Infidels: A History of the Conflict Between Christendom and Islam

by Andrew Wheatcroft

  King Philip II first had intelligence of the battle, it was said, by a messenger from Venice on October 29, while he observed the service of vespers from the curtained gallery overlooking the palace chapel. Over time, the story of this moment was embellished to give weight to the deeper meanings that had become attached to the battle. In 1605, seven years after the king’s death, an account was published that described how Philip II had been at prayer, during the service of vespers, in the Cathedral Church of San Lorenzo.

  Don Pedro Manuel, a gentleman of the bedchamber, entered; with a perturbation of look and manner, which showed that something great had happened, he said aloud to his Majesty, “Sir, the courier of Don John of Austria is here, and he brings news of a great victory.” Yet the magnanimous prince neither changed his posture nor showed any emotion, it being a great privilege, amongst others, of the House of Austria never to lose, happen what may, their serenity of countenance and imperial gravity of demeanour. The vespers being over, he called the prior and ordered that the Te Deum Laudamus should be sung for thanksgiving, with prayers of the Church suitable for the occasion.54

  The circumstantial detail, the naming of the gentleman of the chamber, and the location within the great baroque Church of San Lorenzo are compelling. Tour guides in the palace once pointed to the very seat occupied by the king at the moment the news arrived. Yet the church was not consecrated until 1586, fifteen years after Lepanto.

  When the king eventually received the report from Don John on the evening of November 2 in El Escorial, he was surrounded by his family and courtiers. The messenger, Don Lope de Figueroa, had traveled slowly, because he had been badly wounded in the battle, but also because he had been feted in every town through which he passed.55 The popular rejoicing for Lepanto was not limited to the nations that had participated directly in the battle. Even in France, where for political reasons the Most Christian King preserved good relations with the Ottomans, there were processions and church services in the smallest of towns and villages. In Protestant England, there were days of exuberant celebration in London. German towns went wild with delight. Perhaps for the last time, the sense of universal participation in a holy war transcended the chasm between Catholic and Protestant.56

  WITHIN DAYS OF THE STORY FIRST BEING TOLD IN ANDALUCIA, “LEPANTO” was being reenacted as a play in the caves of the Sacromonte in Granada.57 In such “accounts,” moral truth mattered more than factual verisimilitude.58 What happened at Lepanto was compounded partly from the event itself and partly from the subsequent myths with which it was overlaid. Accurate details of the battle became widely known—from memoirs and pamphlets, or from stories told by travelers. Some of the profusion of woodcut images that appeared throughout Europe stuck to a remarkable degree to the factual truth. A pamphlet circulating in Germany within months of the battle had on its cover a depiction of a galleass at the moment of first contact. Its great guns belched smoke from its sides. The boarding nets and boiled leather shields were in place. The Turkish galleys were smashed to pieces; the sea was filled with turbaned figures and with wooden shields, blazoned with the crescent, floating on the surface of the waters.59 The response to the battle and the meanings drawn from it—its resonance—were extended, both in time and in place. For Sir Richard Lovelace, writing a century after Lepanto, it had become an eponym or shorthand for Christian triumph: “When the sick Sea with Turbants Night-cap’d was; / … This is a wreath, this is a Victorie.”

  Lepanto was remembered in many different ways. Rome celebrated the return of Marc Antonio Colonna with a triumph worthy of a Caesar. He rode to the Capitol on a white horse, followed by long lines of soldiers and captive Turks, shackled in pairs and dragging heavy chains, all wearing his red-and-yellow livery.60 Another Colonna, Honorato, and his heroism in the battle are still commemorated each year in the little hill town of Sermonetta. Messina, which had greeted the returning fleet with tournaments and a vast catafalque to honor the dead, commissioned a huge gilded statue of Don John from Andrea Calamach. The admiral still stands to this day, his left foot on the severed turbaned head of a Turk, while all around the story of Lepanto is told in bas-relief. The Signoria of Venice commissioned Tintoretto, Pietro Longo, Andrea Vincentino, and Antonio Vassilachi to make a series of paintings for the Sala dello Scrutinio in the Doge’s Palace. In the city churches and the Arsenal, the Holy League and the divinely ordained victory were recalled in altarpieces, paintings, and marble plaques. The aged Titian, who had declined to produce a commemorative canvas for Venice, succumbed to King Philip. In a huge painting (Allegory of the Battle of Lepanto), the king is the dominant figure, offering up his infant son Don Ferdinand (born in the months after Lepanto) to heaven. Winged Victory hands down the victor’s laurels, while in the foreground a trussed-up Turk, his weapons and turban lying on the ground beside him, and a burning galley fleet in the background point to the great triumph.

