Empires of the Sea

by Crowley, Roger

  BY LATE SEPTEMBER, Ali was at Lepanto, the fortified port the Turks called Inebahti, a bare fifty miles south of Preveza and in a similar position to that occupied by Barbarossa against Doria. Like Barbarossa’s at Preveza, Ali Pasha’s position was virtually unassailable. Lepanto was a well-fortified, tightly walled port tucked into the mouth of the Gulf of Corinth; the entrance of the gulf was protected on both sides by gun emplacements, so that, as the Ottoman navigator Piri Reis had put it, not even a bird could fly through it. In any case, the prevailing winds would make any direct assault on the fleet extremely difficult. Ali could sit tight and wait for the enemy to exhaust themselves offshore, then strike at will, or refuse battle altogether. He had compelling reasons not to fight. The ships needed repairs; believing the campaigning season to be over, many of the cavalrymen had returned home. It seemed hard to believe that the enemy would risk an attack in early October. Furthermore, all the captured prisoners told the same story—that there were serious differences of opinion in the Christian ranks. Ali waited to see what would happen next.

  At four in the afternoon on October 2 all the bottled-up tensions in the Christian armada suddenly exploded. The fleet was at Gomenizza on the mainland opposite Corfu when the long-running feud between the Venetians and the Spanish boiled over. Because the Venetian galleys were short of men, the commander Venier had been persuaded with great reluctance to board Spanish-paid soldiers on his vessels. There had been trouble from the start. “In the embarkation of these men and their biscuit, I had many difficulties to contend with, and much insolence from the soldiers to put up with,” Venier wrote in his self-defense afterward. On the morning of October 2, as part of the review of battle readiness, Doria was sent to inspect the Venetian galleys. The tempestuous Venier flatly refused the hated Genoese the right to criticize his ships; tempers were already flaring when a brawl broke out on one of his Cretan galleys, the Armed Man of Rethimno, between the Venetian crew and its Spanish and Italian soldiers. It started when a crewman disturbed a soldier’s sleep, and quickly degenerated into a full-scale fight that littered the deck with dead and wounded on both sides. The captain dispatched a message to Venier’s flagship to the effect that the Spaniards on the Armed Man were killing the crew.

  The position of Lepanto in the Gulf of Corinth

  Venier was still fuming from his encounter with Doria and ordered four men and his provost marshal to board the ship and arrest the mutineers. The leader of the revolt, Captain Muzio Alticozzi, met them with arquebus fire. The provost marshal was shot through the chest; two of the men were thrown into the sea. Venier, now beside himself with fury, ordered the galley to be boarded, then stood by to blast it out of the water. When a Spanish ship offered to intervene, he erupted in fury. “By the Blood of Christ,” the old man roared, “take no action, unless you wish me to sink your galley and all your soldiers. I will bring these dogs to heel without your assistance.”

  He ordered a party of arquebusiers aboard the Armed Man to seize the ringleaders and deliver them to his ship. He then had Alticozzi and three others hanged from the mast. By this time, the captain of the Spanish ship had reported the situation to Don Juan, who could now see four bodies dangling from the mast of Venier’s ship. Don Juan himself was equally incandescent at these unauthorized executions of Spanish-paid men. He threatened to hang Venier on the spot. For Doria it was another chance to suggest returning to Messina and leaving the Venetians to it. The Venetian and the Spanish galleys primed their cannon with powder and held lit tapers at the ready. There was a tense standoff, the two galley fleets squaring up to each other for several hours. Eventually tempers cooled sufficiently for reason to prevail. Don Juan declared that he would no longer deal with Venier; henceforward all communications with the Venetians were to be by way of Venier’s second-in-command, Agostino Barbarigo. The incident had brought the whole expedition to the brink of ruin, and word quickly reached the Ottoman high command. When captives reported to Ali and Pertev that the Venetians and Spanish had come close to blowing each other out of the water, it doubled the belief that the outnumbered and divided Christian fleet would not fight. More likely they would carry out a token raid on the Albanian coast and retire.

