Empires of the Sea - the Final Battle for the Mediterranean 1521-1580 (31 page)

FOUR MONTHS EARLIER,
a matching ceremony had taken place in Istanbul. Selim had conferred on Ali Pasha a similar swallow-tailed banner, but even larger. This one was vivid green—the color of paradise—and seamlessly embroidered with the ninety-nine names and attributes of God, repeated 28,900 times. Now it was dazzling splendidly in the autumn sun from the masthead of the
Sultana
in the Adriatic. The two banners were markers of matching aspirations and the assumption of God-given victory.

The consecrated Christian banner was given to mark the league’s first objective—the relief of Famagusta—but by now the war had drawn closer. During July and early August, Ali Pasha’s fleet had been blazing a trail of destruction across the Venetian sea empire. Working their way west along Crete and around the coast of Greece, the Ottomans made themselves lords of the Adriatic. Along the coast of modern Albania, they seized a string of fortified posts—Dulcigno, Antivari, and Budva—while the army moved overland in a coordinated pincer movement. Venier was forced to abandon his base on Corfu to avoid being bottled up, and moved the Venetian fleet west to Messina, to await the Spanish fleet. Venice was now totally without protection; the news worsened daily. In late July, the experienced corsairs Uluch Ali and Kara Hodja—“the black priest,” a defrocked Italian friar—carried their raids to the city’s very doorstep. Their ships came in sight of the city itself; an Ottoman squadron under Kara Hodja sustained a brief blockade of the basin of Saint Mark. Panic-stricken defensive measures were put in place; fortifications and cannon were mounted on the islands around the city. The Ottoman crescent moon was very close indeed.

FAR AWAY AT FAMAGUSTA,
the siege was entering its final act. Lala Mustapha’s offer of negotiated surrender was fiercely resisted. Bragadin was in personal agony: “You must know that by the commission which I hold, I am forbidden on pain of death to surrender the city. Forgive me,” he cried, “I cannot do it.” It took Baglione and two more punishing assaults to talk him around. By July 31, the city was on its knees. The last cat had been eaten; only nine hundred Italians were left alive, of whom four hundred were wounded. The survivors were exhausted, shell-shocked, and hungry. Many of the city’s beautiful buildings were in ruins. The Famagustans had paid the highest price for their loyalty. There were no ships on the horizon. Baglione reassured Bragadin that “having discharged our debt in defence [of the city], we have not failed in any way…. I tell you, on my word as a gentleman, that the city has fallen. At the next assault we shall not be able to meet them, not only because of our few troops, now so depleted, but because of the gunpowder, which has been reduced to five and a half barrels.” Famagusta had been pummeled for sixty-eight days, absorbed 150,000 rounds of cannon fire, and used up, through warfare or disease, perhaps sixty thousand Ottoman troops. Bragadin gave way. On August 1, in the network of interconnecting tunnels under the walls, Venetian miners handed their counterparts a letter for the pasha. The white flag was raised on the ramparts.

The generous terms were a measure of the toll on Lala Mustapha’s army. All the Italians would be allowed to leave the island with colors flying; safe passage on Ottoman ships would be afforded them to Crete; the Greek inhabitants could go if they wished or stay and enjoy personal liberty and property. The Italians wanted to take all their cannon, but Mustapha refused to allow more than five. At this point there is a small but significant difference in the sources. All the Venetians agree that these, give or take a few minor details, were the terms on which Mustapha sealed the document and granted the safe conduct. Mustapha Pasha subsequently narrated his own version to the chronicler Ali Efendi, who took part in the siege. In this there is a further clause: the Venetians were still holding fifty hajj pilgrims captured by Querini in January, and it was agreed by both parties that these pilgrims had to be surrendered. In the space between these two accounts, something terrible arose.

On August 5, the Venetians started to embark on the Turkish ships. “Up to that hour the Turks’ relations with all the rest of us had been friendly and without suspicion, for they had shown much courtesy toward us in both word and deed,” wrote Nestor Martinengo, although by this stage, against the terms of the agreement, Ottoman soldiers were already entering the city and engaging in opportunistic looting. It may have been difficult to restrain men who had been promised lavish booty by the pasha.

