Text/Noel Malcolm
The defeat at the Battle of Lepanto, which was defeated by the Christian coalition, was recognized as a sign that the Ottoman Turkish Empire was beginning to decline, and many friends knew about it. However, there are not many articles analyzing the detailed process of the Battle of Lepanto, and this article will restore the Battle of Lepanto from the records of the Christian Coalition and the Ottoman Empire.
Comparison of the strength of Christianity with the Ottoman Navy
The Christian fleet sailed south from Igoumenitsa in search of the enemy to engage, arriving on the island of Kefalonia on 4 October, where it received dismal news from Crete that Famagusta had fallen.
The news came late, suggesting that the Ottomans may have completely disrupted communications in the eastern Mediterranean, as the surrender took place on August 1. The report also describes how the Ottoman commander Lara Mustafa Pasha, who had won the siege, took aim at the Venetian commander, Marc Antonio Blagadin( who was accused of killing Muslim prisoners) and ordered the execution of many Italian, Greek and Albanian soldiers who had laid down their arms. Bragadin himself was humiliated and then skinned by the Ottomans; his skin was stuffed with straw and sent to Ottoman territory as a trophy.
While in a sense the news of the fall of Cyprus dispelled the main rationale for the Alliance expedition, it directly strengthened the resolve of the Allied soldiers— especially the Venetians, who were eager for revenge. They would get the opportunity three days later, and eventually, the two fleets would encounter each other in the sea near the north shore near the entrance to Patras Bay.
The Battle of Lepanto of 7 October 1571 (traditionally called after the naval base where the Ottoman fleet was stationed, quite far away) was one of the most famous naval battles.
Location and position of the Battle of Lepanto
In the western part of the Greek peninsula
According to modern concepts, influenced by the continuous history of naval warfare from the 18th to the 20th century, naval warfare depended heavily on side guns, the main purpose of which was to sink enemy ships. However, paddle sailing battles in the 16th century were quite different. These ships mainly act as platforms for soldiers, who shoot at their opponents and then board enemy ships for close combat.
The long ramming angle or beak in front of each warship is not intended to sink enemy ships, but to pierce the other side and then serve as a springboard for soldiers to pass. Although it is true that warships have artillery, their main purpose in battle is not to sink enemy ships, but to strike people on deck, or to smash oars or rudders to render enemy ships incapacitated.
Heavy artillery (which can be used in amphibious assaults for bombardment fortifications) was installed only in the bow of ships; small slalom guns for anti-personnel could be placed elsewhere, although there was little space left for them on normal warships. While skilled Venetian gunners could hit a warship from as far away as 500 yards away, most of the shelling between ships was only to what the Spaniards called "clothes burning."
The main weapons used before hand-to-hand combat were arquebusiers and heavy muskets of the same kind; arquebusiers fired half-ounce bullets, while heavy muskets in Spain fired two ounces of projectiles that penetrated armor at 100 yards and killed horses from 500 yards away. There were also crossbows, which could penetrate light armor, and traditional bows; no one thought that these weapons had become obsolete due to the invention of firearms, because the traditional crossbows had a faster rate of fire and were not affected by rain.
In addition, the ship was equipped with a device for throwing "fireballs" and a device for carrying a viscous preparation known as "Greek fire" that could burn violently. Arquebusiers were available on both sides of the Battle of Lepanto, but the Allied side was more numerous; the Ottomans relied more on the traditional compound bow, which did not work for good armor. Although there were cannons on both sides, there were fewer Ottoman paddle schooners.
While these weapons could play an important role in disrupting enemy formations, the final stages of the engagement between the two warships included hand-to-hand combat on board, the use of swords, daggers, spears, and, most effectively, the spears of the Spanish infantry. In the words of Miguel de Cervantes, who fought on a Genoese ship in Lepanto, in the end it all depends on the courage of the individual soldiers to rush onto the enemy warship:
When the ships were entangled, the soldiers had no more room for themselves than the two-foot planks on the impact angle. Although he saw countless artillery pieces on the enemy side in front of him... however...... He held up all his guns and tried to rush up the enemy ship along the narrow embankment. And the most astonishing thing is that once one person falls, never to be able to get up again before the end of the world, another person takes his place – the greatest manifestation of courage and boldness in the face of all the dangers that war brings.
The great battle that determined the fate of Europe
Before the battle began on the morning of 7 October, more than 40,000 Christians and Ottoman soldiers must have been prepared for such a battle. A few hours later, the two fleets faced each other at a safe distance, each lined up in a single north-south direction, more than four miles long.