  The official memory of the battle was consolidated. In March 1572, the pope decreed that the feast of the Rosary should be celebrated on the anniversary of Lepanto. In the cathedral of Toledo a banner captured at Lepanto was displayed annually on the day of the battle, and a service of thanksgiving held. In churches throughout Christendom, the day of Lepanto was recalled long after the details of the battle had been forgotten. As a “site of memory,” it had great attraction: it demonstrated Christian unity. Subsequently, only the relief of Vienna from a Turkish siege in 1683 showed Christendom responding in a similar fashion, with a single voice. If the Protestants did not take part in Lepanto, few condemned it as a papistical triumph. It possessed a personable hero and a diabolical enemy, which is perhaps why it continued to feature in tracts and pamphlets for more than a century after.

  More distant still in time, the Catholic man of letters G. K. Chesterton wrote his epic “Lepanto,” in which Don John “has set his people free,” not only righting the wrongs of his own day, but providing a message for the future.

  The North is full of tangled things and texts and aching eyes,

  And dead is all the innocence of anger and surprise,

  And Christian killeth Christian in a narrow dusty room,

  And Christian dreadeth Christ that hath a newer face of doom,

  And Christian hateth Mary that God kissed in Galilee,—

  But Don John of Austria is riding to the sea.

  Don John calling through the blast and the eclipse

  Crying with the trumpet, with the trumpet of his lips,

  Trumpet that sayeth ha!

  Domino gloria!

  This theme of continuity—of the continuing battle with the world of “Islam”—had a precise context in 1911. As Chesterton’s “Lepanto” was being published, and six days after the anniversary of Lepanto, the army of Italy landed in Libya to seize the last remnant of Ottoman territory in North Africa. A few days before, far away in the Adriatic, the Italian navy had attacked and sunk Turkish gunboats at Prevesa, another site of memory, for this was where Don John had anchored in the days before Lepanto.61 With the Treaty of Ouchy, signed on October 15, 1912, Italy completed the Christian “reconquest” of North Africa, so that European nations dominated the entire southern seaboard of the Mediterranean, from Egypt to Morocco. “Lepanto,” at least in Chesterton’s eyes, was an active and current crusade, not some event plucked at random out of a dead past.

  The resilience of Lepanto also bound itself to the popular imagination. The annual pageants of Christians and Moors celebrated Christian victory for centuries in towns and villages on the eastern coast of Spain, and in Corsica.62 Old memories were revived or reconstructed, as in the huge Moresca held at Vescovato in Corsica in 1786 in honor of the new governor, the comte de Marbeuf. There, 160 dancers in elaborate costumes enacted an epic tale of Christian triumph.63

  This cycle of celebration and the memory of victory had no direct counterpart in the Islamic world. There the catastrophe at Lepanto was mourned as an act of divine will. The contemporary chronicle of the battle laconic
ally recorded that “the Imperial fleet encountered the fleet of the wretched infidels and the will of God turned another way.”64 When he received the news, the sultan raged and wished to order the execution of all the Christians in his domains. But he was easily dissuaded, to the degree that we might suspect that his anger had primarily a histrionic purpose. It was not the Ottoman tradition to make a lasting memorial out of victory or to chasten themselves with the remembrance of defeat. Triumph or catastrophe were in the hands of God. Selim II’s chief minister, the grand vizier Mehmed Sokullu, even suggested to the Venetian emissary Barbaro, who met him a few days after the news of the battle reached Constantinople, that the Christian triumph was meaningless:

  You come to see how we bear our misfortune. But I would have you know the difference between your loss and ours. In wresting Cyprus from you, we deprived you of an arm; in defeating our fleet, you have only shaved our beard. An arm when cut off cannot grow again; but a shorn beard will grow all the better for the razor.65

  Of all the great victories won by Ottoman arms, only the capture of Constantinople by Mehmed II was remembered and commemorated in the manner of the West celebrating Lepanto, and then without the pictorial and textual effusion that the Christian victory generated. As a result, it embedded itself less firmly into the domain of history and memory.

