Scholars are correct to point out that Europeans neither invented firearms nor enjoyed a monopoly in their use. But they must acknowledge that the ability to fabricate and distribute firearms on a wide scale and to improve their lethality was unique to Europe. From the introduction of gunpowder in the fourteenth century to the present day, all major improvements in firearms—the matchlock, flintlock, percussion cap, smokeless powder, rifle barrel, minié ball, repeating rifle, and machine gun—have taken place in the West or under Western auspices. As a general rule, Europeans did not employ or import Ottoman or Chinese guns, and they did not pattern their technique of munitions production on Asian or African designs.
This idea of continual innovation and improvement in the use of technology is embodied in Aristotle’s dictum in his Metaphysics that prior philosophers’ theories contribute to a sort of ongoing aggregate of Greek knowledge. In the Physics (204B) he admits, “In the case of all discoveries, the results of previous labors that have been handed down from others have been advanced bit by bit by those who have taken them on.” Western technological development is largely an outgrowth of empirical research, the acquisition of knowledge through sense perception, the observation and testing of phenomena, and the recording of such data so that factual information itself is timeless, increasing and becoming more accurate through the collective criticism and modification of the ages. That there were an Aristotle, Xenophon, and Aeneas Tacticus at the beginning of Western culture and not anything comparable in the New World explains why centuries later a Cortés could fabricate cannon and gunpowder in the New World, while the Aztecs could not use the Spanish artillery they captured, why for centuries the lethal potential of the land around Tenochtitlán was untapped, but was mined for its gunpowder and ores within months after the Spanish arrival.
Western technological superiority is not merely a result of the military renaissance of the sixteenth century or an accident of history, much less the result of natural resources, but predicated on an age-old method of investigation, a peculiar mentality that dates back to the Greeks and not earlier. Although the theoretical mathematician Archimedes purportedly snapped that “the whole trade of engineering was sordid and ignoble, and every sort of art that lends itself to mere use and profit,” his machines— cranes and a purported huge reflective glass heat ray—delayed the capture of Syracuse for two years. The Roman navy in the First Punic War not only copied Greek and Carthaginian designs but went on to ensure their victories by the use of innovative improvements such as the corvus, a sort of derrick that lifted enemy ships right out of the water. Long before American B-29s dropped napalm over Tokyo, the Byzantines sprayed through brass tubes compressed blasts of Greek fire, a secret concoction of naphtha, sulfur, and quicklime that like its modern counterpart kept burning even when doused with water.
Military knowledge was also abstract and published, not just empirical. Western military manuals from Aelian (Taktike theoria) and Vegetius (Epitoma rei militaris) to the great handbooks on ballistics and tactics of the sixteenth century (e.g., Luigi Collado’s Practica manual de artiglierra [1586] or Justus Lipsius’s De militia Romana [1595–96]) incorporate firsthand knowledge and abstract theoretical investigation into practical advice. In contrast, the most brilliant of Chinese and Islamic military works are far more ambitious and holistic texts, and thus less pragmatic as actual blueprints for killing, embedded with religion, politics, or philosophy and replete with illusions and axioms from Allah to the yin and the yang, hot and cold, one and many.
Courage on the battlefield is a human characteristic. But the ability to craft weapons through mass production to offset such bravery is a cultural phenomenon. Cortés, like Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Don Juan of Austria, and other Western captains, often annihilated without mercy their numerically superior foes, not because their own soldiers were necessarily better in war, but because their traditions of free inquiry, rationalism, and science most surely were.
SEVEN
The Market—or Capitalism Kills
Lepanto, October 7, 1571
Accumulated capital, not forced exactions, is what sustains wars.
—THUCYDIDES, The Peloponnesian War (1.141.5)
GALLEY WAR
No Quarter
WERE THEY MERCHANT BARGES? The Ottoman admiral, Müezzinzade Ali Pasha, had never seen anything like the six bizarre ships floating a few hundred yards in front of his attacking galleys. Perhaps they were some sort of supply vessels? Clearly, they were both new and huge— and drifting right toward his flagship, the Sultana! In truth, the six colossal oddities were recently constructed Venetian galleasses. Each carried nearly fifty heavy guns—bristling from starboard and port, shooting over the bow and from the poop deck, guns it seemed booming everywhere. Each of these novel monstrosities could deliver more than six times as much shot as the largest oared ships in Europe—and in terms of firepower alone were worth a dozen of the sultan’s standard galleys.
