Empires of the Sea - the Final Battle for the Mediterranean 1521-1580 (36 page)

Yet this verdict underestimates the sheer terror in which Christendom lived in the middle years of the sixteenth century, and the material and psychological consequences of momentary success. No one standing on the banks of the Golden Horn in August 1573 watching Kilich Ali’s triumphant return from Tunis—the banners, the displayed captives, the cannon shot salutes to the sultan, the nighttime illuminations surrounding the shores of the great city with a ring of fire—could know that Lepanto had sounded the death knell for such Ottoman maritime victories, or that Kilich himself was the last of the great corsair descendants of Hayrettin. In 1580, Philip signed a peace with the sultan that ended the imperial contest for the Mediterranean at a stroke. It was couched in the familiar ringing terms of Ottoman imperial documents and conceded no majesty to anyone:

Your ambassador who is currently at our imperial court submitted a petition to our throne and royal home of justice. Our exalted threshold of the centre of greatness, our imperial court of omnipotent power is indeed the sanctuary of commanding sultans and the stronghold of the rulers of the age.

A petition of friendship and devotion came from your side. For the safety and security of state and the affluence and tranquility of subjects, you wished friendship with our home of majestic greatness. In order to arrange a structure for peace and to set up conditions for a treaty, our justice-laden imperial agreement was issued on these matters….

It is necessary…when it arrives, that is to say after petitioning to our abode of happiness on the basis of sincerity and frankness, that your irregulars and corsairs who are producing ugliness and wickedness on land and sea do not harm the subjects of our protected territories and that they be stopped and controlled….

On the point of faithfulness and integrity let you be staunch and constant and let you respect the conditions of the truce. From this side also no situation will come into existence at all contrary to the truce. Whether it be our naval commanders on the sea, our volunteer captains [corsairs] or our commanders who are on the frontiers of the protected territories, our world-obeyed orders will be sent and damage and difficulties will not reach your country or states and the businessmen who come from that area….

In our imperial time and at our royal abode of happiness it is indeed decided that the prosperity of times come into being. In the same manner, if the building of peace and prosperity and the construction of a treaty and of security are your aims, without delay send your man to our fortunate throne and make known your position. According to it our imperial treaty will be commanded.

It reads like a statement of Ottoman victory; it was certainly no defeat. By this time Philip had defaulted on the crown’s payments to its creditors and his attention was being drawn west and north—to the conquest of Catholic Portugal and a proposed invasion of Protestant England. What the treaty recognized was the hardening of a fixed frontier in the Mediterranean between the Muslim and the Christian worlds. With the capture of Cyprus, the Ottomans had virtually cleared the eastern sea, though Venetian Crete still awaited; the failure of Malta and the disaster at Lepanto had scotched grandiose Ottoman schemes of proceeding to Rome. Conversely, with the strategic recapture of Tunis it was clear to Spain that North Africa was cemented into the Ottoman Empire. Charles’s hopes of Constantinople had also long gone. The year 1580 was the end of the Crusading dream; the end of great galley wars too. The empires of the sea had fought themselves to a standstill.

YET IF CHRISTENDOM
could not win the battle for the Mediterranean, it might certainly have lost it. The year after the battle, old Don Garcia de Toledo was still blanching at the sheer risk of Lepanto. Don Juan had hazarded everything on a single throw of the dice. Don Garcia knew that the consequences of failure would have been catastrophic for the shores of the Christian Mediterranean—and that the margin of victory had been far narrower than its spectacular outcome. With defeat, and the absence of any defending fleet, would have come the rapid loss of all the major islands of the sea—Malta, Crete, the Balearics—a last-ditch defense of Venice, and then, from these launch-pads, a push into the heart of Italy, to Rome itself, Suleiman’s ultimate goal. Southern Europe could have looked very different indeed if Shuluch Mehmet had turned the Venetian wing, if the heavily gunned galleasses had not disrupted Ali Pasha’s center, or Uluch Ali had punctured Doria’s line an hour earlier. As it was, the check at Malta and the victory at Lepanto stopped dead Ottoman expansion in the center of the sea. The events of 1565–1571 fixed the frontiers of the modern Mediterranean world.

And though the Ottomans shrugged off defeat, damage had been done. At Lepanto, the empire suffered its first military catastrophe since the Mongol warlord Tamerlane shattered the army at Ankara in 1402. These were huge psychological gains for Christian Europe. Christendom’s sense of military inferiority had become so deeply ingrained that resigned acceptance had become the normal reaction to each successive defeat. The explosion of fervor in the autumn of 1571 signaled a belief that the balance of power might be starting to tilt. Cervantes put into the mouth of Don Quixote an expression of just what difference the few hours at Lepanto had made: “That day…was so happy for Christendom, because all the world learned how mistaken it had been in believing that the Turks were invincible at sea.”

