Empires of the Sea

by Crowley, Roger

  As Venice was at peace with the empire, a religious opinion was sought from the chief mufti as to the legitimacy of breaking a treaty with the infidel; the mufti duly found precedent in the Arab occupation of the island: it was Selim’s duty to recover these places for Islam. It was the only treaty the Ottomans would break in the sixteenth century. From the outset the Cyprus campaign carried particular overtones of holy war.

  Sokollu Mehmet, the chief vizier

  When the sultan’s emissary, Kubat, delivered his message to the Venetian authorities on March 28, 1570, the broad contents were already known and a response framed; even before Kubat was heard, the red banner of war had been carried in the doge’s procession. The Venetians listened in silence to the familiar, peremptory crash of Ottoman rhetoric and reported it thus:

  Selim, Ottoman Sultan, Emperor of the Turks, Lord of Lords, King of Kings, Shadow of God, Lord of the Earthly Paradise and of Jerusalem, to the Signory of Venice: We demand of you Cyprus, which you shall give Us willingly or perforce; and do you not irritate our horrible sword, for We shall wage most cruel war against you everywhere; nor let you trust in your treasure, for We shall cause it suddenly to run away from you like a torrent; beware to irritate Us.

  It was the measure of how intimately the Ottomans—or Sokollu—understood Venice that their direst threat was on cost grounds, but the senate was resolute and voted for war by the unprecedented margin of 195 to 5. Kubat had to be slipped out of a back door to avoid the attentions of the mob.

  DESPITE THIS THUNDERCLAP, the Ottoman plan was not a sudden whim; the visit of 1568 indicated that it was years deep, part of a clear intention for final Ottoman control of the Eastern Mediterranean. Reconnaissance had been accompanied by planning that conformed to all the verities of Ottoman diplomacy and turned on careful calculations. Whatever Sokollu felt, he was instrumental in preparing the ground. He had made peace in Hungary and the Yemen, then thrown dust in the eyes of Christian Europe: the promised support for the Morisco revolt was intended to distract Philip in faraway Madrid; in France, Charles IX was receiving from the Turks offers of new treaties, to keep Christendom in diplomatic turmoil. As for the Venetians, they had been encouraged to use their bribes on Sokollu as “the friend of Venice” who could pour oil on the troubled waters of Ottoman aggression and who would then offer, at the last moment, to take the island peacefully off their hands. Sokollu reasoned that Venice was too far from Cyprus to mount an adequate defense—if it fought at all—and, crucially, that Europe was too disunited to mount a joint response. Fear of crusade always dominated Ottoman thinking, but two hundred years’ experience of disorganized pan-Christian actions had reasonably led Sokollu to hope that Venice could be teased into peaceful surrender. It was a reasonable bet that proved wrong. No one in early 1570 could have predicted that the Cyprus war and the Morisco revolt—events at the far ends of the sea—would trigger a chain reaction that would surprise everyone. Nor had anyone made adequate allowance for the messianic personality of Pope Pius V, or the daring of Don Juan of Austria, or the velocity that events in Famagusta would impart to a united sense of Christian purpose.

  EVEN BEFORE KUBAT’S dramatic ultimatum, the Venetians had started to make overtures to Christian Europe and, against their better judgment, to raise the question of Holy League again. On March 10, the doge was writing to his ambassador at Philip’s court in Madrid with oily disingenuousness that “the forces of his Catholic Majesty should be united with ours in order to oppose the fury and power of the Turks, to which we have readily assented because of our desire for the universal good, and because we hope that the Lord God has turned His compassionate eyes toward Christendom, and that He is willing at this time to repress the audacity of the infidels.” The problem was that no one believed in Venice’s sincerity; people wondered, even as Venice made this offer, if the republic was still negotiating with Sokollu—which indeed they were. If the Ottomans withdrew their threat, the merchants on the Rialto would cheerfully forget the greater good of Christendom and go back to trading with the infidel. Philip could doubtless still recall Venetians cheering at the fall of Saint Elmo and had no intrinsic interest in helping Venice; indeed the Ottoman concentration on Cyprus seemed an ideal moment to retake Tunis and consolidate the Western Mediterranean.

