The Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean (48 page)

But for all those Christians who rejoiced in those exultant October days, the real importance of Lepanto was neither tactical nor political; it was moral. The heavy black cloud which had overshadowed them for two centuries and which since 1453 had grown steadily more threatening, to the point where they felt that their days were numbered–that cloud had suddenly lifted. From one moment to the next, hope had been reborn. It was, perhaps, the Venetian historian Paolo Paruta who best summed up the popular feeling, in the course of his funeral oration in St Mark’s on those who had been killed in the battle:

They have taught us by their example that the Turks are not insuperable, as we had previously believed them to be…Thus it can be said that as the beginning of this war was for us a time of sunset, leaving us in perpetual night, now the courage of these men, like a true, life-giving sun, has bestowed upon us the most beautiful and most joyful day that this city, in all her history, has ever seen.

To every patriotic Venetian, it seemed essential that the glorious victory must be followed up at once. The Turk must be given no rest, no time to catch his breath; he must be pursued and brought to battle again, before he had a chance to repair his shattered forces and while the allies still maintained their forward impetus. This was the message that the government of the Republic now propounded to its Spanish and papal allies, but its arguments fell on deaf ears. Don John himself, one suspects, secretly agreed and would have been only too happy to press on through the winter, but his orders from Philip were clear. By the terms of the League, the allied forces would meet again in the spring; until then, he must bid them farewell. He and his fleet returned to Messina.

By the spring of 1572 it was plain to the Venetians that their instincts had been right. Spain was, as usual, prevaricating and procrastinating, raising one objection after another. Pope Pius did his utmost to spur them to action, but he was already a sick man and on 1 May he died. With his death the spirit went out of the League. At last, despairing of Spanish help, Venice decided to launch an expedition of her own, which Marcantonio Colonna willingly joined with his squadron of papal galleys. Only then were the Spaniards goaded into action. They had no wish to be left out if there was indeed another victory to be won. Philip’s objections fell away and in June Don John was finally given permission to join his allies.

The fleet assembled at Corfu and sailed south in search of the enemy. The allies had learned with some dismay that in the eight months since Lepanto Sultan Selim had managed to build a new fleet of 150 galleys and eight galleasses–these latter being an innovation for the Turks, who had obviously been impressed by the brilliant use Don John had made of them at Lepanto. Rumour had it, however, that the shipwrights, aware of the fate that awaited them if they failed to meet the Sultan’s deadlines, had been obliged to use green timber; that the guns had been so hurriedly cast that many of them were useless; and that the crews, press-ganged into service after the appalling losses at Lepanto, were scarcely trained. It was unlikely, in short, that they would give the allies much trouble. The principal problem would be to bring them to battle.

And so indeed it was. The two fleets met off Modone–for 250 years one of Venice’s principal trading posts in the Peloponnese, until it had fallen to the Sultan in 1500–and immediately the Turks ran for harbour. The allies followed them, took up their positions in the roadstead off Navarino (the modern Pylos) and settled down to wait. Modone, they knew, could not maintain a fleet of such a size for long. The mountainous hinterland was barren and without roads; all supplies must come in by sea. It was only a question of time before the enemy would be forced to emerge, and a second Lepanto would follow.

But once again Venice saw her hopes dashed, and once again the Spaniards were the cause. On 7 October–the first anniversary of the great battle–Don John suddenly announced that he could no longer remain in Greek waters and was returning to the west. The Venetian Captain-General Giacomo Foscarini, dumbfounded, asked why and, when the prince unconvincingly replied that his provisions were running low, at once offered to supply him from his own stock and order more from Venice as necessary. But Don John, clearly acting on new orders from Spain, could not be shaken. Colonna unaccountably took his side. Foscarini had to face the fact that his fleet was not strong enough to challenge the Turks alone. Fuming at the thought of the opportunity lost, he had no choice but to give the order to return.

