Famous Sea Fights, from Salamis to Tsu-Shima

by A. Hilliard Atteridge

The Turk has long been known as the "sick man of Europe," and the story of the Ottoman Empire for a hundred years has been a tale of gradual dismemberment. Thus it is no easy matter for us to realize that for centuries the Ottoman power was the terror of the civilized world.

It was in 1358 that the Ottomans seized Gallipoli, on the Dardanelles, and thus obtained their first footing in Europe. They soon made themselves masters of Philippopolis and Adrianople. A crusading army, gathered to drive the Asiatic horde from Europe, was cut to pieces by the Sultan Bajazet at Nicopolis in 1396. On the day after the battle ten thousand Christian prisoners were massacred before the Sultan, the slaughter going on from daybreak till late in the afternoon. The Turk had become the terror of Europe.

Constantinople was taken by Mahomet II in 1453, and the Greek Empire came to an inglorious end. Then for more than a century Austrians, Hungarians, and Poles formed a barrier to the advance of the Asiatic power into Central Europe.

But the Turks during this century became a maritime power. They had conquered the Crimea and were masters of the Black Sea. They had overrun Greece and most of the islands of the Archipelago. They had threatened Venice with their fleets, and had for a while a foothold in Southern Italy. They took Rhodes from the Knights of St. John, annexed Syria and Egypt, and the Sultan of Constantinople was acknowledged as the Khalifa of Islam, the representative of the Prophet by the Mohammedan states of North Africa—Tripoli, Tunis, and Morocco. In 1526 the victory of Mohacs made the Turks masters of Hungary. They had driven a wedge deep into Europe, and there was danger that their fleets would soon hold the command of the Mediterranean.

These fleets were composed chiefly of large galleys—lineal descendants (so to say) of the ancient triremes. There was a row of long oars on either side, but sail power had so far developed that there were also one, two, even three tall masts, each crossed by a long yard that carried a triangular lateen sail. The base of the triangle lay along the yard, and the apex was the lower corner of the triangular sail, which could be hauled over to either side of the ship, one end of the yard being hauled down on the other side. The sail thus lay at an angle with the line of the keel, with one point of the yard high above the masthead, and by carrying the sheet tackle of the point of the sail across the ship, and reversing the position of the yard, the galley was put on one tack or the other. Forward, pointing ahead, was a battery of two or more guns, and there was sometimes a second but lighter battery astern, to be used when the galley was escaping from a ship of superior force. Turks, in the Eastern Mediterranean, Moors in the West, recruited their crews of rowers by capturing Christian ships and raiding Christian villages, to carry off captives who could be trained to the oar. This piracy, plundering, and slave-hunting went on in the Mediterranean up to the first years of the nineteenth century, when, after the Turks themselves had long abandoned it, the sea rovers of the Barbary States in the western waters of the inland sea still kept it up, and European nations paid blackmail to the Beys of Tripoli, Tunis, and Algiers to secure immunity for their ships and sailors.

In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries no part of the Mediterranean was free from the raids of the Moslem pirates. Such was the peril of the sea that ships used to carry two sets of sails, one white for use by day, the other black, in order to conceal their movements in the darkness. Thousands of Christian slaves were always wearing out their miserable lives in the galleys and prisons of the Mohammedan ports. Isolated expeditions were sometimes made by this or that Christian power for their deliverance. Two religious orders were founded to collect alms for their ransom, to minister to them in their captivity, and to negotiate for their deliverance. But all this was only a mitigation of the evil, and year after year there went on the enslavement of Europeans, men for the galleys, women for the harems.

One would have thought that all Europe would have banded itself together to drive back the Turk from the Danube and sweep the corsairs from the Mediterranean. To their honour be it said that successive Popes endeavoured to arouse the old crusading spirit, and band civilized and Christian Europe together for an enterprise that was to the advantage of all, and the neglect of which was a lasting disgrace. But their efforts were long defeated by the mutual quarrels and jealousies and the selfish policy of the European powers. Venice and Genoa long preferred to maintain peace with the Sultans, in order to have the undisturbed monopoly of the Eastern trade. France was too often the ally of the Turk, thanks to her traditional rivalry with the House of Austria, the rulers of the German Empire. The pressure of Turkish armies on the Eastern frontiers of the Empire made it impossible for the Emperors to use their full strength on the Rhine or in North Italy.

Again and again Rome uttered the cry of alarm, and the warning passed unheeded. But at last it was listened to, when a new outburst of aggressive activity on the part of the Turks for a while roused the maritime nations of the Mediterranean from their lethargy, and then a glorious page was added to the story of naval warfare.

In the year 1566 Suleiman the Magnificent died. He had conquered at Mohacs and besieged Vienna, enlarged the boundaries of the Ottoman Empire on land, and made its fleets the terror of the Mediterranean; but the year before he died his pashas had failed disastrously in their attempt on Malta, and his successor, Selim II (whom Ottoman historians surname "the Drunkard"), was reported to be a half-imbecile wretch, devoid of either intelligence or enterprise. So Europe breathed more freely. But while the "Drunkard" idled in his seraglio by the Golden Horn, the old statesmen, generals, and admirals, whom Suleiman had formed, were still living, and Europe had lulled itself with false hopes of peace.