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Declining and rising empires: Venice, the Ottomans and Spain(II)

 

The apogee of galley warfare, 1559–80


In April 1559 the peace of Cateau-Cambrésis was concluded between France and Spain . Philip II, the new king of Spain, could not know that this marked the end of the period known to posterity as ‘the Italian wars’ and that France would disappear as a naval power until the 1620s. But he – and even more the viceroy of Sicily and the Knights of Malta – hoped that Spanish resources could now be concentrated on counter-measures against Ottoman sea power. They hoped to use the galleys and soldiers freed from the war with France to make a surprise attack against Tripoli, another attempt to improve the strategic situation with the capture of a galley base. The expedition took much longer to organise than expected and did not start in earnest until early 1560. It arrived first at the island of Djerba, half-way between Tunis and Tripoli, which originally was intended as a temporary base. Sickness and bad winter weather changed the plans and it was decided to stay at Djerba and fortify the island.

The Ottoman navy under its commander, Piali Pasha, had quickly organised a force of around 85 galleys which made a rapid voyage from Constantinople to Djerba. It arrived on the morning of 11 May 1560 and surprised a disorganised Christian force. Many galleys were not manned and their commander, the 20–year old Gian Andrea Doria, panicked and lost control. The Christian fleet was never formed for serious resistance and lost 27 to 30 of some 45 galleys and around half of its 29 sailing ships. The army was left on Djerba with no possibility of escaping or receiving supplies. It held out until the end of July 1560 when it capitulated. The total Christian losses of soldiers and seamen at Djerba are uncertain, one (high) estimate puts it at 18,000. The main cause of the catastrophe was an underestimation of the Ottoman ability to respond quickly and with superior force to a Christian attack in mid-Mediterranean. Spain and her smaller allies had also displayed inefficiency in mobilising their forces, and thus lost the advantage of surprise.

For Philip II the Ottoman navy had now become the main threat to his empire. France was in serious political difficulties, and his own troubles in the Netherlands were yet to come. But the Ottoman galleys might still capture his North African possessions, devastate the coasts and stir up rebellion in Granada. He decided to expand the permanent galley force and its readiness for combat, and made the Pope agree to a taxation of Church property in exchange for a promise that Spain would maintain 100 galleys in service. During the following years many galleys were lost in minor actions or in gales, and some of these losses may be attributed to lack of experienced crews, partly a result of Djerba. The expected Ottoman expedition to take Spanish-held Oran far in the west appeared in 1563 but it was relatively weak, 30 to 40 galleys, and was forced to retreat by the Spanish fleet.

In 1565 the Ottomans launched their long-expected major offensive. Its target was Malta, which was attacked by 140 galleys and an army of around 30,000 men. The defenders had about a tenth of that strength, led by the Grand Master of the Order of St John, Jean de la Valette. The siege of Malta from May to early September 1565 belongs to the epics of Christian–Muslim confrontation in the Mediterranean. For Spain, the problem was how best to use her limited forces. Her fleet was too weak to intercept the invaders at sea or protect the transfer of a major army to Malta. The Spaniards chose to leave the Turks to spend as much of their men and ammunition in assaults on the walls of the Knight’s strongholds at Malta as they would and to hope that the defenders would survive a few months. In late August, a Spanish relief force was sent from Sicily. It was twice forced back by bad weather, but when it arrived, it found the Turks in the process of evacuation. They had been so decimated that they were unable to fight the Spanish forces either on land or at sea.

The following years saw no major actions at sea, although both sides mobilised large fleets and the Ottoman numerical superiority at sea was obvious. It is, however, also obvious that they had difficulties in translating their superiority into lasting conquest in the western Mediterranean. This may be the logical explanation for their decision to attack Venetian-ruled Cyprus in 1570. They must have calculated that the addition of the Venetian fleet to the enemy forces meant less than the fact that Cyprus was situated so far from the main Christian bases that it would be difficult for their galleys to prevent the attack. The Turkish invasion force, supported by about 150 to 160 galleys, reached Cyprus in July and rapidly occupied the island, except the city of Famagusta. The Venetians had quickly mobilised their fleet, but they were inferior in numbers of galleys and infantry to interfere directly with the Ottoman invasion. In late August the Italian squadrons of Philip II’s galley fleet (49 galleys) and the Pope’s squadron (12 galleys) arrived in the Levant, bringing the Christian force up to about 180 to 190 galleys. The three fleets found it difficult to co-operate; they believed that their forces were too small for a relief of Cyprus and could not agree on a less ambitious plan, such as attacks on Ottoman territories in Greece or the Adriatic. They achieved little, but in January 1571 a small Venetian squadron was able to bring in supplies to Famagusta, which made it possible to continue the resistance. The Sultan dismissed Piali Pasha as commander of the Ottoman navy for his failure to keep up an efficient blockade during the winter.

