Culture and Military Innovation at Lepanto
Lepanto, situated off the western coast of Greece, was a likely place for a sea battle between Europe and its enemies, being on the general fault line between the Ottoman-held Balkans and the Christian western Mediterranean. Whenever East met West in the Mediterranean, the waters off the Gulf of Corinth made a logical nexus of battle, as the two great sea fights nearby at Actium (31 B.C.) and Prevesa (1538) attest. Salamis itself lay not more than two hundred miles to the east across the isthmus at Corinth. The Ottoman fleet, after a successful season of conquest on Cyprus, was planning to winter in the small bay of the present-day tourist community of Naupactus, on the northwestern shore inside the gulf. Once the spring weather came and his crews were rested and refitted, Ali Pasha, the Sultan’s admiral, looked forward to a season of raiding far from Istanbul—and perhaps an invasion itself of European shores to cap off the capture of Cyprus the prior August.
In response to the attack on Malta (1565), the Turkish massacre of Christians at Famagusta in August 1571, and the subsequent appearance of Ottoman raiders off European coastlines, the confederation of Venice, Spain, and the Papal States had at last formed a grand, if somewhat shaky, alliance. By early fall 1571 the combined fleet of the newly christened Holy League had made its way across the Adriatic from Sicily. The Christians were desperately searching for the Ottoman armada before the winter season set in and the Mediterranean turned too rough for a decisive battle between oared ships. The alliance’s fear was that such a large Ottoman fleet wintering close to western Europe would race throughout the Adriatic, plundering, kidnapping, and killing at will among Italian coastal communities, even sacking Venice itself.
Rather than be caught and defeated in small flotillas by the sultan’s enormous predatory navy, Pope Pius V had at last convinced Philip II of Spain and the Venetian Senate to stake their combined fleets in a do-or-die gamble to rid once and for all the western Mediterranean of the Turkish menace. If they did not find the Ottomans this autumn, the pope warned, there was every likelihood that the rare unanimity of action would be lost. Each Christian state would be forced once more to resist by itself or make terms with the sultan on its own. Word had reached the Holy League’s fleet in Corfu as early as the evening of September 28 that the Turkish armada was anchored not far away on the non-Western shores of the Gulf of Corinth. Once his fleet arrived off the coast of Aetolia a week later, Don Juan convinced his squabbling admirals to attack the Turks the next day, the Sunday morning of October 7. He cut off debate with a terse “Gentlemen, the time for counsel is past and the time for fighting has come.” As at Salamis, squabbling Europeans met a unified though autocratic Asiatic command.
What the Holy League lacked in manpower and ships (the Ottomans enjoyed a numerical advantage of at least thirty galleys, even more lighter ships, and more than 20,000 soldiers) was more than made up by superior Christian tactical leadership and numerous subtle advantages in nautical technology. The confederates’ admiral, Don Juan of Austria, the illegitimate son of Charles V of Spain and half brother to the reigning king, Philip II, was one of the more remarkable and gifted captains of a sixteenth-century Mediterranean world characterized by an array of brilliant and headstrong Venetian and Genoese sailors and generals: Sebastian Veniero, governor of Crete and future doge of Venice, Pietro Giustiniani, prior of Messenia, Marcantonio Colonna, commander of the papal contingent, and Agostino Barbarigo, admiral of the left wing at Lepanto.
Contemporary accounts remark on Don Juan’s selflessness and his single-minded zeal in uniting the disparate nations of southern Europe to deny the Turks any further inroads in the West, especially along the coastal cities on the western Mediterranean. We need not believe all the romance about the twenty-six-year-old prince—tales of his pet marmoset, his tame lion, his dancing a jig on the deck of his flagship, Reale, moments before the fighting—to acknowledge that few men of the time could have held together such an ill-sorted coalition of rivals. Commercially minded Venetians fought their former Ottoman trading partners reluctantly and only when threatened with annihilation. Imperial Spaniards were as ready to battle the Italians, Dutch, English, and French as the Turks. The Papal States’ shrill warnings about the Mediterranean becoming an Islamic lake were seldom taken seriously, especially given the popes’ intrigue in the dynastic wars of European succession. In any case, for the first time in decades Christendom found at its helm a magnanimous leader—one more interested in checking the spread of Islam than enriching himself or even gaining advantage for his native state at the general expense of Europe. (Don Juan turned over his one-tenth share of the prize money from Lepanto to the impoverished and wounded in the fleet, as well as a gift of 30,000 gold ducats from the grateful city of Messina.)