  It was at this moment that the ghost of Bragadin reentered the fray. With tempers soothed, the Holy League fleet sailed on south down the Greek coast. At Cape Bianco, Don Juan ordered a rehearsal of his battle formation; the squadrons were arranged across a five-mile front, each one distinguished by a different-colored flag. On October 4 they had reached the island of Kefalonia, when they spied a lone frigate tacking up from the south. It was the vessel from Crete carrying word of Famagusta. The appalling news had a sudden and electrifying effect on the fleet. It focused the Venetian desire for vengeance and instantly soothed divisions. Rationally it also knocked the bottom out of the whole expedition. If Famagusta could no longer be saved, the expedition’s ostensible purpose had gone. When Don Juan held another council of war on the Real, there were more Spanish pleas to divert a pointless mission, but by now it was too late. The Venetian commanders thundered for revenge. Forward momentum had become unstoppable. The fleet pushed on in squally weather. By the evening of October 6 the Christians were heading toward the Curzolaris islands at the entrance to the Gulf of Patras, with the intention of luring the Ottomans out to fight.

  FORTY MILES AWAY, in the castle at Lepanto, the Ottomans were holding a final council of war. All the key commanders were there: Ali Pasha and Pertev Pasha; the experienced corsairs Uluch Ali and Kara Hodja; two of Barbarossa’s sons, Mehmet and Hasan; and the governor of Alexandria, Shuluch Mehmet. It was the mirror image of the debates at Messina and Corfu—to fight or not to fight?—with the same mixture of caution and adventure. Kara Hodja, back from another scouting mission, declared that the Christians numbered one hundred fifty galleys at most, but there were compelling reasons not to risk battle. The season was late; the men were tired and many had deserted from the campaign; their position at Lepanto was unassailable.

  There are many different versions of what was said, but the party of prudence seems to have been represented by Pertev Pasha, “a man pessimistic by nature,” who pointed out that some of the Ottoman ships were short of men, and almost certainly by Uluch Ali. The weather-beaten corsair, badly scarred on the hand from a mutiny of his galley slaves, was by far the most experienced seaman in the room. He was fifty-two years old and had learned his trade at the side of Turgut. He was intensely feared by the Christians for his courage and cruelty; the previous year he had inflicted a rare humiliation on the galleys of the Maltese knights, and like all the corsairs who had mastered the art of survival, he weighed the odds carefully. It is highly unlikely that Uluch voted for battle. Their argument was clear: “The shortage of men is a reality. From this point of view, it’s best to remain in Lepanto harbor and fight only if the unbelievers come to us.” Others, such as Hasan Pasha, spoke for battle—the Christians were divided among themselves and were numerically inferior.

  Ali Pasha’s final verdict was delivered in tones of high bravado. “What does it matter if in every ship there are five or ten men rowers short?” he roundly declared. “If God on high wants it, no harm can come to us.” But behind this display of disregard, there were the orders from Istanbul. According to the chronicler Pechevi, Ali went on, “‘I continually receive threatening orders from Istanbul, I fear for my position and my life.’ Having said this, the other commanders could not oppose him. In the end the decision was taken to go out and meet the enemy.” They went and readied their ships.

  Uluch Ali

  Toward the end of the day on October 6 the weather shifted. It was a flawless evening. “God showed us a sky and a sea as not to be seen in the finest day of spring,” the Christians recalled. By two the following morning, Sunday, October 7, their fleet was working its way toward the Gulf of Patras. In Lepanto harbor the rattle of anchor chains; one by one the Ottoman ships started to row out through the mouth of the gulf, leaving the protec
tive security of their shore-based guns.

  CHAPTER 20

  “Let’s Fight”

  Dawn to noon, October 7, 1571

  Dawn. The wind from the east. A fine autumn day.