In Spring 1571, Spain, Venice and the Pope formed a closer alliance, the Holy League. They agreed to maintain a force of 200 galleys, 100 sailing ships, 50,000 infantry and 4,500 cavalry during the years 1571–73 in order to wage war on the Ottomans. Philip II’s half-brother, Don John of Austria, was appointed commander of this force. It took the whole summer of 1571 to gather the Spanish part of it and bring it to the Levant. Famagusta had capitulated in early August and the Turkish conquest of Cyprus was complete. During September the combined fleet was finally organised under Don John, who, in spite of his youth, proved to be an efficient leader of a force that was full of political and personal antagonism. Totalling around 206 galleys and six Venetian galeasses (converted merchant galleys), it was organised as a coherent fleet with a unified command structure and a formal battle order where galleys from different states were mixed in the same squadron. The well-trained Spanish infantry was partly distributed on the 108 Venetian galleys which were weak in manpower. The Ottoman fleet, about 220–230 galleys and at least 50 to 60 small galleys, was in the Gulf of Lepanto under the command of the new Kapudan Pasha, Müezzinzade Ali Pasha.

The two fleets met on 7 October 1571 in one of the largest and best known battles ever fought at sea. It was unusual as both sides deliberately sought offensive action without having any important strategic purpose to seek battle for. It was too late in the season to make use of a victory and neither side threatened any vital interests of the other. Both sides are said to have underestimated the strength of their opponent and the Ottomans had an express order from the Sultan to fight. On the Christian side, Don John might have fought for glory but also with a conviction that the alliance would not survive one more year of hesitant inactivity by the united fleet. Lepanto was primarily fought because political logic required action.

Following this logic, the two fleets charged each other in two long lines abreast spread across the Gulf of Lepanto without considering if a defensive position or a few preliminary tactical manoeuvres might have suited them better. J. F. Guilmartin has argued that Ali Pasha hoped that his two wing squadrons and the small galleys would be able to use their superiority in manoeuvrability to turn the flanks of their opponents and attack the Christian formation from the side or the rear (where galleys were vulnerable), while his own centre squadron would fight a probably difficult defensive action. On the Christian side, the galeasses were placed as a vanguard (only four reached their place in the formation) to bring disorder to the advancing Turkish line with gunfire, while the reserve squadron was intended to be deployed at a decisive place at a crucial moment.

As the battle developed, the Christian inshore squadron – mainly a Venetian force – was able to make a difficult wheeling movement and press their Turkish opponent to the shore where it was nearly annihilated. The two centres fought an equally fierce battle where Christian firepower and heavy infantry finally won a crushing victory in which Ali Pasha was killed. The two offshore squadrons manoeuvred for a time until the Turks took an opportune moment to outflank the enemy centre. They began to capture Christian galleys but were halted by the Christian reserve squadron and finally attacked by the Christian offshore squadron.

With the loss of around 180 Ottoman galleys and 60 small vessels against 12 Christian galleys, Lepanto ranks as a battle of annihilation. Galleys were easily replaced, however. The losses of men were more important. They were heavy and more equally distributed, but the figures reported in the literature are contradictory. Guilmartin has argued that the Ottoman loss in skilled manpower was crippling for the efficiency of their navy.

During 1572 the Spanish-Italian galleys were as usual late in arriving in the Levant, but this time the delay can partly be explained by Philip II’s orders. He was uncertain about the political and military situation in the Netherlands and France and wished to have his galleys available in the western Mediterranean as long as possible. During the summer the Venetian fleet repeatedly attempted to bring its weakened opponent to action, but the Ottomans skilfully avoided this and restricted the operations of the Venetians at the same time. When the Spanish-Italian fleet under Don John finally arrived, a half-hearted attempt to take the fortress of Modon in the Morea (Peloponese) was made. When that failed, Venice had had enough of the war and concluded peace with the Sultan in early 1573. In that year the Ottoman fleet did not leave the Levant, while Spain launched an amphibious expedition to retake Tunis, lost in 1570. It was lost again in 1574 when the Ottomans sent a large expedition with 280 galleys and 15 galeasses. This, however, was the last major long-distance expedition ever undertaken by a galley fleet and the last major operation of the Spanish-Ottoman war. The Spanish fleet was seriously weakened by financial problems and unable to intervene.