On such calm seas they were mobile too and with sails and oars could maneuver and turn to fire in every direction. Now four of the six bobbing behemoths methodically began to blast apart Ali Pasha’s galleys—“tanta horribile et perpetua tempesta,” a contemporary account recorded. Grapeshot and five-pound balls tore through the Turkish decks. The rarer thirty- or even sixty-pound iron projectiles blew apart entire sections of the Turkish ships at the waterline—men, planking, and oars obliterated altogether.
“Big ships, big ships with big cannon,” the Turkish crews reportedly screamed of the murderous incoming fire. Two of the galleasses’ commanders, Antonio and Ambrogio Bragadino, had just heard of the ghastly torture and murder of their brother, Marcantonio, on Cyprus a few weeks earlier. Now the brothers urged hundreds of their gunners to fire continuously, determined this Sunday morning to take no prisoners in revenge.
If Ali’s ships could not get past the galleasses to close quickly with the Christian armada, the entire Ottoman fleet, despite its far greater size, would be systematically torn apart at sea:
The sea was wholly covered with men, yardarms, oars, casks, barrels, and various kinds of armaments, an incredible thing that only six galleasses should have caused such great destruction, for they had not hitherto been tried in the forefront of a naval battle. (K. M. Setton, The Papacy and the Levant, 1056)
Most of the Christian observers believed that a third of the Ottoman armada was scattered, disabled, or sunk before the battle proper between galleys had even commenced. As many as 10,000 Turkish seamen were thrown into the sea when their galleys were obliterated in thirty minutes of firing from just four European ships—two of the six galleasses on the right wing drifted out of position and saw little action. Ali Pasha had seen in these strange galleasses some glimpses of the future of naval warfare, and it rested not with rams, boarders, or rowers, but with mass-produced iron cannon, high decks, and large vessels.
Nevertheless, a portion of the center of the Ottoman fleet, ninety-six galleys and escorts led by Ali Pasha’s Sultana, headed through and finally around the blistering gunfire toward Don Juan’s La Reale— an enormous galley in its own right, launched from the dockyards of Seville and adorned by the artistic hand of Juan Bautista Vázquez himself. The prince’s gaudy embroidered banner of the Crucifixion and the combined arms of Spain, Venice, and the Holy See marked for all to see the center of the Christian line, where Don Juan was flanked by the papal captain Marcantonio Colonna—to die bravely in the battle to come—and the Venetian septuagenarian Sebastian Veniero. Thanks to Don Juan’s singular genius and magnanimity, the shaky confederation fleet was under the shared tactical command of a Genoese, Venetian, and Spaniard.
As the battered Turkish ships approached the armada of the Holy League, priests scurried across the decks, blessing the crews in the final seconds before the collision of galleys; many of them were armed and had every intention of offering material as well as spiritual comfort to their flocks. “My children,” Don Juan had told his men in the minutes bef
ore the collision, “we are here to conquer or to die as Heaven may determine.” Crucifixes adorned every ship in the fleet at Lepanto. The Christians, not the supposed “fanatical” Muslims, would fight like men possessed. All were enraged over rumors of the most recent Ottoman atrocities on Cyprus and Corfu, and convinced this was the best and last chance that they might have to engage the Turkish fleet in a decisive battle and thus seek retribution for decades of Islamic raiding of their shores.
Soon eight hundred Christian and Turkish soldiers mixed it up on the Sultana, itself an ornate galley with decks of polished black walnut. But for all its beauty, the Sultana lacked the protective boarding nets of the Reale and thus became the central slaughter place of the two lines, a veritable floating battlefield between cross and crescent. The Christians, most of whom wore steel breastplates and fired harquebuses, twice nearly forced their way to the center of Ali Pasha’s ship before swarms of Turks fought them back. Smaller Ottoman galliots that had survived the galleasses’ initial broadsides docked constantly beside the two locked flagships and unloaded reinforcements, in hopes that the sheer manpower and skill of the Janissaries might cancel out the superior firearms, armor, and group cohesion of the Spanish and Italian infantry. More Christian ships were also pulling up beside the Sultana and unloading fresh harquebusiers to join the fight for Ali Pasha’s ship.
