Winter passed in desultory fashion. The Ottoman fleet had returned to safe harbors on the mainland, and Lala Mustapha was left awaiting the spring. In the interim there were sorties and skirmishes and Homeric bouts of single combat to relieve the tedium, in which Baglione himself took part. The whole population watched from the walls and accused the Turks of cheating by wounding horses and running away when beaten, rather than yielding to the victor. Baglione offered prize money to up the sporting interest—just two ducats for killing an opponent, five for unseating him from his horse.
In the midst of this low-level engagement, Venice delivered a small, sharp military blow to their enemy that was to have unforeseen consequences. In January, the republic appointed the energetic Marco Querini as commander of the galleys in Crete. The new man discovered that the Ottomans had withdrawn their fleet from the winter seas; there was just a token force left to support the army at Famagusta. He decided on an audacious, high-risk, and unseasonal strike, timed to coincide with the start of Ramadan. On January 16 he set sail with a dozen galleys and four high-sided sailing ships laden with seventeen hundred soldiers assigned to reinforce the town. Running east on the winter seas, he reached Famagusta in ten days; as the four ships made for the harbor, they were sighted by the Ottoman galleys, but Querini had laid a careful trap. His own galleys, lurking out of sight, caught the Ottomans totally by surprise and shot three of their vessels to bits before towing Querini’s sailing ships into the harbor, to the great joy of the defenders. For three weeks Querini rampaged around the coast, destroying fortifications and harbor installations, capturing merchant ships and putting new heart into Bragadin’s men.
On the night of Querini’s departure, Bragadin and Baglione prepared an ambush. They ordered that no one was to appear on the walls the next morning, then loaded their cannon with grape and chain shot, their arquebuses with bullets, and readied their cavalry behind the gate. At dawn, the Ottomans looked up at silent ramparts. Nothing moved; the ships had gone. They scrambled out of the trenches. Still no sign of life. They began to think the Venetians had sailed away with Querini. When this was reported to Mustapha, the whole army moved forward. As the Turks came within range, a signal shot was fired, followed by a furious volley of fire from the walls that mowed down swaths of men. It was then followed by a devastating cavalry charge.
Querini had departed with promises of substantial relief; he also apparently left Bragadin with a boatload of captured hajj pilgrims to employ as hostages—though the details of this would be later disputed. These unfortunates were destined to play a pivotal role in what ensued.
QUERINI’S “VISIT” ALSO SERVED as a vivid reminder of what Venice was still capable of; it shocked the Ottoman high command and triggered a series of reactive measures that would aggregate large consequences. Selim was outraged and disturbed at this jolt to his pride; for protector of the faithful, keeping the hajj routes open was critical. He executed the bey of Chios, nominally responsible, by way of example. Piyale kept his head, but was dismissed from his post—a useful blow for Sokollu to inflict on one of his rivals. Command of the navy passed to the fifth vizier, Muezzinzade Ali—Ali Pasha—a far less experienced commander and another potential rival. Some have detected Sokollu’s malign hand in this appointment, a deliberate attempt to sabotage a military operation whose success might weaken his position. Whatever the motive, the appointment would prove crucial. At the same time, fear of another relief effort forced the Ottomans into unfamiliar procedures. To guard Cyprus, they sailed much earlier than usual.
In mid-February, twenty galleys were sent to watch Crete; on March 21, Ali Pasha also departed from Istanbul. By sailing early, the fleet was inevitably committed to a long campaigning season. And in his pocket, as he sailed out of Istanbul, the new admiral carried a set of unprecedented instructions. In principle, the Ottomans had little interest in open-sea warfare. They used their ships to transport troops and to support amphibious operations against enemy ports and islands; the sieges of Malta and Rhodes were typical uses of Ottoman sea power. In this respect Ali Pasha’s orders were extraordinary. They instructed him “to find and immediately attack the Infidel’s fleet in order to save the honour of our religion and state.” It is impossible to know if these were issued by Sokollu, or by the incautious sultan himself. It was to prove a fateful prescription.
