls at periodic intervals to cleanse them of shit and rats—but if the crew survived to enter a battle, the chained and unprotected rowers could only sit and wait to be killed by men of their own country and creed. The nominally free men who made up the bulk of the Ottoman rowing force fared little better. Levied by the sultan in large numbers from the empire’s inland provinces, many had never seen the sea before. Inexperienced and inefficient as oarsmen, they succumbed in large numbers to the terrible conditions.

  One way or another the oared galley consumed men like fuel. Each dying wretch dumped overboard had to be replaced—and there were never enough. Official Spanish and Italian memoranda report monotonously on the shortage of fodder for the benches, so that the supply of ships often outstripped the resources to power them, as in the case of a sudden disaster that overcame the galleys of the Knights of Saint John in 1555.

  On the night of October 22, their four vessels were riding safely at anchor in their secure harbor in Malta. The commander of the galleys, Romegas—the Order’s most experienced naval captain—was asleep at the rear of his ship when a freak whirlwind whipped across the sea, snapped the ships’ masts, and flipped the galleys over. When dawn broke, all four galleys were floating upside down on the gray water. Rescuers put out in boats to hunt for signs of life and inspect the damage; when they heard a dull tapping coming from one of the ships, they smashed a hole in the hull and peered downward into the dark. Out promptly hopped the ship’s monkey, followed by Romegas, who had spent the night up to his shoulders in water in an air pocket. It was only when the vessels were righted with the help of buoyant air barrels that the full horror of the event became clear; the corpses of three hundred drowned Muslim slaves still chained to the benches floated in the water like ghosts. Repair and replacement of the vessels was a manageable problem; it was securing new crews that was the real difficulty. The pope threw open the episcopal prison in Naples to supply some of the number; the knights then had to take some of their ships to snatch more slaves to fill the empty spaces. It was the same for both sides: much of the raiding was undertaken solely to make such raids possible. The violence was self-perpetuating. The galleys created their own need for war.

  IT WAS CLEAR during the 1550s that inch by inch Charles was losing this contest. Plagued by trouble with Protestants in Germany and the Low Countries, interminable war with France, spiraling debts that even the bullion fleets from the Americas were now unable to control, the emperor was too busy sustaining the burden of his empire to attend coherently to the sea. Intermittent truce with Suleiman made little difference to the situation; when the Ottoman imperial fleet did not sail, the corsairs of the Maghreb still did. The plunder of the coasts of Italy, Sicily, the Balearic Islands, and Spain continued almost unchecked. Ruinous economic and demographic decline particularly affected Southern Italy. Sometimes the wholesale evacuation of a patch of coast was ordered by the local governor to save the population from an Ottoman raid, as on the Adriatic coast in 1566. Five hundred square miles of countryside were devastated anyway. Sea trade between Spain and Italy was intermittently on the brink of paralysis; the whole structure of Spain’s Mediterranean empire seemed threatened by this merciless raiding. “Turgut,” a French bishop wrote in 1561, “has held the kingdom of Naples in such a noose…[that the galleys] of Malta, of Sicily, and other neighbouring ports are so harassed and confined by Turgut that not one of them can pass from one place to another.” Rumors again spread across the western sea that these attacks were the prelude to a full-scale invasion of Italy. In Rome successive popes trembled and pleaded for concerted action. In the Maghreb, Spanish forts continued to fall one by one. Tripoli, held for Charles by the Knights of Saint John, went in 1551; henceforward it would mimic Algiers as a gold rush town for Islamic corsairs. Bugia went in 1555. Andrea Doria, now in his eighties, waged counterstrikes of varying effectiveness; he bottled up Turgut in the lagoon at Djerba, but the corsair slipped effortlessly through his fingers by dragging his ships overland. The following year, Turgut reappeared with Suleiman’s imperial fleet and attacked Malta. Subsequent Spanish expeditions to the African shore met with disaster and death.

