Empires of the Sea - the Final Battle for the Mediterranean 1521-1580 (27 page)

In Madrid, Venice, Genoa, and Rome a hundred theories were circulating about Ottoman intentions. It was said that the sultan had no appetite for war: “The Turk is only interested in amusing himself, having a good time and eating and drinking; he placed all affairs of state in the hands of his chief minister,” came back a Spanish report. Others claimed that the Ottomans were busy in the East or were just biding their time.

The true sources of Ottoman policy were hidden from foreign powers, no matter how hard agents in Istanbul pressed their ears to the wall; nor did anyone possess a panoptic vision of the sea. There were larger rhythms at work in the Mediterranean in the years 1566–68 that interfered with human plans: harvest failures and grain shortages in cities with swelling populations, outbreaks of plague and famine. People were dying of hunger in Egypt and Syria in 1566; in 1567, Spanish agents reported a terrible shortage of bread in Istanbul; plague carried off many people there. The narrow margins of human survival quieted war talk.

At the same time the energetic Sokollu Mehmet was occupied with trouble farther east. The Ottomans learned early the difficulty of managing Arab lands; there were revolts in the marshes north of Basra, more serious trouble in the Yemen. Simultaneously Sokollu conceived visionary projects to overcome the barriers to new conquests; he ordered the construction of a Suez canal that would give Ottoman ships direct access to the Indies, and he developed a matching plan for a second canal linking the Black and the Caspian seas to enable an attack on the Persian foe by water. Neither project came to fruition and these failures were significant. There would be no New World for Ottoman navigators. Hemmed in, they necessarily had to push forward again into the Old.

The checks and balances of motive and initiative in the late 1560s were the play of new globalizing forces in the world. The Mediterranean was the center of a vast arena of turmoil whose interconnections could be grasped only from space. Events in the Yemen, in the Netherlands, in Hungary and North Africa, were intertwined. The Protestant revolution in northern Europe was facilitated by the Mediterranean pressure the Turks applied to Philip. And for the first time, the New World was exerting an influence on Europe. France and Spain bristled with particular hostility after the Spanish massacre of French settlers at Fort Caroline in Florida in 1564. More dramatically the silver mines of Potosi in Peru were making and wrecking the economies of the Old World. From the 1540s, bullion fleets across the Atlantic were supplying the Spanish crown with the means to fight. The king could build ships, pay for professional armies, wage wars, on an unprecedented scale. But with this inflow of wealth came an inflationary pressure the Hapsburgs failed to understand. Warfare had always been costly; in the sixteenth century it rocketed. The price of ship’s biscuit—a critical expense in sea warfare—quadrupled in sixty years; the commensurate total cost of operating Spanish war galleys tripled; price increases rippled across Europe and lapped at the shores of the Ottoman world too. War had become an expensive game. “To carry out war, three things are necessary,” remarked the Milanese general Marshal Trivulzio presciently in 1499, “money, money and yet more money.”

Only two superpowers—the Ottomans and the Hapsburgs—had the resources now to wage war on a significant scale, and they were evenly matched. In the age of empire both could extract resources, tax, and aggregate matériel on a hitherto unimaginable scale. By midcentury, power was being concentrated in Madrid and Istanbul; formidable bureaucracies managed the logistics of war in distant provinces with impressive skill. In the Mediterranean the exponential weight of numbers was driving smaller players to the wall. Venice had been the great naval power of the fifteenth century; by the time of Preveza in 1538, though her fleet was five times larger, it was still dwarfed by the Ottomans’. The impact of fleet sizes was shrinking space; where wars within the Mediterranean had once been local, they could now encompass the whole sea. Spain and the Ottomans had been sniping blindly for thirty years, since Barbarossa and Doria. They had fought each other to a standstill at Malta. A decisive clash for control of the center of the world still awaited.

