Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power

by Victor Davis Hanson

  In contrast, dozens of highly emotive firsthand narratives in Italian and Spanish—often at odds with each other in a factual and an analytical sense—spread throughout the Mediterranean. We know as little of the Turkish experience at Lepanto as we do of the plight of Abd ar-Rahman at Poitiers or the Mexicas at Tenochtitlán. What we do learn of the non-West in battle is secondhand, and most often a result of European investigation and publication. Thus, nearly all of the names of the soldiers of Xerxes, Darius III, Hannibal, Abd ar-Rahman, Montezuma, Selim II, and the Zulu king Cetshwayo are lost to the historical record. The few that are known survive largely to the efforts of an Aeschylus, Herodotus, Arrian, Plutarch, Polybius, Livy, Isidore, Díaz, Rosell, Contarini, Bishop Colenso, or Colonel Hartford, who wrote in an intellectual and political tradition unknown among the Persians, Africans, Aztecs, Ottomans, and Zulus.

  Things have changed little today in terms of the exclusive Western monopoly of military history. Six billion people on the planet are more likely to read, hear, or see accounts of the Gulf War (1990) from the American and European vantage points than from the Iraqi. The story of the Vietnam War is largely Western; even the sharpest critics of America’s involvement put little credence in the official communiqués and histories that emanate from communist Vietnam. In the so-called Dark Ages of Europe, more independent histories were still published between A.D. 500 and 1000 than during the entire reigns of the Persian or Ottoman Empire. Whether it is history under Xerxes, the sultan, the Koran, or the Politburo at Hanoi, it is not really history—at least in the Western sense of writing what can offend, embarrass, and blaspheme.

  Such is the nature of societies that allow dissenting voices and free expression. Even when European and American citizens openly attack the military conduct of their own governments, candor often has the ironic result only of enhancing Western credibility and furthering its dominance of the dissemination of knowledge. So it was at Lepanto: most readers in Europe, the Americas, Africa, and even throughout Asia are more likely to know of the battle through an account in English, Spanish, French, or Italian—or an allusion in Cervantes, Byron, or Shakespeare—than a sympathetic Ottoman chronicle written in Turkish.

  Christendom had never seen such a celebration as the aftermath of Lepanto. Crowds all over Italy and Spain sang Te Deum Laudamus, the church’s traditional hymn of praise and thanks to God. A special October Devotion of the Rosary was inaugurated by the Vatican, still celebrated today in a few churches of Italy. For most of the subsequent winter, captured Turkish rugs, banners, arms, and turbans lined the streets and shops of Venice, Rome, and Genoa. Special commemorative coins were struck with the inscription “In the year of the great naval victory by the grace of God against the Turks.” Hundreds of thousand of woodcuts, engravings, and medals circulated even in Protestant northern Europe. The winged lion of St. Mark appeared on victory monuments throughout Venice. The great Venetian painters Veronese, Vicentino, and Tintoretto produced vast canvases of Lepanto; the latter’s stunning depiction focused on the taking of Ali Pasha’s flagship and the mortal wounding of Barbarigo. A remarkable fresco of the battle by Vasari still adorns the Vatican. Dozens of other monuments and paintings in the pope’s palace celebrate the astounding victory. Titian painted a commemorative portrait for Philip II, in which the monarch is seen standing at an altar holding up to heaven his son Don Fernando as Victory descends from the clouds; a captive Turk is in the foreground, a burning fleet in the distance.

  At Messina Andrea Calamech sculpted a grandiose statue of Don Juan—still impressive today—in appreciation of the prince’s salvation of the city from the Turkish fleet. Fernando de Herrera’s Canción de Lepanto remains today a selection of modern anthologies of Western literature. Miguel Cervantes, a veteran of the battle who lost the use of his hand, years later immortalized Lepanto in his Don Quixote: “Those Christians who died there were even happier than those who remained alive and victorious.” The boy prince who would be King James I of England composed several hundred lines of an epic in commemoration of Lepanto. At Stratford the young Shakespeare was also apparently deeply affected: in his later plays his duke is called Prospero after notable Italian nobles at the battle, and his Othello is made to serve with the Venetians at Cyprus to defend the island against Turkish attack.