  By the early 1550s Charles himself was a broken man, sunk under the weight of empire. His dutiful attempts to micromanage the Christian world in person had ended in nervous breakdown. Crippled by gout, his finances hocked to German bankers, he obsessively sought order in a miniaturized, private world: “He is seen for days on end in a dark humour,” reported one eyewitness, “one hand paralyzed, one leg tucked under him, refusing to give audiences and spending his time taking clocks and watches apart and putting them together again.” In 1556 Charles relinquished the Spanish crown to his son Philip and retired to a monastery to devote his soul to God. As well as religious books and the personal journals of his life, he took with him his maps of the world and the works of Julius Caesar. The final maritime disaster of his reign occurred in the summer of 1558: a Spanish expedition was annihilated in the Maghreb. When the news filtered back to Spain, Charles was on his deathbed. No one had the heart to tell him.

  By this time Suleiman had already claimed to his own satisfaction to have won the contest with his great rival. In 1547 he had signed a truce with Charles and his brother Ferdinand; Ferdinand agreed to pay an annual sum for his Hungarian territories, which in Suleiman’s eyes reduced him to the status of a vassal, while the document referred to Charles only as “king of Spain.” Ferdinand and Charles signed in person. Suleiman, too elevated to treat with the infidel himself, had his imperial cipher appended, as usual, by an official. For the sultan, the titles, terms, and manner of the agreement assumed huge symbolic importance. Henceforward he considered himself to be “Emperor of the Romans”—Caesar.

  A defining moment of triumph in the White Sea followed hard on the heels of Charles’s death. When Philip II inherited the crown of Spain, the worsening situation on the shores of his domain made serious attention to the Mediterranean problem a pressing issue: North African corsairs were now venturing into the Atlantic and disrupting the galleon traffic with the Indies. A further break in the in
terminable fighting with France in 1559 seemed to offer the decisive moment to tackle the Maghreb again.

  A plan was developed to retake the strategic port of Tripoli and regain control of the axis of the sea. The preparations, like all Spanish naval ventures, were laborious and somehow inhibited by Philip. The new king was not like his father: where Charles had been a risk taker, Philip was cautious—destined to go down in history as the Prudent King; where Charles led his own armies, Philip fought by proxy, attempting to control his commanders by a string of orders issued distantly from the royal palace in Madrid. The choice of commander was controversial. Even the apparently indestructible Andrea Doria at ninety-three was finally too old to take part; the baton passed to his great-nephew Gian’Andrea, an inexperienced twenty-one-year-old. The results were disastrous.

  The fleet did not sail until December of 1559, with fifty galleys and six thousand soldiers. It dithered about its objective and finally settled on Turgut’s pirate lair at Djerba. The island was easily overrun in the spring of 1560 and a fort constructed and garrisoned. But the corsairs had hurried word to Istanbul, and an Ottoman fleet of eighty-six galleys under their commander Piyale Pasha hastened to sail. They made the journey to Djerba in a record twenty days. Gian’Andrea’s fleet was caught in total surprise when the Ottoman sails loomed on the horizon. There was an indecent haste to embark, then no attempt to form a line of battle. Piyale just picked off the ships one by one. Gian’Andrea slipped away from the scene with his privately owned galleys and vague promises of relief for the stricken fort. None came; Philip acted with an ambivalence that would soon become customary: He hastened the preparations for the relief fleet, then forbade it from sailing, fearing at the last minute to risk more ships. He abandoned the men to their fate. Besieged, then cut off from a water source, the doomed fort fell. All five thousand men inside were either killed in the fighting or put to death; only the aristocratic commanders were spared. They were sent as trophies with the captured galleys to Suleiman. On Djerba the Muslims built a pyramid out of the bones of the dead; the “fortress of skulls” was still there in the nineteenth century.

  The catastrophe for Spain was far more serious than the simple tally of lost ships and men; it was not the thirty galleys, the five thousand soldiers, and the six thousand four hundred oarsmen—difficult though they would be to replace—that were truly significant. It was the six hundred experienced mariners, the two thousand naval arquebusiers, the seasoned commanders—a whole generation of men skilled in galley warfare whose expertise, acquired with years of practical experience, could not be replaced with any quantity of Inca gold. The debacle at Djerba left Spain and Italy more exposed than ever.

