Empires of the Sea

by Crowley, Roger

  It was now that Uluch’s worst fear was realized. Seeing the temptation of the shore, the Muslims gave up the fight. There was a confused flight for the beach. Ships crashed into one another; men hurled themselves overboard, scrabbling and drowning in the depths and the shallows. Those behind used the trampled bodies of their compatriots as a bridge to land. The Venetians were in no mood for prisoners. They put out longboats and pursued them ashore with shouts of “Famagusta! Famagusta!” One enraged man, finding no other weapon, grabbed a stick and used it to pin a fallen opponent to the beach through the mouth. “It was an appalling massacre,” wrote Diedo. In the confusion, a band of Christian galley slaves on the Venetian ships who had been unshackled on Don Juan’s orders took stock of their options and decided that instant freedom was better than a general’s promise. Leaping ashore with the weapons they had been given, they ran off to take their chances as bandits in the Greek hills.

  SHORTLY AFTER MIDDAY the heavyweight centers of the two fleets also collided. The fancifully named galleys of the Venetians and the Spanish—the Merman, the Fortune on a Dolphin, the Pyramid, the Wheel and Serpent, the Tree Trunk, the Judith, and innumerable saints—shattered into the squadrons from Istanbul, Rhodes, the Black Sea, Gallipoli, and Negroponte, commanded by their captains: Bektashi Mustapha, Deli Chelebi, Haji Aga, Kos Ali, Piyale Osman, Kara Reis, and dozens more. One hundred fifty fully armed galleys plowed into one another.

  THE CHRISTIANS HAD ROWED slowly toward this collision, intent on holding their line. The Ottomans were ragged and disarranged by the blizzard of shot from the galleasses but moved forward with eager velocity, skimming the calm sea, their lateen sails raked back, their guns blazing. The principal players on each side clustered at the nerve center of the battle: On the Ottoman side, Ali Pasha in the Sultana, with Pertev Pasha, the army commander, on his right shoulder; Mehmet Bey, governor of Negroponte with Ali’s two sons on his left; Hasan Pasha, Barbarossa’s son; and a group of other experienced commanders. Don Juan steadied himself on the poop of the Real with Marc’Antonio Colonna and Romegas in the papal flagship on one side, Venier on the other. Philip would have been appalled by Don Juan’s sense of risk. He was horribly visible standing before the banner of crucified Christ in his bright armor, sword in hand, refusing pleas to retreat into his cabin. Ali stood on his poop in equally brilliant robes, armed with a bow. Both men were playing for high stakes, oblivious of the wise words Don Garcia once addressed to La Valette: “In war the death of the leader often leads to disaster and defeat.”

  As the ships closed, the Sultana loosed off shots from its forward guns. One ball smashed through Don Juan’s forward platform and mowed down the first oarsmen. Two more whistled wide. The Real, with its forward spur cut off, could shoot lower, and waited until the enemy was at point-blank range, “and all our shots caused great damage to the enemy,” wrote Onorato Caetani, captain-general of the pope’s troops, aboard the Griffin. The Sultana seemed to be making for the Venetian flagship, then dipped its helm at the last moment and slammed into the Real, bow to bow; its beaked prow rode up over the front rowing benches like the snout of a rearing sea monster, crushing men in its path. The vessels recoiled in shock, but remained interlocked in the entangled mess of rigging and spars.

  Sea of fire

  There were similar shattering collisions all along the line. The papal flagship, directed by Colonna in support of the Real, was hit by Pertev Pasha’s ship, spun around, and slammed into the side of the Sultana, just as another Ottoman galley careered into Colonna’s stern. On the other side, Venier also moved up but found himself immediately engulfed in a separate mêlée. The Christian line had already been breached, and the sea was a tangled mass of thrashing ships.