All that winter the Venetian ambassador in Madrid worked on King Philip. The Turks, he argued, were bent on world domination; they had been constantly extending their territories for some five hundred years and were continuing to do so; the longer they were allowed to advance, the stronger and more irresistible they would become. It was surely the King’s duty to Christendom–and to himself, if he wished to keep his throne–to take up arms against them, and not to rest until the work that had been so gloriously begun at Lepanto was thoroughly finished. But Philip refused to listen. He hated and mistrusted Venice; as far as the Turks were concerned he had done his duty the previous year, and with considerable success; after such a victory it would be some time before they raised their heads again. Meanwhile, he was fully occupied with William the Silent’s revolt in the Low Countries. He did not go whining to Venice to help him with his problems; he saw no reason why he should assist her any further with hers.

Moreover, in those same winter months, Charles IX of France was also busy, intriguing against Philip on three separate fronts. In the Low Countries he was giving all possible support to the rebellion; in the Mediterranean he was manoeuvring to gain control of Algiers, where his machinations may well have been responsible for Don John’s recall from Navarino; in Venice and Constantinople his ambassadors were working hard to bring about a peace between the Sultan and the Republic. By early spring they had succeeded. Venice had not wished for anything of the kind; since Lepanto she had done everything in her power to hold the League together and to persuade her fellow members to join her in an out-and-out offensive, stopping–with God’s help–only at Constantinople itself. But she had failed. Philip was frankly not interested, the new Pope Gregory XIII scarcely more so. Deserted by her allies, knowing full well that to continue the war alone would be to invite new Turkish invasions of the Adriatic and, in all probability, the seizure of Crete–her last stronghold in the Levant–she had no choice but to accept the terms which were offered her. On 3 March 1573 the treaty was signed. Venice undertook,
inter alia
, to pay the Sultan 300,000 ducats over three years, and to renounce all her claims to Cyprus.

In the dominions of the Most Catholic King, there were cries of horror and disgust. In Messina, a furious Don John tore the League banner from his masthead and ran up that of Spain. How right Philip had been, said his subjects, not to trust those Venetians; they were bound to betray him sooner or later. It was, they protested, as if the Battle of Lepanto had never been won.

It was indeed. In spite of all the jubilation, the cheering and the shouting and the building up of the great Lepanto legend that still persists today, the truth is that one of the most celebrated naval battles ever fought proved to be of no long-term strategic importance whatever. And those who lamented loudest had only themselves to blame.

After the Battle of Lepanto a curious calm descended upon the Mediterranean. It was as if the whole vast basin had somehow exhausted itself. Until the last quarter of the sixteenth century–though the countries of northern Europe might latterly have disputed the fact–the Middle Sea had been, in a very real sense, the centre of the western world. It was the centre no longer.

For Spain, Christopher Columbus and his successors had opened new and exciting horizons. With her possession of Naples and Sicily in the south and Milan in the north
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no longer disputed, with the island of Sardinia also hers and the city of Genoa now effectively a Spanish port, the rest of Italy and the Mediterranean had ceased to interest her. True, in 1601 she and a group of Italian states–but not Venice–despatched a powerful force of seventy galleys and 10,000 men to surprise and capture Algiers (since it was commanded by Gian Andrea Doria its failure was assured), but her real attention was now fixed on the west and the north, where her constant problems in the Low Countries and her rivalry with England were taking up almost all her time.

As for France, she was no longer the kingdom that she had been under Francis I. Foreign adventure in the south was now for her a thing of the past; instead, she was being almost literally torn apart by the Wars of Religion, which were to continue for more than thirty years and bring the country to the brink of disintegration. Even Italy was quiet–at least by Italian standards. Apart from Naples and the Papacy there was only one major power in the peninsula, and the Republic of Venice was always too keen on commerce to make war unless it absolutely had to. Between the various north Italian city-states internecine fighting went on as it always had, but most of it was of little if any lasting significance to the Mediterranean world.