THE BATTLE BETWEEN ISLAM AND CHRISTIANITY
for the center of the world did not begin with the siege of Rhodes, nor did it entirely end with Lepanto, but between 1520 and 1580 the contest achieved a special definition when religious impulse and imperial power combined to produce a conflict of terrible intensity that was fought on the cusp of two distinct eras of human history. The styles of warfare were at once primitive and modern; they looked back to the visceral brutality of the Homeric bronze age, and forward to the clinical devastation of artillery weapons. At that moment, Charles and Suleiman believed that they were fighting for control of the earth. What Lepanto and its aftermath revealed was that even with shattering victories, the Mediterranean was no longer worth the fight. The middle sea, hemmed in by clustering landmasses, could now not be easily won by oared galleys, whatever the resources available. Both sides had participated in a hugely expensive arms race for an elusive prize. The conflict stressed the human and material reserves of both the protagonists more than they were prepared to admit. Cyprus and Lepanto cost the Ottomans upward of eighty thousand fighting men. Despite their huge population, the supply of skilled soldiers was not inexhaustible, and when the bishop of Dax saw the proudly rebuilt fleet, he was not impressed: “Having seen…an armada leave this port made up of new vessels, built of green timber, rowed by crews which never held an oar, provided with artillery which had been cast in haste, several pieces being compounded of acidic and rotten material, with apprentice guides and mariners, and armed with men still stunned by the last battle…” As the Spanish found after Djerba, the special conditions of naval warfare made specialist skills hard to replace. After 1580, there was a growing distaste for maritime ventures; the Ottoman fleet lay rotting in the still waters of the Horn. The glory days of Barbarossa would never return.

Both sides were soon afflicted by economic malaise. Philip defaulted on his debts in 1575; the years after 1585 saw fiscal crisis start to rack the Muslim world too. The slogging maritime war, and the particular cost of rebuilding the fleet after Lepanto, increased the steepening gradient of taxation in the sultan’s realms. At the same time, the influx of bullion from the Americas was beginning to hole the Ottoman economy below the waterline, in ways that were barely understood. The Ottomans had the resources to outstay any competitor in the business of war, but they were powerless to protect their stable, traditional, self-sufficient world against the more pernicious effects of modernity. There were no defensive bastions proof against rising European prices and the inflationary effects of gold. In 1566, the year after Malta, the gold mint at Cairo—the only one in the Ottoman world, producing coins from limited supplies of African gold—devalued its coinage by 30 percent. The Spanish real became the most appreciated currency in the Ottoman empire; it was impossible to strike money of matching value. The silver coins paid to the soldiers grew increasingly thin; they were “as light as the leaves of the almond tree and as worthless as drops of dew,” according to a contemporary Ottoman historian. With these forces came price rises, shortages, and the gradual erosion of the indigenous manufacturing base. Raw materials and bullion were being sucked out of the empire by Christian Europe’s higher prices and lower production costs. From the end of the sixteenth century globalizing forces started stealthily to undermine the old social fabric and bases of Ottoman power. It was a paradigm of Islam’s whole relationship with the West.

THE TREATY OF
1580
RECOGNIZED
a stalemate between two empires and two worlds. From this moment, the diagonal frontier that ran the length of the Mediterranean between Istanbul and the Gates of Gibraltar hardened. The competitors turned their backs on each other, the Ottomans to fight the Persians and confront the challenge of Hungary and the Danube once more, Philip to take up the contest in the Atlantic. After the annexation of Portugal he looked west and symbolically moved his court to Lisbon to face a greater sea. He had his own Lepanto still to come—the shipwreck of the Spanish armada off the coast of Britain, yet another consequence of the Spanish habit of sailing too late in the year. In the years after 1580, Islam and Christendom disengaged in the Mediterranean, one gradually to introvert, the other to explore.

Power started to swing away from the Mediterranean basin in ways that the Ottomans and the Hapsburgs with their overcentralized bureaucracies and their hidebound belief in God-given rights could hardly foresee. It was Protestant seamen from London and Amsterdam with their stout sailing ships financed by an entrepreneurial middle class who started to conjure wealth from new worlds. The Mediterranean of the oared galleys would become a backwater, bypassed by new forms of empire. The life—and death—of the cartographer Piri Reis symbolized the Ottomans’ lost opportunity to turn outward and explore the empirical world. An anonymous Ottoman mapmaker, writing in the 1580s, crystallized an awareness of the threat that new voyages to the Indies would bring. “It is indeed a strange fact and a sad affair that a group of unclean unbelievers have become strong to the point of voyaging from the west to the east, braving the violence of the winds and calamities of the sea, whereas the Ottoman empire, which is situated at half the distance in comparison with them, has not made any attempt to conquer [India]: this despite the fact that voyages there yield countless benefits, [bringing back] desirable objects, and articles of luxury whose description exceeds the bounds of the describable and explicable.” Ultimately Spain would be outflanked too.

