CHAPTER 19
Snakes to a Charm
August 22 to October 7, 1571
THE FATE OF FAMAGUSTA was still hidden from the Christian fleet when Don Juan reached Messina on Sicily on August 22. He was again treated to extraordinary displays of ceremonial pomp. Don Juan stepped ashore beneath a triumphal arch emblazoned with heraldic devices, to be presented with a charger with silver trappings—a gift from the city—to the roar of cannon, and buildings festooned with banners, inscriptions, and images of Christ triumphant. At night the city was brilliantly illuminated. All the congregated strength of the Christian Mediterranean seemed to be assembled in one place. Two hundred ships rocked at anchor in the harbor; thousands of Spanish and Italian fighting men crowded the narrow streets; thousands of chained galley slaves rested on the rowing benches. It was Pius’s personal triumph to have gathered the great commanders of the age to fight in the name of Christ: Romegas and the Knights of Saint John were there, and Gian’Andrea Doria, Colonna with the papal galleys, the experienced Spanish admiral Bazán, the one-eyed Ascanio who had relieved Malta, the combustible Venetian Sebastiano Venier, Marco Querini whose daring raid on Cyprus had caused the Ottomans so much trouble early in the year, detachments from Crete and the Adriatic. It was an Olympic gathering, a test of Christendom’s resolve. “Thank God that we are all here,” wrote Colonna, “and that it will be seen what each of us is worth.”
Beneath the surface, this magnificent pan-Christian operation was a brawling, bad-tempered, quarrelsome assortment of conflicting egos and objectives. There had been trouble all the way around the coast between the Italian and Spanish soldiers; fighting in the streets of Naples, fighting again at Messina; the men had killed each other. The officers had been forced to hang a few scapegoats to restore order. The commanders eyed one another with jealousy and suspicion. The Venetians hated Doria, whom they described sneeringly as looking like a corsair; their irascible commander, Venier, was fuming with impatience at the endless delays. He suspected the Spanish of something less than enthusiasm for battle and was hardly willing to take orders from Don Juan. Everyone regarded the Venetians as unreliable. They had brought a large quantity of ships but were woefully short of men. The Knights of Saint John were virtually the sworn enemies of Venice, a feeling enhanced by the recent execution by the city of one of their number for counterfeiting the republic’s coinage. Meanwhile many of the men were simmering with discontent at the lack of pay. In short, the expedition of 1571 was riven with all the divisions that had surfaced at Preveza, during the relief of Malta and the ill-fated attempt to relieve Cyprus the previous year. It was a fair calculation, in the Ottoman camp, that the Christian enterprise would fail, as it had so often in the past. Yet if the Ottomans were wrong, the stakes could be high; and the possibility certainly caused anxiety in Istanbul.
Behind all the trumpet calls and celebrations, the critical issue by late August was simply whether to risk battle or not. The season was late, the enemy rampant. Opinions were sharply divided. There were men with something to prove, such as Colonna smarting from the failed expedition the previous year; Venier and the Venetians, desperate for battle; and the aggressive Spanish admiral Bazán. Then there was the prince himself carrying the weight of papal expectation. Among all the gifts and celebrations he received, one outweighed all the others. Pius dispatched the bishop of Penna to Messina as his special envoy with the promise that victory would be rewarded with an independent crown. On the other side there was the majority Spanish opinion—Doria with the mandate not to risk the Spanish fleet; Requesens with orders to shackle Don Juan; and the cautious spirit of Philip, who had paid the majority share of the expedition, hovering in the background.
Don Juan was being lobbied with advice from all sides, some of it extremely helpful. The duke of Alba had written from faraway Flanders to urge him to manage the men well: “Your Excellency should always try to present a cheerful face to all the soldiers, for it’s commonly known that they set great store on this and on Your Excellency bestowing a few favorable words on one national contingent one day and on another the next. And it’s most advisable that they understand that Your Excellency takes great care over their pay and gives it to them whenever possible, and when not that you order that care should be taken that they are given their due rations at sea and that their provisions are of good quality, and that they understand when this is done that it’s by your order and diligence, and when it’s not, that you regret it and order punishment.” Don Juan followed this to the letter and grew in the process. On August 3 he had quelled a pay mutiny at La Spezia by personally promising that the men would be paid. The Spanish meanwhile were working hard to rein in the enthusiasm of their young commander. Even Don Garcia de Toledo, dismissed from Philip’s service after Malta, had advice to give.
