Bernardino de Escalente, in his work Diálogos del arte militar, printed in Seville in 1583, says that the Captain Ojeda, of the galley Guzmana, recaptured the Capitana of Malta; and that, in recognition thereof, “the Religion” pensioned him for life. Ojeda, it is to be presumed, was under the orders of the Marquis of Santa Cruz during the battle.
There remains one incident connected with the battle of Lepanto which must be told. In the Marquesa galley, in the division of Doria, was lying in his bed sick of a fever a young man twenty-four years of age; a Spaniard of Alcala de Henares, “de padres hidalgos y honrados,” we are told, although these parents were poor. When this young man heard that a battle was imminent he rose from his bed and demanded of his captain, Francisco San Pedro, that he should be placed in the post of the greatest danger. The captain, and others, his friends, counselled him to remain in his bed. “Señores,” replied the young man, “what would be said of Miguel de Cervantes should he take this advice? On every occasion up to this day on which his enemies have offered battle to his Majesty I have served like a good soldier; and today I intend to do so in spite of this sickness and fever.” He was given command of twelve soldiers in a shallop, and all day was to be seen where the combat raged most fiercely. He received two wounds in the chest and another which cost him the loss of his left hand. To those to whom he proudly displayed them in after-years he was accustomed to say, “wounds in the face or the chest are like stars which guide one through honour to the skies.” Of him the chronicler says: “He continued the rest of his life with honourable memory of this wonderful occurrence, and, although he lost the use of his left hand, it added to the glory of his right.” How glorious was that right hand is known to all readers of El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha.
The losses at the battle of Lepanto are something so prodigious that imagination boggles at them. It is said that the Christians lost five thousand men and the Turks no less than thirty thousand. Enormous as these numbers are, they represent probably a very conservative estimate of the loss. The Turks lost two hundred vessels, and when we recollect the number of men embarked on board of the sixteenth-century galleys we can see that the numbers are by no means exaggerated, especially as no quarter was given on either side. When the Captain Ojeda recaptured the battered wreck which had been the Capitana of Malta, we are told that on board of her were three hundred dead Turks; if this were the cost of the capture of one galley we need not be surprised at the total.
With the results to Europe of this amazing battle we have nothing to do in this book. That which it demonstrated, as far as the Sea-wolves were concerned, was that they still remained the most competent seamen and sea-fighters in the Mediterranean, and that the legend of the invincibility of the Ottomans at sea rested on what had been accomplished during a long period of years by these insatiable pirates and magnificent warriors.
That which the fighting Pontiff, Pius V., said when he heard of the victory is in character with everything which history has told us of this remarkable occupant of the chair of Saint Peter. It was short but very much to the point, consisting of the one sentence, “Fuit homo misus a Deo cui nomen erat Joannes.”
In a collection of epitaphs printed in Colonia in 1623 (and edited by one Franciscus Swertius) is one in Spanish by an anonymous author on Don John of Austria. In this, which takes the form of question and answer, it is asked of him “who with so much real glory lies so humbly ’neath this stone,” what it is that Spain can do for him, what temple or what statue can she raise to his honour. To this the hero is made to reply that “My temple is found in my works, my statue has been my fame.” This is not only a pretty conceit, but it is very substantially true when we think of the place in history which this man attained.
It remains to speak of the future career of Ali Basha after his experiences at Lepanto. He now returned to Constantinople, where he found that the bitter complaints of the Janissaries concerning their lack of pay had preceded him; this must have been annoying, as by this time so insignificant a circumstance had probably escaped his memory. His old friend and patron Piali Basha was still in power; the Basha used his influence, and the corsair laid at the feet of the Sultan the great Standard of Saint John captured by him from the Knights—which was the only trophy which came to Constantinople from that disastrous battle; and in consequence we are told that “instead of reprimands he was loaded with caresses and applauses.”
There was in Ali the same dauntless quality of never knowing when he was beaten which had distinguished Kheyr-ed-Din Barbarossa. His exploits at Lepanto had secured him the high favour of the Sultan, which he used in a manner most grateful to that sovereign by approaching him with a request that he might be allowed to fit out another fleet to revenge himself on the Christians. The Sultan acceded to his request, and such diligence did he use that in June 1572, only eight months after the crushing defeat of the Turks, Ali took the sea with two hundred and fifty galleys besides smaller vessels. So powerful had he now become that Selim nominated him as his Admiralissimo, allowing him also to retain the Bashalic of Algiers. With his new fleet he sought out the allies once more, finding them at anchor in a port in the Morea. He lay outside the harbour defying them to come out, which they refused to do—“but they parted without bloody noses”—is Morgan’s comment. Haedo attributes this inertia on the part of the allies to dissension among their leaders; but, however that may have been, Ali gained almost as much favour with the Sultan as if he had defeated them in a pitched battle. “But these are the judgments of God and things ordered by His divine providence and infinite wisdom,” says Haedo. The connection is somewhat hard to establish.
In 1573 the Bashalic of Algiers passed into the hands of Arab Ahmed, and in this same year Don John of Austria recaptured Tunis from the Turks. Ali, with a fleet of two hundred and fifty galleys and forty smaller vessels, recaptured it again in a siege lasting forty days, and once more returned to Constantinople in triumph with thousands of Spanish captives. He was yet to live some years to harass the Christians, against whom he ever displayed a most inveterate rancour. In 1576 he set out from Constantinople with sixty galleys and ravaged the Calabrian coast, where he had been born. In 1578, the Janissaries of Algiers having assassinated Arab Ahmed the Basha, he was sent to chastise them, which he did with a heavy hand.
Ali was never married, and left no descendants; in the later years of his life he built himself a sumptuous palace some five miles from Constantinople, and no man in all the realm save the Sultan himself was so great a man as the Calabrian renegado, the unknown waif from Southern Italy who possessed neither name nor kindred. He was tall and robust in stature, but all his life suffered from “scald-head”; for a definition of which ailment we may refer the curious to the dictionary. He possessed, for a chieftain and a fighting man, the disadvantage of a voice so hoarse as to be inaudible at a few paces distant. In default of offspring he maintained at his charges five hundred corsairs, whom he called his children. He died in the year 1580, and with him what has been called the “Grand Period of the Moslem Corsairs” in this book may be said to have come to an end.