During The Middle Ages and The Renaissance, there was a constant naval war between the Christian and Muslim states in the Mediterranean. When there was no major campaign involved it was a handy excuse to be Pirates. Circa 1570, the Republic of Venice was entering a prolonged decline in Mediterranean dominance and the Ottoman Empire was extending its hegemony into the world's oceans.
By the reign of the Sultan Selim II (affectionately known as Selim the Sot), the Empire was recovering from its failed attempt to conquer Malta. The Ottomans turned their gaze toward Cyprus which was rich in sugar and an important base, under the authority of the Venetians at the time. The Ottomans, commanded on the sea by admiral Ali Pasha, invaded Cyprus, and the threat provoked an alliance among the Mediterranean Christian states, chief among whom were the Republic of Venice and the Spanish Empire of King Philip II. The former lent the ships and the crews, the latter the money and the marine infantry, and together they readied a fleet to meet the challenge, with Philip's novel half-brother John of Austria being handed command under the eye of the veteran admiral Álvaro de Bazán.
The result was a battle of annihilation that was effectively the largest naval brawl in western history since classical antiquity. The Turkish fleet arrived in the Gulf of Patras in Greece, but the Spanish-Italian fleet intercepted it on 7 October 1571. The two armadas clashed in a massive, multi-level affair where the elite Spanish Tercios and Turk Janissaries warred on the massed boards as in a land battle while cannonfire fell over everybody. The Ottomans disrupted the Christian line in not less than three occasions, but Bazán's chess-like maneuvers covered the breach every time, and eventually, with the timely help of enslaved Christians that had revolted in the Ottoman ships, the Christian crews and boarding parties overpowered their opponents. Ali Pasha was killed in a duel of flagships against John, and the rest of the Turk fleet was rounded and methodically destroyed or captured almost in its totality. Only the most experienced Ottoman captain, Occhiali, managed to escape with the ships he could gather.
This battle was a great victory for the Christian powers and was celebrated as such. It was the last major galley battle before galleys were superseded by great sailing warships, with its commander Bazán being one of the promoters of this innovation, and it was also where several famous military men achieved fame, like the mentioned John of Austria, Giovanni Andrea Doria, Marcantonio Colonna and Alexander Farnese, as well as people who would stand out in other fields after their military career, like Miguel de Cervantes. Even the Pope, Pius V, came out with glory, as he would be canonized after his death on a supposed miracle by which he "felt" the battle's outcome in real time from his chambers in Rome. In sum, there was a time in Europe where merely being Christian and having been at Lepanto, or being related in any way to the battle, was enough for you to qualify as a full-fledged war hero.
Although the Turks later managed to rebuild their fleet, so many skilled sailors and warriors were lost that the Turkish fleet would be incapable of major effective operations for a generation — the galleys themselves were rebuilt quickly but fleets at the time depended so much on the skill of sailors that this was something of a bluff — by which time its preferred methods of shipbuilding and naval tactics were so obsolete that recovery was impossible.
Ironically, the Turks still retained Cyprus. Philip II would find himself too busy with his own conflicts in Europe, leading him to focus his resources on the Dutch and English (and later the French), after which the Holy League started unraveling, meaning Venice ultimately found itself alone. Wishing to end hostilities with the Ottoman Empire and hopefully regaining trade with them, they signed a treaty giving the island away in 1573. Still busy, Philip signed his own truce with the Ottomans in 1580, helped by the fact that the Turks were having their own problems against Persia, although his son Philip III would eventually return to the war against the Ottoman Empire in the following century, using their new galleons to score a couple of big victories against Turk fleets off their coasts of Anatolia.
The historical significance of the battle is controversial to this day. First it was seen as a great and momentous victory, then there was the backlash, then the backlash to the backlash, and so on. Evaluations are often colored by nationalism, pro-western bias, anti-western bias, or any number of historical frameworks. At the time in the West it was seen unambiguously as a historical turning-point and a great, even miraculous victory attributed to the intercession of the Virgin Mary. Revisionists portray the battle as an inconsequential side-show, pointing out that the Turks quickly rebuilt their fleet, kept Cyprus, and continued the war, while the Christians did not regain any significant territory (this was certainly the official Ottoman position in the immediate aftermath of the battle). The post-revisionist view is that the battle was important in that the Ottoman Empire never again attempted to seriously compete against European naval powers, with the gap between them only continuing to grow over the coming decades. The Ottomans did quickly rebuild their fleet, but mostly avoided engaging the Europeans in naval combat, as their technology and tactics continued to fall behind the Europeans; what battles the Ottomans did engage in, they mostly lost. Therefore, in a greater sense, this battle was the point where Christian navies took control of the world's oceans.