The old man was two hundred miles away, taking a cure for his gout at the hot springs near Pisa. He was a repository of knowledge about the Mediterranean wars. He had been at Charles’s triumph at Tunis in 1535, seen the destruction of his fleet at Algiers eight years later, and relieved Malta. Above all he remembered the lessons of Preveza in 1538, the nearest thing to a major sea battle in thirty years, when Barbarossa got the better of Andrea Doria. He had cautious words for the young man, which he unfolded in a series of letters. He understood the risks, the problems with naval alliances, and the physical and psychological superiority that the Ottomans now had at sea: “If I were in charge, I would be reluctant [to fight] with your majesty’s fleet lacking eight or nine thousand experienced soldiers from Flanders, because were defeat to happen—God forbid—it would do far more harm than the benefits of any victory could bring. Bear in mind also that our fleet belongs to different owners, and sometimes what suits some of them doesn’t suit others, whereas our enemy’s fleet has just one owner, and is of one mind, will, and loyalty, and those who fought at Preveza know the value of this. The Turks have gained the psychological advantage over the Venetians, and I believe that even against us they haven’t much lost it.”
Behind the Spanish position lay fifty years of maritime defeat. Preveza and Djerba hovered behind all their thinking; be cautious, he repeated, be cautious. “For the love of God,” Don Garcia wrote again to Requesens, “consider well what a great affair this is, and the damage that may be caused by a mistake,” before going on to emphasize the convoluted secrecy of the Spanish position. “But as it will be better for various good reasons that the Venetians should not know how much or why it is in His Majesty’s interest that there should be no battle, I pray you after having read this letter to Don Juan to destroy it.” There was a determined aim to ensure that the expedition should fail, while saving the face of the Catholic King.
But Don Juan’s personal inclination was already clear from the sets of questions he was now firing back to Don Garcia. If he were to fight, how should he organize his fleet? How should he use his artillery? When should he give the order to fire? Don Garcia’s advice, some of which failed to reach him in time, was very specific, drawn from the accumulated knowledge of half a century of sea warfare. Full frontal sea battles had been extremely rare—and none on the scale that was now being planned—but those fought had been illuminating. He advised Don Juan to learn the lessons of the past: “You should be warned not to order all the fleet into one squadron because such a large number of ships will certainly lead to confusion and some ships obstructing other ships—as happened at Preveza. You must put the ships into three squadrons, and put at the outer extremity of the wings those galleys in which you have greatest confidence, giving the tips of the wings to exceptional captains, and ensure that enough sea remains between the squadrons so that they can turn and maneuver without impeding one another—this was the arrangement employed by Barbarossa at Preveza.”
These words were to prove highly influential. As to when to fire, his advice was horribly specific, a vivid reminder of the realities of sea battles. There were no second chances; the shots had to count: “In reality it’s
not possible to fire twice without causing the greatest possible confusion. In my opinion the best thing is to do what the cavalry say, and to fire the arquebuses so close to the enemy that their blood spurts over you…. I’ve always heard captains who know what they’re talking about say that the noise of the bow spurs breaking and the report of the artillery should be simultaneous or very close together.” He was advocating point-blank range.
As the ships continued to gather in early September, Don Juan decided to hold a final meeting to agree on the plan of action. Wisdom dictated that all the senior officers should be present; given the prickly sensibilities of the various factions, Don Juan was determined to act openly. On September 10 seventy senior officers gathered on board the Real for the fateful conference. Don Juan put forward two options: to seek out the enemy or, in line with Don Garcia’s advice, not to seek battle “but rather have the enemy to come to us, seeking every occasion to force them to do so.” The opinions divided predictably: the papal fleet and the Venetians for immediate attack, Doria and a Spanish contingent for caution. But when Don Juan roundly declared his intention to attack and win, the vote was carried unanimously. Under silent peer pressure, Doria and Requesens caved in. “Not everyone willingly agrees to fight, but nonetheless [is] forced and pressured by shame to do so,” wrote one commander.