The reserve ship group was located in the rear of the center of the front. The two fronts were divided into three parts; on the Christian side, Don Juan commanded the Chinese army, Gian Andrea Doria commanded the right wing, and the Venetian quartermaster General Agostino Barbarigo commanded the left wing. The tip of that wing was at the northern end of the front, near land: not the modern coastline that had been formed by later alluvial formation, but a group of islands, known in Greek as Achenadis and in Italian as Kuzolari, most of which are now integrated into the continent.
Don Juan carefully mixed the ships of Spain, Venice, and elsewhere so that the front was not simply divided by country, but the left wing was mostly Venetian paddle schooners (especially those from Dalmatian and Crete), and the right wing was mostly Genoese paddle schooners outside a certain point.
Don Juan's own flagship is in the center, the Pope's flagship is on its right, and the Venetian's flagship, led by Veneer, is on its left. Due to prestige and honor, most of the flagships were concentrated there: for example, the Duke of Parma was on the genoa flagship, and the Duke of Urbino was on the Flagship of Savoy.
Similarly, the center of the Ottoman Front contained the flagships of Ali Muazinzad Pasha and Petf Pasha, as well as lantern paddle schooners of other dignitaries. These ships also concentrated the largest number of Janissaries, who were armed with arquebusiers and highly skilled.
The ace of the early Ottoman Empire
Yeniceri New Army
The apparent difference between the two fleets—though the Ottoman commanders realized their importance very late—was that the League had six huge Venetian Gallisse warships, which advanced to the forefront of the warship front.
Shortly after noon, the Ottoman fleet finally began to attack, and the importance of these battleships became clear. The Calaiss in the water were too high for the enemy to climb; each Calaiss was a floating fortress armed with an average of 31 guns, some of which were used for lateral attacks.
The Ottoman paddle schooners approached with powerful and precise shelling; the Ottomans at first thought that the Calais had cannons on the bow of the ship, so they received a second blow as they passed them. Some paddle schooners were sunk, which not only dealt a huge blow to Ottoman morale, but also destroyed their attack formations, making them lose their coherence.
The Gallisse of Venice
In the Battle of Lepanto, he was mighty on all sides
Ali Muazzinzad Pasha pressed up and engaged his opponent Don Juan directly, while Pettfu Pasha charged Colonna's flagship. The other warships formed a circle to provide support, and fierce fighting broke out.
The Pope's flagship has been battling several Ottoman paddle schooners at the same time; including one lantern paddle schooners commanded by two teenage sons of Ali Muazzinzad Pasha. According to Kaetani's deputy, Bartolomeo Sereno (who was with Kaetani on a nearby papal warship), the young nephew of the pope performed well, and when people around him were knocked down by enemy fire (including Colonna's butler, whose head was blown up to his side), he shot resolutely with an arquebusier.
There was little trick to be used in this situation, and Gasparo Bruni may have found himself most of the time not only serving as a combat commander for sailors and crew, but also himself – as we shall see, he was seriously wounded in battle.
The battles on each front are fierce.
On the left flank, Agostino Barbarigo struggled to prevent Ottoman warships from sneaking along the beach to encircle the Confederate fleet; he had insufficient soldiers and the heaviest damaged of the Confederate fleet. However, over time, this gave him some advantage as the Ottoman crew tried to pull the ship ashore to avoid attack. (Partly because 30 to 40 percent of the crew of the Ottoman fleet were Greeks, though few came from this particular place.) ）
On the right flank, the Confederate warships had to fight the most experienced warriors of the Ottoman fleet, the privateers brought from Algiers by commander Uluchi Ali; more than a dozen Christian warships were all killed. One of the most famous examples is a Venetian ship called the Christ Of the World, which repelled 5 Ottoman paddle schooners and was again attacked by 4 oared schooners, losing almost all of their men.
One version of the story says that the wounded captain, Benedetto Soranzo, waited until many Ottoman soldiers had swarmed onto the ship, lit the remaining powder kegs, and blew the ship up into the sky; another attributed the act to the chief of affairs who had just seen Soranzo beheaded.
Uluci Ali even managed to outwit Gian Andrea Doria, luring him away from the battlefield and then slipping into the created gap; at the end of the battle, as the irreversible situation of the battle and the scale of the defeat became clearer, he led the privateers to the open sea. He was also the only ottoman commander to maintain a sizable fleet of ships.