No one moved more warily in the shadow of power than the Venetians. They struggled to live on the shrinking frontier between Istanbul and Madrid. Venice was continually torn between trade and war. Her position kept her ambiguous, a liminal place between two worlds, of neither the land nor the sea, the East nor the West, interpreting each to the other—and treated by both as a double agent. Nobody invested so much energy in watching and understanding “the Grand Turk,” or in conniving with him. Deep in the maze of passages beneath the doge’s palace, a busy secretariat monitored Ottoman intentions in scrupulous detail; thousands of pages of memoranda, reports, international briefings poured from the tips of Venetian pens. At the same time, the republic’s diplomats worked tirelessly to appease her voracious neighbor—cosseting and cajoling, toadying to Ottoman sultans, bribing ministers, supplying information and rich gifts—and spying. A ceaseless flurry of encoded messages from the republic’s residents in Istanbul made it back to the doge’s palace on trading galleys and swift brigantines, interpreting palace politics, fleet movements, and rumors of war. The Venetians briefed shamelessly on both sides according to the set of tested maxims: “It is better to treat all enemy rulers as friends,” one seasoned politician advised, “and all friends as potential enemies.” Venice followed this to the letter. To the pope they presented themselves as the front line of Christendom, to the sultan as a trading partner and friend. When Philip appointed his half brother Don Juan of Austria to command his resurgent fleet in 1568, Venice sent honeyed messages of congratulation but kept Istanbul fully informed of his movements.

Venice played her cards with extreme care, but after Malta this delicate balancing act became increasingly fraught. Despite the new peace treaty with Selim in 1567 and the quiet waters of 1568, the Venetians were edgy and disquieted. Why were the Turks so amenable? Were they concealing something? Was the new treaty designed to lull? There were worrying signs. Intelligence reports suggested new works in the Istanbul arsenal; and Selim was quietly constructing a fort on the mainland opposite Cyprus. Seasoned sea watchers feared for the safety of the Most Serene Republic’s overseas colonies. La Valette, who evidently knew a thing or two, sold all his Order’s landholdings in Cyprus in 1567 shortly before he died. The Venetian senate took tentative steps—modestly increasing troop numbers and building cannon foundries on Crete and Cyprus—but war was expensive and the hardnosed Venetians were reluctant to lay out speculative cash. They continued to guard their hand.

The difficulties for the papacy of corralling Venice and Spain into a Holy League against the Turks seemed as great in 1568 as they had ever been. Philip was still busy in the Low Countries. He had no sharp motivation for aggressive war; nor was there any reason to help the self-serving Venetians if they were attacked on Cyprus or Crete. Had they helped at Djerba? Had they not openly rejoiced at the fall of Saint Elmo? And the Venetians, for their part, were quite happy trading with Islam until a blow fell—then they would appeal to all Christendom. But not until.

And yet, for those who could see, the underlying conditions were there: Selim’s need for a confirming victory, the incendiary blasts of Pius V, the aggregation of resources among the two superpowers, the shrinking sea—it was only a matter of time before something triggered a headlong rush to war. In the dying days of 1567, events in Spain started to quicken the pace.

THE CLIMATE OF RELIGIOUS
fervor in Spain had been sharpened by Protestant rebellion in the Netherlands. The Catholic Church felt itself under attack on all sides, nowhere more so than in the land of the Catholic King himself. The infidel was never far away; he was just across the straits of Gibraltar, a short sail away; he surrounded Spain; closer even, he was within its very heartlands. The Moriscos, the remnant Muslim population of southern Spain, forcibly converted to Christianity by imperial decree, remained unfinished business; they were somehow inassimilable. As the shadow of the Turk lengthened over the whole sea, fear grew that the Moriscos were still crypto-Muslims, a fifth column of Ottoman holy war in the homelands. Christian Spain became increasingly wary of its home population. Year after year, tightening decrees attempted to determine the zeal of the suspect new Christians. On January 1, 1567, Philip issued an edict to erase the last cultural traces of Islam in Spain: Arabic could no longer be spoken, the veil was prohibited, and so were public baths. It was the last straw for a goaded people, backed into a corner by intolerance and religious dogma. On Christmas night 1567, Morisco mountaineers from the Alpujarras scaled the walls of the Alhambra Palace in Granada and called for uprising in the name of Allah.