At the hour of vespers, with the ships almost loaded, Bragadin set out to take the city keys to Lala Mustapha. The proud Venetian aristocrat departed from Famagusta in a show of pomp—some suggested less the defeated general than the victor. He walked in state, preceded by trumpeters and wearing crimson robes. A crimson parasol was carried above his head as the symbol of his office. With him went Baglione and the other commanders and a personal bodyguard—about three hundred men in all. They walked with their heads held high between the jeering ranks of the Ottoman army, but were safely conducted with due ceremony to Mustapha’s tent. The commanders left their swords at the threshold and entered. Mustapha rose from his seat and gestured them to stools covered with crimson velvet; they duly kissed the pasha’s hand, and Bragadin began his formal declaration of surrender: “Since the Divine Majesty has determined that this kingdom should belong to the most illustrious Grand Signore, herewith I have brought the keys to the city, and herewith I give the city up to you in accordance with the pact which we have made with each other.” And then, at the moment of greatest vulnerability for the Venetians, it all started to go horribly wrong.

Negotiated surrender hangs on a thread of mutual trust. Whether it was the Bragadin’s visible pride, or his earlier taunt to Mustapha, or the pasha’s exasperation at the sheer pointlessness of a siege that had cost at least sixty thousand men, or a need to justify the lack of booty to his men, or a justifiable grievance about the prisoners, whether it was spontaneous or premeditated, none of this is clear, but when Bragadin inquired if they were now free to depart, the thread snapped.

According to the Ottoman accounts, it started with a tetchy exchange about guarantees of safekeeping for the return of the ships from Venetian Crete. Mustapha wanted a hostage from among the nobles. Bragadin cursed him angrily: “You shan’t have a noble, you shan’t even have a dog!” Angry now, Mustapha asked where the hajj prisoners were. According to Ali Efendi’s account, Bragadin admitted that they had been tortured and killed after the peace treaty had been signed: “Those Muslim captives were not under my personal control. The Venetians and native Beys killed them on the day of surrender and I killed those who were with me.”

“Then,” said the pasha, “you have broken the treaty.”

There were other matters too to add fuel to Mustapha’s fire: the destruction of a large quantity of cotton and ammunition—booty might well have been a subtext to the pasha’s displeasure—and there were something haughty in Bragadin’s words and manner that riled the conqueror unbearably.

The Venetians told the story differently. In one, Querini had taken most of the Muslim prisoners away with him in January; in another, it was claimed that only six were left, and they had escaped; in a third, that Bragadin was ignorant of the fate of these men. “Do I not know,” came the angry reply, “that you have murdered them all?” Then getting into his stride, all Mustapha’s grievances came tumbling out. “Tell me, you hound, why did you hold the fortress when you had not the wherewithal to do so? Why did you not surrender a month ago, and not make me lose 80,000 of the best men in my army?” He wanted a hostage against the safe return of his ships from Crete. Bragadin replied this was not in the terms. “Tie them all up!” shouted the pasha.

In a flash they were hustled outside and prepared for death. The executioners strode forward and Bragadin was made to stretch out his neck two or three times. Then Lala Mustapha thought again; he decided to reserve him for later and ordered his ears and nose to be cut off—the punishment for common criminals. Baglione protested that the pasha had broken his faith; he was executed in front of the tent along with the other commanders. In the Venetian account, Mustapha then showed Baglione’s head to the army: “Behold the head of the great champion of Famagusta, of him who has destroyed half my army and given me so much trouble.” Three hundred fifty heads were piled in front of the ornate tent.

Bragadin’s end was lingering and dreadful. He was kept alive until August 17, a Friday. The wounds on his head were festering; he was crazed with pain. After prayers, he was processed through the city to the sound of drums and trumpets, accompanied by his faithful servant Andrea, who had accepted conversion to Islam in order to serve him to the last. Because of his earlier words to the pasha, he was made to carry sackfuls of earth along the city walls and to kiss the ground each time he passed the pasha. He was taunted to convert to Islam. The Venetian hagiographers record a saintly response: “I am a Christian and thus I want to live and die. I hope my soul will be saved. My body is yours. Torture it as you will.” They probably heightened the horror for a receptive audience, but the stark facts are beyond doubt. These were ritual acts of humiliation. More dead than alive, he was tied in a chair and hoisted to the top of a galley’s mast, ducked in the sea, and shown to the fleet with jeers and taunts: “Look if you can see your fleet; look, great Christian, if you can see succour coming to Famagusta.” Then he was hustled into the square beside the church of Saint Nicholas, now converted into a mosque, and stripped naked. The butcher ordered to commit the final act—and this would not be forgiven in Venice—was a Jew. Tied to an ancient column from Salamis still standing to this day, Bragadin was skinned alive. He was dead before the butcher reached the waist.