BACK IN ROME the talks went on. In March the Spanish tried to divert the principal objective of the league to Tunis, but Pius was obdurate—the expedition would go east—and kept a tight fist on the purse strings. When all parties were finally invited to sign, the Venetians suspended the talks without explanation and went back to talking to Sokollu; as the noose tightened on Famagusta, the peace faction in Venice grew clamorous. The pope was reduced to tears; it seemed as if all his efforts were bound to fail; but by this time Sokollu’s terms had grown more demanding—and Colonna was dispatched by Pius to persuade the Venetians back to the table. Eventually in May 1571, after ten months of wrangling and distortion, the final terms were agreed.
On May 25, 1571, the three parties signed the historic document in the Sala del Concistoro in the Vatican. It was followed a week later by huge public celebrations in the streets of Rome; specially minted coins were thrown to the crowd “as a sign of joy and gladness.” On June 7, the league document was formally published in Venice in front of a huge crowd; a mass was sung in Saint Mark’s and the doge walked in solemn procession. There was a thrill of expectation throughout Italy, mirrored in the stirring words of Pius himself, conscious that he had made history. He spoke, according to one observer, “with lively and loving words, thanking the Divine Majesty that in the time of his pontificate He had conceded the grace to Christendom that the Catholic princes had united and drawn together against the common enemy.”
The terms of the league gave something to everyone. It was conceived not as a temporary alliance but, in the lofty words of its formulation, as an alliance in perpetuity—a permanent crusade that harked directly back to the causes of the Middle Ages. It was to be both offensive and defensive in nature, a war waged not just against the Turk, but against his vassal states in Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli, this clause being of crucial importance to Philip. The league’s financial arrangements were spelled out: Spain would pay a half, Venice a third, the papacy a sixth of the costs. And the short-term objectives were defined. The league was to prepare an immediate expedition of two hundred galleys and attendant forces for the recovery of Cyprus and the Holy Land—the latter objective being one that both Venice and Spain prayed would be honored more in the breach than in the observing.
It was an extraordinary diplomatic coup by Pius; he appeared to have succeeded where fifteen of his predecessors had failed. To forge a united front to push back the infidel had long been one of the most ardent papal objectives. Pius, by sheer willpower, persistence, and money had achieved what many had believed was impossible, but despite the fine words in which the agreement was couched, many seasoned observers remained skeptical. In January, Philip had predicted that “as the League is now, I do not believe it will do or achieve any good at all.” As if to justify these remarks, the ink was hardly dry before Spain tried to renege on the terms. Pius had to whip the Spanish back into line by threatening to withdraw the crusading subsidies again. Many others remained equally unconvinced. “It will look very fine on paper…but we shall never see any results from it,” wrote the French cardinal de Rambouillet during the negotiations. He saw nothing later to change his mind, and in Istanbul they were hopeful too, after the failed expedition of 1570, that the whole thing would collapse of its own accord.
The fact that the league held together for any time at all was largely the conjunction of two remarkable circumstances. The first was the choice of leader of the joint Christian battle force, Don Juan of Austria, Philip’s half brother, the illegitimate son of Philip’s father, Charles V. The second was the violent and extraordinary denouement to the siege of Famagusta that was unfolding as the del
egates signed and the crowds cheered.
THE SPRING SAILING had brought Lala Mustapha fresh men; Cyprus was so close to the Ottoman coast that no matter how many men died, replenishment was an easy matter. Word of the rich pickings at Nicosia had got about, and the pasha proclaimed, perhaps unwisely, that the booty at Famagusta would be better still. Adventurers and irregulars flocked to the cause. By April, Lala Mustapha had a vast army, somewhere in the region of one hundred thousand men. The Ottomans boasted that the sultan had sent so many to the siege that if each one threw a shoe into the ditch, they would fill it up. Crucially, a large number of these were miners, armed only with picks and shovels. Within the walls, there were four thousand Venetian infantry and the same number of Greeks.