The Christians approached the seas off Lepanto with nearly 300 Venetian, Spanish, Genoese, and other assorted European ships of all sizes: 208 galleys, 6 galleasses, 26 galleons (which were late and played no role in the actual fighting), and another 76 smaller craft, all comprising an armada of more than 50,000 rowers and 30,000 soldiers—a pan-Christian force in size not seen since the Crusades. Still, this force was smaller than the nearly 100,000-man fleet of 230 major warships of the sultan, with another 80 assorted gunships. But the quality of the Christian galleys, not the superior number of Ottomans, would prove the critical factor at Lepanto. Venetian galleys were the best-designed and most stable craft on the Mediterranean, serving as models for the Turkish fleet itself. The Spanish vessels, too, were better built and stouter than those of the Ottomans. Don Juan, in consultation with his Venetian admirals, had provided the allied galleys with innovations unknown to the Ottoman fleet, which had ironically confirmed that at the greatest galley battle since Actium, the age of the oared ship was already over. Lepanto would be the last large galley fight in naval history.
First, the Christians had sawed off the beaks of their galleys, surmising that the age of ramming was past and that their ships could be better supplied with additional cannon. Rams also obstructed cannon placed on the forecastles, and caused the gunners to shoot high to clear their own prows. But with a clear view and more room for additional artillery, the Christian galleys could fire directly in the path of their own advance. At Lepanto their blasts tore through the sides of the Ottoman galleys, while most of the enemy’s volleys were high, harmlessly striking the outrigging and masts of the Christians. Credit Don Juan and his admirals with realizing that cannon fire, not a galley’s bronze beak, could sink more Ottoman ships.
The Arsenal at Venice and the expertise of Spanish craftsmen had also ensured that the Christian galleys were far better armed. Not only were there more cannon per galley—1,815 total guns on the ships of the Holy League against 750 in the much larger Ottoman armada—but each weapon was better cast and maintained than its Ottoman counterpart. After the battle the Venetians found hundreds of captured Turkish cannon to be unsafe and worthless—a judgment borne out by modern metallurgical analysis of extant Ottoman guns. The only uses the victorious Europeans had for them were as trophies or scrap for recycling; under a free market such inferior weapons had no real value other than as raw material. They might as well have been anchors or ballast for all the profit their sale would bring in a competitive European market, replete with cannon crafted from the latest designs of Italian, English, German, and Spanish workshops.
The Christians also had a far greater number of smaller swivel cannon that could pepper Ottoman galleys and clear them of boarders. European soldiers on deck wore heavy breastplates, making thousands of them nearly invulnerable against Turkish arrows. Far more Christian infantrymen were armed with harquebuses, clumsy weapons but deadly at ranges of up to three hundred to five hundred yards when fired into masses of confined soldiers. For that reason, the Turkish vice-admiral Pertau Pasha had cautioned his commanders to avoid battle altogether; his men were feudal conscripts without firearms and were not up to battling mailed harquebusiers. While primitive muskets were scarce
ly accurate in the modern sense, they could be rested on deck and aimed into the mass of the Turkish crews as the Christian gunners were safe behind boarding nets. Given the crowded conditions of galleys and the crashing and locking together of ships, it was hard for a harquebusier to miss his target.
European troops had longer experience with and better training in the use of firearms, and so could shoot their more reliably manufactured cannon and muskets with more dependable gunpowder at rates three times faster than their much fewer Ottoman counterparts. True, the composite recurved bow of the Ottomans was a deadly weapon—possessing greater range, accuracy, and rates of fire than the crossbow—but it required months of training, exhausted the bowman after a few dozen shots, and could not be fabricated as quickly or plentifully as either crossbows or firearms. The European emphasis was typically to put as many deadly weapons into as many hands as quickly as possible, worrying little about the social position of the shooter or the degree of status and training necessary to employ a weapon effectively.