The skin was stuffed with straw. Dressed in the commander’s crimson robes and shaded by the red parasol, it was mounted on a cow and paraded through the streets. Later the hideous dummy was exhibited along the coast of the Levant, then sent to Selim in Istanbul.

This theatrical act of cruelty was not universally applauded within the Ottoman domain. Sokollu was said to have been appalled. Maybe he understood, as with the massacre at Saint Elmo, that such acts only stiffened resolve; or he read a deeper motive. With the butcher’s knife Lala Mustapha had wrecked his rival’s attempt to broker surrender by peaceful means; Sokollu’s diplomacy turned on the need to keep the republic from alliance with Spain. All this was probably now in ruins. Bragadin had given the Venetians a martyr and a cause. He had not died in vain: the time spent on Famagusta and the losses incurred had seriously impeded the Ottoman war with Venice. His stuffed skin, now dangling from the yardarm of a Turkish galley, still had its part to play.

CHAPTER
19

Snakes to a Charm

August 22 to October 7, 1571

T
HE FATE OF FAMAGUSTA
was still hidden from the Christian fleet when Don Juan reached Messina on Sicily on August 22. He was again treated to extraordinary displays of ceremonial pomp. Don Juan stepped ashore beneath a triumphal arch emblazoned with heraldic devices, to be presented with a charger with silver trappings—a gift from the city—to the roar of cannon, and buildings festooned with banners, inscriptions, and images of Christ triumphant. At night the city was brilliantly illuminated. All the congregated strength of the Christian Mediterranean seemed to be assembled in one place. Two hundred ships rocked at anchor in the harbor; thousands of Spanish and Italian fighting men crowded the narrow streets; thousands of chained galley slaves rested on the rowing benches. It was Pius’s personal triumph to have gathered the great commanders of the age to fight in the name of Christ: Romegas and the Knights of Saint John were there, and Gian’Andrea Doria, Colonna with the papal galleys, the experienced Spanish admiral Bazán, the one-eyed Ascanio who had relieved Malta, the combustible Venetian Sebastiano Venier, Marco Querini whose daring raid on Cyprus had caused the Ottomans so much trouble early in the year, detachments from Crete and the Adriatic. It was an Olympic gathering, a test of Christendom’s resolve. “Thank God that we are all here,” wrote Colonna, “and that it will be seen what each of us is worth.”

Beneath the surface, this magnificent pan-Christian operation was a brawling, bad-tempered, quarrelsome assortment of conflicting egos and objectives. There had been trouble all the way around the coast between the Italian and Spanish soldiers; fighting in the streets of Naples, fighting again at Messina; the men had killed each other. The officers had been forced to hang a few scapegoats to restore order. The commanders eyed one another with jealousy and suspicion. The Venetians hated Doria, whom they described sneeringly as looking like a corsair; their irascible commander, Venier, was fuming with impatience at the endless delays. He suspected the Spanish of something less than enthusiasm for battle and was hardly willing to take orders from Don Juan. Everyone regarded the Venetians as unreliable. They had brought a large quantity of ships but were woefully short of men. The Knights of Saint John were virtually the sworn enemies of Venice, a feeling enhanced by the recent execution by the city of one of their number for counterfeiting the republic’s coinage. Meanwhile many of the men were simmering with discontent at the lack of pay. In short, the expedition of 1571 was riven with all the divisions that had surfaced at Preveza, during the relief of Malta and the ill-fated attempt to relieve Cyprus the previous year. It was a fair calculation, in the Ottoman camp, that the Christian enterprise would fail, as it had so often in the past. Yet if the Ottomans were wrong, the stakes could be high; and the possibility certainly caused anxiety in Istanbul.

