The Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean (43 page)

That same year an imperial fleet under Andrea Doria captured ten Turkish merchantmen off Messina, following up this coup with an intrepid raid on a section of the Ottoman fleet off Paxos, in the Ionian Sea. The Sultan, determined that these two insults should be properly avenged, conceived a daring plan. In the spring of 1537 he personally would lead an army of 20,000 men through Thrace and down the Balkan peninsula as far as Valona, in what is now Albania; meanwhile, Barbarossa would sail with a fleet of 100 ships to the same port. There he would embark the army and carry it across to Brindisi, whose governor had been suborned and had promised to open the city gates. Unfortunately for Süleyman, this plan misfired when the governor’s treachery was discovered just in time. With both his army and navy already in the Adriatic, the Sultan had to decide quickly on an alternative. While he was deliberating, Barbarossa staged a series of lightning raids along the coast of Apulia, returning with the usual shiploads of treasure and slaves to learn that his master had decided to besiege the island of Corfu.

The largest of the Ionian Islands, Corfu had technically been a Venetian colony since the Fourth Crusade.
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In the distribution of the former Byzantine territories of 1204, old Doge Dandolo had laid claim to a huge share, for which the Republic had no real appetite nor any means of properly digesting it. She had therefore had no choice but to leave the Ionian Islands to the Greek and Italian adventurers who occupied them. Since then Corfu had fallen into several successive hands. At first occupied by the Venetian family of Venier, it had at various times been held by the Despotate of Epirus, Manfred of Sicily and the house of Anjou, returning to Venice in 1386. Unlike all its neighbouring islands except Paxos, however, it had never been taken by the Ottomans (and, incidentally, never would be). In recent years it had been protected by its Venetian status, but Ibrahim Pasha was now dead and to Süleyman with his huge army it must have seemed easy prey. He landed his entire army and all his ordnance–some thirty cannon, including a gigantic fifty-pounder, the largest in the world at that time–surrounded the chief citadel of the town and began to pound it into submission.

Fortunately, Corfu’s defences were strong. The town, half-way up the eastern coast of the island, lay behind and below the high citadel crowning the rocky peninsula that juts out towards the shores of Albania, commanding the approaches from both land and sea. Within this citadel was a garrison of some 2,000 Italians and roughly the same number of Corfiots, together with the crews of such Venetian vessels as happened to be in port at the time. Food and ammunition were in plentiful supply; morale was excellent. It needed to be, for the defenders now found to their dismay that they were faced not just with an attack from the sea but with a combined naval and military operation, carefully planned and on a considerable scale. The devastation suffered by the local peasants, as well as by the ordinary citizens, was appalling, but the citadel, despite constant battering from Turkish cannon on land and sea and several attempts to take it by storm, somehow stood firm. Then, mercifully, came the rain. Corfu has always been famous for the ferocity of its storms, and those which burst upon it in the early days of September 1537 seem to have been exceptional even by local standards. The cannon became immovable in the mud; dysentery and malaria spread through the Turkish camp. After barely three weeks’ siege, the Ottoman army re-embarked on the 15th, leaving a triumphant if still somewhat incredulous garrison to celebrate its victory.

But the war was not over. Barbarossa’s fleet was still active, and the other Mediterranean harbours and islands that remained in Venetian hands were not as defensible as Corfu. Many of them, though theoretically under the protection of the Republic, were in fact ruled by private families who had no means of staving off any sustained attack. But Barbarossa was remorseless. One by one they fell: Nauplia and Malvasia (now Monemvasia) on the east coast of the Peloponnese, then the islands–Skyros, Aegina, Patmos, Ios, Paros, Astipalaia–all of them considerably nearer to the Turkish mainland than to Venice, whose fleet was now blocked by the throng of Ottoman ships in the Adriatic narrows.

The Most Serene Republic had been brought to her knees, and it was Kheir-ed-Din Barbarossa who was responsible for her humiliation. No wonder that when he returned to Constantinople it was to a hero’s welcome such as had never been known. But he gave as good as he received: 400,000 gold pieces, 1,000 young women and 1,500 youths. There was also a personal present for the Sultan: 400 more youths, dressed in scarlet and carrying vessels of gold and silver, bales of precious silks and embroidered purses almost bursting with gold coins.