In Europe the social ramifications of military technology were far less important than its simple efficacy; the sultan, however, was careful that weapons in and of themselves—like printing presses—should not prove to be sources of social and cultural unrest. Even when the Janissaries and less well trained Ottoman troops adopted European firearms, they often failed to embrace the appropriate tactics of mass infantry warfare, which went against the heroic code of the Muslim warrior and the elite status of that professional corps. “Instead of using musketry en masse, as was developing in the West, or massed pikemen acting in unison, the Ottomans looked upon each musketeer or sharpshooter as a warrior risking his life for a place in paradise” (A. Wheatcroft, The Ottomans, 67).
At Lepanto heavier and more plentiful firearms, greater rates of fire, more reliable ammunition, and better-trained gunners added up to enormous European advantages—if the captains would not panic but sail directly into the heart of the dreaded Turkish fleet. Since European seamen had for decades been caught in small groups on the Mediterranean by Islamic corsairs and had their seaside villages often devastated by sudden onslaught of the Ottoman galleys, it was Don Juan’s singular achievement to convince his admirals that for the first time in memory the advantages were all with the Europeans. The Ottomans were trapped and forced to fight in daylight and head-on against the combined might of the best of European military seamanship, which at last could bring its overwhelming firepower to the collision.
North African and Turkish ships were more numerous, lighter, and less well armed than their European counterparts, and relied on numbers, quickness, surprise, and agility to raid coastal waters and outmaneuver enemy flotillas. They were designed to guard merchant ships, engage in amphibious operations, and support sieges—not to square off in cannon duels with Europeans. Unfortunately, Ali Pasha forgot those innate strengths and waged a decisive naval shoot-out against massive Christian firepower, a set battle that no fleet in the world—except one comprised of English galleons and gunners—could have won. Yet in a sense Ali had no choice, for history was on the side of neither galleys in general nor the Ottoman military in particular: within twenty years after Lepanto two or three British galleons alone might mount as many iron cannon as the entire Turkish fleet in the Mediterranean.
In addition to the presence of the six galleasses, themselves originating from the abstract studies of ship design dating back to Hellenistic Greece, and the greater number of cannon and firearms, the Christians had rigged up steel boarding nets designed to protect their own galleys, as gunners targeted the enemy. Don Juan later claimed that thanks to his nets not a single Christian ship was boarded by the Ottomans—an astounding declaration, if true. The oarsmen of the respective fleets were also qualitatively different. Much of the sixteenth-century naval policy at Venice had been characterized by a great debate over the composition of the republican fleet’s crews. For decades the Venetians were slow to accept the idea that to match the size of the Ottoman armada, their own fleet required thousands of additional rowers of all kinds—far more oarsmen than available among the republic’s free citizenry. At first the Venetians hired foreign oarsmen, then turned to their own destitute, finally to convicts—and on rare occasions to captives and slaves as well. The same exigencies were true of the other Italian states and Spain, which all came to the use of slave rowers rather late and with real reluctance. While there were servile crews on both sides at Lepanto, the oarsmen of the Holy League still included free rowers, and the coalition was more likely to free those slaves it did employ. In contrast, the Christian slaves on Turkish galleys were threatened with death before the battle should they raise their heads, and there is some indication that at least on a few ships they mutinied in the midst of the battle.
In effect, there was not a single free fighter in the Turkish fleet—not the shackled oarsmen, not the Janissaries, not those peasants mustered under feudal service, not the renegade admirals and seamen, and not even Ali Pasha himself. Across the water, the Christian admirals at the battle were free aristocrats; many of them were not even professional military men—civilians like seventy-six-year-old Sebastian Veniero, the Venetian lawyer who shared command of the center with Don Juan, or the Italian noble and landowner Marcantonio Colonna, who commanded the papal contingent. None of these proud and often headstrong individuals could be arbitrarily executed by the pope, the doge at Venice, or King Philip II for simple failure to win at Lepanto. In contrast, Ali Pasha and his commanders knew that an embarrassing defeat required a sufficient number of heads for the sultan.
