Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power (34 page)

Center, right, and left—the Christians now achieved success across the battle line. The victory was partly because of the opening murderous barrages of the galleasses that were posted nearly a mile in front of the fleet, and partly because of the superior quality and number of cannon on the individual European galleys that shot right over their truncated prows into the waterlines of the Turkish ships. The return fire was aimed too high, slower, and finally nonexistent. In almost every case, Christian ships literally destroyed their enemies in exchanges of gunfire. Once the galleys were locked, and it was a question of infantry fighting on deck, the Europeans—especially the 27,800-man Spanish contingent, of which 7,300 were German mercenaries—proved superior to Turkish foot soldiers. The harquebuses of the Spaniards weighed fifteen to twenty pounds and could shoot a two-ounce ball four hundred to five hundred yards, shredding all flesh in its path. The Ottomans found success only when they could swarm isolated Christian galleys, bury them under a sea of arrows, and overwhelm the wounded defenders. They had little experience with the shock warfare of heavy infantry in a confined setting, where group solidarity and discipline, not personal heroism or maneuver, brought victory.

By 3:30 Sunday afternoon, a little more than four hours after the galleasses opened fire, the battle was over. More than 150 Muslims and Christians had been killed every minute of the fighting, ranking Lepanto’s combined 40,000 dead—thousands more were wounded or missing— with Salamis, Cannae, and the Somme as one of the bloodiest single-day slaughters on land or sea in the history of warfare. When it was over, two-thirds of all the galleys in the great Mediterranean fleet of the Ottoman Empire were either floating junk or in tow behind Christian galleys headed westward.

Floating
Sewers

Nearly 180,000 men were present at Lepanto, rowing, firing, and stabbing each other under conditions that modern soldiers can scarcely imagine. War galleys on both sides were filthy, ghastly ships, as dirty on inspection as they were elegant at a distance. Once they were locked in mortal combat, they became little more than grisly floating platforms of death, no longer the sleek boats of ancient fable that glided through the whitecaps of the Mediterranean. The radical changes of the last two millennia in naval combat were not so much due to advances in technology or nautical design. Classical Greek triremes and Venetian galleys were not that dissimilar in size, construction, and propulsion. Rather, there were alterations in the conditions of the later ships’ service or operation, specifically the forced labor of chained rowers, the larger contingents of on-board marines, and voyages of much greater distances on the open sea.

Whereas the Athenians’ invasion fleet of 415 B.C. had beached their much lighter craft each night onshore in their circuitous and weeks-long voyage from the Piraeus to Sicily, by the sixteenth century galleys could on occasion cut directly across the Mediterranean. Such ships in theory could have on board twenty days’ supply of water—and thus sail overnight without adequate shelter for their servile oarsmen. In addition, cross-Mediterranean voyages between Asia Minor and Spain and France—practically unheard-of in antiquity—were commonplace by 1571 and often lasted for days on end without nightly stops at safe ports.

The great Venetian war galleys at Lepanto were often 160 feet and more in length and as much as 30 feet wide at the beam. From twenty to forty banks of oars pulled from each side of the ship, five men handling together an enormous forty-foot “sweep,” resulting in crews that were twice and three times the size of those of classical antiquity. Sails were raised only during transit to and from battle—or for brief periods during combat when a sudden onslaught might be enhanced by a tailing wind. As many marines, bowmen, and harquebusiers as possible crammed onto the decks, sometimes nearly sinking the galley under the combined weight of four hundred to five hundred rowers and soldiers. Besides the firepower of the boarding parties—nearly two hundred independent infantrymen per ship—each galley attacked its prey with a ten- to twenty-foot iron beak and up to twenty cannon: larger ones in the poop and prow, more numerous three- to four-pounders arranged haphazardly along the decks to issue broadsides. The main gun of many galleys was a vast bronze 175-millimeter cannon of several tons that could hurl a sixty-pound ball well over a mile.

If the galley was a rather frail ship, vulnerable to capsizing in even small storms (the Christian states lost nearly forty a year to bad weather on the Mediterranean in the late sixteenth century), it was an easy vessel to construct. The sleek standardized designs resulted in a galley achieving twenty-minute bursts of speed of eight knots and more, its low sides allowing marines to scurry throughout the ship and leap onto a captured vessel. The overcrowding of the rowing crews and the proximity of man to sea, however, made the ships wretched in transit and a charnel house in battle. Galleys and their crews were rammed, peppered with cannonballs and grapeshot, torched by fire grenades, and raked by small-arms fire and arrows. The absence of high decks, armor, and heavy roofing guaranteed terrible fatalities with almost every barrage.

The contemporary historian Gianpiertro Contarini said the waters around Lepanto were
“tutto il mare sanguinoso”—
a sea of blood—as thousands of Christians and Turks bled to death in the water. Thousands more of the wounded clung to the junk of battle among the bobbing corpses. Eye witnesses record that the trapped Janissaries—easy targets due to their size, gaudy clothing, and bobbing plumes—were huddling and seeking shelter under the rowing benches as the Turkish galleys were smashed apart by cannon fire and raked by harquebuses from the higher Christian decks. Finally, out of ammunition, the Janissaries resorted to throwing anything they found on deck, including lemons and oranges, at the murderous Christian gunners.

So many combatants were confined within such a small space—often as many as four hundred rowers and soldiers occupying 3,000 square feet—that few shots could miss, whether powered by muscle or powder. Whereas in ancient trireme ramming, most fatalities were due to drowning, in sixteenth-century sea fights men just as often died from arrows and cannon fire, if not frequently butchered by boarding parties as they rowed chained and immovable. Galleys were ingeniously designed for relatively calm waters—there is essentially little tide in the Mediterranean—and their firepower and speed made them terrible predators of merchant ships. But once galley met galley, their assets were often neutralized, and the resulting battle more resembled a confused free-for-all on land than a contest of seamanship.