The southern mountains of Spain crackled with revolt. Catholic Spain found itself suddenly embroiled in internal holy war with Islam, and its best troops were hundreds of miles away in the Netherlands. The uprising projected all the fears about the Turks onto a huge screen. The Moriscos had been appealing for aid from Istanbul for seventy years. In the late 1560s they sent out cries for help, dispatching representatives to the sultan. Selim ordered men and arms from Algiers in early 1570; arquebuses were shipped across the straits; there were soon four thousand Turkish and Barbary troops in the mountains of southern Spain. There was live fear that the Turks were planning a long-distance invasion of Spain; it was claimed they would sail in 1570 “to give heart and help to the Moors of Granada.” Sokollu Mehmet openly asked the French king for use of Toulon as a base. And in the confusion the corsair Uluch Ali dethroned a Spanish puppet regime and recaptured Tunis. At a stroke, Charles’s proudest achievement had been undone. Suddenly distance was telescoped: Istanbul was no longer a thousand miles to the east. The spectre of the Turk was very close indeed.

The Morisco revolt served to concentrate Philip’s mind firmly on the Mediterranean; troops were recalled from Italy; more were levied in Calabria. Don Juan of Austria was given the task of crushing the rebels. It was a dirty fight, driven by the long-repressed resentment of the Moriscos and the matching fear of the Christians. Fought with visceral hatred across the fault lines of culture and faith, it prefigured the horror of Goya’s firing squads, the pitiless mutilations of the Spanish civil war. The Moriscos were buoyed up by the encouragement of Turkish intervention; they fought desperately and horribly in the snow-blocked passes of the Alpujarras. But the Spanish operated with slamming brutality. On October 19, 1569, Philip gave the army the right to take booty from the Moriscos. The war of fire and blood dragged on through 1570. On November 1 of that year Philip made the drastic decision to order the expulsion of the whole civilian Morisco population from the lowlands for tacitly abetting the revolt. Don Juan approved its logic but found it heartrending. “It was the saddest sight in the world,” he wrote on November 5, “for at the moment of departure there was so much rain, wind and snow that the poor people clung together lamenting. One cannot deny that the spectacle of the depopulation of a kingdom is the most pitiful anyone can imagine.” The rebellion collapsed. The promised Turkish armada never came; it was probably never intended to come: it seems likely that Sokollu used the Moriscos to distract attention from deeper intentions. The cornerstone of Sokollu’s thinking was to ensure the development of Ottoman plans without provoking unified Christian action.

On this occasion the strategy confounded its own purposes; Sokollu had probably intended to tie Philip up with the problems of his internal revolt. The revolt had quite the opposite effect. It enabled Philip to grasp a strategic truth: until the Turk was defeated in the central Mediterranean, Spain would always be under threat. The Morisco revolt rendered Philip susceptible to the pope’s call for unified Christian warfare.

What the true Ottoman purposes might have been was suggested by a small incident at the other end of the sea. In early September 1568, a fleet of sixty-four Ottoman galleys appeared off the southeast coast of Cyprus, under the vizier Ali Pasha. At Famagusta the Venetian rulers of the island tensed themselves, then dispatched one of their ships, “with a fine present of a thousand piastres in a silver bowl,” to exchange courtesies. The vizier declared that there was no cause for alarm; he was on his way to load timber on the Anatolian coast and simply wanted to hire a pilot. Furthermore the Venetians should discount rumors of a military buildup in Istanbul. A fleet was being prepared to aid the Moriscos in Spain, and the army would march on Persia. The Venetians had every reason to be wary of such “visits” friendly landfall on the Genoese island of Chios in 1566 by Piyale had resulted in its capture. Nevertheless a contingent of Turkish officers was treated to a courtesy tour of the fortifications of Famagusta; Ali Pasha himself came ashore the following day in disguise. With him he brought an Italian engineer in the sultan’s service, Josefi Attanto, with a request that he should be allowed to tour the island to find four classical columns suitable for a building he was constructing for Selim. Attanto dutifully scoured the island; despite the extensively colonnaded ruins at Salamis just a few miles north of Famagusta, he was mysteriously unable to find anything suitable. He did however give close attention to the fortifications of both Famagusta and Nicosia.