  Everyone, however, had reckoned without the pope. The Cyprus crisis was just the opportunity to reanimate the Holy League for which Pius had been waiting. He threw himself headlong into the project with a frightening passion; he immediately committed the papacy to supplying galleys for the venture and loosed the papal purse strings with a promptness that left the recipients slightly openmouthed after the tightfistedness of his predecessor. “His Holiness has demonstrated the truth of one of our Castilian proverbs,” quipped the Spanish cardinal Espinosa, “that the constipated die from diarrhea.”

  Pius dispatched the Spanish churchman Luis de Torres to Philip with cogent arguments for combined action. “It is clear that one of the principal reasons why the Turk has quarrelled with the Venetians is that he thought he would find them unaided, without any hope of uniting with Your Majesty, who is so occupied with the Moors of Granada.” That had indeed been Sokollu’s calculation; it was a reasonable one, but it had unintended consequences.

  Philip was suspicious of the whole idea of Holy Leagues, and it was not in his nature to act spontaneously. God’s bureaucrat, who dressed soberly in black, read everything, ruled absolutely, thought suspiciously, and acted cautiously, was not one to make up his mind quickly—nor to reveal his intentions prematurely. “He is one of the greatest dissimulators in the world,” complained the French ambassador. “He knows how to pretend and conceal his intentions better than any king…up to the time and the hour at which it suits him to let them be known.” Where Selim delegated the affairs of state, Philip wanted to weigh every detail and manage every operation personally. His decision-making was a byword for sloth. “If we have to wait for death,” joked his officials, “let us hope that it comes from Spain, for then it would never arrive.”

  Yet Torres arrived at a critical moment and initially appeared to achieve unexpected results. The Morisco war was at its height and Philip was at Cordoba, overseeing the campaign. Spain crackled with religious fervor; the fear that the Turks might be aiding the revolt loomed large in Philip’s mind. In an atmosphere of heightened emotions, distances telescoped and it seemed to Philip that nothing less than a direct challenge to Ottoman power could now solve his internal problems and resolve the whole issue of Mediterranean security. And Torres had brought with him the promise of substantial papal subsidies, for money always concentrated Christian minds. Torres had his answer within two days. The Catholic King agreed in principle to involvement in a Holy League, the terms for which must be scrupulously worked out, Philip’s natural caution quickly reasserting itself on this point. In the interim, prompted by the prospect of cash up front, he committed himself to providing “immediate” aid to “please the Pope and provide always for Christendom’s need.” He would send his naval commander Gian’Andrea Doria—the inglorious survivor of Djerba—with a galley fleet to the south of Italy. For the first time in many years, the Mediterranean witnessed a unified Christian attempt to turn back the Ottoman tide.

  It was to be a tripartite force. Venice, the Papacy, and Spain, oiled by church money and indulgences for the sins of those who participated, were to combine their fleets in a concerted attempt to save Cyprus. Each force appointed its own commander. The Venetians gave the baton of command to Gerolamo Zane, in a typically elaborate service in Saint Mark’s. He departed the lagoon with an advanced galley fleet on March 30, 1570. Doria, the most experienced seaman in the whole operation, was captain general of the Spanish galleys, while to the pope fell the choice of overall commander. He made what was effectively a political compromise. Marc’Antonio Colonna was an Italian but also a vassal of the Spanish king; it was felt he could appeal to both parties and draw Philip into the league. The problem was that he was a
diplomat and a general, not an experienced naval man. Off the record there were snorts of derision in the Spanish camp—Cardinal Espinosa declared that his sister knew as much about ships—and Philip initially dragged his heels over accepting the appointment, annoyed that Colonna had accepted without consultation, reminding his man that there was as yet no such thing as a league. But Pius was unmovable in his choice. On July 15, Philip wrote to the commander expressing pleasure at his appointment.