The war had reached stalemate and both sides were increasingly engaged outside the Mediterranean: Spain in the Netherlands and the Atlantic; and the Ottomans against Persia. A truce was concluded in 15 80/8 1. It seemed as if the war was to be revived in 1593, when the Ottomans and the Austrian Habsburgs went to war but the two galley fleets mainly observed each other in the waters between Greece and Italy during 1594– 96. On land, the war went on until 1606, but in the Mediterranean the two empires were finally at peace with each other.

It is obvious that galley warfare had reached a stage where it no longer could fulfil the ambitions of rulers with offensive long-distance operations in mind. The Spanish fleet was notoriously late in arriving in the Levant, the Ottomans were no longer effective in the western Mediterranean, and the Venetians could not act offensively outside the Adriatic. The three major galley powers lacked base systems for the forward deployment of large forces. At the same time, the size and cost of these short-range forces had increased dramatically. J. F. Guilmartin has argued that this was the result of technological, economic and social factors which made galleys less useful as offensive weapon systems than they had been in the first half of the sixteenth century. Guns had become less scarce, oarsmen less well fed, and modern fortresses took longer to capture. The Mediterranean way of warfare based on galleys and fortresses had reached a phase of stagnation. Both the old maritime state of Venice and the two large Mediterranean empires had created huge and expensive armed forces which were barely able to fight each other. The next decades were to show that they were not even able to control the sea lines of communication within their hemispheres.

 

The triumph of private violence, 1580–1650


The return to peace around 1580 did not signal a revival of economic prosperity and a flourishing maritime economy in the Mediterranean. Instead, the period from 1580 to about 1615 saw the definite decline of this sea as the maritime centre of Europe. It could not survive the onslaught of private violence both from its own shores and from the dynamic maritime economy of north-western Europe. The old ship-owning centres, Venice and Genoa, left most of this business under the pressure of violence and superior economic competition, although Genoese investors could make profits from warfare as galley entrepreneurs. A new maritime structure developed where long-distance trade in the Levant was dominated by foreigners and where much of the trade between Asia and Europe, which earlier went through this area, had been diverted to the Cape of Good Hope route .

Privateering in the form of coastal raids and trade warfare had been normal parts of the great wars up to 1580. This type of warfare continued after the end of the imperial wars and the private use of violence became an institutionalised part of Mediterranean behaviour at sea. The great centres of piracy and privateering were Algiers, Malta and Leghorn, the new maritime city of the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, ruled by the Medici family (formerly the Republic of Florence). Several other cities in North Africa and local communities in the Ottoman empire also became centres of piracy. This activity was part of a rise of political unrest and lack of central control which shook the empire from the 1580s and lasted for decades. Ottoman control over North Africa became largely nominal and the corsair cities in this area made their independent wars on the Christians. In the eastern part of the Ottoman empire, piracy was an aspect of local rebellions and banditry which the central government was unable to control. With the exception of North Africa, the Ottoman empire was more of a victim than an originator of piracy. One port under nominal Ottoman control, Ragusa (Dubrovnik), flourished as a shipowning centre, probably because this city had adapted her fleet to modern technology. The Ragusans were even much in demand as leasers of warships to Spain .

Another victim was Venice. This is interesting as the new conditions in the Mediterranean might have been favourable for a state which earlier had thrived under conditions of uncertainty and risk. In the Middle Ages, Venice had become dominant in the Levant in large part thanks to her ability to combine politics, trade and armed protection in a region of eternal conflicts. Her state-owned merchant galleys, largely abandoned before 1570, had been the cost-efficient armed merchantmen of this glorious epoch. By the 1580s the Levant was again a conflict-stricken region where the Ottomans had lost much of their control. The central government in Constantinople was markedly favourable to Venice. Since the peace of 1573 it acknowledged the Republic’s claim that it had a monopoly on violence in the Adriatic and Venetian merchants were treated with respect. But, instead of profiting from this situation, Venice lost most of its old Levantine trade to the English, French and Dutch merchants.

These foreigners, especially the English and Dutch, used sailing merchantmen of a new and more efficient type, armed with cheap cast-iron guns, the early-modern equivalent of the medieval merchant galleys. The western ships were faster, could sail closer to the wind, and could fight with many guns in proportion to their size and crew. Venetian galleys patrolled the Adriatic and the waters around Crete, but their ability to protect shipping proved insufficient. Foreigners soon found that they were not only able to defend themselves against Mediterranean galleys and local sailing ships but they were also able to attack local merchantmen, plunder at will along Levantine coasts, and circumvent the nominally very strict Ottoman control of trade.

