Worst, with more than 4,000 men slain, including 18 galley captains and 12 heads of the city’s great houses.
The Muslim losses were far heavier. Up to 30,000 died, including many pashas and governors; some 3,000 Muslims were taken prisoner, and 15,000 Christian galley slaves were liberated from the oars of Ottoman vessels. As for ships, about 240 galleys and galiots were either sunk, burned or captured by the Christians.
Yet Lepanto was a battle without apparent results. Strategically, it bore no fruit at all. Cyprus was not recaptured. That same winter 150 new galleys and eight galleasses were laid down in the. shipyards of Constantinople, and when Uluch Ali asked the Grand Vizier how anchors and rigging could be found for such a mighty resurrection, the Vizier merely replied: “The wealth and power of the Empire are of such magnitude that if it were necessary we would make anchors of silver, cables of silk and sails of satin.’’
Nevertheless, in the intangible half-world of men’s hopes and fears, the battle was a turning point. All Christian Europe experienced a surge of relief and self-confidence. For the first time in men’s memory, the Turks had been decisively beaten and had proved, as Colonna wrote, to be “no more than other men.’’
Venice, anxiously awaiting news of the battle, broke into a delirium of joy when on October 17 a galley hove into view trailing captured Turkish banners in the waves and flaunting a crew dressed in Ottoman costumes stripped from the dead. Bells clanged, bonfires blazed, and a prolonged season of pageantry and jubilation ensued. Night after night the shops of the Rialto were alive with light and music; 99 poets celebrated the victory in august (and turgid) verse; commemorative coins were struck; and painters scurried to record the miracle along the ceilings and walls of the Doge’s palace.
The battle was seen, above all, as the victory of Christ over mammon. Pope Pius V, placing in Don Juan’s debt the whole Christian world, greeted the news with the Biblical verse; “There was a man sent from God, whose name was John.’’
Within a few years of the Battle of Lepanto, the Mediterranean fell silent. The Ottoman and Spanish Empires, facing each other in the closed arena of the sea, never clashed in such strength again. As the two giants withdrew, it seemed that the empire of Venice, at once so tough and so fragile, must once more assert itself. Yet instead, the sea power of the ancient republic declined, and was never to recover.
With the departure of the great fleets—the Spanish ships to traffic in the wealth of the New World, the Ottoman galleys to rot unused in Constantinople—there began a golden age of piracy. Barbary corsairs, Italian and Dalmatian pirates, intruding Dutch and English, the Knights of Saint John privateering in the name of Christ—all turned their hand against the merchantmen of the republic.
The Venetian galleys and galleasses were ill-suited to combat these predators. Many of the pirates sailed in northern European ships called bertoni (Bretons)—three-masted galleons armed with as many as 35 cannon and dauntingly high to board. These sailing vessels were far
To 16th Century Europe the Battle of Lepanto had a significance that far outweighed the immediate concerns of Venetian merchants or Turki. sh warriors. The Venetian Ambassador to Madrid, Leonardo Dona, conveyed the general feeling when he wrote a jubilant dispatch announcing “the glorious victory that the loving hand of God has given to all Christendom.”
Viewed as the culmination of a protracted struggle against the infidel that had begun with the Crusades nearly 500 years before, the victory at Lepanto suggested to Christians that God had once and for all confirmed them in Almighty favor (even though the Turks, declining to share this feeling of finality, continued to pre. ss their campaign against Christian Europe for another century and a quarter). Europeans expressed their exultation in virtually every art form —painting and writing, weaving and metalwork, music and architecture. As time went on, they did so in a growing profusion of baroque extravagance and sublime incongruity.
Some of the art was frankly secular; in Spain, King Philip II commanded El Greco to paint his portrait as one of a trio of figures representing the Holy League —Pope Pius V and the Doge of Venice being the other two. And in Rome—100 years after the event—the descendants of fleet commander Marc Antonio Colonna still considered the battle so vital a part of their personal history that they made it the prevailing theme of a set of frescoes they commissioned for their lavish villa.