After 1580 the corsairs also deserted the sultan’s cause and returned to man-taking on their own account along the barren shores of the Maghreb. The sea at the center of the world would face another two hundred miserable years of endemic piracy that would funnel millions of white captives into the slave markets of Algiers and Tripoli. As late as 1815, the year of Waterloo, 158 people were snatched from Sardinia; it took the New World Americans finally to scotch the menace of the Barbary pirates. Venice and the Ottomans, permanently locked into the tideless sea, would contest the shores of Greece until 1719, but the power had long gone elsewhere.

EPILOGUE

Traces

I
N JULY
1568,
IN THE HEAT
of a Maltese summer day, Jean Parisot de La Valette suffered a severe stroke as he was riding home from a day’s hawking in the woods. The gruff old warrior lingered for a few weeks, long enough to free his household slaves, forgive his enemies, and commit his soul to God. The people watched in silence as his coffin was carried through the streets of Birgu—renamed Vittoriosa after the siege—lifted onto a black galley, and rowed across the harbor. He was buried in the chapel of Our Lady of Victory, in the new capital that bore his name, Valletta, constructed on the hills of Mount Sciberras—where the Turks had placed their guns—and the ruins of Saint Elmo. His tomb is decorated with a Latin epitaph, composed by his English secretary, Sir Oliver Starkey: “Here lies La Valette, worthy of eternal honour. The scourge of Africa and Asia, and the shield of Europe, whence he expelled the barbarians by his holy arms, he is the first to be buried in this beloved city which he founded.”

After him, the other participants of the great maritime conflict fell away one by one. Selim slipped in his bathhouse in 1574, apparently dizzy from an attempt to give up drinking; Sokollu, his power waning, was stabbed to death in 1578; Uluch Ali died in the arms of a Greek slave girl in 1587; Gian’Andrea Doria lived until 1606, tainted to the end with suspicions of cowardice. Philip wrote his last memorandum in 1598. And in a quiet corner of Italy, the town records of Correggio noted an entry for December 12, 1589, on the man whose eyewitness account—dedicated to “the most serene señor Don Juan of Austria”—has preserved so much detail on the siege of Malta: “It is believed that the death of Francisco Balbi di Correggio, a wandering poet who wrote in Italian and Spanish and who was ever persecuted by men and by fortune, occurred on this date away from his native land.”

None endured a sadder fate than Don Juan himself, so eager for glory and a crown of his own. Lepanto won him few plaudits from the cautious Philip, who shackled his ambitions and snuffed out his dreams. In the end, the king dispatched him to Flanders to crush the Dutch revolt, where the dashing prince who had danced galliards on his own deck died of typhoid and disappointment in 1578. No career had a more startling trajectory, like the path of the comet bursting briefly across the night sky before Lepanto, then gone into the dark sea. Only two months after the battle he wrote a sad description of his own fate: “I spend my time building castles in the air, but in the end all of them, and I, blow away in the wind.” It is an epitaph that might serve all the empire builders of the violent century.

Memorials to these people and events dot the Mediterranean shore. They make a picturesque backdrop for tourism: the dark, forbidding gateways of Venetian fortresses entered under the watchful eye of Saint Mark’s lion; ruined watchtowers on the headlands of Southern Italy; the massive bastions of Malta; lonely coves where abandoned villages, cleared by pirate raids, crumble into dust beneath the shade of pines; rusting cannon and neat pyramids of stone balls on seaside promontories; the immense, vaulted chambers of galley pens. Barbarossa sleeps in a fine mausoleum on the banks of the Bosphorus, from where his spirit can watch tankers sliding up to the Black Sea, and the wealth of Cyprus went to pay for the astonishing minarets of Selim’s mosque in Edirne. Turgut Reis had his home port on the Turkish coast renamed in his honor, while the people of Le Castella in Calabria have forgiven the renegade Uluch Ali to the extent of erecting a statue. Suleiman himself lies in a mausoleum near his great mosque, the Suleymaniye, that looks down over the Golden Horn and the site of the arsenal. As for Bragadin, the martyr of Famagusta is forever being flayed alive in a lurid fresco in the church of Saint John and Saint Paul in Venice. The skin itself followed him home. Someone stole it back from Istanbul in 1580 so that it now nestles in the wall behind his monument.

Period prints and paintings allow us to get some idea of the sheer intensity of the contest these men fought. Ottoman janissaries, their ostrich-feathered shakos flickering like snakes’ tongues, mass in trenches before the Maltese redoubts; doubleted defenders in steel casques shoulder arquebuses; cannons roar; plumes of smoke embellish the air; fleets clash on seas jammed solid with masts under apocalyptic skies; drowning figures gasp and wave. But of the galleys that made all this happen—unloading troops and raiding coasts and advancing in great crescents to the thumping of drums and blaring of war trumpets—almost nothing remains beyond random battle trophies in museums: faded banners bearing the names of God in Arabic or Latin, stern lanterns, weapons, and clothes. The ships have all been taken by the sea.