  WHAT THE SURVIVORS WOULD REMEMBER—as far as they remembered anything from the flash-lit moments of battle—was the noise. “So great was the roaring of the cannon at the start,” wrote Caetani, “that it’s not possible to imagine or describe.” Behind the volcanic detonation of the guns came other sounds: the sharp snapping of oars like successive pistol shots, the crash and splinter of colliding ships, the rattle of arquebuses, the sinister whip of arrows, cries of pain, wild shouting, the splash of bodies falling backward into the sea. The smoke obscured everything; ships lit by sudden shafts of sunshine would lurch through the murk as if from nowhere and tear at one another’s sides. Everywhere confusion and noise: “a mortal storm of arquebus shots and arrows, and it seemed that the sea was aflame from the flashes and continuous fires lit by fire trumpets, fire pots and other weapons. Three galleys would be pitted against four, four against six, and six against one, enemy or Christian alike, everyone fighting in the cruellest manner to take each other’s lives. And already many Turks and Christians had boarded their opponents’ galleys fighting at close quarters with short weapons, few being left alive. And death came endlessly from the two-handed swords, scimitars, iron maces, daggers, axes, swords, arrows, arquebuses, and fire weapons. And beside those killed in various ways, others escaping from the weapons would drown by throwing themselves into the sea, thick and red with blood.”

  AFTER THE FIRST SPLINTERING COLLISION between the two flagships, men on both sides attempted to board. There were four hundred Sardinian arquebusiers on the Real, eight hundred fighting men in all, jam-packed shoulder to shoulder so that each had no more than two feet of space. Ali had two hundred arquebusiers and one hundred bowmen. At the first moment, “a great number of them, very bravely, leaped aboard the Real; at the same moment many men from the Real leaped aboard their ship.” According to legend, Maria the dancer was one of the first across, sword in hand. The battle became cut and thrust at close range, the chained rowers trying to duck under the narrow benches, while armed men clattered down the central deck. The Muslims were quickly forced back from the Real; the Spanish troops made it as far as the Sultana’s mainmast before they were stopped; its intricate walnut decking was soon slippery with oil and blood as both sides hacked and slipped in the muck. Each ship was supported from behind by other galleys that fed a transfusion of fresh men up rear ladders as those at the bows collapsed and died. At close range, missiles were deadly. A man armored in a breastplate and back plate could be skewered right through by a single arrow or felled by a bullet. Don Bernardino de Cardenas on the Real was hit on the breastplate by a shot from a swivel gun; it failed to rupture his armor but he died later from the force of the blow. Islam’s green banner was peppered with shot, but the Christians were forced back.

  Both sides understood that the flagships were key to the battle. Makeshift barricades were erected at the mast stations to thwart boarders, so that the fight for the boats resembled street fighting in a narrow alley. So close were the men that they were massacred in droves; more were fed in from behind. Flights of arrows from the Sultana whipped across the sky, hitting the deck of the Real so fast they seemed to be growing out of it; according to one eyewitness, the Christian ships bristled like porcupines. The fortunes on the flagships reversed and the Ottomans stormed back up the Real. In the midst of this mayhem, Don Juan’s pet marmoset was seen pulling out arrows from the mast, breaking them with its teeth, and throwing them into the sea.

  On either side of the Real and all down the line, the fighting was furious. Venier, trying to come up to the aid of the flagship, hit the Sultana amidships but was surrounded on both sides. Only the appearance of two Venetian galleys from the reserve saved his life. Both their captains were killed. Bazán’s reserve galleys, kept back to buttress the line at critical moments, were now being pumped in to stem the tide of battle. Colonna repulsed the galley of Mehmet Bey with Ali’s sons aboard. Farther up the line the galleys of the corsairs Kara Hodja and Kara Deli attempted to storm the Griffin, Kara Hodja running at the front of his men, but the arquebus fire was starting to tell. “Giambattista Contusio felled Kara Hodja with an arquebus and one after another until there weren’t six Turks left alive.” And the Spanish pikemen, who had learned to fight in organized drills in the Alpu
jarras, were deadly at close range. Once aboard an enemy ship, they swept down the deck, impaling resisters and butting them into the sea. Aurelio Scetti recorded the desperate courage of his fellow Christian galley slaves liberated from their chains to fight: “There was a high number of deaths among the Turks when the Christian prisoners jumped aboard the enemy ships, telling themselves, ‘Today we either die or we earn our freedom.’”

  The fighting on the Sultana and the Real continued for over an hour. A second rush up the deck was again repulsed, but there was a gradual weakening of Ottoman firepower. Don Juan himself fought from the prow with his two-handed sword and received a dagger thrust in the leg. On the poop of his adjacent galley, the eighty-year-old Venier stood bareheaded and fired off crossbow bolts at turbaned figures as fast as his man could reload.