But nowhere was the artistic expression more fervent than in the Church. On the first anniversary of the battle. Pope Pius V proclaimed the first Sunday in October a religious holiday, and he had commemorative medals struck to remind his flock of quarrelsome nations that, in a dark hour, faith and unity had spared Christians from the terrors of the infidel. Subsequent anniversaries brought similar reminders of the glorious triumph at Lepanto, sustaining the episode in the collective memory of Christian Europe over the next 200 years and more.
On a pulpit carved to resemble a ship in commemoration of the Battle o/Leponfo, a gilded Archangel Michael springs to battle from the bowsprit, and cherubs scamper like nimble seamen through rigging of gilded rope. Gracing a monastery chapel in Irsee, Bovoria. the pulpit was built in 1725 at the instigation oftheAbbot Willibald Grindl, who as a youth in Austria bad seen the Turks turned back from the gates of Vienna in 1683.
An Wth Century piaster reiie/ in a Poiermo chapei shows the Virgin Mary-enthroned in the clouds, with Pope Pius V in monk’s robes on his knees before her—looking on with approval as Christian and Turkish ships savoge each other ot Lepanto. Two little urchins perched on o lintel at the bottom of the relief—one ciutching o Christian helmet, the other o Turkish turbon—odd a poignont touch to the scene; they represent the wor orphons o/Leponto.
More maneuverable than Venetian round ships. And the galleasses, useless in rough weather, were too ponderous to catch them. The Venetian light galleys were more successful, but they required constant revictualing and were unable to operate during the winter months. The bortoni could not only carry heavier artillery—and fire it broadside instead of from bow and stern—but also required much smaller crews than did galleys and galleasses. So the days of the great war galleys were gone. The huge Spanish Armada that set off to attack England in 1588, just 17 years after Lepanto, included only four galleys and four galleasses among some 130 vessels.
On a monstrance (below)—a vessel used to display a communion wafer— vignettes of the Battle of Lepanta farm a meshwork of shimmering gold and silver filigree. An enlarged detail (left) depicts Pope Pius V on the stern of a ship flying Venice’s Lian of Saint Mark.
Made by Bavarian gaidsmith Johann Zecki, the monstrance was completed in 1708 after 30 years af work.
With the discovery of the Americas and the sea route to the Orient, the whole balance of world commerce was inexorably tilting away from Mediterranean states and toward the surging nations of Europe’s Atlantic coast: first to Portugal and Spain, then to France, Holland, England. Venetian trade along the Atlantic seaboard disappeared, and in the 1570s tough, seaworthy British bertoni penetrated the Mediterranean. As traders, these vessels surpassed the Venetian great galleys. In addition to their smaller crew and ability to sail all year round, they had a larger cargo capacity.
By now Venice itself was relying on foreign vessels for much of its transport. “Foreigners and strangers from remote countries have become masters of all the shipping,” ran a report of the Venetian Board of Trade in 1602. ‘The English in particular, after driving our men from the westward voyage, at present sail the Levantine waters, and voyage to the islands and harbors in our own dominion.” By the start of the 17th Century the Dutch, sailing round Africa, had captured the spice trade; and soon afterward the last great outlet of Venetian goods was shut off when the Thirty Years’ War devastated Germany.
To counter the bertoni sailed by pirates, the Venetians resorted to a neurotic expedient: the building of a monster 240-ton galleon. The vessel inspired frenzied hopes. ‘‘The mere rumor that the galleon has put to sea,” declared a senator in 1605, ‘‘will strike such terror into the hearts of the pirates that they will find it in their own best interests to take to other pursuits.”
In this self-blinding belief, the galleon was solemnly blessed and launched in 1608. Her operating cost, at first estimated at 20,000 ducats a year, in fact exceeded 43,000. But her speed was less than hoped, and she was hampered by the slightest contrary wind or hint of calm. If a pirate 20 miles away was to be caught, the wind had to blow strongly behind the galleon all day.
During her 17 months of service, this marine dinosaur, bristling with 76 guns, was at sea almost continuously, escorting merchant shipping. Then technical problems drove her ashore. For two years she stayed in dry dock and was only released, ignominiously, as a merchantman. But on March 24, 1615, as she was about to overwhelm a Tunisian bertoni after a two-hour battle, her powder magazine caught fire, and she sank to the bottom in the waters of Cyprus.