By mid-April, Lala Mustapha was ready to press forward in earnest. Bragadin counted his finite food stocks and decided that there was no alternative but to expel the noncombatants. Five thousand old men, women, and children were given food for one day and marched out of a sally port. Any ruthless besieging general might now be expected to take advantage. Julius Caesar let the women and children die of starvation, hemmed in between the Roman legionnaires and Vercingetorix’s fort in 52 B.C.; Barbarossa forced them back to the walls of Corfu in 1537. The mercurial Lala Mustapha did neither. He let them return to their villages. It was both compassionate and astute, a guarantee of goodwill toward the Greek population.
Bragadin was determined to emulate the defense of Malta, but there were crucial differences—not only was Famagusta fourteen hundred miles from any help, but the geology was different too. Birgu and Senglea had been built on solid rock; tunneling had required superhuman effort. Famagusta was constructed on sand—easy to mine, even if it required constant propping. In late April, Lala Mustapha’s huge labor force started to shovel their way toward the city. The Christians jeered at the Turks for waging war like peasants, with picks and shovels, but the strategy was terribly effective. A vast network of trenches zigzagged toward the moat, so deep that mounted men could ride along them with only the tips of their lances showing, so extensive that the observers declared the whole army could be accommodated within them. Earth parapets were thrown up that concealed all but the tops of the Ottoman tents, and earth forts constructed fifty feet wide and bulwarked with oak beams and sacks of cotton. If these were destroyed by gunfire, they were quickly rebuilt. When the platforms overtopped the walls, they were mounted with heavy cannon.
Famagusta under siege
The defenders fought with the confidence of the Knights of Saint John for the honor of their little republic. Baglione conducted sorties and ambushes, picked off miners, threw gunpowder into their trenches, hid planks in the sand studded with poisoned nails, knocked out gun emplacements, and killed alarming numbers of men. The fortitude of the defense astonished and worried the Ottoman high command. Men wrote home to Istanbul that Famagusta was defended by giants. When Lala Mustapha sent a message to Bragadin on May 25 with yet another request for surrender, he was met with shouts of “Long live St Mark.” One of these parleys was rebuffed with a hotter response. The Venetians lived in eager hope of relief, and Bragadin invited the messenger to tell his master that when the Venetian fleet came, “I shall make you walk before my horse and clear away on your back the earth you have filled our ditch with.” These were not wise words.
Eventually the weight of numbers started to tell. In early May, as the Holy League prepared to append their signatures in Rome, the Ottoman cannon started a heavy bombardment. Day after day they poured shot into the houses to break the citizens’ morale, and against the walls to batter them down. Despite heroic repair work, Lala Mustapha’s men inexorably degraded the fortifications; tunneling allowed them to plant mines and blast the front off the ravelins and bastions. On June 21 the Ottomans opened a definitive breach and delivered the first of six furious assaults that gradually whittled away the defense. Supplies of food and gunpowder began to dwindle. “The wine is finished,” wrote the Venetian engineer Nestor Martinengo, “and neither fresh nor salted meat nor cheese could be found, except at a price beyond all limits. We ate horses, asses, cats, for there was nothing else to eat but bread and beans, nothing to drink but vinegar with water and this gave out.” On July 19, the bishop of Lemessos, a talismanic figure for the people, was killed at his table by an arquebus. The Greek citizens had supported their Venetian masters faithfully; now they had had enough. Mindful of the end of Nicosia, they petitioned Bragadin for surrender. After an emotional mass in the cathedral, Bragadin begged them for fifteen more days. They assented, but the Ottomans too knew the end was near. On July 23, Lala Mustapha, increasingly frustrated by what he regarded as pointless resistance, shot a blunt message over the wall to Baglione, yet again repeating Suleiman’s formula at Rhodes:
I, Mustapha Pasha, want you milord general, Astorre, to understand that you must yield to me for your own good, because I know that you have no means of survival, neither gunpowder nor even the men to carry on your defence. If you surrender the city with good grace, you will all be spared with your possessions, and we shall send you into the land of the Christians. Otherwise we shall seize the city with our great sword, and we shall not leave a single one of you alive! Mark you well.