  Bazán’s reinforcements were beginning to swing the battle, and the heavyweight galleasses came blasting back into the fray. Pertev Pasha’s ship had its rudder shot away; Pertev jumped ship into a rowing boat manned by a renegade and slipped off, the oarsman calling out in Italian, “Don’t shoot. We’re also Christians!” Pertev cursed Ali’s recklessness as he went. Ships were now closing in on the Sultana, snuffing out the supply of men able to reinforce Ali Pasha’s vessel. The pasha’s sons made a desperate attempt to help their father, but were repulsed. Colonna and Romegas captured one galley, then turned to consider the next target.

  “What shall we go for next?” asked Colonna. “Take another galley or help the Real?” Romegas seized the tiller himself and turned the ship toward the Sultana’s right flank. Venier was closing in from the other side, sweeping the deck with fire. “My galley, with cannon, arquebuses, and arrows, didn’t let any Turk make it from the poop to the prow of the pasha’s ship,” he wrote. A third wave of men swept up the Sultana’s deck; a last-ditch stand was taking place at the poop deck behind makeshift barricades. Ali Pasha was still furiously dispatching arrows from his bow as the last defenses were blown away. Men were throwing themselves into the sea to avoid the hail of fire.

  There are a dozen different accounts of Ali’s last moments, according different degrees of heroism to the pasha. Most probably the admiral, an easy target in his bright robes, was felled by an arquebus shot; a Spanish soldier hacked off his head and raised it aloft on a spear. There were shouts of “Victory!” as the league’s flag was run up to the masthead. Don Juan jumped onto the deck of the Sultana, but realizing the fight was over, retired to his own ship. Resistance on the Sultana collapsed. Ali’s head was taken to Don Juan, who according to some accounts was gravely offended that his adversary had been so ungallantly decapitated, and ordered the object to be thrown into the sea. The Spanish soldiers mopped up.

  Ottoman resistance in the center began to collapse. Ali’s sons were captured on the flagship of Mehmet Bey; others surrendered or tried to flee. According to Caetani, the decks of both the Real and the Sultana had been reduced to a shambles: “On the Real there were an infinite number of dead.” On the Sultana, pitching on the slow sea with its crew decimated to the last man, “an enormous quantity of large turbans, which seemed to be as numerous as the enemy had been, rolling on the deck with the heads inside them.”

  BUT FOR THE OTTOMANS the battle was not yet lost. While both fleets were fully engaged at the center, there was still a possibility of snatching victory. Gian’Andrea Doria and Uluch Ali had been playing a game of cat and mouse on the seaward wing, still maneuvering for position an hour after the centers collided.

  Doria was a figure of controversy and suspicion in the Christian fleet. His reluctance for this battle, his concern for his own galleys, and his innate caution became grounds for growing concern as Don Juan gazed up at the struggle unfolding to the south. It appeared from the central battle group that Doria was moving too far out to sea, as if trying not to engage. Don Juan dispatched a frigate to summon him back.

  More likely Doria had understood from the start the gravity of his position and was working furiously to avoid being caught out. Uluch Ali had more ships; the possibility of outflanking the Christians was considerable. If the Ottomans could outdistance him on the outer wing, they could decimate their enemy from behind. Uluch Ali slid his squadron farther and farther south, pulling Doria with him and enlarging the space between the Christian center and its right wing. A gap opened up, a thousand yards wide. Some of the Venetian ships, fearing treachery by Doria, turned back, fragmenting his line. Uluch Ali, who “could make his galley do what a rider could do with a well-trained horse,” was working with conscious intent. A shrill blast on the whistle and a section of his squadron spun about and headed for the gap, now outflanking Doria on the inside. The Genoese admiral had been out-played. Before he could react, the Ottomans were bearing down on the flank of the Christian center.