  Most of the paintings and popular songs attributed the remarkable Christian victory to divine intervention. But even more secular contemporary historians who sought tactical exegeses were not sure how the Holy League had halted centuries of Turkish aggression in a few hours. Why, in fact, did the Europeans win, when they were outnumbered, discordant, and fractious until the moments before the battle, in unfamiliar enemy waters, far from their home bases, their governments in mortal hatred of one another? Was it luck—the sudden change in winds that gave Don Juan’s galleys added speed as they sailed into the Ottoman center or the gentle breezes that blew their cannon smoke into the enemy’s eyes? Or was it the relatively calm seas and absence of rain that ensured the plodding galleasses could easily maneuver and take aim right before the Turkish fleet—and that thousands of Christian harquebuses had dry firelocks? Surely critical to the outcome was the Ottoman foolhardiness in accepting a challenge of decisive battle with heavier and better-armed Christian ships. Once the galleasses unleashed their opening salvos and were seen to approach firing from all sides, contemporaries on both sides noted that even the indomitable Turks “became afraid.” All narratives attribute much of the Christian success to the six floating fortresses and their initial shelling of the Ottoman front lines.

  Or perhaps the edge was spiritual? Lepanto was fought on a Sunday morning, and the crews were given mass by priests on deck even as they prepared to kill. A few days earlier on Corfu the Christians had received the gruesome news of the fall of Cyprus, and the Ottoman perfidy in slaughtering all the hostages and prisoners of Famagusta. The most repeated tale among the crews of Lepanto was the horrific account of the torture and disfigurement of Marcantonio Bragadino, leader of the brave garrison there, who was flayed alive and stuffed after being promised safe passage on capitulation. Don Juan’s crews had seen the Ottomans’ most recent sacrilege on Corfu—Christian graves desecrated, priests tortured, civilians kidnapped, and churches defiled. All contemporary sources remark that once Christian infantrymen boarded the Turkish galleys, they fought with an almost inhuman savagery.

  Or was the verdict at Lepanto due to the brilliant battlefield leadership of Don Juan, who had mixed the Italian, Spanish, and Venetian galleys throughout the armada to maintain harmony? No less important was the rare statesmanship of both the pope and Philip II. Yet what most nullified Ottoman courage and numbers was the presence of so many topflight European ships, equipped with superior firepower and better-armed soldiers—a testament to the Western manner of designing, producing, and distributing armaments that operated only within the confines of capitalist economies. The abundance of cannon, harquebuses, crossbows, and finely crafted ships trumped Ottoman numbers, the reputation of the dreaded Turkish soldier, and the convenience of home waters in a single stroke, and so gave the Holy League a good chance of victory—if its cohesion, generalship, and tactics were competent—when victory was unforeseen.

  EUROPE AND THE OTTOMANS

  A Fragmented Continent

  Sixteenth-century middle and eastern Europe, as had been true since the sixth century A.D., felt itself besieged by the East. Whereas northern Africa and Asia Minor had become unified by Islam, and were for the most part provinces or protectorates of a vast Ottoman hegemony, Europe was ever more wracked by religious strife. Christendom, split asunder by Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy, was by the sixteenth century to fragment further with the schism of Protestantism and the growth of nation-states in England, France, Holland, Italy, and Spain, founded on principles of ethnic, cultural, and linguistic affinity, not monolithic allegiance to the Vatican.

  France, having rid itself of the last Islamic attackers in the early tenth century, w
as more or less in alliance with the Ottomans for much of the sixteenth century. The friendship was not always passive: the French had used Ottoman help to take Corsica from Genoa in 1532 and had allowed the Turkish admiral Barbarossa to winter his galley fleet—manned by Christian slaves, no less—in French ports (1543–44). No wonder that on the morning of the battle, the Ottoman admiral Hassan Ali confidently urged the Turks to leave the harbor and row out to battle outside the Gulf of Corinth, since the Christians were “of different nations and had different religious rites.”