For long periods, Westerners were even able to force their way in and out of the Mediterranean, although it meant sailing close to the coast of Spain. It is an interesting example of the inefficiency of empires that English and Dutch private shipping came to the Mediterranean during a period when these nations were at war with Spain, supposedly the most powerful state in Europe. They did so at high risk and often under various disguises. When Spain really tried to eliminate enemy shipping (1598–1607, 1621–45), they ran into trouble but the fact that this had not been the regular Spanish response from the beginning of the wars with the Netherlands and England says something about the lack of a consistent maritime policy in that empire .

The efficient Christian powers at sea in this period were the small ones: the Orders of St John (Malta) and St Stephen (Tuscany). They sent out their official fleets as well as privateers not only to attack Muslim pirates but also Ottoman and Christian shipping. Venice was a chief object of these attacks as her ships traded with the Ottomans and the cargoes on Venetian ships might be described in one way or another as belonging to infidels. At least the Knights of Malta also attacked heretic English and Dutch shipping, although apparently not with much success. Tuscany sought co-operation with the west Europeans and Leghorn became an important port for their trade, including a convenient port for selling captured goods. The most important port for Western shipping in the Levant became Smyrna (Izmir), which in the early seventeenth century rose to be a centre for trade between east and west on the initiative of Western traders who sought a convenient entrepôt for their new informal trading empire.

Venice also suffered increasing hostility from the House of Habsburg. In the Adriatic her shipping was attacked by the Uskoks, a group of enterprising pirates living around Fiume in the narrow archipelago coast belonging to the Austrian Habsburgs. They acted as part of the warrior communities in the border zone between the Habsburg and Ottoman empires and they regarded Venetian trade with the enemy as free game.33 More remarkably, Venice was under attack from Spanish viceroys in Naples and Sicily who supported and owned privateers. This activity reached its height during the reign of the Duke of Osuna in the 1610s. He created a veritable fleet of sailing ships (apparently owned by himself but probably using government funds) which acted against Venice, often together with the royal Italian galleys controlled by the viceroy.

From 1616 to 1620,Venice and Naples (Osuna) were involved in a semi-official war. Venice finally hired about 20 to 30 Dutch and English armed merchantmen to fight Osuna’s fleet. In November 1617 they even fought a battle in the Adriatic, the first Mediterranean contest where gun-armed sailing ships were the main combatants. Osuna was finally recalled and imprisoned in 1620, and his sailing warships were transferred to the Atlantic, but the episode says something of the limited degree of control exercised by Spain in this period. Osuna’s fleet was fairly efficient and seems to have discouraged North African raids as long as it existed. Its activity fits into a picture where efficient private violence at sea was closely intertwined with the use of gun-armed sailing ships. The Algerines began to adopt such ships in the first decades of the seventeenth century, when the technology was brought in by Dutch and English pirates who found Algiers to be a convenient port for their activities. Tuscany, Malta and France also began to use sailing warships, partly bought from the Netherlands. The truce between Spain and the Dutch in 1609 gave these two powers the possibility to send out squadrons of sailing warships to carry North African corsairs. Spain and France made a successful joint attack on the corsair fleet at Tunis in 1609 and the English navy sent a squadron against the Algerines in 1620/21.These efforts were sporadic and the results limited .

In the 1620s and 1630s, small-scale warfare and piracy went on much as before between the North Africans, the Italian galley squadrons of Spain and minor powers, and Christian privateers. In the Levant, the Ottomans began to regain central control of their empire and became increasingly irritated by Venice’s inability to control the Christian privateers in her waters which were used for attacks on Ottoman shipping. This was the main reason for the Ottoman invasion of Crete starting in 1645. The war lasted until 1669. The fact that Venice now – unlike the sixteenth century – was able to fight a very long war with the Ottomans was a somewhat paradoxical effect of the Republic no longer being a great maritime power. Venice was now a regional power in the Adriatic and much of the resources for the war came from taxes on landed wealth. Venice again hired a considerable fleet of armed merchantmen from the Netherlands (later also from England) including crews, officers and even admirals. With this the Venetians were able to blockade the Dardanelles and major ports in the Aegean, something they had been unable to do since the fifteenth century. The Turks also found themselves blockaded on Crete. Characteristically, they reacted like other Mediterranean people in search of counter-measures against northern European sailing ships: they began to hire Dutch and English armed merchantmen themselves, although with less success than Venice .