For the Venetians, by the time the triumphant Barbarossa sailed into the Golden Horn the victory of Corfu had already gone sour; every week was now bringing them reports of new defeats, new losses. In 1538 he was again on the warpath, terrorising first Skyros and Skiathos in the Sporades and then Andros in the Cyclades, and many smaller islands nearby. From the larger and more important islands he exacted an annual tribute; the smaller were obliged to provide manpower for the galleys, since the vast fleet that he was building needed literally thousands of oarsmen, of whom there was a chronic shortage. He then turned south to Crete, still Venice’s chief colony in the eastern Mediterranean. The fortifications of the capital, Candia, proved impregnable, but over eighty villages along the coast and several of the outlying islands were not so lucky.

Meanwhile, the European powers seemed incapable of forming alliances that were not poisoned by mutual suspicion and petty bickering almost before they began. In the summer of 1538 one such attempt, embarked upon by the Emperor, the Pope and Venice with all the fervour of a Crusade and a degree of optimism such that the participants actually made advance plans for the division of the Ottoman Empire between them, ended not as they had imagined, with the capture of Constantinople, but with a resounding victory for Barbarossa. It was while he was ranging along the south coast of Crete that he received reports of a huge combined fleet heading south down the Adriatic towards the Ionian Islands. The Venetian contingent alone consisted of eighty-one ships–some under sail but the majority oared galleys–under one of the Republic’s leading admirals, Vincenzo Cappello; the papal contribution, of another thirty-six galleys, was commanded by another Venetian, Marco Grimani, and these were joined when they reached Corfu by another thirty from Spain. Yet even this was only the vanguard: expected shortly were the forty-nine vessels sent by the Emperor, which had been delayed pending the arrival of his secret weapon: a further squadron of fifty so-called galleons–literally, ‘large galleys’–square-sailed and heavily armed, which had proved their worth in the Atlantic and the New World but which had never yet been seen in the Mediterranean. Predictably, Charles had entrusted the command of the whole enterprise to his trusted admiral Andrea Doria.

To set against this, Barbarossa could muster about 150 ships of his own, under Dragut, Sinan and several other former corsairs of long experience and tested courage. Here too was a formidable force; if numbers were all, however, it would have been no match for its opponents. But the Turkish fleet was united; the Christian was anything but. No Venetian, for a start, would willingly submit to being commanded by a Genoese; nor was there any love lost between Italians and Spaniards. There were differences, too, in long-term objectives. Cappello was interested above all in protecting the Ionian Islands, commanding as they did the gateway to the Adriatic. Grimani’s chief concern was Italy’s western seaboard, the ports of Civitavecchia and Ostia and indeed Rome itself, only a few miles from Ostia up the Tiber. The Spaniards cared for neither of these things: Spain was too far away. They doubtless hoped to teach the Turks a lesson, but when that was done they wanted above all to get home with any prizes that might be obtainable. Discord, in short, could be virtually guaranteed, and tempers were not improved by the continued delay of Doria and his fleet, thanks to which the enforced inactivity at Corfu was prolonged from days into weeks.

At last Marco Grimani could stand it no longer. Leading the papal squadron out of Corfu, he sailed south to Preveza at the entrance to the Bay of Arta. This huge inlet of the Ionian Sea is in fact more of a gulf than a bay. Covering some 250 square miles, it is entered by a narrow, winding channel in places only a quarter of a mile wide. It thus provides an extraordinary natural harbour, and Grimani’s purpose may well have been to satisfy himself that the Turkish fleet was not lying in wait there. It proved not to be; on the other hand, the fortress of Preveza was fully garrisoned and disposed to fight, and its cannon inflicted considerable damage on the raiders before they escaped to safety.

Had Grimani delayed his little expedition by another few days, he would have found his worst fears confirmed. Barely had his squadron disappeared over the northern horizon than Barbarossa’s fleet sailed up from the south and turned straight into the bay. Here, off Actium, at the very spot where Octavian had met Mark Antony 1,570 years before, he prepared for battle.