  On October 1, 1560, Piyale Pasha’s victorious fleet rounded Seraglio Point below the sultan’s palace and pulled into the Golden Horn to a tumultuous welcome. The Flemish diplomat Busbecq was there to witness a spectacle “as pleasing to Turkish eyes as it was grievous and lamentable to Christians.” Suleiman went to the tiled kiosk at the end of the palace gardens, “in order that he might see at closer range the armada as it entered and the Christian commanders who were on display.” The procession of ships had been arranged to demonstrate the supremacy of Ottoman sea power. The Ottoman galleys were vividly painted in red and green; the captured Christian ones had been stripped of masts, rigging, and oars “so that they might appear small, shapeless, and contemptible when compared with the Turkish galleys.” On the poop of Piyale’s flagship, resplendent with banners and noise, the Christian commanders were paraded as an object lesson in humiliation.

  Ottoman naval power was at its apogee. If ever there was a moment when one side might be said to control the uncontrollable sea, it was now. Yet those who closely observed the sultan on that early autumn day could see no hint of joy or triumph in his face. His manner was grave, severe, implacable.

  In Genoa, Andrea Doria, four days short of his ninety-fourth birthday, turned his face to the wall and died.

  CHAPTER 7

  Nest of Vipers

  1560–1565

  NEWS OF THE DJERBA DEFEAT passed along the Christian shore with a convulsive shudder. It was clear that the situation in the central Mediterranean was now critical. On July 9, 1560, the viceroy of Sicily, who had planned—and survived—the ill-fated venture, wrote starkly to Philip: “We must draw strength from our weaknesses; let Your Majesty sell us all, and myself first, if only he can become lord of the seas. Only thus will he have peace and tranquility and will his subjects be defended, but if he does not, then all will go ill with us.”

  Invasion fears stalked Spain and Italy; people braced themselves for the new sailing season. There seemed now to be no counterforce capable of resisting Ottoman maritime aggression: it was only a matter of time before Suleiman struck again and in force. The Mediterranean became a sea of rumors: every spring confidential dispatches from Istanbul suggested the imminent departure of a substantial fleet, yet nothing happened. Even to close watchers of the Turkish scene, the explanation was obscure. Suleiman had other priorities and problems. There was rumbling civil war between his sons, trouble with Persia, power struggles among his viziers, plague, and food shortages. An atmosphere of phony war hung over the sea. Every year the coastal defenses of Philip’s realms were prepared, then stood down; and in the meantime Philip, starkly aware of Spain’s vulnerability at sea, set about building galleys. The French watched him closely: “for two months now,” read a report to the French king in 1561, “the said King of Spain has had the shipyards of Barcelona working diligently to finish several galleys and other seagoing vessels.” Philip was playing catch-up against the inevitable moment.

  The storm finally broke over the central Mediterranean in 1564. That summer the Knights of Saint John triggered a series of events whose reverberations were felt within the tiled kiosks of Suleiman’s palace—and unwittingly unleashed a decisive contest for the heart of the sea.

  AFTER THEIR ARRIVAL ON MALTA in 1530, the galleys of the Order set sail almost every year to conduct their personal maritime crusade, sweeping the seas for Islamic plunder and slaves in the name of religion. When Jean Parisot de La Valette was elected grand master of the Order in 1557, this activity intensified. La Valette had witnessed the siege of Rhodes as a young knight and pursued sea warfare with zeal. The line between crusading and lucrative piracy was wafer-thin; for the Venetians, the knights were merely “corsairs parading crosses,” indistinguishable from their Muslim counterparts, and their activities provoked endless trouble. Foremost among these corsairs was Romegas, who had survived the tornado of 1555. His nervous system had been permanently damaged by the long hours trapped in the water under the hull—it was said that ever after, his hands shook so much that he could not drink from a glass without spilling the contents—but Romegas maintained a fearsome reputation for seamanship, courage, and violence. Muslim mothers invoked him as a bogeyman to frighten their children to bed; to demoralized Christians he was a source of hope. Rumors of his sudden appearances on the coasts of Greece brought the local populace thronging to the beach with gifts of fruit and poultry.

