White founts falling in the courts of the sun,
G. K. Chesterton, “Lepanto” (1911)
And the Soldan of Byzantium is smiling as they run;
There is laughter like the fountains in that face of all men feared,
It stirs the forest darkness, the darkness of his beard,
It curls the blood-red crescent, the crescent of his lips,
For the inmost sea of all the earth is shaken with his ships.
Two hours before dawn on Sunday, 7 October 1571, Don John of Austria gave the signal to weigh anchor. The wind had been against him for two days and it was against him still. The galleys of the Holy League went forward by oar alone, two hundred hulls feeling their way toward the mouth of the Gulf of Patras in the dark.
At sunrise, abreast of the little Curzolares islands, the lookout in the foretop of Don John’s flagship saw a sail. Then more sail. Then the whole Ottoman fleet, coming on in a great crescent. Don John broke out the azure standard of the League at the mizzen-peak and fired the signal gun, and the line dressed itself for battle.
The fleets
The Holy League was Pius V’s making: Spain, Venice, the Papal States, Genoa, Savoy, Tuscany, the Knights of Malta, powers that spent most years quarreling and had been talked into one line. Command went to Don John, the twenty-four-year-old illegitimate half-brother of Philip II of Spain. Something like two hundred and twelve Christian hulls, something like eighty-five thousand men.
Against them came Ali Pasha with about two hundred and seventy-four hulls and eighty-eight thousand men, the fleet of an empire at the height of its power. His galleys were lighter-built than the Christians’, lighter-gunned, and crowded with archers. He drew them up in a vast crescent and then drew the horns in, to match the straight Christian line hull for hull.
Don John held the center in the Real, with Marcantonio Colonna’s papal flagship and the Venetian Sebastiano Veniero beside him. Giovanni Andrea Doria took the right, the seaward wing. Agostino Barbarigo, the Venetian proveditore, took the left, inshore. Behind the center waited Alvaro de Bazan, Marquis of Santa Cruz, with the reserve. Ali Pasha held the Ottoman center in the Sultana. Mehmed Sirocco, Pasha of Alexandria, held the inshore right. The seaward left went to Uluch Ali, the Dey of Algiers.
The approach
The captains came aboard the Real for council, and some of them were against fighting at all. Don John cut the debate short. The time for counsel was past, and what remained was the work itself.
Then, in full armor, he boarded a fast frigate and ran the length of the line, galley by galley, exhorting each crew in turn. Requesens did the same on the other wing. When he came back aboard, Don John knelt on the prow in his armor to pray, and the whole fleet knelt with him. A crucifix was raised on the deck of every ship. Franciscans, Dominicans, Theatines and Jesuits moved along the line giving general absolution, with the papal indulgence for the men about to fight.
Below decks, the arithmetic of the galley age was being settled. Throughout the League’s fleet the Christian slaves had their fetters knocked off and were given arms, with promises of freedom and reward if they fought well. The Muslim slaves on the same benches had their chains examined link by link and their rivets made fast, and handcuffs fitted besides. On the Ottoman side the arrangement was reversed: Ali’s oarsmen were Christians too, chained to their benches, rowing under threat of death if they flinched. He addressed them in Spanish himself and promised them liberty if the Turks carried the day.
Late in the morning the wind, which had stood in the Christians’ teeth since dawn, fell to a calm and then rose again from the opposite quarter, filling the League’s sails and blowing fair against the Turkish prows. The Christians took it for heaven’s doing. Whether it was or not, the smoke of their guns would now blow down onto the Ottoman decks.
Noon
Strong gongs groaning as the guns boom far,
G. K. Chesterton, “Lepanto” (1911)
Don John of Austria is going to the war.
It was noon before the fight began. Don John had six great galleasses towed half a mile ahead of his line, floating gun platforms of a kind the Turks had not met before, and they opened first. Their shot went through the Ottoman center and right like nothing afloat had any business doing. Two vessels went down. Ali Pasha ordered his galleys to sheer away from the strange hulls and push on past them, and the maneuver disordered his line before a Christian oar had touched a Turkish hull.
First contact came on the Christian left. Sirocco slipped a column of galleys between Barbarigo’s line and the shore and caught the Venetians between two fires, eight Turkish vessels on Barbarigo’s galley at one point. Barbarigo fought without armor and took an arrow through the left eye. He was carried below and died of it three days later. His captains held the line without him, beat Sirocco off, and sank his vessel. Fished out of the sea mortally wounded, Sirocco was beheaded by the Venetians. The Ottoman right was destroyed or driven ashore.