  BENEATH SUCH FELICITOUS WORDS lay oceans of mutual suspicion and unstated but divergent objectives. The expedition of 1570, undertaken under no agreed terms, was an exercise in bad faith, held together by the willpower and subsidies of the pope. Philip had no intrinsic interest in saving Cyprus for the Venetians, but welcomed the papal subsidy and would have liked to divert the expedition to North Africa; natural caution—and the catastrophe at Djerba—governed his secret instructions to Doria. The loss of his carefully reconstructed fleet would lay Spain open to North African corsairs again; he had no intention of risking it for the treacherous Venetians, who were quite capable of cutting a late deal with the sultan. The Venetians, for their part, had a profound distrust of the Genoese in general and the Doria clan in particular after the Preveza debacle of 1538. And neither party had any faith in the pope’s choice of Colonna as a naval commander. They quietly ordered their admirals to obey him only in so far as it accorded with their experience. The small print of Philip’s directive to Doria hedged these instructions in particularly ambiguous terms: “You shall obey Marc’Antonio Colonna as General of the Galleys…and with the practical experience you possess, you should at all times draw the attention of [Colonna] to what you judge the correct course of action in all things.” Behind this lay a larger command: “You should look carefully where you put our galleys because of the great harm that any misfortune would bring upon Christendom.” Philip was actually giving Doria the selfsame command he had given Don Garcia de Toledo at Malta: not to engage the enemy fleet at all. Doria’s brother was said to have offered a wager “that there would be no combat with the enemy’s armada, because Gian’Andrea had orders from his Majesty not to engage in such for this year.” This chimed exactly with Doria’s own peculiar relationship to the endeavor: he was present both as commander of the king’s fleet and as a private contractor. Twelve of the galleys were personal property rented out to Philip: he had no intention of risking them in a fight.

  It was against this background that the allies launched their fleets. The enterprise was ramshackle, ill-conceived—and late. The Venetians had been at peace for thirty years and were playing catch-up. They built and recommissioned ships with extraordinary speed; in June the arsenal turned out 127 light and 11 heavy galleys, but the search for reliable manpower was, as ever, a problem. The sea, and the conditions on board, quickly thinned out Zane’s force still further. He was at Zara on the Dalmatian coast, waiting for Colonna and Doria, when typhus took hold of the rowing benches. The men started to sicken and die. He sat there under orders for two months, then moved to Corfu, where things failed to improve. Inaction demoralized the fleet; when more rowers were recruited from the Greek islands, they died too. Exasperated at the nonappearance of their allies, the Venetian senate ordered Zane to push on to Crete with his depleted ships in late July.

  Gian’Andrea Doria

  Doria, meanwhile, was making the usual laborious preparations, collecting troops in Southern Italy and awaiting Philip’s exacting but conflicting instructions. Reverting to type, the king had not as yet actually pledged to join his fleet with the Venetians’, merely to send it to Italy. It took further clarifications to get Philip to instruct Doria accordingly, but in such ambiguous terms that Doria complained to his father-in-law that “the king commands and wishes that I serve him and guess [his intentions]. Yet the more I read his letter, the less I understand it…. Thus, I have no other choice but to go, but slowly.” He acted accordingly, dawdling around the south coast of Italy to a meeting with the papal galleys of Colonna at Otranto. Colonna had been waiting fifteen days, then had to endure Doria playing games with naval protocol. Doria failed to make the customary visit to his superior officer; eventually Colonna went aboard the Genoese flagship, where Doria informed him of his overriding “obligation of preserving intact the fleet of Your Majesty” and that he would stay with the combined fleet no later than the end of September.

  Eventually Colonna and Doria set sail for a rendezvous with the Venetians on Crete on August 22, “and all this was done,” Colonna reported ruefully afterward, “despite Gian’Andrea who, for fear of being discovered, went so far out to sea that he could hardly make the landing in Crete.”

  IT WAS ALL HAPPENING too late. The Ottomans had planned their operation carefully and sailed early. Piyale left Istanbul in late April with eighty galleys; the army commander, Lala Mustapha, departed twenty days later; the cavalry and janissaries marched across Anatolia to the collection point at Finike on the southern coast, one hundred fifty miles from Cyprus. By July 20, the Ottomans had landed somewhere between sixty thousand and eighty thousand men on the island.

  The expedition was the echo of Malta, though on a far larger scale. There were two competing objectives. Nicosia, the inland capital in the center of the island, and Famagusta, “the eye of the island,” its heavily fortified port on the eastern coast. Venice’s most competent commander, Astorre Baglione, guessed the Ottomans would go for Famagusta, and Piyale again argued for capturing the safe harbor. But somewhere in the back of Lala Mustapha’s brain lurked the lesson of Mdina, which had been his namesake’s nemesis on Malta. He was anxious not to leave Nicosia unguarded in the rear.