In hindsight, despite Philip’s attempts to shackle the fleet, this outcome was inevitable. Against all expectations, the Christians had assembled an enormous fleet. To turn back now would involve massive loss of face—and Don Juan had let it be known that if the Spanish would not participate, he would proceed with the papal and Venetian fleets alone. The failure of the previous year, the huge weight of religious expectation imparted by the pope, the crowds, the banners and the celebrations, the dashing pronouncements of Don Juan—the expedition was being impelled forward, “like snakes drawn by the power of a charm,” as one observer put it.
Doria, mindful of Philip’s orders, was still hopeful that battle might be avoided. It was resolved that the final objective would be decided at Corfu. There might yet be time to halt the impetus to war, but every sea mile east of Messina would make the decision harder to overturn.
Crowds cheered; officers and men thronged churches to receive the sacrament; the papal ambassador pronounced his blessing. Early on the morning of September 16, Don Juan scribbled a final letter to Don Garcia that would soon have the old man shuddering in his steam bath. He was sailing in pursuit of the enemy. “Although their fleet is superior in size to that of the league according to the information we have,” he wrote, “it isn’t better in terms of quality of either ships or men, and trusting in God our Father, whose cause this is, I have decided to go and seek it out. And so I leave tonight—may it please God—on the voyage to Corfu and from there I will go wherever I learn that their fleet is. I have 208 galleys, 26,000 soldiers, six galleasses, and twenty-four ships. I trust in our Lord that, if we meet the enemy, He will give us victory.” The papal nuncio stood on the mole at Messina in his red robes, and blessed the vast contingent of ships, decked with their flags and pennants, as they rowed past the breakwater and out into the open sea.
AS THE ARMADA SWUNG OUT along the Italian coast, questions about the Ottoman fleet became more pressing. Where exactly was the enemy, and what condition were they in? How many ships did they have? What was their intention? The need for reliable intelligence was crucial. Don Juan had sent the Maltese knight Gil de Andrada forward with four fast galleys to hunt for clues. Three days later, Andrada returned with worrying news. The Turks had attacked Corfu, then retired to Preveza. There was a fear that the Ottoman fleet was now dispersing for the winter. That night, scanning the sky and the dark sea, the whole fleet witnessed a celestial phenomenon that raised their spirits. A meteor of unusual brilliance coursed across the sky and burst into three trails of streaking fire. It was taken as a good omen. Then the weather turned dirty; for several days the fleet toiled through rainy squalls that blotted out the horizon and held them back.
Andrada’s intelligence had been partially correct. The Ottomans were withdrawing from the Adriatic after a highly successful campaign. They had captured key fortresses and taken a large quantity of booty. They raided Corfu for eleven days but withdrew as the Holy League left Messina, and then sailed south to seek the safety of their base at Lepanto, tucked into the mouth of the Gulf of Corinth, to watch and wait for orders from Istanbul.
It had been an exceptionally long season. Ali Pasha’s ships had been at sea since March; the hulls of the galleys were now fouled with weed and needed cleaning; the men were tired. The Adriatic raids, despite their dramatic success, had exhausted the fleet. There was a general feeling that it was too late in the year for large-scale naval maneuvers; soldiers who had been in the ships for months asked to be released, or defected to the land army of Ahmet Pasha. Additionally there was a strong belief from past experience that the Christian fleet would collapse in disunity of its own accord or draw in its horns for the winter.
The Ottomans had also been carrying out their own information-gathering and, unknown to the Christians, had scored an extraordinary intelligence coup. One night in early September the Christian fleet had been lying at anchor in Messina harbor; all Marc’Antonio Colonna’s papal ships were decked in black mourning for the death of his daughter. Unnoticed, a black galley rowed quietly through the lanes between the anchored vessels, up and down. It was the ship of the Italian-born corsair Kara Hodja, counting the enemy’s strength. He also took back with him Don Juan’s battle plan, either from spies or perhaps even from printed news sheets, so widely circulated were its details. He knew exactly how they intended to organize their fleet and the intention to push on to Corfu—though their purpose after that remained obscure.