Behind all the trumpet calls and celebrations, the critical issue by late August was simply whether to risk battle or not. The season was late, the enemy rampant. Opinions were sharply divided. There were men with something to prove, such as Colonna smarting from the failed expedition the previous year; Venier and the Venetians, desperate for battle; and the aggressive Spanish admiral Bazán. Then there was the prince himself carrying the weight of papal expectation. Among all the gifts and celebrations he received, one outweighed all the others. Pius dispatched the bishop of Penna to Messina as his special envoy with the promise that victory would be rewarded with an independent crown. On the other side there was the majority Spanish opinion—Doria with the mandate not to risk the Spanish fleet; Requesens with orders to shackle Don Juan; and the cautious spirit of Philip, who had paid the majority share of the expedition, hovering in the background.

Don Juan was being lobbied with advice from all sides, some of it extremely helpful. The duke of Alba had written from faraway Flanders to urge him to manage the men well: “Your Excellency should always try to present a cheerful face to all the soldiers, for it’s commonly known that they set great store on this and on Your Excellency bestowing a few favorable words on one national contingent one day and on another the next. And it’s most advisable that they understand that Your Excellency takes great care over their pay and gives it to them whenever possible, and when not that you order that care should be taken that they are given their due rations at sea and that their provisions are of good quality, and that they understand when this is done that it’s by your order and diligence, and when it’s not, that you regret it and order punishment.” Don Juan followed this to the letter and grew in the process. On August 3 he had quelled a pay mutiny at La Spezia by personally promising that the men would be paid. The Spanish meanwhile were working hard to rein in the enthusiasm of their young commander. Even Don Garcia de Toledo, dismissed from Philip’s service after Malta, had advice to give.

The old man was two hundred miles away, taking a cure for his gout at the hot springs near Pisa. He was a repository of knowledge about the Mediterranean wars. He had been at Charles’s triumph at Tunis in 1535, seen the destruction of his fleet at Algiers eight years later, and relieved Malta. Above all he remembered the lessons of Preveza in 1538, the nearest thing to a major sea battle in thirty years, when Barbarossa got the better of Andrea Doria. He had cautious words for the young man, which he unfolded in a series of letters. He understood the risks, the problems with naval alliances, and the physical and psychological superiority that the Ottomans now had at sea: “If I were in charge, I would be reluctant [to fight] with your majesty’s fleet lacking eight or nine thousand experienced soldiers from Flanders, because were defeat to happen—God forbid—it would do far more harm than the benefits of any victory could bring. Bear in mind also that our fleet belongs to different owners, and sometimes what suits some of them doesn’t suit others, whereas our enemy’s fleet has just one owner, and is of one mind, will, and loyalty, and those who fought at Preveza know the value of this. The Turks have gained the psychological advantage over the Venetians, and I believe that even against us they haven’t much lost it.”

Behind the Spanish position lay fifty years of maritime defeat. Preveza and Djerba hovered behind all their thinking; be cautious, he repeated, be cautious. “For the love of God,” Don Garcia wrote again to Requesens, “consider well what a great affair this is, and the damage that may be caused by a mistake,” before going on to emphasize the convoluted secrecy of the Spanish position. “But as it will be better for various good reasons that the Venetians should not know how much or why it is in His Majesty’s interest that there should be no battle, I pray you after having read this letter to Don Juan to destroy it.” There was a determined aim to ensure that the expedition should fail, while saving the face of the Catholic King.

But Don Juan’s personal inclination was already clear from the sets of questions he was now firing back to Don Garcia. If he were to fight, how should he organize his fleet? How should he use his artillery? When should he give the order to fire? Don Garcia’s advice, some of which failed to reach him in time, was very specific, drawn from the accumulated knowledge of half a century of sea warfare. Full frontal sea battles had been extremely rare—and none on the scale that was now being planned—but those fought had been illuminating. He advised Don Juan to learn the lessons of the past: “You should be warned not to order all the fleet into one squadron because such a large number of ships will certainly lead to confusion and some ships obstructing other ships—as happened at Preveza. You must put the ships into three squadrons, and put at the outer extremity of the wings those galleys in which you have greatest confidence, giving the tips of the wings to exceptional captains, and ensure that enough sea remains between the squadrons so that they can turn and maneuver without impeding one another—this was the arrangement employed by Barbarossa at Preveza.”