If this position is taken to its logical conclusion, this battle gave Christian empires control not only over most of the world's seas, but the world itself. Ottoman control of eastern trade routes meant the Turks had easy access to the riches of the East, while European powers were forced to develop their naval technology and send bold explorers in order to find alternate routes, either West (the Spanish way, leading to the discovery of The Americas) or South (around Africa, favorite of the Portuguese). Europe would be more than compensated for the extra effort. Control over the seas gave them control over trade, money, and everything that goes with it. European naval supremacy would lead directly to European imperialism and colonialism, meaning it would be western Europe that would dominate the world for the next couple of centuries. Turkey having any influence outside of its immediate vicinity was basically out of the question, while thanks to naval power Europe would eventually dominate as far away as China. Had the Turks won at Lepanto, it is possible that Western expansion might have been seriously impeded, particularly in the areas bordering the Mediterranean, Black Sea, Red Sea, and Indian Ocean, and all of history would have been changed.
The Battle of Diu, an encounter of the Conquest of Portuguese India happened sixty years earlier during which the Portuguese destroyed an Ottoman fleet that outnumbered them to an insane degree, is often considered a sort of "Lepanto of the East", although it receives little attention. It also marked the beginning of Western European dominance in the Indian Ocean.
Bottom line: it was important, an event on par with the naval battle of Actium fought not too far away many centuries earlier.
Depictions in fiction
- "Lepanto", a poem by G. K. Chesterton
- Don Quixote:
- The first part of the novel has the Captive Captain tale: A Spanish captain, Ruy Pérez de Viedma, narrates how he was charging against a Turkish galley when the wind changed and his men couldn’t follow him, and so the Turks made him a slave:
I may say, in short, that I took part in that glorious expedition, promoted by this time to be a captain of infantry, to which honourable charge my good luck rather than my merits raised me; and that day—so fortunate for Christendom, because then all the nations of the earth were disabused of the error under which they lay in imagining the Turks to be invincible on sea-on that day, I say, on which the Ottoman pride and arrogance were broken, among all that were there made happy (for the Christians who died that day were happier than those who remained alive and victorious) I alone was miserable; for, instead of some naval crown that I might have expected had it been in Roman times, on the night that followed that famous day I found myself with fetters on my feet and manacles on my hands. It happened in this way: El Uchali, the king of Algiers, a daring and successful corsair, having attacked and taken the leading Maltese galley (only three knights being left alive in it, and they badly wounded), the chief galley of John Andrea, on board of which I and my company were placed, came to its relief, and doing as was bound to do in such a case, I leaped on board the enemy's galley, which, sheering off from that which had attacked it, prevented my men from following me, and so I found myself alone in the midst of my enemies, who were in such numbers that I was unable to resist; in short I was taken, covered with wounds; El Uchali, as you know, sirs, made his escape with his entire squadron, and I was left a prisoner in his power, the only sad being among so many filled with joy, and the only captive among so many free; for there were fifteen thousand Christians, all at the oar in the Turkish fleet, that regained their longed-for liberty that day.
- The second part of the novel has a great Take That! against FanFiction author Avellaneda, who wrote a Continuation Fic to the first part and some words making fun of Miguel de Cervantes' wounds (which he got as a marine at Lepanto itself):
What I cannot help taking amiss is that he charges me with being old and one-handed, as if it had been in my power to keep time from passing over me, or as if the loss of my hand had been brought about in some tavern, and not on the grandest occasion the past or present has seen, or the future can hope to see. If my wounds have no beauty to the beholder's eye, they are, at least, honourable in the estimation of those who know where they were received; for the soldier shows to greater advantage dead in battle than alive in flight; and so strongly is this my feeling, that if now it were proposed to perform an impossibility for me, I would rather have had my share in that mighty action, than be free from my wounds this minute without having been present at it.
- The first part of the novel has the Captive Captain tale: A Spanish captain, Ruy Pérez de Viedma, narrates how he was charging against a Turkish galley when the wind changed and his men couldn’t follow him, and so the Turks made him a slave:
- The battle is featured at the end of Il Leone di Damasco by Emilio Salgari (the author of Sandokan), with the protagonists reinforcing La Real during the fight against the Sultana.
- It is also featured as a scenario in Age of Empires II, where the player plays as a Spanish faction with an objective of building a Wonder and defending it from the Turkish navy invasion.
- A rare option in the Table Top Game Diplomacy, where Italy attacks Turkey, is named 'The Lepanto Gambit'.
- In addition to being able to recrate the causes of, the battle itself, and the aftermath, one of the songs
in the soundtrack to Europa Universalis 4, is called Battle of Lepanto.