  His raids were comparatively small-scale affairs. The knights could put to sea only a miniature fleet of five heavily armed galleys, but their reach stretched as far as the shores of Palestine, and their impact could be dramatic. In the summer of 1564, Romegas’s activities suddenly became very dramatic indeed.

  On June 4, cruising off the west coast of Greece with the Order’s squadron, Romegas came upon a huge galleon accompanied by a posse of Ottoman galleys. Sensing a rich prize, the knights advanced into battle and captured the ship after a fierce fight. It proved to be a valuable trophy; the ship was a business venture of the chief eunuch, an important personage at the sultan’s court, laden with eighty thousand ducats worth of oriental merchandise bound for Venice. The galleon was sailed back to Malta, where it was soon to become a potent symbol of injured Ottoman pride. Meanwhile Romegas set out again with orders from La Valette to wreak havoc on the sultan�
�s shipping. He chose his targets unerringly. Off the coast of Anatolia, he used his cannon to hole a large armed merchantman and captured its high-ranking passengers as they abandoned ship. He scooped up the governor of Cairo and the 107-year-old former nurse of Suleiman’s daughter Mihrimah, returning from the Mecca pilgrimage. Three days later he took the governor of Alexandria, on his way to Istanbul on the sultan’s orders. These notables were worth considerable ransom. As Romegas sailed back to Malta with his galley laden with three hundred extra captives, word of each successive outrage filtered back to Istanbul. Howls of indignation and rage from Mihrimah and the court echoed in Suleiman’s ears. The abduction of the old lady, dearly loved by his daughter and destined to die on Malta, was particularly lamented. There were loud demands; insults to the Lord of Two Seas and the Protector of the Faithful could not go unpunished.

  Galley of the Knights of Saint John

  The Suleiman who listened to these tears and lamentations was very different from the energetic young sultan whose splendid array and chivalrous actions had so impressed Christian hostages at Rhodes in 1522. He was seventy years old and had ruled the greatest empire on earth for almost half a century. He had led a dozen extensive campaigns to east and west against his great imperial rivals and had outlived all except Ivan the Terrible. Suleiman was the most feared potentate in the whole arena of empires. He had been almost as ruthless as his great-grandfather Mehmet the Conqueror, as magnificent in his shows of splendor as Charles V, and like his great rival he had been used up in the process.

  European prints of the elderly sultan show a haggard figure, haunted and hollow-eyed. He had much to be sorrowful for. In addition to the ceaseless wars against the infidels to the west and his Muslim rival, the shah of Persia, to the east, he had struggled against the internal problems of the Ottoman system: the murmurings of his janissary troops, the corruption and ambition of his ministers, civil wars by his sons, revolts by dissident ethnic groups, inflation, outbreaks of religious heresy, plague, and famine. His personal life had been marked by acts of weakness, bad judgment, and tragedy. Unique among sultans, he had married for love his favorite slave girl, Roxelana, renamed Hurrem, but the cruel logic of Ottoman succession, whereby only one son could survive and rule, had torn his family apart. There had been heartbreaking moments. He had personally witnessed the strangulation of his favorite son, Mustapha, for supposedly plotting against him. Only later did he come to see that the accusations were false. Another son, Beyazit, had been put to death with all his young children. By the 1560s only the least capable of his sons, Selim, survived to succeed him. Where the early years had seen extravagant shows of worldly splendor in competition with the potentates of Europe, Suleiman’s reign became marked by increasing piety and sobriety, as he sought to emphasize his position as guardian of the caliphate and leader of Orthodox Islam. An austere gloom fell on the court. Hurrem died and Suleiman retreated from the world. He was rarely seen in public and watched meetings of the divan—the council of state—silently from behind a grille. He drank only water and ate off clay plates. He smashed his musical instruments, forbade the sale of alcohol, and gave his energy to the building of mosques and charitable foundations. He was crippled by gout, and rumors of his failing health circulated across Europe. Year after year in the late 1550s and early 1560s, reports of his imminent death surfaced in the obsessively attentive courts of Europe: “The Turk is still alive but his death is imminent,” it was confidently reported in faraway England in 1562. Increasingly he was held to be under the influence of his devout daughter Mihrimah and pious figures in the court circle.