Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power (36 page)

EUROPE AND THE OTTOMANS

A
Fragmented
Continent

Sixteenth-century middle and eastern Europe, as had been true since the sixth century A.D., felt itself besieged by the East. Whereas northern Africa and Asia Minor had become unified by Islam, and were for the most part provinces or protectorates of a vast Ottoman hegemony, Europe was ever more wracked by religious strife. Christendom, split asunder by Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy, was by the sixteenth century to fragment further with the schism of Protestantism and the growth of nation-states in England, France, Holland, Italy, and Spain, founded on principles of ethnic, cultural, and linguistic affinity, not monolithic allegiance to the Vatican.

France, having rid itself of the last Islamic attackers in the early tenth century, was more or less in alliance with the Ottomans for much of the sixteenth century. The friendship was not always passive: the French had used Ottoman help to take Corsica from Genoa in 1532 and had allowed the Turkish admiral Barbarossa to winter his galley fleet—manned by Christian slaves, no less—in French ports (1543–44). No wonder that on the morning of the battle, the Ottoman admiral Hassan Ali confidently urged the Turks to leave the harbor and row out to battle outside the Gulf of Corinth, since the Christians were “of different nations and had different religious rites.”

As the Ottomans increasingly looked westward, not merely for additional slaves and plunder but also for European weaponry and manufactured goods, the West itself turned farther to the west and south. The newly discovered Americas and the trade routes along coastal Africa offered riches without struggle with the Turks or the stiff tariff charges of the long caravan routes through Ottoman-occupied Asia. By the sixteenth century a disunited western Europe was not merely beset by a hegemonic East but had itself grown powerful at a variety of new mercantile centers—Madrid, Paris, London, and Antwerp—which had increasingly little interest in the backwaters of the eastern Mediterranean.

The Balkans and the islands of the eastern Mediterranean were considered costly sideshows not worth confrontation with the Turkish fleet, given the general stagnation of the Ottoman Empire in comparison to newer avenues of trade and commerce elsewhere. Most enslaved Christians were Orthodox anyway, and western Europeans had feuded with the Byzantines well before the fall of Constantinople. The absolute fault lines of Christian versus Muslim, or East against West, were also eroding. England and France sometimes ignored and at other times aided the sultan, while Venice became increasingly dependent on trade along the Turkish coast. Lepanto would be one of the last great battles in history in which a few Western powers united solely on the basis of shared culture and religion against Islam.

Still, the Ottomans in particular, and Islam in general, were in theory more powerful in terms of population, natural resources, and territory occupied than any one Mediterranean Christian state. But by the same token, Islamic power was clearly inferior to southern Europe as a whole should it ever unite for a grand expedition. On the rare occasions of even partial alliances—the great First Crusade (1096–99) during the Middle Ages is the best example—Western success even far from Europe was not uncommon well before the Reformation, gunpowder, and Atlantic exploration. European military dynamism was a continuum from classical antiquity, not a later fluke of the gunpowder age and the discovery of the New World. The First Crusade had ended with Franks in occupation of the Holy Land and revealed a singular ability to move and feed armies by land and sea not matched in the Islamic world. In rare cases of foreign attacks inside Europe—Xerxes, the Moors, Arabs, Mongols, and Ottomans—foreign dynasts found themselves at the heads of unified imperial or religious armies, their Western opponents isolated, divided, and often squabbling among themselves. But Christendom’s rare collective efforts soon waned, and by 1300 the Crusades were not to be followed by any comparable pan-European expedition across the Mediterranean. Yet even in a state of religious and political fragmentation Europe was relatively safe from Islamic invasion, since such invasions required logistical expertise and heavy infantry beyond even the sultan’s resources. The fifteenth-century Ottoman unification of much of Asia, the Balkans, and northern Africa, and the general acceptance of one god who put a high value on the advancement of religion by the sword, placed a divided Europe at an enormous disadvantage. As in the eighth century at the dawn of Islamic conquest, once again many small warring Christian and Western states were to be attacked continuously and individually by a vast religious and political unity.