  THE CHRISTIAN FLEET WAS IN THE LEE of a small group of islands, the Curzolaris, that guard the Gulf of Patras and the straits to Lepanto from the north. Don Juan put scouts ashore to climb the hills and spy the sea ahead at first light. Simultaneously, lookouts from the lead ship’s crow’s nest sighted sails on the eastern horizon. First two, then four, then six. In a short time they could descry a huge fleet “like a forest,” scrolling up over the sea’s rim. As yet it was impossible to determine the number. Don Juan hoisted the battle signals; a green flag was run up and a gun fired. Cheering rang across the fleet as the ships rowed one by one between the small islands and debouched into the gulf.

  Ali Pasha was fifteen miles away as the dawn broke and the enemy ships were spotted threading through the islands. He had the wind and the sun at his back; the crews were moving easily. At first he could see so few ships that it seemed to confirm Kara Hodja’s report about the inferior size of the Holy League’s fleet. They appeared to be heading west. Ali immediately assumed that they were trying to escape to open sea. He altered the fleet’s course, tilting southwest to stop the outnumbered enemy from slipping away. There was a feeling of anticipation in the galleys as they surged forward to the timekeeper’s drum. “We felt great joy and delight,” one of the Ottoman sailors later recalled, “because you were certainly going to succumb to our force.”

  And yet there were twinges of unease among the men; a large flock of crows, black with ill omen, had tumbled and croaked across the sky as the fleet left Lepanto, and Ali knew that his boats were not confidently manned. Not all the men were happy at the prospect of a sea battle; in places, the number had been made up by compulsion from the area around Lepanto. As each half hour passed, the distant fleet seemed to grow. Far from escaping, they were fanning out. His first impression had been inaccurate; there were more ships than he had thought. Kara Hodja’s count had been wrong. He cursed, and adjusted his course again.

  Ali’s initial shift of the tiller had sparked a parallel reaction in the Christian fleet—that the enemy was getting away—then a matching correction at the realization of the true size and intent of the enemy fleet. As the hours passed and the two armadas spread across the water, the full extent of the unfolding collision became apparent. Along a four-mile-wide front, two enormous battle fleets were drawing together in a closed arena of sea. The scale of the thing dwarfed all preconceptions. There were some 140,000 men, soldiers, oarsmen, and crew, in some 600 ships—something in excess of 70 percent of all the oared galleys in the Mediterranean. Unease turned to doubt. There were men on each side secretly appalled by what they saw.

  Pertev Pasha, general of the Ottoman troops, tried to persuade Ali to feign a retreat into the narrowing funnel of the gulf, under the shelter of Lepanto’s guns. It was a course of action the admiral’s orders and his sense of honor could not permit; he replied that he would never allow the sultan’s ships even to appear to be taking flight.

  There was equal concern in the Christian camp; it was becoming increasingly clear with every successive sighting from the crows’ nests that the Ottomans had more ships. Even Venier, the grizzled old Venetian, suddenly fell quiet. Don Juan felt compelled to hold yet one more conference on the Real. He asked Romegas for his opinion; the knight was unequivocal. Gesturing at the huge Christian fleet around the Real, he said: “Sir, I say that if the emperor your father had once seen such a fleet as this, he wouldn’t have stopped until he was emperor of Constantinople—and he would have done it without difficulty.”

  “You mean we must fight, then, Monsieur Romegas?” Don Juan checked again.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Very well, let’s fight!”

  There was still an attempted rearguard action by those who remembered Philip’s cautious instructions, but it was now too late. Don Juan’s mind was set. “Gentlemen,” he said, turning to the men assembled in his sea cabin, “this is not the time to discuss, but to fight.”

  BOTH FLEETS BEGAN to fan out into line of battle. Don Juan’s plans had been laid in early September and carefully practiced. They drew on the advice in one of Don Garcia’s letters: to divide the fleet into three squadrons. The center, commanded by Don Juan in the Real and closely supported by Venier and Colonna, consisted of sixty-two galleys. On the left wing, the Venetian Agostino Barbarigo with fifty-seven galleys, on the right, Doria with fifty-three. Backing up this battle fleet was a fourth squadron, the reserve, lead by the experienced Spanish seaman Álvaro Bazán, with thirty galleys; his brief was to hurry to the aid of any part of the line that crumbled.