Many of the European galleys, particularly the Spanish vessels, were larger than their Ottoman counterparts. Their higher decks allowed boarding parties to jump down into the Turkish ships, while hundreds more of the Christian gunners remaining on board poured shot downward with impunity on the beleaguered enemy archers. The Christians— the Spanish especially—were also comfortable with mass charges, in which discipline, cohesion, and sheer weight might overwhelm the individual bravery and martial skill of the Janissaries.
At last a final rush led by Don Juan himself, brandishing battle-ax and broadsword, overwhelmed the Sultana’s crew. Ali Pasha, shooting arrows from his small bow, fell with a harquebus bullet in his brain. Soon his head was on a pike and posted on the Reale’s quarterdeck, as his treasured gilded and green flag from Mecca was ripped from the mast, the papal pennant raised in its place. Panic engulfed what was left of the ninety-six ships at the center of the Ottoman fleet once their crews saw that their admiral was decapitated and the sultan’s flagship now the property of Don Juan himself. The Spaniards pulled their vessels away from the death ship and sought out additional prey to their beleaguered right.
Meanwhile, the Christian left wing under Agostino Barbarigo—a few days after the battle he would perish from a ghastly wound to the eye— was outflanked and being driven onto the Aetolian mainland by the longer Ottoman right under the wily Mehmed Siroco (“Suluk”). Indeed, the three wings of Don Juan’s fleet constituted a battle line of only some 7,500 yards; the admirals of the Holy League were thus rightly worried that the longer Ottoman front might circumvent their wings and sweep them from the rear. But in a brilliant feat of seamanship Barbarigo backwatered, kept most of the enemy ships in front of his own line, and then began driving them onto the shore as he raked their decks with gunfire and awaited the inevitable boarding by the numerically superior Turkish galleys. Barbarigo had under his command the best galleys from the Arsenal at Venice—among them Christ Raised, Fortune, and Sea Horse— and both his outnumbered ships and crews were qualitatively superior to their Ottoman counterparts.
Once the Turkish soldiers had exhausted their supply of arrows— many of them poison-tipped—the struggle between Siroco and Barbarigo became another land battle of sorts between infantry. The frenzied Christians, wearing armor, equipped with firearms, and advancing over the decks in dense lines and columns, found they could systematically slaughter the Turkish peasants, most of whom soon ran out of arrows and were without metal body protection, harquebuses, or the succor of the Janissaries. At close ranges on the decks of the galleys, fire from the harquebuses tore right through the unarmored Turks, killing and wounding with almost every shot. Mehmed Siroco would also soon lose his head, his truncated corpse thrown ignominiously overboard. The Christians sank or captured most of his fifty-six ships, killed the crews, and spared neither the surrendering nor the wounded. Later they claimed that not a single galley or its crew escaped.
Salamis (above) was one of the largest, most confused—and deadliest— engagements in naval history. European artists reinvented it as a struggle between high-prowed Mediterranean galleys, but they at least capture the congestion of a quarter-million sailors in hundreds of triremes, rowing, boarding, killing, and drowning—all within a few thousand square yards of sea. Themistocles (below left) created the Athenian fleet, engineered the Persian defeat, and laid the foundations of Athenian imperialism before being ostracized and sentenced to death in absentia by the very citizenry he had saved. On this relief from Persepolis (below right), Darius and Xerxes, who would both invade Greece and be defeated, appear as near divinities—stiff and unapproachable, with none of the realism of classical Greek sculpture.
East meets West (above) in a Roman floor mosaic from Pompeii. In Alexander’s rush toward Darius III, their antithesis is striking: Darius is frightened although perched on his imperial chariot amid bodyguards, while a solitary Alexander strives to plunge into the melee. Sometimes associated with the Battle of Issus (333 B.C.), the scene seems to be a mélange, incorporating moments from all four of his great fights. At left, a Hellenistic bust reflects the Olympian divinity of Alexander, emphasizing his youth, beauty, and farseeing gaze.