  For Christians, the tales of Lepanto contained a double message about Islam. On one side there was Lala Mustafa, the commander in Cyprus, Bragadino’s cruel and bestial nemesis. He exemplified the traditional Christian perception of the Muslim. But on the other was the noble enemy, the Ottoman commander at Lepanto, Ali Pasha. There was a long Christian tradition, back to the time of the Crusades and the stories of King Richard’s chivalrous opponent, Saladin, of respecting a strong enemy. Ottoman sultans such as Suleiman the Lawgiver were also honored for their martial and civic virtues, even if those qualities sat alongside the image of cruelty. But unlike Saladin and Suleiman, Ali Pasha was not redeemed by success. He failed: his nobility of behavior was personal and not a consequence of his role or office. When he went down among his galley slaves and spoke words of comfort to them, he behaved as should a Christian. This was clearly the unvoiced assumption of the Western narratives that recorded his conduct.

  Don John regarded him with respect. He took Ali’s two young sons, captured on the Ottoman flagship Sultana, under his personal protection. He sent their tutor, who also survived, back to Constantinople with a letter to their mother, saying that they were safe and well cared for. Eventually, after one of the boys had died from a chance illness, Don John returned the other to his family without payment of the large ransom that would have been traditional. This was not simply the courtesy to be expected of one commander to another. I can think of no other case in the same century that provides a parallel. Like Ali Pasha, Don John was moving past the boundaries of character and relationships prescribed for both Christians and Muslims.

  More persuasive of these ambiguities than Don John and Ali was Miguel de Cervantes, a veteran of La Naval (as the battle came to be known to the Spaniards). Lepanto was only the beginning of Cervantes’s encounter with the Muslim world. In 1575 he was captured by an Algerian corsair almost in sight of the French coast. His experience of five years in the slave prisons of Algiers became the core of the long “Captive’s Tale” in his novel Don Quixote. But more important than the events described is the manner in which Cervantes undermined the whole sense of the embattled relationship between the domain of “Islam” and the Christian world. In the book, he presents himself as only the second author and also the first reader of the whole story of Don Quixote. He uncovered the first author and the ur-text by chance. As Cervantes tells it, one day in Toledo he came across a boy selling a bundle of old papers.

  Now, as I have a strong propensity to read even those scraps that sometimes fly about the streets, I was led by this, my natural curiosity, to turn over some of the leaves: I found them written in Arabic, which not being able to read although I knew the characters, I looked about for some Portuguese Moor who should understand it; and indeed though the language was both more elegant and more ancient, I might easily have found an interpreter.

  His interpreter read the title page out loud to him: “The history of Don Quixote de la Mancha by Cid Hamet Benengeli, an Arabian Author.” Cervantes paid him to translate the entire text, which took six weeks, at a price of two quarters of raisins and two bushels of wheat. The mysterious and unseen Cid Hamet was not just a convenient cipher, like the exotic characters of Turks or Persians used to comment on the Christian world from some detached and external perspective.66 The “Arabian author” wanders back into the text from time to time, and is there at Quixote’s death. It is he who writes the final words of Quixote’s epitaph:

  For me alone was Don Quixote born and I for him; he to act and I to record; in a word we were destined for each other … let the wearied and mouldering bones of Don Quixote rest in the grave [i.e., write no further sequels to his life] … in doing so thou wilt conform to thy Christian profession of doing good to those who would do thee harm; and I shall rest satisfied and perfectly well pleased, in seeing myself the first author, who fully enjoyed the fruit of his writings, in the success of his design, for mine was no other than to inspire mankind with an abhorrence of false and improbable stories recounted in books of chivalry, which are already shaken by the adventures of my true and genuine Don Quixote, and in a little time will certainly sink into oblivion. Farewell.

