Empires of the Sea - the Final Battle for the Mediterranean 1521-1580
Read Empires of the Sea - the Final Battle for the Mediterranean 1521-1580 Online
Authors: Roger Crowley
Tags: #Military History, #Retail, #European History, #Eurasian History, #Maritime History
Contents
To George,
who also fought in this sea, and who took us there
The inhabitants of the Maghreb have it on the authority of the book of predictions that the Muslims will make a successful attack against the Christians and conquer the lands of the European Christians beyond the sea. This, it is said, will take place by sea.
—
IBN KHALDUN, FOURTEENTH-CENTURY ARAB HISTORIAN
PROLOGUE
Ptolemy’s Map
L
ONG BEFORE THE OFFICE BLOCKS
across the Golden Horn, before even the mosques, there was the church. The dome of Saint Sophia stood alone against the skyline for a thousand years. If you had made your way up onto its roof anytime in the Middle Ages, you would have been afforded an unimpeded view of “the city garlanded by water.” From here it is quite clear why Constantinople once ruled the world.
On the afternoon of May 29, 1453, Mehmet II, sultan of the Ottoman Empire, made this ascent. It was the end of a momentous day. His army had just taken the city by storm in fulfillment of Islamic prophecy and destroyed the last vestiges of the Christian empire of Byzantium. Mehmet climbed, in the words of the Ottoman chronicler, “as the spirit of God ascending to the fourth sphere of heaven.”
The sultan gazed upon a scene of melancholy devastation. Constantinople had been wrecked and thoroughly looted, “despoiled and blackened as if by fire.” The city’s army had been routed, the churches ransacked; its last emperor had perished in the massacre. Long lines of men, women, and children were being roped together and herded off. Flags fluttered from empty buildings, a sign to looters that the spoils had already gone. Above the pitiful wailing of the captives, the call to prayer rose in the spring air. It signaled the emphatic end of one imperial dynasty, the legitimization of another by right of conquest. The Ottoman Turks, a nomadic, tribal people from the heart of Asia, had now consolidated the presence of Islam on the European shore in the city they called Istanbul. Its capture confirmed Mehmet both as heir to Byzantium and as the undisputed leader of holy war.
From his vantage point the sultan could contemplate the past and future of the Turkish people. To the south, beyond the Bosphorus straits, lay Anatolia, Asia Minor, the road up which the Turks had made their long migration; to the north, Europe, the object of their territorial ambitions. But it was the prospect to the west that was to prove most challenging to the Ottomans. In the afternoon sun, the Sea of Marmara glittered like beaten brass; beyond lay the wide expanse of the Mediterranean, the place the Turks called the White Sea. With the conquest of Byzantium, Mehmet was not just inheriting a landmass; he was also heir to a maritime empire.
THE EVENTS OF
1453 were part of a larger ebb and flow in the struggle between Islam and Christianity. Between the eleventh and the fifteenth centuries, Christendom, on the impetus of the Crusades, had dominated the Mediterranean. It had created a patchwork of small states on the shores of Greece and the islands of the Aegean, which linked the enterprise of crusading to the Latin West. The direction of conquest had begun to reverse when the Crusaders lost their last major foothold on the shores of Palestine in 1291 at the fall of Acre. Now Islam was poised to strike back.
No one since the Romans had possessed sufficient resources to organize this sea, but Mehmet conceived himself as the inheritor of the Roman emperors. His ambitions were limitless. He was determined to create “one empire, one faith and one sovereignty in the world,” and he styled himself the “sovereign of two seas”—the White and the Black. This was alien territory for the Ottomans. The sea is not solid ground. There are no natural frontiers, nowhere for nomads to pitch camp. It is uninhabitable. It remembers nothing: Islam had established footholds in the Mediterranean before and then lost them. But Mehmet had already set down a clear declaration of intent: he brought a large, if inexperienced, fleet to the siege of Constantinople, and the Ottomans were quick learners.
In the years after the conquest, Mehmet commissioned a copy of a map of Europe by the ancient geographer Ptolemy, translated for him into Arabic by Greeks. Here he studied the configuration of the sea in predatory detail. He ran his finger over Venice, Rome, Naples, Sicily, Marseilles, and Barcelona; he traced the Gates of Gibraltar; even faraway Britain fell under his gaze. The translators had prudently ensured that nowhere was marked as prominently as Istanbul, and Mehmet was as yet unaware that the Catholic kings in Spain were in the process of constructing a matching set of imperial ambitions at the map’s western edge. Madrid and Istanbul, like giant mirrors reflecting the same sun, were initially too far apart to be mutually visible. Soon hostility would focus the light. Even Ptolemy’s map, with its unfamiliar misshapen peninsulas and distorted islands, could not conceal an essential fact about the Mediterranean: it is really two seas, pinched at the middle by the narrow straits between Tunis and Sicily, with Malta sitting midstream, an awkward dot. The Ottomans would quickly dominate the eastern seas, the Hapsburgs of Spain the western. In time both would converge on the dot.