Ali’s fleet departed. A few days later Cyprus learned that it had never gone for timber but returned directly to Istanbul, snatching a boatload of Venetian soldiers from Famagusta as it sailed off.

CHAPTER
16

A Head in a Dish

1570

M
AYBE THE VENETIANS HAD SEEN
this coming for a long time. Maybe after thirty years of peace they hid from themselves the truth about Ottoman power. After the fall of Rhodes, Cyprus was an anomaly, Christianity’s forward position in a Muslim sea, isolated, fertile, hundreds of sea miles from Venice, both a provocation and a temptation to the sultans in Istanbul—“an island thrust into the mouth of the wolf,” one Venetian called it.

Like Malta, Cyprus had always lived in the shadow of empires and holy wars. From the air it looks like some primitive marine dinosaur, with a swordfish beak and crude flippers pushing hard into the corner of the sea. Beirut is a mere sixty miles to the southeast; the snowcapped mountains of Anatolia are visible to the north. Too big, too fertile, too close to ignore, everyone had made a claim on the place and left their mark. The Assyrians, the Persians, the Phoenicians had been and gone. The island’s root population of Greek speakers had been converted to Orthodox Christianity by the long rule of Byzantium. The Arabs held it for three centuries, and Islam never forgot the claim. When Crusaders came from the West, they turned Cyprus into the mart and marshaling yard of Christian war. They built Gothic cathedrals among the palm trees and transformed its inland capital, Nicosia, into a polyglot meeting place of diverse worlds, and the port of Famagusta briefly into the wealthiest city on earth. By the time the Venetians acquired it by sleight of hand in 1489, the current of holy war had reversed again, and the Ottomans were already halfway masters of the Eastern Mediterranean.

Almost from the start of Venetian rule, Cyprus had been on the checklist of Ottoman conquests. The Venetians paid tribute to the sultan and bribes to his viziers to preserve their neutrality; theirs was an undignified policy of appeasement, slipping ducats into complacent hands year after year. It was, on the whole, cost-effective and cheaper than maintaining war fleets, now let to rot in the backwaters, but this policy permitted no fallback position. It encouraged belief in Istanbul that the republic had grown soft with peace and would never fight.

In the short run, appeasement had been worth it. Cyprus supplied the mother city with a stream of wealth: grain from the great central plain, salt from the southern shore, strong wine, sugar, and cotton—“the plant of gold”—produced by serfs under conditions of plantation slavery. Venice held the island strictly for its commercial utility and treated it as badly as Crete. In the imagery of Venetian artists, Neptune poured the riches of these marine colonies from an inexhaustible conch into the city’s lap; their wealth went to construct everything that rose like a mirage from the malarial lagoon—the stone churches, the paintings of Titian and the music of Saint Mark’s, the palazzos, the Grand Canal by moonlight—all this had been brought or paid for by the merchant galleys beating their way home from the eastern seas.

It was a one-way trade. Venice gave nothing back. The downtrodden Greek Cypriot peasantry were ruled corruptly and taxed viciously. They were poor beyond belief. “All the inhabitants of Cyprus are slaves to the Venetians,” wrote the visitor Martin von Baumgarten in 1508, “obliged to pay to the state a third of all their increase or income…and which is more, there is yearly some tax or other imposed on them, with which the poor common people are so flayed and pillaged that they hardly have the wherewithal to keep soul and body together.” When in 1516 the administration of Cyprus proposed to generate extra cash by selling some of their twenty-six thousand serfs out of bondage, only one man could raise the fifty ducats. Nor was the tone of the island improved by its employment as a Botany Bay for the republic’s undesirables. Murderers and political dissidents were exiled to Famagusta to swell the population. It was, all in all, a recipe for nervous occupation: the Cypriots would not reliably fight for their overlords as the Maltese had done. They slipped across the straits and made appeals to the sultan. Two Cypriots appeared in Istanbul in the 1560s with letters to Suleiman that the serfs would welcome Ottoman rule on the island; the Venetian agent in the city bribed Sokollu to hand over the men; they conveniently disappeared, but the incident did not increase Venetian confidence. The 1560s brought growing civil disturbances and ill omens: a proposed peasants’ revolt in 1562; violent storms, famine, plague, earthquakes, and bread riots—all interpreted as signs from God; and the repeated, dull mutter of invasion scares, despite the renewal of treaties in 1567.

