Empires of the Sea: The Siege of Malta, the Battle of Lepanto, and the Contest for the Center of the World Book

My third book by Crowley, and it won't be my last -- he's one of the best narrative historians I've read. Engrossing, authoritative, and crammed full of detail. Highly recommended.

In a nutshell: in the 16th century, an expansionist, aggressive, and supremely organized Ottoman state focuses much of its attention on the Mediterranean, while squabbling European powers headed by Hapsburg Spain focus on the New World and internecine squabbling. The stage is set for decades of piracy, raiding, and slaving, with acute outbreaks of intense fighting -- Rhodes, Preveza, Tunis, Malta, Lepanto. Add a dash of religious fervor, a pinch of arms race, and a smidgen of technological and doctrinal military revolution and you've got a recipe for a brutal meatgrinder of a see-sawing half-century of trans-continental warfare. It's intense stuff, some of which I knew and some of which I didn't, all of it put into context and explained holistically (i.e., this isn't a book that's just about Lepanto).

The good bits:

* The Ottomans were besiegers nonpareil. "No army in the world could match the Ottomans in the art of siege warfare; through espionage they came to Rhodes quite well informed about the defenses, and had made a realistic assessment of the task. The Turks accordingly placed their ultimate confidence less in their siege guns than in subterranean devices: the use of explosive mines." As an aside and on the topic of sieges and the Ottomans, I highly recommend the novel The Siege by Ismail Kadare.

* Even the best besiegers in the world get a run for their money every now and then, as at Rhodes. How clever is this? "In case a tunnel should be missed, [Tadini, in charge of defensive planning] bored spiral vents in the walls' foundations to disperse the force of explosive charges."

* More on the significance of Rhodes, home to the Order of Saint John (aka the Knights Hospitaler): The gunpowder age and the development of accurate bronze cannon that fired penetrative iron balls were revolutionizing fortress design. Italian military engineers developed their discipline as a science. They mapped geometric angles of fire with compasses and used knowledge of ballistics to design radical solutions. At Rhodes, the engineers constructed prototypes of this new military engineering: massive walls, angled bastions of immense thickness that commanded wide fields of fire, slanted parapets to deflect shot, mountings for long-range guns, splayed gun ports, inner defensive layers with concealed batteries, double ditches excavated to the depth of canyons, counterscarps that exposed an advancing enemy to a torrent of fire. The new principles were depth defense and cross fire; no enemy could advance without being hit from multiple vantage points, nor could he be sure what traps lay within. Rhodes in 1522 was not just the best-defended city on earth, it was also a laboratory of siege warfare."

* Specialized knowledge is becoming more and more, well, special. "Suleiman's master gunner had his legs blown off by a cannonball'a loss said to have been more grievous to the sultan than that of any general."

* The end of Christian Rhodes. This kind of Christmas-truce-in-no-man's-land chivalry wouldn't last. "The treaty was finally signed on December 20. Four days later L'Isle Adam went to make his submission to Suleiman in a plain black habit, the garb of mourning. The meeting was almost gentlemanly. Suleiman was apparently moved by the bearded melancholy figure who stooped to kiss his hand, and by the knights' gallant defense. Through an interpreter, he consoled the visibly ageing L'Isle Adam with sympathetic words on the vagaries of life'that "it was a common thing to lose cities and kingdoms through the instability of human fortune." Turning to his vizier, he murmured, "It saddens me to be compelled to cast this brave old man out of his home." Two days later, in a further remarkable gesture, he made a visit to view the city he had captured, almost without guards and trusting to the knights' honor. As he left, he raised his turban in salute to his adversary."

* Meanwhile, in Spain... First impressions aren't always fair, but the Hapsburgs didn't make it easy. "Where the young Suleiman's calculated imperial demeanor struck all who saw him, Charles just looked an imbecile. Generations of inbreeding within the Hapsburg dynasty had bequeathed an unkind legacy. His eyes bulged; he was alarmingly pale. Any redeeming physical features that he did possess'a well-formed body, a broad forehead'were immediately offset by the long protruding lower jaw that frequently left his mouth hanging open, which to those impolite enough or royal enough to remark on it, lent the young man an aspect of vacant idiocy. His grandfather Maximilian bluntly called him a heathen idol. Facial deformity made it impossible for Charles to chew food properly, so that he was troubled all his life by digestive problems, and the deformity left him with a stammer. The king spoke no Spanish. He seemed grave, tonguetied, stupid'hardly the prospective emperor of the terrestrial globe."

