XIV.
LEPANTO.
1571.
The failure of the siege of Malta was a sensible rebuff, yet it cannot be said that it seriously injured the renown of the Turks in the Mediterranean. They had been resisted on land; they had not yet been beaten at sea. Nor could they look back on the terrible months of the siege without some compensating feeling of consolation. They had taken St. Elmo, and its fall had aroused general jubilation in every Moslem breast; the Moors of Granada went near to rising against the Spaniards on the mere report of this triumph of the Turkish arms. Though they had failed to reduce St. Michael, the cause was to be found, at least in part, in a false alarm and an unreasoning panic. To be defeated by such warriors as the Knights of St. John was not a disgrace; like the Highlanders in the Crimean War, these men were not so much soldiers, in their opponents’ eyes, as veritable devils; and who shall contend against the legions of the Jinn? Moreover, forced as they were to abandon the siege, had they not left the island a desert, its people reduced by half, its fortifications heaps of rubbish, its brave defenders a handful of invalids?
So reasoned the Turks, and prepared for another campaign. They had lost many men, but more were ready to take their place; their immense fleet was uninjured; and though Dragut was no more, Ochiali—as the Christians called ’Ali El-Ulūji “the Renegade”—the Turks dubbed him Fartās, “Scurvied,” from his complaint—was following successfully in his old master’s steps. Born at Castelli (Licastoli) in Calabria about 1508,[46] Ochiali was to have been a priest, but his capture by the Turks turned him to the more exciting career of a Corsair. Soon after the siege of Malta he succeeded Barbarossa’s son Hasan as pasha or Beglerbeg of Algiers (1568), and one of his first acts was to retake Tunis (all but the Goletta) in the name of Sultan Selīm II., who, to the unspeakable loss of the Mohammedan world, had in 1566 succeeded his great father Suleymān. In July, 1570, off Alicata, on the southern coast of Sicily, Ochiali surrounded four galleys of “the Religion”—they then possessed but five—and took three of them, including the flagship, which Saint-Clément, the general of the galleys, abandoned in order to throw himself and his treasure on shore at Montichiaro. One galley alone, the St. Ann, made a desperate resistance; the others surrendered. Sixty Knights or Serving Brothers of the Order were killed or made prisoners on this disastrous day, and so intense was the indignation in Malta, that the Grand Master had much ado to save Saint-Clément from being lynched by the mob, and was obliged to deliver him up to the secular court, which at once condemned him to death. He was strangled in his cell, and his body thrown in a sack into the sea. Such a success went far to atone for Mustafa Pasha’s unfortunate siege.
A far more important triumph awaited the Turks in 1570-1:—a siege, and a conquest. The new Sultan, like his father, saw in the island of Cyprus a standing affront to his authority in the Levant. Then, as now, Cyprus was a vital centre in all maritime wars in the Eastern Mediterranean; a convenient depôt for troops and stores; a watch-tower whence the movements of the Turkish fleet could be observed; a refuge for the numberless Christian Corsairs that infested the coast of Syria. Cyprus belonged to Venice, and on the score of her protection of piracy the Sultan found no difficulty in picking a quarrel with the Senate. War was declared, and Piāli Pasha transported a large army under Lala Mustafa (not the Seraskier who commanded at Malta) to lay siege to Nicosia, the capital of the island. After forty-eight days, the city fell, September 9th, and became a shambles. The catastrophe might have been averted, had the Christian fleet owned a single competent chief; but unhappily the relief of Cyprus was entrusted to the least trustworthy of all instruments—a coalition.
Pope Pius V., a man of austere piety, full of the zeal of his high office, and in energy and intellect a born leader, spared no effort to support the Venetians as soon as war became inevitable. Few of the states of Europe found it convenient to respond to his appeal, but Philip of Spain sent a numerous fleet under Giovanni Andrea Doria, and the Pope himself, aided in some degree by the Italian princes, added an important contingent, which he confided to the care of the Grand Constable of Naples, Mark Antony Colonna. Giovanni Zanne commanded the Venetian fleet. The whole force, when united, amounted to no less than two hundred and six vessels, of which eleven were galleasses, and nearly all the rest galleys; while the soldiers and crews numbered forty-eight thousand men. So dire was the dread then inspired by the Turks that this vast armament dared not move till it was known that Ochiali had left the neighbourhood of Italy, and even then the rivalries of the different admirals tended rather to war between the contingents than an attack upon the enemy’s fleet. While the Christians were wrangling, and Doria was displaying the same Fabian caution that had led his grand-uncle to lose the battle of Prevesa, Piāli Pasha, wholly regardless of danger, had bared his galleys almost entirely of soldiers, in order to aid Lala Mustafa in the final assault on Nicosia. Had the allied fleets attacked him on the 8th or 9th of September it is doubtful whether a single Turkish galley could have shown fight. But Colonna and Doria wasted their time in wrangling and discussing, while the foe lay powerless at their feet. Finally they sailed back to Sicily, for fear of bad weather. Such were the admirals who furnished the gibes of Ochiali and his brother Corsairs. Famagusta surrendered August 4, 1571, and despite the promise of life and liberty, the garrison was massacred and the Venetian commander, Bragadino, cruelly burnt to death. Cyprus became a Turkish possession thenceforward to this day.
Meanwhile, the Turkish and Barbary fleets, commanded by ’Ali Pasha, the successor of Piāli, and Ochiali, ravaged Crete and other islands, and coasting up the Adriatic, worked their will upon every town or village it suited their pleasure to attack. Thousands of prisoners, and stores and booty of every description rewarded their industry. At length, in September, they anchored in the Gulf of Lepanto. They had heard that the united Christian fleets were on the move, and nothing would suit the victors of Cyprus better than a round encounter with the enemy. Flushed with success, they had no fear for the issue.
Many a Christian fleet had gathered its members together before then in the waters of the Adriatic. The great battle off Prevesa was in the memory of many an old sailor as the galleys came to the rendezvous in the autumn of 1571. But there was an essential difference between then and now. Prevesa was lost by divided counsels; at Lepanto there was but one commander-in-chief. Pope Pius V. had laboured unceasingly at the task of uniting the Allies and smoothing away jealousies, and he had succeeded in drawing the navies of Southern Europe on to another year’s campaign; then, warned by what he had learned of the wranglings off Cyprus, he exerted his prerogative as Vicar of God, and named as the sole commander-in-chief of the whole fleet, Don John of Austria.