Algiers pirates have always been fierce
The picture above is written by Sima Da
Pictures of the new plot of the black African protagonist in Age of Discovery 4
The turning point of the battle came in the middle, where don Juan, Colonna, and The flagships of Veniers experienced several hours of fierce fighting (as we have seen, the flagship of Theveniers may have Antonio Bruti's son Yakomo, and perhaps Yakomo's brother Marco, who was the nephew of Gasparro Bruni). The Marquis de Santa Cruz brought in reinforcements from the reserves and dropped them on the flagships of Spain and the Pope, some of whom managed to break into the flagship of Ali Muazzinzad Pasha and kill him.
According to Ferrante Caracciolo (who was on a Papal oared schooner slightly to the left of the Central Group at the time), a Spanish soldier cut off Ali Pasha's head and brought it to Don Juan, who was disgusted by this unchivalric behavior; however, the head was still propped on a long pole at the stern, which clearly caused frustration among the remaining Ottoman warriors. As several other Ottoman commanders were killed, the battle drew to a close.
Ferrante Caracciolo attributed the victory to four factors: the role of the Gallisse warships; the confederate ships firing artillery earlier than the Ottomans; "the enemy's trust in the terrain" (meaning, because the nearby land was their homeland territory, they were clearly willing to abandon the battle); and the Alliance's superiority over arquebusiers.
Modern historians have added other factors. Ricardo Sereso Martinez largely embraced the four factors caracciolo said (while emphasizing the precision of the artillery fire rather than preemptive strikes), and also referred to more effective reserves and more experienced soldiers. But this last point does not seem to be the case; half of the Spanish infantry were recruits, and the comments of Ascanio de la Cogna suggest that the same is true of most Italians.
Naval historian John Gilmartin emphasized three factors: the role of the Gallissey warships; the stronger strength of the Allied Chinese forces, thanks in large part to its dominant reserves; and Barbarigo's skill and determination to ensure that the Christian front was not encircled.
The most detailed account of the Battle of Lepanto comes from Alessandro Barbero, who places particular emphasis on two other factors.
He noted that in general the Allied combatants were more numerous, including crew members and non-slave oarsmen, who could take up arms; the Ottoman fleet, after more than five months of sea battles, was heavily depleted by death and desertion, probably with a total of only 20,000 warriors. The League had 23,000 soldiers and another 13,000 crew members to fight. Christian soldiers had more arquebusiers, and they wisely used arquebusiers to clear as many enemies as possible before boarding the enemy ships. They also had solid armor to protect them from the arrows of ottoman archers.
The result, Barbero concluded, was an "inevitable" victory. His argument was good, but his conclusions were still surprising; given that the battle had been extremely sticky and indistinguishable for quite some time, we had to marvel at the indomitability of the Ottoman warriors, who actually came close to overcoming the gap between the two sides.
Persian poet's description of the war
Almost all accounts of this battle come from the West. Ottoman chroniclers have taken this hastily, which is understandable. Modern standard accounts do record disputes between senior Ottoman commanders before the battle over the suitability of fighting enemy fleets; this is what the historian Pachevi briefly described, but most of the available detailed historical sources were drawn from Western sources and from information obtained during post-war interrogations of prisoners.
However, there is in fact a contemporary Ottoman account of the Battle of Lepanto, the author of which was either involved or acquainted with many of the people who fought at the time: the Persian poet Muhammad ibn " Abdullah Zerek Hussein".
He fought in the Battle of Cyprus, completing his Turkish narrative Work History of the Conquest of Cyprus in 1574; his account of the Battle of Lepanto appears in a supplementary text, written in Cyprus in the late 1570s, focusing primarily on subsequent Ottoman attacks on Lagurette and Tunisia. Surprisingly, this account seems to have been overlooked by all modern Lepanto studies.
Zerek's account describes the fleet's destruction of Crete in the summer, the capture of Kefalonia, Corfu, Sopot and Budva, where "soldiers were not content to plunder the property of the inhabitants and take women, girls, boys and the elderly away".
It gave a fairly accurate account of the Allied fleet, saying they had 25,000 warriors; it noted that Kara Hoka had captured a Christian sailor shortly before the battle and forced him to give him the position of the fleet; it confirmed the differences among the senior commanders, accusing Ali Muazizad Pasha of failing to take the advice of experienced sailors. (Ali was widely slandered by the Ottomans: 17th-century Katib Cheleby commented that the newly appointed naval commander "never commanded even a small rowboat in his lifetime.") ）
Zelek provided some details of the battle itself. He wrote that 40 to 50 Ottoman ships were too close to land and unfortunately ran aground, which cast an innocent illusion on this not-so-unexpected outcome.