LEGENDS OF LEPANTO
More than 15,000 Christian slaves were freed at Lepanto and more than two hundred galleys and nearly one hundred lesser craft were mostly destroyed or lost to the sultan. Italy itself was saved from Ottoman maritime invasion. In the battle’s aftermath Europe flirted with the idea of sailing right up the Golden Horn or freeing the Greek-speaking populations of the Morea, Cyprus, and Rhodes. The Christian fleet—the largest European armada in the Mediterranean until modern times—lost around 8,000 to 10,000 killed, 21,000 wounded, and ten galleys. In contrast, there were 30,000 Ottomans slain at Lepanto, many of them skilled bowmen who would not be replaced for years. Thousands were simply executed when their galleys were taken in tow, and even more were left to drown or to be finished off by scavengers. In the battle’s aftermath Christians in small boats shot and speared any Ottomans still alive in the water; plunderers hunted for private purses, clothes, and jewelry of the defeated Turkish elite. Christian annals report that only 3,458 Turkish prisoners were taken, an astoundingly low figure given the almost 100,000 of the enemy present before the battle. Most of the 6,000 Janissary shock troops also perished; the historian Gianpietro Contarini believed thousands of that elite corps had been killed. There are no records of the thousands of Ottoman wounded, many of whom must have suffered horrific gunshot wounds. One hundred eighty ships of all types—most of them later found to be beyond repair—were towed to Corfu. Dozens more washed up on the shores of Aetolia. A mere handful returned to Lepanto.
The losses were doubly grievous for the sultan, since unlike the Europeans he had neither the capacity to fabricate thousands of new harquebuses nor the ability to draft a new army of conscripts. Rowers—not to mention munitions fabricators and designers—had to be brought in as mercenaries, renegades, or slaves from European shores. Most quality-manufactured guns would need to be imported, given this singular European propensity to fabricate cheap, plentiful, and easily used firearms:
The main impact of the development of efficient small arms upon warfare at sea came not, as we would suppose, directly through an increase in fire power, but indirectly through a sharp reduction in training requirements. This gave the nations which depended upon the arquebus greater resilience in the face of heavy manpower losses than those which depended upon the composite recurved bow. While it was fairly easy to turn Spanish villagers into musketeers, it was virtually impossible to turn Anato
lian peasants into masters of the composite recurved bow. (J. Guilmartin, Gunpowder and Galleys, 254)
The loss of 34 Ottoman admirals and 120 galley commanders ensured that even the sultan’s massive replacement program—150 ships of green timber and shoddily fabricated cannon built within the next twelve months—would be short of experienced seamen, archers, and seasoned galleys.
Non-Westerners rightly complain about Europe’s monopoly of commemoration, and its hold on the art of history itself. Nowhere was this imbalance more true than in the aftermath of Lepanto, a Western “victory” soon known as such to millions, through published histories, commissioned art, and popular literature. In none of those genres was there any consideration of the battle from the Ottomans’ point of view. Instead, we hear only of the sultan’s postbellum threats to execute Christians in Istanbul, the grand vizier’s scoff that the Ottoman’s beard “was only shaved,” not cut, and various accounts of lamentation among the families of the lost. The few Turkish accounts of the battle were not literary and not widely published, but dry, government-sanctioned, and rigidly formal accounts that had little or no likelihood of appealing to any readership other than a tiny screened government elite in Istanbul. The parameters of inquiry in such court chronicles of Selânki, Ālī, Lokman, and Zeyrek were carefully delineated—if the scribe was not to be exiled or executed. Ottoman sources attributed the Turkish loss to the wrath of Allah and the need for punishment for the sins of wayward Muslims. Vague charges of general impiety and laxity only enhanced the government’s anger at its own people; there was to be little exegesis and analysis concerning the shortcomings in the sultan’s equipment, command, and naval organization.
Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power Page 33