Empires of the Sea - the Final Battle for the Mediterranean 1521-1580 (32 page)

It had been an exceptionally long season. Ali Pasha’s ships had been at sea since March; the hulls of the galleys were now fouled with weed and needed cleaning; the men were tired. The Adriatic raids, despite their dramatic success, had exhausted the fleet. There was a general feeling that it was too late in the year for large-scale naval maneuvers; soldiers who had been in the ships for months asked to be released, or defected to the land army of Ahmet Pasha. Additionally there was a strong belief from past experience that the Christian fleet would collapse in disunity of its own accord or draw in its horns for the winter.

The Ottomans had also been carrying out their own information-gathering and, unknown to the Christians, had scored an extraordinary intelligence coup. One night in early September the Christian fleet had been lying at anchor in Messina harbor; all Marc’Antonio Colonna’s papal ships were decked in black mourning for the death of his daughter. Unnoticed, a black galley rowed quietly through the lanes between the anchored vessels, up and down. It was the ship of the Italian-born corsair Kara Hodja, counting the enemy’s strength. He also took back with him Don Juan’s battle plan, either from spies or perhaps even from printed news sheets, so widely circulated were its details. He knew exactly how they intended to organize their fleet and the intention to push on to Corfu—though their purpose after that remained obscure.

The problem was that Kara Hodja had miscounted. He had missed a complete Venetian squadron of sixty galleys in the inner harbor. He put the tally at no more than one hundred forty. Don Juan had 208. Ali was puzzled by the aggressive intentions of an enemy with inferior numbers but reported this news back to Istanbul by swift frigate. At the same time, Don Juan, sighting the mountains of Corfu through the drizzle, was given equally unsafe intelligence. Some Venetians, returned from the enemy fleet in a prisoner exchange, reported that the Ottomans had one hundred sixty galleys and lacked fighting men, that Uluch Ali had departed the fleet. In fact they had about three hundred galleys, and Uluch Ali had gone to unload booty at Modon and return. A few days later, Gil de Andrada, scouting ahead, quizzed some Greek fishermen who seemed to confirm the weakened state of the enemy; they assured him that the Christians might offer battle with every certainty of victory. The same Greeks had just given identical messages of hope to Ali Pasha’s scouts. The two sides had underestimated each other. Intelligence failures were about to aggregate serious consequences.

By September 27, the Christian fleet was anchored in Corfu harbor. It was the final moment of decision: to seek out the enemy or to pause. The mood of the Venetians, particularly, had been further darkened by the state of their island. Irritated by their inability to reduce the fortress, and bad-tempered by the length of the campaign, elements of the Ottoman army had indulged in wanton atrocities and ritual desecrations of holy shrines that fired up the crusading zeal of the Italians. Doria and sections of the Spanish contingent again pressed on Don Juan the risk and the lateness of the season; they suggested a face-saving raid on the Albanian coast before withdrawing for the winter, but Don Juan and the Venetians were not to be turned. They would seek out the enemy fleet.

The next day, in faraway Madrid, Philip wrote a letter ordering Don Juan to winter in Sicily and start again the following year. In Rome the pope was urging exactly the opposite course of action through the power of prayer; “he fasts three times a week and spends many hours every day at prayer,” wrote the Spanish cardinal Zuniga. On September 29, Andrada’s scouts reported that the whole Ottoman fleet was at Lepanto. And somewhere off the southwestern tip of Greece, a fast frigate from the Venetian governor of Crete was hurrying north with news of Famagusta.

As September rolled into October, the Holy League was at Gomenizza on the Greek coast. Don Juan held a final review of the fleet. The galleys were stripped for action and put through precise maneuvers. Every captain was made fully aware of the battle plan. Don Juan passed through the fleet, observing the condition of the ships minutely. He was greeted by arquebus salutes as he passed—a not inconsiderable risk: twenty men had been accidentally shot dead since leaving Messina.

MEANWHILE, ALI PASHA
had been receiving a string of orders from Istanbul. There was a fifteen-to twenty-day time lag between the commanders at the front and the imperial center, yet it is clear from the Ottoman documents that Selim—or Sokollu—was attempting to impose considerable central control over the running of the campaign. A steady stream of directives instructed Ali about fleet maneuvers, food supplies, and troop collection. Sokollu and Selim were evidently aware that the fleet was exhausted and manpower a problem, yet the orders dispatched on August 19 were emphatic: “If the [enemy] fleet appears, Uluch Ali and yourself, acting in full accord, must confront the enemy and use all your courage and intelligence to overcome it.” Another directive, not dispatched until after the battle, was even more emphatic: “Now I order that after getting reliable news about the enemy, you attack the fleet of the infidels fully trusting in Allah and his Prophet.” It is impossible to determine the division of responsibility between Sokollu and his master for these remarkable orders. They seemed to leave the commander on the ground no freedom of maneuver. Even Suleiman’s thunderous commandments to Mustapha on Malta did not contain detailed instructions on how to proceed. Maybe the sultan and his vizier refused to believe that the Christians would actually risk battle, or believe that the Christians’ morale would collapse, or maybe the sultan, buoyed up by the final conquest of Cyprus and a zeal for holy war, was overconfident, but they committed Ali Pasha to fight.

