Read Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power Online
Authors: Victor Davis Hanson
Tags: #Military history, #Battles, #General, #Civilization, #Military, #History
Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power (35 page)
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 scarcely 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 Anatolian 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.
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.