* Later given the name 'barbarossa' or redbeard by the Europeans, Hayrettin was perhaps the best and most politically skillful pirate to operate in the Western Med. So politically astute that he gained much of North Africa for the Ottomans, a snazzy title for himself in exchange, and a tomb that stands by the Bosphorus to this day. NB the huge number of slaves; the West simply couldn't get its act together. "Hayrettin's knowledge of the sea, drawn from thousands of voyages, was unmatched, and his intelligence on enemy intentions, gathered from the interrogation of captured crews and from the freely given advice of Spanish Muslims, allowed him to strike unpredictably and at will. He made one or two sweeps a year with a flotilla of eighteen vessels, snatching merchant ships, burning coastal villages, and abducting populations. Over a ten-year period, he took ten thousand people from the coastline between Barcelona and Valencia alone'a stretch of just two hundred miles."

* Oops. Btw, Spain still retains a number of both large and small enclaves in North Africa. "In May 1529, all these forces came to a head when Spain's neglect of its African outposts brought a defining catastrophe. The Peñón of Algiers, the small fort that throttled the city and its port, ran short of gunpowder. Spies reported the situation to Hayrettin, who immediately stormed it. The commander, Martin de Vargas, was offered the choice of conversion to Islam or execution. He chose to die. He was beaten to death in front of the janissaries'a slow and painful end. Shortly afterward, a relief fleet of nine Spanish ships arrived at the Peñón, unaware of the catastrophe, and were all captured."

* The West often conceives of the Muslim Turks as the Other, but they saw themselves -- at least for a time and in part -- as heirs to the same Roman heritage that many in the West claim as their own. "Suleiman staged his own rival triumphs, contriving a matching iconography [to that of the Hapsburg Spaniards]. From the Venetians he had commissioned a set of ceremonial objects worthy of a Roman emperor: a scepter, a throne, and an extraordinary jeweled helmet-crown, which the Italians claimed had been a trophy of Alexander the Great. He entered Belgrade in a cavalcade of opulent pageantry, "with great ceremony and pomp and with pipes and the sound of different instruments, that it was an extraordinary thing to marvel at and he went through triumphal arches along the streets of his progress, according to the ancient customs of the Romans."

* The Columbian Exchange -- disease for tomatoes and gold, and the odds in the Old World change ever so slightly. "In prospect, the armada to Tunis would cost another million, a sum of money Charles did not have. The expedition against Barbarossa took place only because of events on the other side of the world. On August 29, 1533, Francisco Pizarro had strangled Atahualpa, the last king of the Incas, at Cajamarca in the Andes, having extracted an immense quantity of gold for his ransom. Spanish galleons supplied Charles with a windfall 1,200,000 ducats of South American gold for "the holy enterprise of war against the Turk, Luther and other enemies of the faith." The treasure house of Atahualpa paid for Charles's crusade. It was the first time that the New World had altered the course of events in the Old."

* If you time travel to the 16th century, don't live by the water's edge. "The disguised galleys fell on Mahon like the vengeance of God. Barbarossa took the caravel, comprehensively sacked the town, and carried off eighteen hundred people. There was a glut of goods in the slave market of Algiers."

* The sultan didn't play games. "On the evening of March 5, 1536, Ibrahim came to the royal palace as usual to dine with Suleiman. As he was leaving, he was surprised to meet Ali the executioner and a posse of palace slaves: the ambitious vizier had overreached himself, almost assuming that the authority of the sultan was his own, and winning the particular disfavor of Suleiman's wife, Hurrem. When the hacked body was discovered the following morning, it was apparent from the bloody walls that Ibrahim had gone down fighting. The spattered room was left untouched for many years as a warning to ambitious viziers that it takes but a single Turkish consonant to fall from makbul (the favored) to maktul (the executed)."

* Again, specialized skills can't be squandered. "Despite their huge population, the supply of skilled soldiers was not inexhaustible, and when the bishop of Dax saw the proudly rebuilt fleet, he was not impressed: "Having seen…an armada leave this port made up of new vessels, built of green timber, rowed by crews which never held an oar, provided with artillery which had been cast in haste, several pieces being compounded of acidic and rotten material, with apprentice guides and mariners, and armed with men still stunned by the last battle…""

* Lepanto. Don't fire until you see the whites of their eyes has a nicer ring to it, but it's the same idea. Advice from a sage military man to Don Juan of Austria in the run-up to the battle. "In reality it's not possible to fire twice without causing the greatest possible confusion. In my opinion the best thing is to do what the cavalry say, and to fire the arquebuses so close to the enemy that their blood spurts over you…. I've always heard captains who know what they're talking about say that the noise of the bow spurs breaking and the report of the artillery should be simultaneous or very close together."