CHAPTER 18
Christ’s General
May to August 1571
WHILE LALA MUSTAPHA WAS CLOSING in on Famagusta, the Holy League’s naval preparations lumbered into action. In all the ports of Spain and Italy—Barcelona, Genoa, Naples, Messina—men, materials, and ships were being laboriously gathered. The Western Mediterranean was a hubbub of disorganized activity: badly coordinated, unprepared—and late. The Venetian ambassador in Spain watched the proceedings in impotent fury. “I see that, where naval warfare is concerned, every tiny detail takes up the longest time and prevents voyages, because not having oars or sails ready, or having sufficient quantities of ovens to bake biscuits, or the lack of fourteen trees for masts, on many occasions hold up on end the progress of the fleet.” It all contrasted so badly with the central coordination of the Ottoman military machine: its plans were laid far in advance, their execution ensured by unbreakable imperial edict. The governor of Karaman had lost his post for being ten days late in collecting men for the Cyprus campaign the previous year. The Ottomans had a battle plan to meet the Christian threat, and they followed it rigorously in the spring of 1571. The admiral, Ali Pasha, had sailed to Cyprus in March; another fleet under the second vizier, Pertev Pasha, left Istanbul in early May; the third vizier, Ahmet Pasha, marched the land army west in late April to threaten Venice’s Adriatic coast; Uluch Ali sailed east from Tripoli. The campaign was to be much more extensive than the conquest of Cyprus. It was intended to carry the fight into the heart of the Adriatic, even to capture Venice or beyond: “The domination of the Turks must extend as far as Rome,” Sokollu rhetorically informed the Venetians. By late May, Ali and Pertev, judging the siege of Famagusta to be nearly over, combined their fleets and started to ravage Venetian Crete.
The Venetians were desperate for something to happen. Their galley fleet was at Corfu by late April, under the new commander Sebastiano Venier. After the shameful display of the previous year under Zane, the Venetians had now entrusted their enterprise to a formidable man. Venier, already seventy-five years old, with the looks of a bad-tempered lion from some Venetian plinth, was a redoubtable patriot; though no sailor, he was a resolute man of action—impetuous, decisive, and possessed of an explosive temper. He received news of the plight of Cyprus with growing impatience and tried unsuccessfully to persuade his officers that they should strike out for Famagusta on their own, without waiting for the prevaricating Spaniards. It was judged to be too risky; the fleet was still understrength. There was nothing to do but wait. Slowly the allies started to converge on Messina, on the north coast of Sicily, the agreed rendezvous for the operation. Marc-’Antonio Colonna was again appointed to command the papal galleys at the insistence of Pius V, despite the previous year’s debacle. By June, C
olonna was at Naples. Now all they could do was await the arrival of the Spanish and the leader of the whole expedition.
It fell to Philip to choose this commander; his first nominee had been the ever cautious Gian’Andrea Doria. This was immediately ruled out by the pope—he personally blamed Doria for the failure of 1570, and the Venetians detested him. Philip’s second suggestion was his young half brother, Don Juan of Austria. It was to prove an extraordinary choice.
Don Juan, twenty-two years old, good-looking, dashing, intelligent, chivalrous, and daring, driven by an unquenchable appetite for glory, was the antithesis of his half brother, the prudent Philip. He had already proved himself as a military commander during the Morisco revolt, but not without taking what Philip considered unacceptable risks. When Don Juan had placed himself in the front line and been hit on the helmet by an arquebus bullet, Philip was outraged. “You must keep yourself, and I must keep you, for greater things,” he wrote reprovingly. For Philip, Juan represented the only possible dynastic successor in 1571; he was determined not to risk him in battle. To keep him in check, and to ensure astute maritime advice—for Don Juan had no sea experience—he closely shackled his authority with a team of seasoned advisers that included Gian’Andrea Doria, Luis de Requesens, and the marquis of Santa Cruz, Álvaro de Bazán, an experienced seaman. Though Bazán was by nature more likely to favor aggressive action, Philip felt that any likelihood of actual battle had been removed by his insistence that no engagement with the enemy should be undertaken without the unanimous agreement of these three men. He thought that he could count on Doria to deliver a veto.
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