Selim had always been attracted by Cyprus. As early as 1550, the Venetian senate had been warned that if Selim came to the throne, there would be war. By the late 1560s there were pressing dynastic and strategic reasons for eliminating the Venetian colony so close to the Ottoman shore. Selim needed full legitimacy for his regime—and only a brilliant victory could bind the army to their less than charismatic sultan. The great Ottoman architect Sinan was preparing plans for a new mosque complex at Edirne, but according to custom and tradition a sultan’s mosque had to be constructed with funds provided by the infidel; these could come only from conquest. Selim’s early forays in expanding the empire farther east had come to nothing; there was a turning back to the Mediterranean again. At the same time, the Venetian island was a legitimate strategic problem. It sat across the crucial hajj routes to Mecca and trade routes to Egypt, through which the wealth of the East flowed into Istanbul, and the Venetian authorities had been less than effective in clearing out Christian corsairs from the area; the Knights of Saint John continued to be a particular menace. Cyprus lay uncomfortably within the Ottoman center of influence, and when pirates captured the ship carrying the treasurer of Egypt in 1569, Selim’s mind was finally made up. The island must be taken.

Behind this decision lay a power struggle at the heart of the Ottoman court. Selim’s favorites included Lala Mustapha Pasha, his boyhood tutor, and Piyale Pasha, both keen to regain military glory after personal setbacks—and to steal an advance on the chief vizier. Sokollu Mehmet himself was wary of an initiative that might unite Christian Europe, and unwilling to see his rivals triumph, but the sultan was not to be gainsaid. Sokollu’s personal strategy was now to attempt to wheedle Cyprus from the Venetians by diplomacy.

As Venice was at peace with the empire, a religious opinion was sought from the chief mufti as to the legitimacy of breaking a treaty with the infidel; the mufti duly found precedent in the Arab occupation of the island: it was Selim’s duty to recover these places for Islam. It was the only treaty the Ottomans would break in the sixteenth century. From the outset the Cyprus campaign carried particular overtones of holy war.

Sokollu Mehmet, the chief vizier

When the sultan’s emissary, Kubat, delivered his message to the Venetian authorities on March 28, 1570, the broad contents were already known and a response framed; even before Kubat was heard, the red banner of war had been carried in the doge’s procession. The Venetians listened in silence to the familiar, peremptory crash of Ottoman rhetoric and reported it thus:

Selim, Ottoman Sultan, Emperor of the Turks, Lord of Lords, King of Kings, Shadow of God, Lord of the Earthly Paradise and of Jerusalem, to the Signory of Venice: We demand of you Cyprus, which you shall give Us willingly or perforce; and do you not irritate our horrible sword, for We shall wage most cruel war against you everywhere; nor let you trust in your treasure, for We shall cause it suddenly to run away from you like a torrent; beware to irritate Us.

It was the measure of how intimately the Ottomans—or Sokollu—understood Venice that their direst threat was on cost grounds, but the senate was resolute and voted for war by the unprecedented margin of 195 to 5. Kubat had to be slipped out of a back door to avoid the attentions of the mob.