BY LATE SEPTEMBER,
Ali was at Lepanto, the fortified port the Turks called Inebahti, a bare fifty miles south of Preveza and in a similar position to that occupied by Barbarossa against Doria. Like Barbarossa’s at Preveza, Ali Pasha’s position was virtually unassailable. Lepanto was a well-fortified, tightly walled port tucked into the mouth of the Gulf of Corinth; the entrance of the gulf was protected on both sides by gun emplacements, so that, as the Ottoman navigator Piri Reis had put it, not even a bird could fly through it. In any case, the prevailing winds would make any direct assault on the fleet extremely difficult. Ali could sit tight and wait for the enemy to exhaust themselves offshore, then strike at will, or refuse battle altogether. He had compelling reasons not to fight. The ships needed repairs; believing the campaigning season to be over, many of the cavalrymen had returned home. It seemed hard to believe that the enemy would risk an attack in early October. Furthermore, all the captured prisoners told the same story—that there were serious differences of opinion in the Christian ranks. Ali waited to see what would happen next.

At four in the afternoon on October 2 all the bottled-up tensions in the Christian armada suddenly exploded. The fleet was at Gomenizza on the mainland opposite Corfu when the long-running feud between the Venetians and the Spanish boiled over. Because the Venetian galleys were short of men, the commander Venier had been persuaded with great reluctance to board Spanish-paid soldiers on his vessels. There had been trouble from the start. “In the embarkation of these men and their biscuit, I had many difficulties to contend with, and much insolence from the soldiers to put up with,” Venier wrote in his self-defense afterward. On the morning of October 2, as part of the review of battle readiness, Doria was sent to inspect the Venetian galleys. The tempestuous Venier flatly refused the hated Genoese the right to criticize his ships; tempers were already flaring when a brawl broke out on one of his Cretan galleys, the
Armed Man of Rethimno,
between the Venetian crew and its Spanish and Italian soldiers. It started when a crewman disturbed a soldier’s sleep, and quickly degenerated into a full-scale fight that littered the deck with dead and wounded on both sides. The captain dispatched a message to Venier’s flagship to the effect that the Spaniards on the
Armed Man
were killing the crew.

The position of Lepanto in the Gulf of Corinth

Venier was still fuming from his encounter with Doria and ordered four men and his provost marshal to board the ship and arrest the mutineers. The leader of the revolt, Captain Muzio Alticozzi, met them with arquebus fire. The provost marshal was shot through the chest; two of the men were thrown into the sea. Venier, now beside himself with fury, ordered the galley to be boarded, then stood by to blast it out of the water. When a Spanish ship offered to intervene, he erupted in fury. “By the Blood of Christ,” the old man roared, “take no action, unless you wish me to sink your galley and all your soldiers. I will bring these dogs to heel without your assistance.”

He ordered a party of arquebusiers aboard the
Armed Man
to seize the ringleaders and deliver them to his ship. He then had Alticozzi and three others hanged from the mast. By this time, the captain of the Spanish ship had reported the situation to Don Juan, who could now see four bodies dangling from the mast of Venier’s ship. Don Juan himself was equally incandescent at these unauthorized executions of Spanish-paid men. He threatened to hang Venier on the spot. For Doria it was another chance to suggest returning to Messina and leaving the Venetians to it. The Venetian and the Spanish galleys primed their cannon with powder and held lit tapers at the ready. There was a tense standoff, the two galley fleets squaring up to each other for several hours. Eventually tempers cooled sufficiently for reason to prevail. Don Juan declared that he would no longer deal with Venier; henceforward all communications with the Venetians were to be by way of Venier’s second-in-command, Agostino Barbarigo. The incident had brought the whole expedition to the brink of ruin, and word quickly reached the Ottoman high command. When captives reported to Ali and Pertev that the Venetians and Spanish had come close to blowing each other out of the water, it doubled the belief that the outnumbered and divided Christian fleet would not fight. More likely they would carry out a token raid on the Albanian coast and retire.

It was at this moment that the ghost of Bragadin reentered the fray. With tempers soothed, the Holy League fleet sailed on south down the Greek coast. At Cape Bianco, Don Juan ordered a rehearsal of his battle formation; the squadrons were arranged across a five-mile front, each one distinguished by a different-colored flag. On October 4 they had reached the island of Kefalonia, when they spied a lone frigate tacking up from the south. It was the vessel from Crete carrying word of Famagusta. The appalling news had a sudden and electrifying effect on the fleet. It focused the Venetian desire for vengeance and instantly soothed divisions. Rationally it also knocked the bottom out of the whole expedition. If Famagusta could no longer be saved, the expedition’s ostensible purpose had gone. When Don Juan held another council of war on the
Real,
there were more Spanish pleas to divert a pointless mission, but by now it was too late. The Venetian commanders thundered for revenge. Forward momentum had become unstoppable. The fleet pushed on in squally weather. By the evening of October 6 the Christians were heading toward the Curzolaris islands at the entrance to the Gulf of Patras, with the intention of luring the Ottomans out to fight.

FORTY MILES AWAY,
in the castle at Lepanto, the Ottomans were holding a final council of war. All the key commanders were there: Ali Pasha and Pertev Pasha; the experienced corsairs Uluch Ali and Kara Hodja; two of Barbarossa’s sons, Mehmet and Hasan; and the governor of Alexandria, Shuluch Mehmet. It was the mirror image of the debates at Messina and Corfu—to fight or not to fight?—with the same mixture of caution and adventure. Kara Hodja, back from another scouting mission, declared that the Christians numbered one hundred fifty galleys at most, but there were compelling reasons not to risk battle. The season was late; the men were tired and many had deserted from the campaign; their position at Lepanto was unassailable.