Regarding the actual situation in the battle, he confirmed the picture depicted in some Western records, which emphasized the dense smoke screen caused by the continuous artillery fire: "The shelling on all sides was like thunder, and the noble fleet was shrouded in thick smoke that covered the sky. He also emphasized the effects of The Dominance of Christian paddle schooners in arquebus shooting: "Soldiers died in a hail of bullets. ”
He said that Ali Muazinzad Pasha had his paddle schooner attack the Calaissa warship, which was not accurate. In documenting the enormous impact of Ali's death, he, though consciously using poetic language, sounded real: "After hearing this news, the Ottoman army was like a nursery that had been hit by hail; the soldiers lost their strength, and the people abandoned the ships captured from the enemy and fled for their lives." Like mad dogs, the pagans regained their courage and became more violent than the seven-headed dragon. ”
Schematic diagram of the Naval Battle of Lepanto
The fighting ended in the late afternoon. As the fighting subsided, the clouds of pungent smoke began to dissipate, and the survivors were greeted with a tragic picture. In the words of Ferrante Caracciolo, "the sea was full of corpses, planks, clothes, some Ottomans who were swimming and escaping, other Ottomans who were drowning, scattered wrecks of many ships still burning, and some boats sinking".
Bartolomeo Sereno painted a similar picture: between the burning wreckage, the water was "full of tunics, turbans, quivers, arrows, bows, drums," and so on, plus many people who had died of wounds, who had been killed by Christian soldiers with "arquebusiers and spears," and Ottoman soldiers and sailors who managed to swim to the side of the Christian ship and cling to the side of the ship, some with their hands cut off and others dragged onto the ship, either because the Allied forces wanted to collect a ransom or sold them as slaves to earn a sum.
For many on the Ottoman paddle schooners, on the other hand, the end of the battle brought long-awaited freedom: 12,000 or more Christian slaves were freed.
Some of them were women and children looted by Ottoman troops during their raid on Venetian territory earlier this year — including people from Ulcinj and Bar , who were detained by the Ottomans in violation of the agreements signed when those cities surrendered. Many were slaves to warships, chained to oarsmen's seats, paddling their oars in miserable conditions; several thousand of them were already in the fleet when they set out from Istanbul, but there were still large numbers of slaves that had been plundered along the way to replenish warships undermanned by illness and flight.
In the words of one early chronicler, "When someone is heard shouting' victory, victory!' Then they broke the shackles, took up the weapons scattered by the Ottomans, and began to slash and kill in retaliation for the abuse and cruelty they had suffered."
If they succeeded in killing the last remaining Ottoman soldiers and crew, the next step would naturally be to look for valuables on the warships— and in the clothes of the dead Ottomans. But at this point they faced competition from Christian soldiers who were flocking into enemy ships in search of booty (and the looting was not only directed at enemy ships: the entire supply of a Venetian paddle schooner was looted during the battle, and the Spanish soldiers removed all their valuables, even the battle flag of San Marco, which was later bought by an indignant Venetian merchant in Messina).
It was a spoil of war, and the commanders knew it was best not to interfere: the nobleman Ferrante Caracciolo recalled that the dignitaries did not dare to leave their warships unless a captain kept the spoils for them.
It was in this context that the worst scene in the whole story of the Battle of Lepanto took place. One of the slaves on the Ottoman warship was Archbishop Giovanni Bruni, who, like many of his shepherds, was deprived of the freedoms he had promised. His new masters were well aware of his position, but they also knew that he was strongly opposed to the decision to abandon the city of Bar, so they decided to leave him on the deck of the warship and humiliate him in public (along with Ulcini's light cavalry commander, Giovanni's nephew Nicolo), and let him paddle.
It was on the warship that Giovanni and his nephew died. An early Venetian report stated that they were "killed by the Ottomans"; a later Account sent to the Jesuits in Rome states that they were executed by the Ottomans while the battle was in full swing. But in fact they were killed by Christian soldiers.
In the late 17th century, some news about the matter circulated in the region: the Archbishop of Skopje wrote that "in the first round of the attack", Bruni was beheaded by soldiers, who mistakenly believed that he was An Ottoman. Later, a similar story was told in the family records of a Dalmatian nobleman: Bruni was mistakenly killed "at the time of the capture of the paddle schooner.". However, the true story is much worse.
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