The problem was that Kara Hodja had miscounted. He had missed a complete Venetian squadron of sixty galleys in the inner harbor. He put the tally at no more than one hundred forty. Don Juan had 208. Ali was puzzled by the aggressive intentions of an enemy with inferior numbers but reported this news back to Istanbul by swift frigate. At the same time, Don Juan, sighting the mountains of Corfu through the drizzle, was given equally unsafe intelligence. Some Venetians, returned from the enemy fleet in a prisoner exchange, reported that the Ottomans had one hundred sixty galleys and lacked fighting men, that Uluch Ali had departed the fleet. In fact they had about three hundred galleys, and Uluch Ali had gone to unload booty at Modon and return. A few days later, Gil de Andrada, scouting ahead, quizzed some Greek fishermen who seemed to confirm the weakened state of the enemy; they assured him that the Christians might offer battle with every certainty of victory. The same Greeks had just given identical messages of hope to Ali Pasha’s scouts. The two sides had underestimated each other. Intelligence failures were about to aggregate serious consequences.
By September 27, the Christian fleet was anchored in Corfu harbor. It was the final moment of decision: to seek out the enemy or to pause. The mood of the Venetians, particularly, had been further darkened by the state of their island. Irritated by their inability to reduce the fortress, and bad-tempered by the length of the campaign, elements of the Ottoman army had indulged in wanton atrocities and ritual desecrations of holy shrines that fired up the crusading zeal of the Italians. Doria and sections of the Spanish contingent again pressed on Don Juan the risk and the lateness of the season; they suggested a face-saving raid on the Albanian coast before withdrawing for the winter, but Don Juan and the Venetians were not to be turned. They would seek out the enemy fleet.
The next day, in faraway Madrid, Philip wrote a letter ordering Don Juan to winter in Sicily and start again the following year. In Rome the pope was urging exactly the opposite course of action through the power of prayer; “he fasts three times a week and spends many hours every day at prayer,” wrote the Spanish cardinal Zuniga. On September 29, Andrada’s scouts reported that the whole Ottoman fleet was at Lepanto. And somewhere off the southwestern tip of Greece, a fast frigate fr
om the Venetian governor of Crete was hurrying north with news of Famagusta.
As September rolled into October, the Holy League was at Gomenizza on the Greek coast. Don Juan held a final review of the fleet. The galleys were stripped for action and put through precise maneuvers. Every captain was made fully aware of the battle plan. Don Juan passed through the fleet, observing the condition of the ships minutely. He was greeted by arquebus salutes as he passed—a not inconsiderable risk: twenty men had been accidentally shot dead since leaving Messina.
MEANWHILE, ALI PASHA had been receiving a string of orders from Istanbul. There was a fifteen-to twenty-day time lag between the commanders at the front and the imperial center, yet it is clear from the Ottoman documents that Selim—or Sokollu—was attempting to impose considerable central control over the running of the campaign. A steady stream of directives instructed Ali about fleet maneuvers, food supplies, and troop collection. Sokollu and Selim were evidently aware that the fleet was exhausted and manpower a problem, yet the orders dispatched on August 19 were emphatic: “If the [enemy] fleet appears, Uluch Ali and yourself, acting in full accord, must confront the enemy and use all your courage and intelligence to overcome it.” Another directive, not dispatched until after the battle, was even more emphatic: “Now I order that after getting reliable news about the enemy, you attack the fleet of the infidels fully trusting in Allah and his Prophet.” It is impossible to determine the division of responsibility between Sokollu and his master for these remarkable orders. They seemed to leave the commander on the ground no freedom of maneuver. Even Suleiman’s thunderous commandments to Mustapha on Malta did not contain detailed instructions on how to proceed. Maybe the sultan and his vizier refused to believe that the Christians would actually risk battle, or believe that the Christians’ morale would collapse, or maybe the sultan, buoyed up by the final conquest of Cyprus and a zeal for holy war, was overconfident, but they committed Ali Pasha to fight.
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