In the center the two flagships steered prow to prow for each other, and the Sultana’s beak drove through the Real’s rigging as far as the fourth rowing bench. There they locked, and for two hours it was an infantry battle on floating platforms: four hundred picked janissaries, three hundred of them arquebusiers and a hundred bowmen, against Don John’s three hundred Spanish arquebusiers, with Requesens feeding fresh men in astern and Colonna and Veniero fighting their own ships alongside. Ali Pasha himself drew his bow on his quarterdeck. Twice the Spaniards were driven back from the Sultana’s mainmast. The third assault carried through to the poop. Ali threw a small jewel box overboard and then took an arquebus ball in the forehead and fell on the gangway. About two in the afternoon the Sultana was in Spanish hands and the Turkish standard came down.
On the Christian right, Doria had stood out to sea, afraid of being wrapped around his flank, and the maneuver opened a gap between his wing and the center. Uluch Ali saw it and drove his Algerines through into the Christian rear, falling on the Maltese squadron. Three galleys of St. John went down under seven Algerine hulls, the prior was taken with five arrow wounds, and the banner of the Order was lost, until Santa Cruz brought the reserve down at speed and Uluch Ali had to cut his prize adrift and run. It was the nearest thing to a Christian disaster all day. In the same quarter Cardona with eight galleys stood across sixteen rallying Algerines in some of the bloodiest fighting of the battle; Cardona died of a throat wound, and of his five hundred Sicilians only fifty came through unwounded.
Don John fought in the boarding action himself and took a wound in the foot, and would not have it dressed until the action was over.
Four o’clock
It was four in the afternoon before the fight was over. The Ottoman center and right were annihilated. Uluch Ali got away with some thirty galleys, the only organized Ottoman force to escape the gulf, and Don John gave chase but had to give it up for want of oarsmen: the freed slaves who had fought all day were too badly wounded to row.
The count, held the way early-modern counts should be held, runs something like this. The Christians lost around seven or eight thousand dead. The Ottomans lost twenty to thirty thousand. Of their fleet, on the order of two hundred galleys were sunk or taken; the League lost fifteen or seventeen. And somewhere between twelve and fifteen thousand Christian rowers came up out of the Ottoman holds unchained, men who had woken that morning as property. That night a storm broke over the gulf and the victorious fleet sheltered at Petala.
The man who was there
One of the Spanish arquebusiers in that boarding fight was a twenty-four-year-old soldier named Miguel de Cervantes. He fought on a galley in the thick of it and took an arquebus ball that left his left hand useless for the rest of his life. Forty-four years later, answering a rival who had mocked him as old and maimed, he wrote the finest sentence any man who fought there left behind about the day:
sino en la más alta ocasión que vieron los siglos pasados, los presentes, ni esperan ver los venideros
Miguel de Cervantes, Prologue to the Reader, Don Quixote, Part II (1615)
“As if this maimed hand of mine had been got in some tavern,” he wrote, “and not in the highest occasion that ages past have seen, that the present sees, and that ages to come do not expect to see.”
Pius V ordered that a commemoration of the Rosary be made on that day, and the Church has kept the feast ever since. What the Rosary actually won at Lepanto, and what it did not, is a harder question than the paintings suggest, and we have tried to answer it honestly in the companion to this piece.
References
- Battle of Lepanto, 7 October 1571, Gulf of Patras. Formations, sequence and detail from Sir William Stirling-Maxwell, Don John of Austria (1883), vol. 1, ch. 15; “The Battle of Lepanto,” Atlantic Monthly, vol. 1, no. 2 (December 1857); Augusta Theodosia Drane, The Knights of St. John (1858), Lepanto chapter; “Battle of Lepanto,” Encyclopaedia Britannica (1911); Siméon Vailhé, “Lepanto,” Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 9 (1910). Figures are early-modern estimates and are given as ranges; see the companion post’s references for the standing numbers used here.
- Miguel de Cervantes, Prologue to the Reader, Don Quixote, Part II (1615): “sino en la más alta ocasión que vieron los siglos pasados, los presentes, ni esperan ver los venideros.” Text verified against the Centro Virtual Cervantes edition (Instituto Cervantes). English rendering the author’s own.
- G. K. Chesterton, “Lepanto” (1911), quoted from the text as printed by the American Chesterton Society. Published 1911; public domain in the United States.
- Cervantes at Lepanto: “He fought bravely on board a vessel in the great battle of Lepanto in 1571, and was shot through the left hand in such a way that he never after had the entire use of it” (“Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra,” Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 3 (1908)). His own account of the wound is in the Novelas ejemplares prologue (1613).
- The feast: as established in the companion post, Pius V ordered a commemoration of the Rosary on the day; Gregory XIII in 1573 allowed the feast in churches possessing a Rosary altar; Clement XI commanded it for the universal Church in 1716. See Herbert Thurston, “Feast of the Holy Rosary,” Catholic Encyclopedia (1912).