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—— ON THIS DAY ——
OCTOBER 7, 1571
Gulf of Patras, off western Greece
455 years ago
The Battle of Lepanto, fought on October 7, 1571, in which a Christian alliance led by Spain and Venice destroyed the main Ottoman fleet in the Mediterranean.
On the morning of October 7, 1571, two enormous fleets sighted each other at the mouth of the Gulf of Patras on the western coast of Greece. On one side were more than two hundred galleys of the Holy League, an alliance of Spain, Venice, the Papal States, Genoa, and several smaller powers, commanded by Don John of Austria, the twenty-four-year-old half-brother of King Philip II of Spain. On the other were well over two hundred Ottoman galleys and smaller vessels under Ali Pasha. Together the fleets carried something like 140,000 soldiers, sailors, and oarsmen.
By late afternoon the Ottoman fleet had been wrecked. Roughly two hundred of its ships were captured or sunk, Ali Pasha was dead, and his banner was in Christian hands. Ottoman losses ran to perhaps thirty thousand men. The League lost fewer than twenty galleys and several thousand dead. About twelve thousand Christian captives who had been chained to the oars of the Ottoman galleys were set free.
—— MARQUEE EVENT ——
The Holy League of 1571, the alliance of Catholic maritime states assembled by Pope Pius V to confront Ottoman expansion in the Mediterranean.
The alliance had been stitched together by Pope Pius V after the Ottomans invaded Venetian-ruled Cyprus in 1570. Its members distrusted one another nearly as much as they feared the sultan, and the fleet almost came apart on the voyage east. What held it together was Don John's leadership and a technical advantage: six Venetian galleasses, large converted merchant galleys bristling with cannon, which were towed out ahead of the line and broke up the Ottoman formation as it advanced. After that the battle became a vast infantry fight across the decks of interlocked ships.
Among the Spanish soldiers aboard the galley Marquesa was a twenty-four-year-old named Miguel de Cervantes. He was ill with fever but insisted on fighting, took two gunshot wounds in the chest, and a third that permanently crippled his left hand. He remained proud of the injury for the rest of his life. More than three decades later he wrote Don Quixote.
The strategic results were smaller than the celebrations suggested. The League quarreled and dissolved, Cyprus stayed Ottoman, and the sultan's shipyards rebuilt the fleet within a year. The Ottoman grand vizier is said to have told a Venetian envoy that in taking Cyprus the Turks had cut off an arm, while at Lepanto the Christians had merely shaved a beard, which would grow back. But the veteran sailors and archers lost that day could not be replaced so quickly, and the belief that the Ottomans were unbeatable at sea was gone for good. Lepanto was also the last major battle fought between oared galleys. The future of naval war belonged to sailing ships with broadside guns.
—— WHY THIS MATTERS ——
Lepanto checked Ottoman naval power in the Mediterranean. The Ottoman Empire remained formidable for another century, but it never again seriously threatened the western Mediterranean by sea. The rough division of that sea into eastern and western spheres dates from this period.
It was the end of an era in warfare. Galleys rowed by hundreds of men had dominated Mediterranean combat since antiquity. Lepanto was their last great engagement, and the role of heavy gunnery in the outcome pointed toward the age of sail.
Its cultural echo was immense. The victory was celebrated in paintings by Titian, Tintoretto, and Veronese, in poems and church festivals across Catholic Europe, and in the memory of the wounded soldier who went on to write the first modern novel.
—— THE TAKEAWAY ——
On October 7, 1571, more than four hundred oared warships collided off the Greek coast, and by evening the Ottoman fleet was destroyed. The sultan rebuilt it within a year, but the aura of invincibility did not come back. One of the wounded that day was Miguel de Cervantes, who counted it the proudest moment of his life.
—— QUOTE OF THE DAY ——
“The greatest occasion that past or present ages have witnessed, or that the future can hope to see.”
— Miguel de Cervantes, veteran of Lepanto, in the prologue to Don Quixote, Part II (1615)
—— OUR QUIZ OF THE DAY ——
How much do you know about the Battle of Lepanto, Don John of Austria, the Holy League, the Venetian galleasses, and the young soldier named Cervantes?