  It had been Don Juan’s policy to mix up the contingents to limit the possibility of defection by any one national group and to bind them together; the experience of Preveza lay behind this plan. Nevertheless, the mix had been weighted in various places to fulfill different roles. Forty-one of the fifty-seven galleys on the left wing were lighter, more maneuverable Venetian galleys, whose function was to operate hard up against the shore, following advice from Don Garcia that “if this happens in enemy country, it should take place as close to land as possible, to make it easy for their soldiers to flee from their galleys.” The heavier Spanish galleys occupied the center and the right, where the fight might be more bludgeoning.

  The wind was blowing briskly against the Christian ships as they struggled to get themselves into line; Doria’s galleys on the right had to travel farthest to take up their positions. It was a difficult exercise, conducted in slow motion. “One could never get the lighter galleys properly lined up,” Venier recalled, “and it caused me a lot of problems.” It took three hours for the Christians to sort themselves out.

  Ali Pasha’s task was made easier by the following wind but his arrangement was broadly similar. The admiral took the center of the battle fleet in his flagship, the Sultana, diametrically opposite the Real; his right wing was commanded by the bey of Alexandria, Shuluch Mehmet, and his left by Uluch Ali, opposite Doria. As the fleets wheeled and turned, it slowly became clear to the Genoese admiral that he was badly outnumbered. Uluch Ali had sixty-seven galleys and twenty-seven smaller galliots, drawn up in a double line. Doria had just fifty-three. The discrepancy had the potential for serious trouble.

  Where Don Juan was trying to hold a straight line, the Ottomans favored the crescent. It had both a symbolic function as the crescent moon of Islam and a tactical one. Both sides had a clear understanding of the realities of galley warfare. All the offensive capabilities of the galley lay in its bows; the three or five forward-facing guns were effective only within a narrow arc of fire, and the bows were the only place where fighting men could gather in any number. The conventional tactics were to sweep the opponent’s deck with cannon fire, arquebus shot, and arrows, then to ram it with the beaked boarding bridge and pour on board. Galley hulls are fragile shells, horribly vulnerable to impact or shot. To be caught sideways or from behind by another galley was to be left literally dead in the water. Ali’s crescent was designed to outflank and encircle the less numerous enemy, then to break up his ranks in a mêlée where the more maneuverable Muslim vessels might catch the ships sideways and pick them off.

  FOR BOTH SIDES THE INTEGRITY of the line abreast was crucial. However, for Don Juan, whose galleys were weightier and more ponderous, the principle of mutual support was a matter of life and death. Each galley needed to be a hundred paces apart—sufficiently distant to prevent a clash of oars but close enough to prevent an enemy from inserting himself into the ranks. For the same reason, it was critical that they remained in line. Too far ahead, a galley could be isolated and picked off; lagging too far back, the enemy could again insert himself into the line and cause havoc. Once holes were picked in the fabric of the battle formation, it became a dangerous game of chance, but to maintain this matrix of order across a fou
r-mile front required extraordinary skill. Seen from the perspective of a bird circling lazily in the higher air, the effects were quite clear. The Christian fleet continually expanded and contracted in and out like an accordion while its line abreast rippled back and forward in sinuous curves as the ships kept trying to adjust their relative positions outward from the Real at the center.

  Ali Pasha had the same problem. The outer horns of his crescent threatened to get too far ahead, an arrangement that could lead to disaster: unsupported, they would be quickly picked off. It was the sheer size of the fleets and the rippling effect of lag times as each ship kept adjusting its position that made these formations so difficult to maintain. Finding the crescent too hard to orchestrate, Ali switched his deployment to a flat line in three divisions that mirrored his opponent’s formation, with the Sultana as the front marker; no ship’s commander was to pull ahead, under pain of death. The two fleets closed at a walking pace as they struggled to keep their shape.