  Was this more than an audacious literary device? Cervantes did not share the stereotypical image of the Muslim. Take his presentation of Muley Malek in his play The Dungeons of Algiers, written about 1590:

  A famous Moor

  and in his sect and wicked law

  well versed and most devout;

  he knows the language of the Turks,

  speaks Spanish and German as well

  and Italian and French, sleeps

  in a bed and eats at a table

  seated in the Christian manner;

  above all he’s a great soldier

  generous, wise and cool-headed,

  adorned with a thousand virtues.67

  Nor did William Shakespeare, Cervantes’s near contemporary with whom he shared the date of his death, in his characterization of Othello, the Moor of Venice. “Muley Malek” could have served as a model for Othello.68 Yet while Muley is all Moor, Othello is a double man, undoubtedly a Muslim Moor, and yet also a servant of Christian Venice. But for Cervantes to write as he did of Cid Hamet Benengeli, and to ascribe to him the writing of his own work, makes sense only if we understand the specific historical context. The first part of Don Quixote was published in 1605, the second in 1615. Between the two publications, Spain rid itself finally of the Moors’ descendants, the Moriscos. Expelled from the kingdom of Granada after their rebellion was crushed by Don John, the Moriscos were dispersed throughout Spain. All the misfortunes of the nation were blamed upon them. In a final act of ethnic cleansing, they were marched to the seaports in 1609 and shipped to Morocco.

  To make the infidel Cid Hamet the “first author” of his work was unusual and, in these years, an especially daring move. Cervantes, from the events of his life—war, slavery, penury, prison, success, and finally, preparing for death in a monk’s habit—knew that the division of the world into good Christians and bestial Muslims was false. Of the gulf between them he had no doubt, or that each was “infidel” to the other. But he was treated both worse and better in his Algerine slavery than at home in Christian Spain. His work was rooted in his own experience, but even those who had never set foot in a Muslim land were forced to struggle with the issue of the virtuous infidel.

  Tho’ Arabs much to Rapine are inclin’d,

  Of Nature fierce, and Manners unrefin’d,

  Yet is King Halla [of Morocco] gen’rous, mild, and wise,

  And with the most applauded Heroe vies;

  Courteous, humane, and easy of Access

 
; This Monarch succours Merit in Distress.

  Tho’ the great Prince rejects our Creed divine,

  His moral Virtues so illustrious shine,

  That he like some, who Rome’s proud Scepter bore,

  Excells most Kings who Christ their Head adore.69

  Lepanto lay at the heart of this skein of tangled meanings. It was a stunning victory, but as the Turkish vizier Sokullu foresaw, of passing political or military importance. Seven years after La Naval, at Alcazarquivir in Morocco, a Muslim army reinforced with Ottoman janissaries killed the king of Portugal, Dom Sebastian, nephew of Don John, and most of the Portuguese nobility.70 Yet Alcazarquivir has vanished from the collective memory, while the recollection of Lepanto has been embellished and enhanced over the years. The meeting of Don John and Ali Pasha, with its attendant cast of thousands, more than any other encounter in the sixteenth century between Islam and the Christian West presented the ambivalence and the endless ambiguities of the relationship between these worlds.

  CHAPTER TWO

  First Contact

  THIS BOOK IS ABOUT ENMITY, HOW IT WAS CREATED AND HOW IT IS sustained. While Muslims were not the first or only enemies of Western Christendom, they quickly became its prime focus for fear and hatred. Eventually the very words used to describe them became common tokens of abuse.1 Christians at the time of Lepanto often insulted each other in terms applied to Muslims. Protestants in sixteenth-century Bavaria described their clerical enemy as “Jesuits and Mamelukkes.” In England, William Tyndale regretted how many of his Catholic countrymen had become “the Antichriste of Rome’s mamelukes.” “Lustful Turk,” “street Arab,” and “mad mullah” are all nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century epithets, but they reached back to ideas about the East that developed steadily from the seventh century onward.2