Privately owned armed merchantmen from the Netherlands and England had achieved supremacy in the eastern half of the Mediterranean by 1650 – 150 years earlier, the home waters of the two largest fleets in the world. From 1636 the French–Spanish war had brought the two contenders’ sailing-fleets from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean. But the permanent fleets of Spain, Venice and the Ottomans remained their galley forces up to 1650 and later, and even the re-established French Mediterranean fleet spent much on galleys. Such vessels certainly had a role to fulfil in a sea with archipelagos and much windless weather, but they were insufficient for serious warfare in the seventeenth century. Sailing ships had proved superior for offensive and defensive trade warfare and they had shown their ability to blockade enemy ports. In the Atlantic they had also proved useful as convoy escorts. The cost-efficiency of the northern armed merchantmen was easy to observe within the Mediterranean where they dominated the market for violence and protection as well as the long-distance carrying trade.

The inability of the established Mediterranean sea powers to change their technology is an important aspect of their failure as controllers of violence and protection selling. There were of course several other factors behind the decline of the Mediterranean as a political and economic centre, but growing backwardness in warfare and protection at sea was one of the most obvious signs of it. In the Mediterranean, the new maritime powers confronted the earlier leading maritime powers directly, sometimes with armed power, always with economic power. They won. The inability of Venice to adapt to the most recent maritime technology is instructive as it highlights the problems a once very successful system may have in innovating, even when failure to do so exposes it to loss of profit.

The maritime inertia of the two great territorial empires may have had other origins. The Ottomans had already encountered the Portuguese sailing warships in the Indian Ocean in the early sixteenth century and had been unable to defeat them. Spain took control of Portugal in 1580 and created her own sailing navy in the Atlantic in the 1580s. But in the Mediterranean this had little effect. The social and political composition of the two empires in the Mediterranean rendered them unresponsive to information not generated within their own neighbourhood. This probably reflects an inward-looking mentality which must be part of the explanation for the general decline of the region.

It seems as if the mentalities of the Spanish reconquista warriors and the Ottoman holy warriors (the ghazis) were very similar in the case of warfare at sea. The galley, with its fairly simple propulsion and manoeuvring technology, its ability to form into ordered battle and its usefulness in amphibious warfare and sieges has been a weapon system for true warriors. It had proved outstandingly successful in the period of imperial conquests. The galleys continued to provide the two empires with a force with which they could transfer the resources of the state (soldiers, money) and high-ranking passengers from one area to another with safety and predictability. But as protection-sellers and controllers of violence at sea, in the interest of their societies, the Spanish and Ottoman empires proved increasingly inefficient. The costs of protection were very high – a large number of galleys patrolled the Mediterranean even after 1580 – but those who paid for it received an increasingly obsolete form of protection.

The elite groups of these empires were unable to adapt to technical and organisational changes which would reduce the value of existing know-how. Those who did benefit most from change may have been distant from the conservative centres of power. The political systems of the hastily assembled empires may have been insufficiently integrated for a bargaining process where those who would have benefited most from improved protection could ask for it, pay for it and control the quality of service they paid for. These suggestions are hypothetical, but the Mediterranean is interesting precisely because it shows that the changes in warfare at sea which took place in the Atlantic and the Baltic were not a general European development. They were the results of interaction between dynamic change in technology, politics, economy and social conditions whereby one region of Europe prospered while others declined.

In the early sixteenth century, Spain and the Ottomans seemed to be on their way to becoming world powers .Spain had linked Iberian military prowess with sophisticated Italian finance, technology and shipping and had added a new American empire with fascinating possibilities. The Habsburgs could complement these with the economic and maritime power in their Burgundian heritage in north-western Europe. The Ottoman empire was rapidly expanding in the Mediterranean and towards the Indian Ocean and could, reluctantly, have enjoyed the support of the old maritime power, Venice. The great entrepôts of Genoa, Seville, Antwerp, Constantinople, Alexandria/Cairo and Aleppo were under the control of Spain or the Turks. By adopting the most recent maritime technology, these empires might have continued to expand and control even wider territories. They failed. In the Mediterranean they created naval–military systems which effectively eliminated their ability to fight each other. By 1650 Spain was defeated at sea by the rebellious Dutch, while the Ottoman empire had lost all ability to expand through maritime policy. Since 1645, it had been involved in a war with the now relatively unimportant Venice where it had shown little ability to win. The maritime world had changed much more rapidly than the ability of Mediterranean societies and states to adapt to these changes.

 

 

 

 

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