  As the Ottomans increasingly looked westward, not merely for additional slaves and plunder but also for European weaponry and manufactured goods, the West itself turned farther to the west and south. The newly discovered Americas and the trade routes along coastal Africa offered riches without struggle with the Turks or the stiff tariff charges of the long caravan routes through Ottoman-occupied Asia. By the sixteenth century a disunited western Europe was not merely beset by a hegemonic East but had itself grown powerful at a variety of new mercantile centers—Madrid, Paris, London, and Antwerp—which had increasingly little interest in the backwaters of the eastern Mediterranean.

  The Balkans and the islands of the eastern Mediterranean were considered costly sideshows not worth confrontation with the Turkish fleet, given the general stagnation of the Ottoman Empire in comparison to newer avenues of trade and commerce elsewhere. Most enslaved Christians were Orthodox anyway, and western Europeans had feuded with the Byzantines well before the fall of Constantinople. The absolute fault lines of Christian versus Muslim, or East against West, were also eroding. England and France sometimes ignored and at other times aided the sultan, while Venice became increasingly dependent on trade along the Turkish coast. Lepanto would be one of the last great battles in history in which a few Western powers united solely on the basis of shared culture and religion against Islam.

  Still, the Ottomans in particular, and Islam in general, were in theory more powerful in terms of population, natural resources, and territory occupied than any one Mediterranean Christian state. But by the same token, Islamic power was clearly inferior to southern Europe as a whole should it ever unite for a grand expedition. On the rare occasions of even partial alliances—the great First Crusade (1096–99) during the Middle Ages is the best example—Western success even far from Europe was not uncommon well before the Reformation, gunpowder, and Atlantic exploration. European military dynamism was a continuum from classical antiquity, not a later fluke of the gunpowder age and the discovery of the New World. The First Crusade had ended with Franks in occupation of the Holy Land and revealed a singular ability to move and feed armies by land and sea not matched in the Islamic world. In rare cases of foreign attacks inside Europe—Xerxes, the Moors, Arabs, Mongols, and Ottomans—foreign dynasts found themselves at the heads of unified imperial or religious armies, their Western opponents isolated, divided, and often squabbling among themselves. But Christendom’s rare collective efforts soon waned, and by 1300 the Crusades were not to be followed by any comparable pan-European expedition across the Mediterranean. Yet even in a state of religious and political fragmentation Europe was relatively safe from Islamic invasion, since such invasions required logistical expertise and heavy infantry beyond even the sultan’s resources. The fifteenth-century Ottoman unification of much of Asia, the Balkans, and northern Africa, and the general acceptance of one god who put a high value on the advancement of religion by the sword, placed a divided Europe at an enormous disadvantage. As in the eighth century at the dawn of Islamic conquest, once again many small warring Christian and Western states were to be attacked continuously and individually by a vast religious and political unity.

  Ottoman intellectuals and mullahs did not see war as innately wrong. Nor were there objections by the intelligentsia to the idea of a jihad— nothing at all comparable to a growing Western interest in pacifism or even “just war” theory. No Islamic tract was similar to the idea promulgated by Erasmus and others that war itself was somehow intrinsically evil and might be waged only under the narrowest moral circumstances. Europe’s citizens might have inherited a notion of personal freedom from classical antiquity and of spiritual brotherhood from Christ, but the survival of the West lay in how well they ignored the idea that killing was always sinful.

  So Europe combined the earlier Western traditions of decisive battle to annihilate the enemy, of capitalism to craft plentiful and effective weapons, and of civic militarism to bring out the population en masse to resist the Ottomans. Fortunately, there was little in Christianity as it evolved in the Middle Ages that was antithetical to private profit or capitalism in general. If for a time priests worried about the taking of life, they had no compunction in allowing their brethren to profit while they could.

  By the time of the battle of Lepanto, long gone from European control were the old Roman provinces of northern Africa, the Near East, Asia Minor, and most of the Balkans as well as the coastal waters of the eastern Mediterranean, which had become firmly Muslim and were increasingly under the control of Istanbul. For the expansion of an enormous multicultural empire, the Ottomans found useful a unifying religion that advocated aggressive war against nonbelievers—presenting non-Westerners with enemies of moral and religious fervor not seen earlier even in the deadly onslaughts of the Carthaginians, Persians, and Huns, who all likewise had invaded Europe and for a time threatened to annex Greece and Rome into their domains.