* Lepanto. The conventional wisdom was to avoid an all-out confrontation, but terrible intelligence led both sides to gamble on a large battle. "As the hours passed and the two armadas spread across the water, the full extent of the unfolding collision became apparent. Along a four-mile-wide front, two enormous battle fleets were drawing together in a closed arena of sea. The scale of the thing dwarfed all preconceptions. There were some 140,000 men, soldiers, oarsmen, and crew, in some 600 ships'something in excess of 70 percent of all the oared galleys in the Mediterranean. Unease turned to doubt. There were men on each side secretly appalled by what they saw."

* Lepanto was an awful slaughter. "It was a scene of staggering devastation, like a biblical painting of the world's end. The scale of the carnage left even the exhausted victors shaken and appalled by the work of their hands. They had witnessed killing on an industrial scale. In four hours 40,000 men were dead, nearly 100 ships destroyed, 137 Muslim ships captured by the Holy League. Of the dead, 25,000 were Ottoman; only 3,500 were taken alive. Another 12,000 Christian slaves were liberated. The defining collision in the White Sea gave the people of the early modern world a glimpse of Armageddon to come. Not until Loos in 1916 would this rate of slaughter be surpassed. "What has happened was so strange and took on so many different aspects," wrote Girolamo Diedo, "it's as if men were extracted from their own bodies and transported to another world.""

* I know too much about salmonella to tie a chicken over a bleeding stump. "On the stricken San Giovanni, the Spanish sergeant Martin Muñoz, lying below with fever, heard the enemy clattering up the deck overhead, and leaped from his bed determined to die. Sword in hand, he hurled himself at the assailants, killed four, and drove them back before collapsing on a rowing bench, studded with arrows and with one leg gone, calling out to his fellows "Each of you do as much." On the Doncella, Federico Venusta had his hand mutilated by the explosion of his own grenade. He demanded a galley slave cut it off. When the man refused, he performed the operation himself and then went to the cook's quarters, ordered them to tie the carcass of a chicken over the bleeding stump, and returned to battle, shouting at his right hand to avenge his left."

* The corrosive power of inflation, and the ever-increasing influence of the New World. "At the same time, the influx of bullion from the Americas was beginning to hole the Ottoman economy below the waterline, in ways that were barely understood. The Ottomans had the resources to outstay any competitor in the business of war, but they were powerless to protect their stable, traditional, self-sufficient world against the more pernicious effects of modernity. There were no defensive bastions proof against rising European prices and the inflationary effects of gold. In 1566, the year after Malta, the gold mint at Cairo'the only one in the Ottoman world, producing coins from limited supplies of African gold'devalued its coinage by 30 percent. The Spanish real became the most appreciated currency in the Ottoman empire; it was impossible to strike money of matching value. The silver coins paid to the soldiers grew increasingly thin; they were "as light as the leaves of the almond tree and as worthless as drops of dew," according to a contemporary Ottoman historian. With these forces came price rises, shortages, and the gradual erosion of the indigenous manufacturing base. Raw materials and bullion were being sucked out of the empire by Christian Europe's higher prices and lower production costs. From the end of the sixteenth century globalizing forces started stealthily to undermine the old social fabric and bases of Ottoman power."

* The Leviathan of the state may not always be pleasant, but this kind of thing doesn't happen when you have a coast guard. Also, cue up the Marine Corps hymn. "After 1580 the corsairs also deserted the sultan's cause and returned to man-taking on their own account along the barren shores of the Maghreb. The sea at the center of the world would face another two hundred miserable years of endemic piracy that would funnel millions of white captives into the slave markets of Algiers and Tripoli. As late as 1815, the year of Waterloo, 158 people were snatched from Sardinia; it took the New World Americans finally to scotch the menace of the Barbary pirates. Venice and the Ottomans, permanently locked into the tideless sea, would contest the shores of Greece until 1719, but the power had long gone elsewhere."

* Also, there's a character called Kara Hodja ("the black priest"), an Italian priest turned Muslim corsair [with a name like that, he'd fit in on Game of Thrones], and Bragadin, one of the Venetian commanders at Rhodes who ultimately had his skin flayed from his body and stuffed before being paraded around.

* Read this book.