DESPITE THIS THUNDERCLAP,
the Ottoman plan was not a sudden whim; the visit of 1568 indicated that it was years deep, part of a clear intention for final Ottoman control of the Eastern Mediterranean. Reconnaissance had been accompanied by planning that conformed to all the verities of Ottoman diplomacy and turned on careful calculations. Whatever Sokollu felt, he was instrumental in preparing the ground. He had made peace in Hungary and the Yemen, then thrown dust in the eyes of Christian Europe: the promised support for the Morisco revolt was intended to distract Philip in faraway Madrid; in France, Charles IX was receiving from the Turks offers of new treaties, to keep Christendom in diplomatic turmoil. As for the Venetians, they had been encouraged to use their bribes on Sokollu as “the friend of Venice” who could pour oil on the troubled waters of Ottoman aggression and who would then offer, at the last moment, to take the island peacefully off their hands. Sokollu reasoned that Venice was too far from Cyprus to mount an adequate defense—if it fought at all—and, crucially, that Europe was too disunited to mount a joint response. Fear of crusade always dominated Ottoman thinking, but two hundred years’ experience of disorganized pan-Christian actions had reasonably led Sokollu to hope that Venice could be teased into peaceful surrender. It was a reasonable bet that proved wrong. No one in early 1570 could have predicted that the Cyprus war and the Morisco revolt—events at the far ends of the sea—would trigger a chain reaction that would surprise everyone. Nor had anyone made adequate allowance for the messianic personality of Pope Pius V, or the daring of Don Juan of Austria, or the velocity that events in Famagusta would impart to a united sense of Christian purpose.

EVEN BEFORE KUBAT’S
dramatic ultimatum, the Venetians had started to make overtures to Christian Europe and, against their better judgment, to raise the question of Holy League again. On March 10, the doge was writing to his ambassador at Philip’s court in Madrid with oily disingenuousness that “the forces of his Catholic Majesty should be united with ours in order to oppose the fury and power of the Turks, to which we have readily assented because of our desire for the universal good, and because we hope that the Lord God has turned His compassionate eyes toward Christendom, and that He is willing at this time to repress the audacity of the infidels.” The problem was that no one believed in Venice’s sincerity; people wondered, even as Venice made this offer, if the republic was still negotiating with Sokollu—which indeed they were. If the Ottomans withdrew their threat, the merchants on the Rialto would cheerfully forget the greater good of Christendom and go back to trading with the infidel. Philip could doubtless still recall Venetians cheering at the fall of Saint Elmo and had no intrinsic interest in helping Venice; indeed the Ottoman concentration on Cyprus seemed an ideal moment to retake Tunis and consolidate the Western Mediterranean.

Everyone, however, had reckoned without the pope. The Cyprus crisis was just the opportunity to reanimate the Holy League for which Pius had been waiting. He threw himself headlong into the project with a frightening passion; he immediately committed the papacy to supplying galleys for the venture and loosed the papal purse strings with a promptness that left the recipients slightly openmouthed after the tightfistedness of his predecessor. “His Holiness has demonstrated the truth of one of our Castilian proverbs,” quipped the Spanish cardinal Espinosa, “that the constipated die from diarrhea.”

Pius dispatched the Spanish churchman Luis de Torres to Philip with cogent arguments for combined action. “It is clear that one of the principal reasons why the Turk has quarrelled with the Venetians is that he thought he would find them unaided, without any hope of uniting with Your Majesty, who is so occupied with the Moors of Granada.” That had indeed been Sokollu’s calculation; it was a reasonable one, but it had unintended consequences.

Philip was suspicious of the whole idea of Holy Leagues, and it was not in his nature to act spontaneously. God’s bureaucrat, who dressed soberly in black, read everything, ruled absolutely, thought suspiciously, and acted cautiously, was not one to make up his mind quickly—nor to reveal his intentions prematurely. “He is one of the greatest dissimulators in the world,” complained the French ambassador. “He knows how to pretend and conceal his intentions better than any king…up to the time and the hour at which it suits him to let them be known.” Where Selim delegated the affairs of state, Philip wanted to weigh every detail and manage every operation personally. His decision-making was a byword for sloth. “If we have to wait for death,” joked his officials, “let us hope that it comes from Spain, for then it would never arrive.”