In 1565, an Ottoman fleet besieged the island of Malta. It was beaten off, but the success was short-lived. The following years, it was the turn of Chios and Naxos. In August 1571, another Ottoman force took Cyprus from the Venetians after a lengthy campaign and massacred hundreds of Christians holding out in Famagusta, flaying alive the commander, Marco Antonio Bragadino, and hanging his lieutenant, Lorenzo Tiepolo. Six years later Samos was also captured.

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A month after Cyprus capitulated, however, Christendom secured one of its greatest victories over the Ottomans, near Nafpaktos, in what was then called the Gulf of Lepanto. In May 1571, Venice, Spain, and the papacy had forged a somewhat shaky alliance in response to the attack on Cyprus and in the hope of preventing any further Ottoman incursions in the Mediterranean. A combined fleet was hastily assembled under the command of Don Juan of Austria, an illegitimate son of Charles V and half brother of Philip II of Spain.

With 170 Venetian war galleys, it was the largest single Christian fleet ever to venture into the Mediterranean. In the front line were also six bargelike oared ships known as galleasses, which the Ottomans had never encountered. Each carried nearly fifty cannons and could deliver more than six times as much shot as any of the largest galleys of the time.

On Sunday morning, October 7, Don Juan surprised a massive Ottoman fleet in the Gulf of Patras. The battle lasted a little over four hours. The galleasses disabled, destroyed, or scattered as much as a third of the numerically superior Ottoman fleet before the battle even began.

No sooner had the galleys engaged than La Reale, Don Juan’s flagship, succeeded in ramming the Ottoman admiral Müezzinzade Ali Pasha’s flagship, Sultana. A bullet to the brain killed Ali Pasha. The victorious Christians decapitated him and exhibited his head on a pike on La Reale’s quarterdeck. When the rest of the Ottoman fleet realized that their admiral was dead and his ship was in Christian hands, they scattered in panic. Some forty thousand men, both Christians and Muslims, died in the carnage, making it one of the bloodiest encounters in the history of European warfare. More than two-thirds of the mighty Ottoman fleet was sunk in flames or captured by Don Juan and his triumphant admirals.

The victory was hailed far and wide across Europe. A European Christian fleet had crushed an Eastern enemy and, once again, saved Europe and all the values it represented from the yoke of a despotic power. The analogies were, of course, entirely empty. The forces of Don Juan did not represent either Greek democratic freedom or Roman civility. The Spain of Philip II was hardly less despotic than the Ottoman Empire, and in many respects a good deal more so. The men who had powered the galleys at Salamis in 480 bc had been free men fighting for their cities. Those at Lepanto, on both sides, were slaves.

Furthermore, from the Ottoman point of view, Lepanto was far from being the victory the Christians claimed. The imperial fleet was largely rebuilt within a year. Don Juan put to sea again in 1572, and although the two fleets skirmished off the Peloponnesus, neither side could claim a victory. The Turks still dominated the eastern Mediterranean and still controlled most of Hungary.

With the death of Selim II in 1574, however, the Ottomans were more concerned with maintaining the peace within their own territories through years of unrest, palace intrigue, and a number of weak and incompetent sultans than they were with making any further advances against the West. Then there was the Persian question. The struggle between the Sunni Ottoman Empire and the Shiite Safavid Persian one lasted off and on for most of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

For a while, one of the greatest of the Safavid rulers, Shah Abbas, actively sought support from the West. He was responsible for creating a great capital at Isfahan, which the English travelers who visited it in the late seventeenth century said rivaled London in size and opulence. With the help of two English adventurers, the brothers Anthony and Robert Shirley, he created a formidable and highly Westernized military machine.

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