NOWADAYS YOU CAN FLY
the length of the Mediterranean, from southern Spain to the shores of Lebanon, in three hours. From the air it is a peaceful prospect; the orderly procession of ships moves tamely over the glittering surface. The thousands of miles of crenellated coast on the northern shore reveal holiday villages, yacht harbors, and smart resorts, as well as the great ports and industrial complexes that provide the economic muscle of Southern Europe. Every vessel in this calm lagoon can be tracked from space. Ships travel at will, immune to the storms that wrecked Odysseus and Saint Paul. To our ever-shrinking world the place the Romans called the center of the world seems tiny.
Five hundred years ago people experienced the sea quite differently. Its shores were coasts of hunger, stripped early of trees, then soil, by men and goats. By the fourteenth century, Crete was able to furnish Dante with an image of ecological ruin. “In mid-sea sits a waste land,” he wrote, “which once was happy with water and leaves. Now it is a desert.” The sea is also barren. The Mediterranean has been formed by dramatic geological collapse, so that the entrancing transparent waters at its edge plunge away sharply into deep submarine gulfs. There are no continental platforms to rival the rich fishing grounds of Newfoundland or the North Sea. To those living on the shore, the million square miles of water, broken up into a dozen separate zones, each with its own particular winds and coastal irregularities and scattered islands, were intractable, vast, and dangerous—so big that the two halves of the Mediterranean were different worlds. A sailing ship might take two months to make the voyage from Marseilles to Crete in good weather, in bad six. Boats were surprisingly unseaworthy, storms sudden, pirates numerous, so that sailors generally preferred to creep around the sea’s coastal margins rather than cross open water. Peril attended the voyage: no sane person would step up the gangplank without committing his soul to God. The Mediterranean was a sea of troubles. And after 1453 it became the epicenter of a world war.
On this terrain was played out one of the fiercest and most chaotic contests in European history: the struggle between Islam and Christianity for the center of the world. It was a drawn-out affair. Battle rolled blindly across the water for well over a century; the opening skirmishes alone, in which the Ottomans eclipsed Venice, lasted fifty years. The struggle assumed many forms: little wars of economic attrition, pirate raids in the name of faith, attacks on coastal forts and harbors, sieges of the great island bastions, and, rarest of all, a handful of epic sea battles. The struggle sucked in all the nations and special-interest groups that bordered Mediterranean waters: Turks, Greeks, North Africans, Spaniards, Italians, and Frenchmen; the peoples of the Adriatic Sea and the Dalmatian coast; merchants, imperialists, pirates, and holy warriors. All fought in shifting alliances to protect religion, trade, or empire. None could fly a neutral flag for long, though the Venetians tried hard.
The landlocked arena provided limitless possibilities for confrontation. North to south it is surprisingly narrow; in many places only a small strip of water separates alien peoples. Raiders could appear over the horizon at a moment’s notice, and vanish again at will. Not since the lightning strikes of the Mongols had Europe experienced so abruptly the sudden terror of enemies. The Mediterranean became a biosphere of chaotic violence where Islam and Christianity clashed with unmatched ferocity. The battlegrounds were water, islands, and shores, where events were conditioned by wind and weather, the key weapon the oared galley.
FOR CHRISTENDOM, THE OTTOMANS,
whose empire was multiethnic, were always simply the Turks, “cruellest enemy of Christ’s name.” Western Europe saw the contest as the source of ultimate war, and experienced it as trauma, a psychic struggle against the powers of darkness. Within the Vatican, they knew about Ptolemy’s map. They imagined it as the template for Ottoman conquest and pictured the scene in the Topkapi Palace, high above the Bosphorus, in excruciating detail. The generic figure of the sultan, the Grand Turk, turbaned and caftanned, hook-nosed and genetically cruel, sits within the barbaric splendor of his tiled pavilion, studying the sea-lanes to the west. He thinks of nothing but the destruction of Christendom. To Pope Leo X in 1517, the menace of the Turk was as close as breathing. “He has daily in his hand a description and a painted map of the shores of Italy,” he wrote with a shudder. “He pays attention to nothing but collecting artillery, building ships, and surveying all these seas and the islands of Europe.” For the Ottomans and their North African allies it was payback time for the Crusades, the opportunity to reverse the flow of world conquest and control of trade.
This contest would be fought over a huge front, often far beyond the sea. Europe battled their enemy in the Balkans, on the plains of Hungary, in the Red Sea, at the gates of Vienna, but eventually, in the sixteenth century, the concentrated resources of the protagonists would converge on the center of the map. It would be a sixty-year struggle, directed by Mehmet’s great-grandson Suleiman. War broke out in earnest in 1521 and reached its climax between 1565 and 1571, six years of unparalleled bloodshed that saw the two heavyweights of the age—the Ottoman Turks and the Hapsburgs of Spain—hold up the battle standards of their faiths and fight to the death. The outcome would shape the boundaries of the Muslim and Christian worlds and condition the future direction of empires.
It began, if anywhere, with a letter.