  The discordant Christians, however, still retained enormous advantages over the sultan’s armies. Despite the erosion of hegemonic Western military power with Rome’s fall, most states in Europe proper for more than a thousand years had managed to retain in latent form the cultural traditions of classical antiquity—rationalism, civic militarism, forms of capitalism, ideas of freedom, individualism, reliance on heavy infantry and decisive battle—which allowed them greater military power than their individual populations, resources, or territory would otherwise suggest. The chief problem for Europe was no longer a prevailing pacifism, but near continuous war: the absence of central political control in the Middle Ages after the end of Charlemagne’s kingdom had allowed Western warfare to be used suicidally, in constant internecine and extremely bloody fights between European princes.

  The technology of galley construction was far more advanced in the republican city-states of Italy and imperial Spain than in Asia, and far more flexible and likely to evolve to meet new challenges at sea. The entire organization and even terminology of the Turkish fleet was copied from either Venetian or Genoese models, in the same manner as earlier medieval Islamic fleets had emulated Byzantine nautical engineering and naval administration. Both sides rowed ships that were strikingly similar—and exclusively of Italian design. All military innovation—from the cutting off of the galley rams to the creation of the galleasses and the use of boarding nets—was on the European side. Military science—the rebirth of abstract notions of strategy and tactics in the new age of gunpowder—was a Western domain; it was thus no accident that the leading captains of both fleets were European. The sultan himself preferred renegade Italian admirals who were acquainted with European customs and language and therefore far more likely to adapt his galleys to the latest innovations of the enemy.

  The soldiers in the Christian fleet were not all free voting citizens— only Venice and a few Italian states were republican. Yet the crews of the Holy League were not exclusively servile either, as was true of the Ottoman armada, in which elite Janissaries and galley slaves alike were political nonentities. A Turkish galley slave was more likely to flee than a Christian, and European common soldiers were free persons and not the property of an imperial autocrat:

  Throughout the fleet the Christian slaves had their fetters knocked off and were furnished with arms, which they were encouraged to use valiantly by promises of freedom and rewards. Of the Muslim slaves, on the contrary, the chains which secured them to their places were carefully examined and their rivets secured; and
they were, besides, fitted with handcuffs, to disable them from using their hands for any purpose but tugging at the oar. (W. Stirling-Maxwell, Don Juan of Austria, vol. 1, 404)

  In addition, the Christians, plagued by constant raiding from North African corsairs and Turkish galleys, deliberately sought decisive battle. It was the armada of the Holy League that wished to collide head-on with the sultan’s fleet and kill every Ottoman on the water. The latter army was docked in its winter quarters and somewhat reluctant to fight. Moreover, in the Christian fleet, a variety of individual minds and personalities was at work. Spanish, Italian, French, English, and German adventurers— Knights of Malta, nobles of various other religious orders, even Protestants and at least one woman under arms—argued and bickered until seconds before the first fusillade, ultimately bestowing upon the armada the advantages of diverse opinion and the free reign of commanders to react as they felt best to the changing conditions of battle. Even the autocracy of Christian monarchy in Spain—operating as it did in a labyrinth of civic and judicial oversight and audits—usually did not ham-string the liberty of the individual to the same degree as the totalitarianism of the sultan’s rule.

  Yet what gave the much smaller states of the Christian federation a fighting chance for victory was their remarkable ability—given their limited populations and territory—to create capital, and thereby to fabricate excellent vessels, mass-produce advanced firearms, and hire skilled crews. Although Europe was represented in force by only three real Mediterranean powers at Lepanto—the pope, Spain, and Venice—their aggregate economies were far larger than the national product of the entire Ottoman Empire. Before the fleet had even sailed, papal ministers had calculated the entire cost of manning two hundred galleys, with crews and provisions, for a year—and had raised the necessary funds in advance.