These words were to prove highly influential. As to when to fire, his advice was horribly specific, a vivid reminder of the realities of sea battles. There were no second chances; the shots had to count: “In reality it’s not possible to fire twice without causing the greatest possible confusion. In my opinion the best thing is to do what the cavalry say, and to fire the arquebuses so close to the enemy that their blood spurts over you…. I’ve always heard captains who know what they’re talking about say that the noise of the bow spurs breaking and the report of the artillery should be simultaneous or very close together.” He was advocating point-blank range.

As the ships continued to gather in early September, Don Juan decided to hold a final meeting to agree on the plan of action. Wisdom dictated that all the senior officers should be present; given the prickly sensibilities of the various factions, Don Juan was determined to act openly. On September 10 seventy senior officers gathered on board the
Real
for the fateful conference. Don Juan put forward two options: to seek out the enemy or, in line with Don Garcia’s advice, not to seek battle “but rather have the enemy to come to us, seeking every occasion to force them to do so.” The opinions divided predictably: the papal fleet and the Venetians for immediate attack, Doria and a Spanish contingent for caution. But when Don Juan roundly declared his intention to attack and win, the vote was carried unanimously. Under silent peer pressure, Doria and Requesens caved in. “Not everyone willingly agrees to fight, but nonetheless [is] forced and pressured by shame to do so,” wrote one commander.

In hindsight, despite Philip’s attempts to shackle the fleet, this outcome was inevitable. Against all expectations, the Christians had assembled an enormous fleet. To turn back now would involve massive loss of face—and Don Juan had let it be known that if the Spanish would not participate, he would proceed with the papal and Venetian fleets alone. The failure of the previous year, the huge weight of religious expectation imparted by the pope, the crowds, the banners and the celebrations, the dashing pronouncements of Don Juan—the expedition was being impelled forward, “like snakes drawn by the power of a charm,” as one observer put it.

Doria, mindful of Philip’s orders, was still hopeful that battle might be avoided. It was resolved that the final objective would be decided at Corfu. There might yet be time to halt the impetus to war, but every sea mile east of Messina would make the decision harder to overturn.

Crowds cheered; officers and men thronged churches to receive the sacrament; the papal ambassador pronounced his blessing. Early on the morning of September 16, Don Juan scribbled a final letter to Don Garcia that would soon have the old man shuddering in his steam bath. He was sailing in pursuit of the enemy. “Although their fleet is superior in size to that of the league according to the information we have,” he wrote, “it isn’t better in terms of quality of either ships or men, and trusting in God our Father, whose cause this is, I have decided to go and seek it out. And so I leave tonight—may it please God—on the voyage to Corfu and from there I will go wherever I learn that their fleet is. I have 208 galleys, 26,000 soldiers, six galleasses, and twenty-four ships. I trust in our Lord that, if we meet the enemy, He will give us victory.” The papal nuncio stood on the mole at Messina in his red robes, and blessed the vast contingent of ships, decked with their flags and pennants, as they rowed past the breakwater and out into the open sea.

AS THE ARMADA SWUNG OUT
along the Italian coast, questions about the Ottoman fleet became more pressing. Where exactly was the enemy, and what condition were they in? How many ships did they have? What was their intention? The need for reliable intelligence was crucial. Don Juan had sent the Maltese knight Gil de Andrada forward with four fast galleys to hunt for clues. Three days later, Andrada returned with worrying news. The Turks had attacked Corfu, then retired to Preveza. There was a fear that the Ottoman fleet was now dispersing for the winter. That night, scanning the sky and the dark sea, the whole fleet witnessed a celestial phenomenon that raised their spirits. A meteor of unusual brilliance coursed across the sky and burst into three trails of streaking fire. It was taken as a good omen. Then the weather turned dirty; for several days the fleet toiled through rainy squalls that blotted out the horizon and held them back.

Andrada’s intelligence had been partially correct. The Ottomans were withdrawing from the Adriatic after a highly successful campaign. They had captured key fortresses and taken a large quantity of booty. They raided Corfu for eleven days but withdrew as the Holy League left Messina, and then sailed south to seek the safety of their base at Lepanto, tucked into the mouth of the Gulf of Corinth, to watch and wait for orders from Istanbul.