Ottoman intellectuals and mullahs did not see war as innately wrong. Nor were there objections by the intelligentsia to the idea of a jihad— nothing at all comparable to a growing Western interest in pacifism or even “just war” theory. No Islamic tract was similar to the idea promulgated by Erasmus and others that war itself was somehow intrinsically evil and might be waged only under the narrowest moral circumstances. Europe’s citizens might have inherited a notion of personal freedom from classical antiquity and of spiritual brotherhood from Christ, but the survival of the West lay in how well they ignored the idea that killing was always sinful.

So Europe combined the earlier Western traditions of decisive battle to annihilate the enemy, of capitalism to craft plentiful and effective weapons, and of civic militarism to bring out the population en masse to resist the Ottomans. Fortunately, there was little in Christianity as it evolved in the Middle Ages that was antithetical to private profit or capitalism in general. If for a time priests worried about the taking of life, they had no compunction in allowing their brethren to profit while they could.

By the time of the battle of Lepanto, long gone from European control were the old Roman provinces of northern Africa, the Near East, Asia Minor, and most of the Balkans as well as the coastal waters of the eastern Mediterranean, which had become firmly Muslim and were increasingly under the control of Istanbul. For the expansion of an enormous multicultural empire, the Ottomans found useful a unifying religion that advocated aggressive war against nonbelievers—presenting non-Westerners with enemies of moral and religious fervor not seen earlier even in the deadly onslaughts of the Carthaginians, Persians, and Huns, who all likewise had invaded Europe and for a time threatened to annex Greece and Rome into their domains.

The discordant Christians, however, still retained enormous advantages over the sultan’s armies. Despite the erosion of hegemonic Western military power with Rome’s fall, most states in Europe proper for more than a thousand years had managed to retain in latent form the cultural traditions of classical antiquity—rationalism, civic militarism, forms of capitalism, ideas of freedom, individualism, reliance on heavy infantry and decisive battle—which allowed them greater military power than their individual populations, resources, or territory would otherwise suggest. The chief problem for Europe was no longer a prevailing pacifism, but near continuous war: the absence of central political control in the Middle Ages after the end of Charlemagne’s kingdom had allowed Western warfare to be used suicidally, in constant internecine and extremely bloody fights between European princes.

The technology of galley construction was far more advanced in the republican city-states of Italy and imperial Spain than in Asia, and far more flexible and likely to evolve to meet new challenges at sea. The entire organization and even terminology of the Turkish fleet was copied from either Venetian or Genoese models, in the same manner as earlier medieval Islamic fleets had emulated Byzantine nautical engineering and naval administration. Both sides rowed ships that were strikingly similar—and exclusively of Italian design. All military innovation—from the cutting off of the galley rams to the creation of the galleasses and the use of boarding nets—was on the European side. Military science—the rebirth of abstract notions of strategy and tactics in the new age of gunpowder—was a Western domain; it was thus no accident that the leading captains of both fleets were European. The sultan himself preferred renegade Italian admirals who were acquainted with European customs and language and therefore far more likely to adapt his galleys to the latest innovations of the enemy.

The soldiers in the Christian fleet were not all free voting citizens— only Venice and a few Italian states were republican. Yet the crews of the Holy League were not exclusively servile either, as was true of the Ottoman armada, in which elite Janissaries and galley slaves alike were political nonentities. A Turkish galley slave was more likely to flee than a Christian, and European common soldiers were free persons and not the property of an imperial autocrat:

Throughout the fleet the Christian slaves had their fetters knocked off and were furnished with arms, which they were encouraged to use valiantly by promises of freedom and rewards. Of the Muslim slaves, on the contrary, the chains which secured them to their places were carefully examined and their rivets secured; and they were, besides, fitted with handcuffs, to disable them from using their hands for any purpose but tugging at the oar. (W. Stirling-Maxwell,
Don Juan of Austria,
vol. 1, 404)