It was not until 22 September that Andrea Doria finally arrived at Corfu with his galleons. By this time reports of Barbarossa’s movements had reached the island, and on the 25th the entire fleet hove to off Preveza. But what was it to do next? To sail up the narrow channel in line under the guns first of the fortress and then of the Turkish fleet would have been suicidal; in the circumstances it would have been better to attack the fortress, capture it, and turn its guns against the enemy. Doria, however, refused to consider such a course. Any serious losses on land might disastrously weaken his fleet if a sea battle were to follow; he knew, too, that this was the season of the equinoctial gales, when the Mediterranean was at its most treacherous. In the event of a sudden storm–and September storms could blow up in half an hour from a clear blue sky–he might be obliged to withdraw the fleet to some lee shore, leaving any land forces unsupported. The situation looked suspiciously like a stalemate.

It was doubtless for this reason that, on the night of the 26th, Doria gave the order to weigh anchor and head south into Turkish waters. Barbarossa, fully conscious of his enemy’s strength but with no idea of his destination, would have no option but to pursue him, and the two fleets could meet in the open sea. To this degree Doria was right; as his ships sailed down the west coast of the island of Leucas, the Turks did indeed emerge from the Bay of Arta and follow them. His problem was that his fleet, consisting as it did partly of oared galleys and partly of sailing galleons, was impossible to keep together. When the wind was fresh, the galleons swept ahead; when it suddenly changed or dropped, the galleys either overtook them or threw away their advantage and–to the immense relief of the oarsmen–waited for them to catch up. Thus it was that by the time his flagship was rounding the southwestern cape of Leucas some of the heaviest galleons were lying almost becalmed only a few miles from their point of departure.

And then the wind did indeed change. On the morning of the 28th it was blowing from due south, and the fleet was strung out all along the west coast of the island. This, surely, would have been the moment for Doria to return, with all sails set, to the north, regroup his ships and meet the Turks head on. Inexplicably, he remained where he was. Meanwhile, the Ottoman fleet–almost entirely oared–rounded the northern tip of Leucas, Barbarossa in the centre, with Dragut commanding the right wing and Salah Reis the left. There, dead ahead of them, was the largest, strongest, heaviest and therefore–in the conditions prevailing–the slowest of all the allied vessels. She was known as the Galleon of Venice. Commanded by one of the Republic’s most promising young captains, Alessandro Condulmer, she carried a huge weight of cannon–as much as the average coastal fortress–and was well able to defend herself; but, sheltered as she now was by the mountains of Leucas, she was immobile. Her commander despatched a fast pinnace to his admiral with an urgent appeal for help.

Barbarossa attacked, but Condulmer gave as good as he got–indeed rather better, waiting until the attacking Turkish ships came within point-blank range and then blasting them one after another out of the water. He knew, however, that he could not hold out indefinitely against such an enemy; everything depended on the swift arrival of Doria’s galleys. But they did not come. With the wind behind them–which it was–they could have made the journey in three hours at the most; we know too that both Vincenzo Cappello and Marco Grimani pressed their admiral hard to sail with his whole fleet to the rescue. Dusk was falling when he eventually agreed; even then he insisted on taking the fleet in a wide arc to the west.

So Condulmer was obliged to fight on unaided–demonstrating, incidentally, that a sturdy galleon with a highly-trained, well-disciplined crew, even when becalmed, was a more effective fighting weapon than any number of oared galleys. Consequently he, his ship and most of his men survived. But he could not affect the outcome of the battle. By the time Barbarossa turned his ships back to Preveza at sunset he had captured at least two galleys, one Venetian and one from the papal squadron, and five Spanish sail. Doria, with the wind behind him, could still have pursued his adversary at first light the next morning. His forces were far stronger, his firepower infinitely superior. With no difficulty at all he could have turned the tables and inflicted heavy damage on the Turkish fleet. Instead, he ignored it utterly and headed back to Corfu.

Why did Genoa’s foremost naval commander act as he did? In the words of a French naval historian–who was also an admiral–‘For less than this the English shot Admiral Byng in 1756.’
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Was it simply Doria’s hatred of Venice? Since he was neither a coward nor a fool, treachery or deliberate malice are the only possible explanations. Whichever is the true one, by his refusal to engage with a vastly inferior enemy he threw away an excellent chance of a decisive victory. Thanks exclusively to him, that victory belonged to Barbarossa. The immediate loser, beyond a shadow of doubt, was Venice.