  IT WAS A BRILLIANT MANEUVER and a sudden reversal of fortune. Uluch had engineered the kind of broken mêlée the Ottomans wanted to fight. With the wind now behind him, Uluch and his corsairs caught a batch of scattered ships at a serious disadvantage. Ahead of him were the Venetian galleys from Doria’s wing, isolated and in disarray, then the small group of Sicilian galleys, and three vessels flying the familiar white cross on a red ground—Uluch’s most hated enemy, the Maltese galleys of the Knights of Saint John. These detachments were hopelessly outnumbered and already exhausted from the fight. It was now three, four, five to one. Uluch “delivered an immense carnage on these ships.” Seven Algerian ships fell on the Maltese galleys, raking them with a hail of bullets and arrows. The heavily armored but hopelessly outnumbered knights went down fighting. The Spanish knight, Geronimo Ramirez, riddled with arrows like some Saint Sebastian, kept boarders at bay until he fell dead on the deck; the flotilla commander, Prior Pietro Giustiniani, wounded by five arrows and taken alive, was the last man standing on a vessel otherwise devoid of life. The Sicilian galleys pulled up to help but were immediately engulfed in a storm of fire; the Florence was overrun by a galley and six corsair galliots; every soldier and Christian slave was killed. On the San Giovanni a row of chained corpses slumped at the oars; the soldiers were all dead and the captain felled by two musket balls. There were no survivors on the Genoese flagship of David Imperiale or on five of the Venetian galleys. The flagship of Savoy would be found later drifting on the water, totally silent, not a man left to tell the tale.

  There were extraordinary moments of thoughtless bravery on these stricken Christian ships. The young prince of Palma boarded a galley single-handed, fought the crew back to the mainmast, and lived to tell the tale. On the stricken San Giovanni, the Spanish sergeant Martin Muñoz, lying below with fever, heard the enemy clattering up the deck overhead, and leaped from his bed determined to die. Sword in hand, he hurled himself at the assailants, killed four, and drove them back before collapsing on a rowing bench, studded with arrows and with one leg gone, calling out to his fellows “Each of you do as much.” On the Doncella, Federico Venusta had his hand mutilated by the explosion of his own grenade. He demanded a galley slave cut it off. When the man refused, he performed the operation himself and then went to the cook’s quarters, ordered them to tie the carcass of a chicken over the bleeding stump, and returned to battle, shouting at his right hand to avenge his left. A man hit in the eye by an arrow plucked it out, eyeball and all, tied a cloth around his head, and fought on. Men grappling their assailants on deck dragged them overboard to drown together in the bloody sea. The Christ over the World, surrounded and overrun, blew itself up, taking the encircling galleys with it.

  Despite this resistance, Uluch Ali was tearing a hole in the Christian line, collecting prizes as he went. He took in tow the Maltese flagship, strewn with dead bodies, as a trophy for the sultan. A little sooner and he might well have tipped the battle, but with the Ottoman center now collapsing, his chance was ebbing away. Doria regrouped to attack Uluch’s ships from one side; Colonna, Venier, and Don Juan brought their galleys around to confront him from the other. The wily corsair certainly had no intention o
f dying in a lost cause; he cut the towrope on the Maltese flagship, leaving the wounded Giustiniani to tell the tale but prudently taking its standard as a trophy. Steering to the north with fourteen galleys, he slipped off.

  The Christian ships turned to mopping up and looting. The battlefield was a devastated scene of total catastrophe. For eight miles guttering vessels burned on the water; others floated like ghost ships, their crews all dead. The surviving Muslims fought courageously to the last. There were moments of grotesque comedy. Some ships refused to surrender; running out of missiles, they picked up lemons and oranges and hurled them at their attackers. The Christians, wrote Diedo, “out of disdain and ridicule, retaliated by throwing them back again. This form of conflict seems to have occurred in many places towards the end of the fight, and was a matter for considerable laughter.” Elsewhere men still thrashed and fought in the water, clung to spars, or casually drowned. Chroniclers struggled to convey the scale of the carnage. “The greater fury of the battle lasted for four hours and was so bloody and horrendous that the sea and the fire seemed as one, many Turkish galleys burning down to the water, and the surface of the sea, red with blood, was covered with Moorish coats, turbans, quivers, arrows, bows, shields, oars, boxes, cases, and other spoils of war, and above all many human bodies, Christian as well as Turkish, some dead, some wounded, some torn apart, and some not yet resigned to their fate struggling in their death agony, their strength ebbing away with the blood flowing from their wounds in such quantity that the sea was entirely coloured by it, but despite all this misery our men were not moved to pity for the enemy…. Although they begged for mercy they received instead arquebus shots and pike thrusts.” There was looting on a grand scale. Men put out rowing boats to fish the dead out of the water and rob them; “the soldiers, sailors and convicts pillaged joyously until nightfall. There was great booty because of the abundance of gold and silver and rich ornaments that were in the Turkish galleys, especially those of the pashas.” Aurelio Scetti took two Moorish prisoners in the hope of securing his subsequent release from the galleys; he would live to be disappointed.