In addition, the Christians, plagued by constant raiding from North African corsairs and Turkish galleys, deliberately sought decisive battle. It was the armada of the Holy League that wished to collide head-on with the sultan’s fleet and kill every Ottoman on the water. The latter army was docked in its winter quarters and somewhat reluctant to fight. Moreover, in the Christian fleet, a variety of individual minds and personalities was at work. Spanish, Italian, French, English, and German adventurers— Knights of Malta, nobles of various other religious orders, even Protestants and at least one woman under arms—argued and bickered until seconds before the first fusillade, ultimately bestowing upon the armada the advantages of diverse opinion and the free reign of commanders to react as they felt best to the changing conditions of battle. Even the autocracy of Christian monarchy in Spain—operating as it did in a labyrinth of civic and judicial oversight and audits—usually did not ham-string the liberty of the individual to the same degree as the totalitarianism of the sultan’s rule.

Yet what gave the much smaller states of the Christian federation a fighting chance for victory was their remarkable ability—given their limited populations and territory—to create capital, and thereby to fabricate excellent vessels, mass-produce advanced firearms, and hire skilled crews. Although Europe was represented in force by only three real Mediterranean powers at Lepanto—the pope, Spain, and Venice—their aggregate economies were far larger than the national product of the entire Ottoman Empire. Before the fleet had even sailed, papal ministers had calculated the entire cost of manning two hundred galleys, with crews and provisions, for a year—and had raised the necessary funds in advance.

A
Most
Remarkable
City-State

A good example of the vast differences in economic life between the adversaries is that of the Venetian republic—its output of goods and services far smaller than that of the French, Spanish, or English economy. At the time of Lepanto the population of Venice itself was less than 200,000. Its territory was confined to a small circuit of a few hundred square miles in northern Italy and some commercial outposts in the eastern Mediterranean, Greece, Crete, and the Adriatic coast. In contrast, the sultan ruled a population a hundredfold greater than Venice, with far more reserves of wood, ores, agricultural products, and precious metals. He also controlled a territory literally thousands of times larger that served as a lucrative mercantile nexus between East and West. Yet in terms of military assets, trade, commerce, and influence on the Mediterranean, Venice by itself throughout the sixteenth century was the near rival of the Ottomans.

Ostensibly, Venetian power lay in its uncanny ability to craft weapons of war according to modern principles of specialization and capitalist production—500,000 ducats of the annual 7 million in revenue were reserved to finance the operations of the great Arsenal, where thousands of muskets, harquebuses, and cannon, plus supplies of dry timber, were fabricated and then kept in a constant strategic reserve. Besides dozens of small private shipwrights, there was also a public council that ensured ready-made ships in time of crisis—not unlike the American War Production Board of World War II that marshaled industry and labor under the auspices of private enterprise to create near instantaneous lines of weapons production. Three years after Lepanto, Henry III, the French monarch, was entertained in Venice by a firsthand inspection of the Arsenal, which purportedly assembled, launched, and outfitted a galley in the space of an hour! Even under normal conditions the Arsenal was able to launch an entire fleet of galleys within a few days, utilizing principles of ship construction, financing, and mass production not really rivaled until the twentieth century:

Under the order of the Council of Ten, twenty-five of the galleys were to be kept in the basins armed and equipped to sail. The rest were to be kept on land complete in hull and superstructure, ready to be launched as soon as the caulkers should have filled their seams with tow and pitch. Both the docks on which they were stored and water in front were to be kept cleared so they could be quickly launched. Each galley was to be numbered, and its rigging and other furnishings were to be marked with the same number, so that they might be assembled as quickly as possible. (F. Lane,
Venetian Ships
and Shipbuilders of the Renaissance,
142)

The Arsenal itself was copied by the sultan with a facsimile near the Golden Horn, where shipwrights from Naples and Venice were hired to duplicate the Venetian success (with mixed results: foreign visitors saw scores of artillery pieces lying randomly about, for the most part stolen and plundered from Christian forces rather than fabricated on the premises). But if the Turkish ability to build a modern galley fleet was predicated on its efforts to import or steal Western products and expertise—in that manner it would nearly replace its losses at Lepanto within two years—Venetian power was an independent outgrowth of a larger intellectual, political, and cultural prowess not found to the east and
not
predicated on population, natural resources, territory, or even the ability to acquire plunder, forced taxes, or foreign talent.