Empires of the Sea

by Crowley, Roger

  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

  IN 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.

  Author’s Note and Acknowledgments

  OUR KNOWLEDGE OF THE HISTORY of the Mediterranean in the sixteenth century is a testament to the invention of printing and the spread of literacy. Where the great event of the Mediterranean world in the fifteenth century—the fall of Constantinople in 1453—is recorded in a mere handful of short accounts, the siege of Malta, the battle of Lepanto, and all the major events and protagonists in this book are the subjects of numerous vivid chronicles, personal testaments, pamphlets, ballads, prints, and news sheets, produced in all the languages of Western Europe for a receptive audience. In addition to this explosion of printed material, there are literally millions of memoranda, letters, secret briefings, and diplomatic exchanges about the events of the time, dictated by the major players and scribed and dispatched across the sea by professional secretariats in Madrid, Rome, Venice, and Istanbul. For example, it has been suggested that no one person has ever read all the correspondence of Philip II of Spain, who ruled half the world from his study desk for forty-two years, and who could produce twelve hundred items of correspondence in a good month. In the face of such engulfing torrents of material, it is inevitable that a short, general work of this nature owes a huge debt to generations of scholars who have given their lives to heroically mining the archives of the world. Among those whose work I have particularly valued are Fernand Braudel, the father of Mediterranean studies in the sixteenth century; Kenneth Setton, whose wonderful four-volume work The Papacy and the Levant is a treasure trove of source material; and Ismail Danimend. From more recent times I am extremely grateful to Stephen Spiteri, whose compendious book The Great Siege is an ultimate source on everything to do with events on Malta in 1565.

  One vexing issue that has arisen in the writing of this book is the question of the form of names of places and people. The names by which the protagonists are known vary considerably from language to language; many confusingly change their names during the course of the story, have multiple nicknames, and, in the case of the Ottomans, common names that reoccur frequently: two different Mustaphas commanded the sultan’s army within a six-year period. I have tried to be as clear about this as possible, without being too long-winded. The Ottoman admiral at Lepanto—or again Inebaht 1, to give it the Turkish name—is properly called Müezzinzade Ali. For simplicity’s sake, I have called him Ali Pasha throughout. In general I have chosen the form of name by which a person is known in his own language. For example, the corsair who died at Malta is usually referred to in Christian sources as Dragut. I have preferred his Turkish name, Turgut. In addition, I have chosen to transliterate Turkish words for English-speaking readers—Suluç has become Shuluch, Oruç, Oruch, Çavus, Chaush—but I cannot claim that my phonetically approximate renderings are an exact science.

  IN THE ACTUAL
CREATION of this book, I am extremely grateful to a large number of individuals and organizations. First, to Jonathan Jao and the team at Random House for their enthusiasm and professionalism, and to my agent, Andrew Lownie. In all matters to do with the Knights of Saint John and the siege of Malta, research was helped enormously by the use of the wonderful library of the Order of Saint John at Clerkenwell, London (www.sja.org.uk). My thanks to Pamela Willis, the librarian. I am grateful a second time to Dr. Stephen Spiteri. Not only did The Great Siege clearly explain what a ravelin looks like, its author also generously allowed me to reproduce his reconstructions of St. Elmo. I commend his website (www.fortress-explorer.org) for all kinds of information about the fortifications on Malta.

  Many friends and casual bystanders have been unwittingly drawn into this project. Stan Ginn saved the initial proposal from even more serious structural flaws than it now contains; Elizabeth Manners and Stephen Scoffham read and commented on the manuscript; John Dyson provided books from Istanbul; Jan Crowley, Christopher Trillo, Annamaria Ferro, and Andrew Kirby helped with translation; Henrietta Naish had me to stay; Deborah Marshall-Warren sat down for a cup of coffee in the square in Birgu and found herself corralled into finding source material. To all these people I am very grateful. And again, my thanks and love to Jan for supporting the strange enterprise of book writing in good health and bad. Some aspects of it were probably tolerable—the trips to the Venetian lagoon, the landscapes of Malta, and the ramparts of Famagusta—but the business of observing at close quarters books being written is a dull chore at best. Last, a posthumous salute to my father, George Crowley, who knew the sea well in peace and war, and who introduced me to Malta when I was ten. Without that marvelous first glimpse of the Mediterranean, this book would not have come about.