By now the republic’s once-great Arsenal had declined pitifully. A shortage of raw materials, especially wood, had combined with monetary inflation to deepen its plight. The war galley, with its big comple-
Ment of manpower, had outgrown its strength. By 1586 there were only 95 galleys left, and for years none had been built. The convict oarsmen received only five ounces of biscuit and one cup of wine a day, and they were pathetically clothed. “Every year,” wrote a commander in 1605, “many of the convicts lose their hands or feet as a result of the cold, and at last miserably perish.” As for the seamen, a provveditore remarked that nobody volunteered for the fleet unless he was a criminal, a half-wit, a debtor or a drunk.
Not only the Arsenal but the city’s private shipyards as well lay desolate, and the few remaining vessels were liable to be dismantled for their timber and iron. “The ships of Venice,” complained a galleon captain in 1609, “which used—especially the large ones—to be numerous in this city, are now no more.” He spoke of the disastrous consequences of buying foreign-built bertoni and manning them with foreign officers, more skilled than the Venetians. “And so,” he concluded, “as there are no ships built in this city, and as Venetian sailors are not wanted on foreign ships, the old ones go to serve elsewhere and no new ones are trained, so that the seaman’s craft is dying out.”
Originally mounted on the war galley of Doge Francesco Morasini, these matching wooden sculptures af manacled Turks and captured banners and weopons celebrate stunning victuries over the Turks in the Peloponnesus and Dalmatia in the 1680s. Despite this brief, renewed demonstration of military prowess, Venice soon yielded dominance af the Adriatic and Levontine trade routes to English and Dutch merchants.
The backbone of Venice, in fact, was broken. The seagoing vigor of her elite families of merchants and soldiers had not survived prosperity; instead, they had taken to the mainland, investing in real estate and farming. “Since the noblemen and citizens of Venice had enriched themselves,” wrote the diarist Girolamo Priuli, “they wished to enjoy their success and live in the terra firma and elsewhere, devoting themselves to pleasure, delight and the country life, meanwhile abandoning navigation and maritime activities. These were certainly more laborious and troublesome, but it was from the sea that all benefits came.”
Agriculture continued to flourisli after the merchant marine deteriorated. So did some industries, and so, even, did foreign trade—transported in and out of Venice on the ships of others. Hut by the ItUh Century the republic had lost most of its international c;ommercial status. An extravagantly beautiful and gifted city, it was now a port of merely regional Importance. During a century of decline Venice’s ancient love of the sea became restricted to an innocent senility of galas and pageants along the Grand Canal.
On Ascension Day, 1796, as usual, the Doge and his pampered noblemen were rowed out in the Bucentaur for the wedding with the Adriatic. They returned from the ceremony to partake of a banquet that began with Spanish bread, cream, oranges and salted tongue; continued with boiled calf’s feet, tripe, pigeons, roast veal and turkey: and ended with custards, cream cheese, asparagus, fennel, artichokes, prunes and dried chestnuts.
But they had little to celebrate. Within three months the armies of Napoleon Bonaparte were camped in the western provinces of the Venetian mainland, and on May 12 of the following year, bludgeoned into surrender by the French and fearing a popular uprising, the Doge and the Great Council of noblemen abdicated their rights and the 1,000-year-old independence of their city-state, never before conquered.
Mobs rampaged through the streets, dreaming of new freedoms, fighting, pillaging. The statues of Prudence and Strength, flanking the Doge’s throne, were ripped away, and the gilding was hacked off theBucentaur. Four days later, in the last significant voyage its ships ever made, the Venetian navy transported French troops into the city, carrying its enemy into its own heart over the widowed sea.
MethodicoIIy pillaging the treasures af Venice after Napalean farced its surrender in 1797, French saldiers cart away three ancient bronze horses from St. Mark’s Basilica while workmen lawer a fourth/rom its pedestal ahave the church's main partal. The Raman sculptures— venerated symbals af Venice's power ond glary ever since they were looted from Constantinaplein 1204—were returned 18 years later, but Venice never regoined its status as a free republic.
World History