Then there was the Ottoman Empire, and even the Turkish juggernaut now seemed to be running out of steam. The great days of Süleyman the Magnificent were long since over, and his successor Selim the Sot died in 1574–appropriately enough, after consuming a whole bottle of strong Cyprus wine at a single draught and then slipping on the wet floor of the baths. It is true that in that very same year the old corsair admiral Kilij Ali recaptured Tunis from the Spanish–the city and its hinterland became an Ottoman province–but this was the sum total of the Turkish gains in the Mediterranean. Selim’s son Murad III–he had come to the throne only after ordering the strangulation of his five brothers–was more interested in what lay beyond his eastern borders, and preferred to concentrate his attention on Georgia and the Caucasus. His successors seem to have felt much the same way, and so it was that for very nearly a century the Turks were to do little to alter the map of the Middle Sea.

The only attempt to do so after the capture of Tunis came from an unexpected quarter. In 1578 Philip II’s nephew, the headstrong young King Sebastian of Portugal, responded–for reasons that are still not entirely clear–to an appeal for help from the Sherif of Fez, who had recently been expelled from his city by a rival claimant. Sebastian had appealed in his turn to his uncle, who had somewhat grudgingly agreed to support him; he had thus been able to cross the straits of Gibraltar with an army of Spanish and Portuguese numbering some 15,000. On 3 August he reached the town of Alcacerquivir, to find on the following day a vastly greater Moroccan army drawn up against him. He had no choice but to fight, and in the ensuing battle he and both the rival sherifs were killed, as were over 8,000 of his men. Of the remainder nearly all were captured; barely 100 managed to make their escape.

The only real victor of the Battle of the Three Kings, as it was called, was Philip of Spain. Single-handedly, Sebastian had reduced Portugal to such a state of weakness and demoralisation that two years later Philip was able quite simply to swallow it up–doubling at a stroke his colonial empire and gaining valuable Atlantic harbours and shipping besides. Not until 1640 was Portugal to recover her independence.

Philip was to live another twenty years, dying at seventy-one in 1598. No king had ever taken his duties more seriously; none had ever worked harder. Trusting no one, he had spent the last forty years in Madrid or at his palace of the Escorial attending personally to every detail of government and administration, never giving himself time to look up from his desk and take a longer, broader view of the world around him. Morbidly pious, he was determined to perform what he believed to be the divinely appointed task of preserving the true Catholic religion, in the cause of which he could be ruthless, tyrannical and cruel; but he was a lover of books and pictures and–when he was allowed to be–an affectionate husband and father. He was four times married–his wives were respectively Portuguese, English, French and Austrian–and four times widowed; they had given him, however, only two sons. The first was a lunatic, who died under mildly suspicious circumstances in prison at the age of twenty-three; the second–by his last wife–was to survive him as Philip III. His principal achievement from our point of view was to have built up his country as a serious military and naval power; by the 1570s his navy was at least four times stronger than it had been in his father’s time. But he was a sad, lonely man, and his subjects were not sorry to see him go.

The unwonted inactivity of the great Mediterranean powers left the field free for the pirates, who as the new century opened became ever more of a menace. They consisted by no means only of Muslims from Barbary; included among them were plenty of European seamen like the infamous Captain John Ward, who in 1605 or thereabouts arrived in Tunis. There he came to an agreement with the Bey, by which he undertook to attack all Christians except Englishmen and to share the profits. Such was his success–particularly against the Venetians and the Knights of St John–that he was soon able to build himself in Tunis a palace ‘beautified with rich marble and alabaster’, second only in magnificence to that of the ruler himself. In 1609 he even acquired a noble second-in-command: Sir Francis Verney of Claydon in Buckinghamshire, who had left his distinguished family in disgust the previous year and was soon, in the words of an English historian, ‘making havoc of his own countrymen…the merchants of Poole or Plymouth’.
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Algiers, not to be outdone, then secured the services of a certain Simon Danzer or Dansker–of whose nationality we cannot be sure–who enjoyed a similar success. From these men the Barbary corsairs, who had hitherto used only galleys, learned the art of sail, greatly increasing their effectiveness. A dashing raid in 1609 by the Spanish admiral Don Luís Fajardo on the pirate fleet of Ward, Verney and their colleagues as they lay in Tunis harbour dealt them a serious blow, but the admiral was prevented from following up his advantage; at the critical moment he received orders from Madrid to participate in the wholesale expulsion of the Moriscos from Spain.