The maximum range of most smaller galley cannon was not more than five hundred yards. Given the slow rates of fire—especially in the Ottoman fleet—most ships could shoot off only one volley before their target had closed the distance and was either ramming or boarding as the attackers desperately reloaded. A real European advantage at Lepanto lay in having more numerous and heavier cannon throughout the fleet— Venetian artillery was the most finely crafted in the world—that could concentrate their fusillades on the Ottoman galleys as they approached to board, ensuring that a single volley from dozens of heavy guns could annihilate the entire first wave of skirmishers.

The advent of cannon, harquebusiers, and shackled slave rowers brought to the ancient idea of oared warships unprecedented death and suffering at Lepanto, torment unimagined by the crews at Salamis two millennia earlier, despite the greater aggregate losses at the ancient battle. Often the crews of whole ships—rowers and skirmishers in the hundreds—were slaughtered when hooked, boarded, and raked at point-blank range with antipersonnel cannon and musket fire. Gianpietro Contarini says that at Lepanto there was an enormous confusion of swords, scimitars, iron maces, knives, arrows, harquebuses, and fire grenades on every ship. One Spanish source mentions a galley on the right wing on which after the battle every single man was found dead or wounded. It was a truism that European navies in the Mediterranean— the Venetians especially—were without the manpower of the Ottoman fleet and therefore increasingly counted on gunpowder to do what muscle could not. Galley warfare also left the combatants far more vulnerable than on land: on the overloaded boats there was scarcely enough room to turn around, and the surrounding sea cut off all avenues of retreat. The armor of the Christians and the robes and purses of the Ottomans ensured that there was little chance to keep afloat once a soldier was thrown or fell into the water. Most decks were deliberately waxed and oiled to undermine footing and topple intruders.

Ramming was still frequently employed by the Ottomans, as well as boarding by swordsmen and archers. But the introduction of cannon that could hurl iron or stone projectiles of thirty and more pounds right through the side of a low-lying galley also meant that the onrushing seas could swallow chained rowers in a few minutes. Many Turkish galleys were sunk or abandoned at Lepanto, not hauled away as prizes, since cannon fire, not boarding parties, had brought on their demise. The classical protocols of attacking in unison with beaks outward, ship by ship, to prevent enemy inroads was not so important when the new European ships were bristling with cannon on all sides and could fire in any direction. To save powder and lead, the Christians in small boats used long pikes to spear any Turks they found still alive in the sea.

Ramming was eventually doomed by the advent of relatively plentiful bronze-cast cannon: the mounting of each 5,000-pound gun meant that additional oarsmen were necessary to recover an overburdened galley’s original speed. But the increase in rowers added more weight to the ship, required ever more deck space, and ultimately revealed that the laws of physics limited how large and heavy a galley might grow and still find itself seaworthy—quite apart from questions of how to feed and support four hundred rowers, crew, and gunners.

Larger, three-masted galleons, not even the novel and well-armed galleasses, were the answer. The former had no oars; but with higher decks and broad sails, galleons alone possessed the requisite on-ship surface area, smaller crews, and locomotive power to support an ever-increasing number of heavy cannon and tons of stored shot and powder. Larger ships could also navigate the rough Atlantic and Pacific and stay at sea for weeks, unlike the Mediterranean galley. In contrast to Spain and France, the Ottomans had no ports on the Atlantic and so by the seventeenth century lacked transoceanic navigational experience and the sheer technological know-how to build topflight galleons. It was more common to see European warships than Ottoman galleys in the Islamic waters of the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea.

The name of Lepanto conjures up clean images of gaudy Renaissance banners, vast oil canvases of the European masters, and a variety of fascinating Christian spiritual and material commemoratives. Yet life aboard a sixteenth-century Mediterranean galley was nearly unbearable. Most ships in continual service rotted and were unseaworthy within five years. Unlike the ancient trireme, which was less often powered by servile rowers and allowed more space for each oarsman, the galley slave was usually chained to his rowing bench alongside four others. He urinated, defecated, and in rough seas often vomited where he was bound. Clothed in a brief loincloth, he had no protection from seawater, rain, or frost—or the scorching heat of the Mediterranean summer that constituted the greater portion of the sailing season. The sixteenth-century rower was also not free, like his ancient counterpart was, to forage onshore. Nor did his ship seek shelter on land at nightfall—so that on occasion he worked, slept, and ate at his bench for days on end. Dry biscuits and a cup of wine were standard, not the cakes and adequate provisions characteristic of the rations for freemen in the ancient Athenian navy. When a fleet of a hundred such ships pulled into port, a veritable floating city of 40,000 hungry mouths quickly exhausted the local municipal food reserves, as the noisome cargo of tons of raw sewage spread disease and a lingering miasma throughout the port.

Contemporary accounts also relate a number of bizarre details that only confirm the horror. Sailors, marines, and rowers all wore scented scarves—purportedly the origin of the Mediterranean male’s propensity to use strong perfumes—to mask the stench and prevent vomiting. When flies, roaches, lice, fleas, and rats had overrun a galley, and its four-inch-thick boards became inundated with offal, captains—particularly the more fastidious Knights of Malta—sometimes temporarily sank the boats right offshore, in hopes that a few hours of total submersion in seawater might rid them of their cargo of vermin. Plagues—most often cholera and typhus—could wipe out entire flotillas, and understandably so, when four or five men were chained day and night alongside each other, stewing in each other’s lice, fleas, excrement, urine, and sweat. Such were the conditions of service for the nearly 200,000 desperate seamen who collided on October 7, 1571.

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.