In the majestic canvas above by Charles Le Brun (1619–90), Alexander’s men mop up a battlefield full of captives and booty at Gaugamela. The reality was far worse: Over 50,000 corpses were left to rot in the October sun. Persian reliefs like the one below were meant to suggest the uniformity and anonymity of imperial soldiers. Notice the absence of metal body armor, helmets, and heavy shields.
Classical sculptors and authors alike were fascinated with Hannibal Barca (left). While he was imbued with all the stereotypical traits of non-Western enemies—perfidy, arrogance, and cruelty—there was also a grudging admiration for his skill, courage, and tenacity in a hopeless cause. It is notable that all surviving art and literature surrounding Hannibal—much of it sympathetic and romantic— derive from the very culture that destroyed his country, family, and himself. An illustrated manuscript of the late fifteenth century (below) attempts to capture the sheer magnitude and hand-to-hand fighting of Cannae. Yet the rather tame nature of Renaissance warfare paled in comparison; even the most imaginative illustrators had no conception of battles involving well over 100,000 combatants, in which hundreds might be killed every minute.
Carl von Steuben’s romantic painting of the Battle of Poitiers (above) suggests the power of the Frankish “mass of ice,” the wall of tough mailed spearmen who broke the repeated mounted attacks of Islamic horsemen. The battle was viewed as a major event in the preservation of Christianity, in which faith trumped numbers— hence the prominent religious iconography. Often seen as a battle of horsemen, as below in The Pursuit of the Defeated , in reality most Frankish knights probably dismounted during the fight. While the artist has typically represented the Franks as mounted, the density and position of their spears suggest the onset of a classical phalanx.
This map of Mexico City (above), often attributed to Cortés himself, suggests its size and wealth. The enormous population—estimated at over 200,000—was fed by a vast fleet of lake-borne canoes. Hernan Cortés (above right) was often portrayed as a triumphant knight of a grateful monarchy; in fact, he died poor, disillusioned, and ignored by those he had enriched. While this Spanish woodcut (right) presents Montezuma in warrior dress, he took no part in the fighting and was killed months before the destruction of his imperial city.
Later Mexican drawings stressed the deadly effect of Spanish steel on unprotected flesh. At the festival of Toxcatl (above), 120 Spaniards massacred over 3,000 unarmed Aztec nobles at the cost of a few wounded.
This image of the subsequent siege of the Spanish (below) shows them superbly armed, arrayed in dense formation, and vastly outnumbered, as more numerous lighter-clad Aztecs attempt to storm their redoubt. All contemporary Spanish and Mexican observers felt that European weapons were the key to the conquistadors’ victory.
To sixteenth-century Europeans, the sudden muster and vast size of the Christian fleet at Lepanto were proof of the power of Christ to resist the Muslim onslaught. In this haunting canvas of Giorgio Vasari (1511–74), the supernatural forces of good and evil watch as the six enormous galleasses lead out the Holy League’s massive armada. The dense formation of his galleys conveys an accurate impression that the fighting resembled more a land than a sea battle, as hundreds of ships quickly became interlocked in the confused fighting.
The last minutes of thousands of Ottoman sailors at Lepanto were a favorite topic of European illustrators. Eyewitness accounts provided lurid descriptions of robed survivors clinging to the flotsam of wrecked galleys before sinking beneath the waves or being harpooned by Christian pikemen. Most Ottoman fatalities occurred after the actual fighting was over; and we should assume the majority of the 30,000 lost either drowned or were executed at sea.
Rorke’s Drift (above) had almost no defensive advantages; yet within a few hours the British crafted a redoubt of bags and boxes that proved unassailable. The chief mistake of King Cetshwayo (below left) was underestimating the strength of his enemies; only later when he visited London himself did he appreciate England’s enormous resources. The three-pronged attack on Zulu power centers conceived by Lord Chelmsford (below right) resulted in the complete destruction of a vast kingdom in less than a year.
Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power Page 31