  Lala Mustapha was part of the sultan’s inner circle. His honorific forename—Lala, “guardian”—denoted his care of Selim as a child; he was a passionate opponent of Sokollu Mehmet, who tacitly disapproved of the whole venture. Success was now critical for Mustapha, who shared two attributes with his namesake General Mustapha on Malta—an explosive temper in the face of stubborn opposition and a matching propensity for acts of exemplary cruelty. It was a character trait that would not serve the Ottoman cause well.

  UNLIKE THE KNIGHTS AT BIRGU, the Venetians had at least given some foresight to defending their Cypriot strongholds. Nicosia lies at the center of the island’s great plain—a dusty thirty-mile-long expanse, flat as a billiard table, that shimmers in the summer heat. The open terrain had allowed the unsentimental Venetians to rip the heart out of one of Europe’s most beguiling and cosmopolitan cities. During the 1560s they blew up palaces and churches, evicted thousands of people, and demolished the island’s most precious building—the monastery of Saint Domenico with its royal tombs—in the name of defensive engineering. In its place they constructed a perfectly symmetrical star fortress, three miles in circumference, taken straight from the pages of an Italian siege manual. It had a few shortcomings—some of the bastions were faced with turf, rather than stone—but it was considered by visiting experts to be of “the finest and most scientific construction.” In the summer of 1570 it had provisions for a two-year siege. In the right hands it might have held out for a long time.

  The problem was that Nicosia required twenty thousand men to defend its whole perimeter; the city’s total population was put at fifty-six thousand, of which only twelve thousand were fit for military service, and many of these were untrained Greek levies. The priest Angelo Calepio, who later wrote a startling eyewitness account of what transpired at Nicosia, commented coolly about these men: the government “had neither muskets nor swords to give them, no arquebuses, no defensive armour…. Many of the soldiers were brave enough, but many had so little training that they could not fire their muskets without burning their beards.” Effective defense also required a competent commander, and in this respect Venice had been unlucky. Death had stripped the island of its most experienced generals; the best remaining soldier on the island, Astorre Baglione, was in Famagusta. By default, control of Nicosia passed to the utterly disastrous
Nicolas Dandolo. “Would to God we had lost him too!” wrote Calepio bitterly. Dandolo was cautious, uncharismatic, scornful of the opinions of others, and remarkably unintelligent. Throughout the whole siege he managed to frustrate the best efforts of his skilled Venetian officers and local Greek cavalry.

  Nicosia: “the finest and most scientific construction”

  He botched almost everything. Lala Mustapha was surprised to be able to land unopposed. Dandolo had forbidden the cavalry from repulsing the invaders. The Venetian senate had sent the island permission to free their Greek serfs, in a last-minute attempt to win their goodwill; the release was never implemented. From the start the Ottomans treated the local population with great clemency. “No liberty did they get,” Calepio recorded, “except such as Mustapha gave them.” It was all too easy to detach the Greek Cypriots from their Italian masters. When the unfortified village of Lefkara submitted to the Turks, a force from Nicosia sallied forth and massacred the local population. Unsurprisingly, later appeals to the outlying villages for help went unanswered.

  Lala Mustapha marched on Nicosia unopposed and was quick to erect the gun platforms and snake his trenches forward. Dandolo seemed frozen into immobility, forbidding sorties, hoarding gunpowder, snuffing out initiative. Calepio, subsequently bitter from personal loss and imprisonment, could not restrain himself:

  We were anxious to harass [the enemy] with our cavalry to stop their horses from bringing up faggots, but were not allowed to do so: even when some of the most daring of them came close up to our ditch to cut away the bridges and fronts of the bastions, and to bore into the walls, the Lieutenant [Dandolo] would not allow our men to fire on them if they were one or two, but only when they were ten or more, saying that he could not justify it to St Mark. So that the enemy had all the convenience for damaging our walls and bastions which they themselves could desire, whilst I and very many others have heard with our own ears the haughty commands and threats addressed to our gunners and their chief about wasting powder, which was doled out with the utmost niggardliness, as though to avoid injuring men who with such furious and incessant firing were trying to take our lives. Even what they had the Lieutenant wanted to hoard, so that very many people began to think he was a traitor. More than once Signor Pisani asked [him] why he did not let our men do what was necessary for the defence, and they almost came to blows when [Dandolo] was told, “Illustrious Sir, we ought to clear the ditch, and drive out the enemy, so that they may not with spades and picks undermine our ramparts, and lay them low.” Signor Dandolo answered that our bastions were so many mountains.