The Battle of Lepanto, 1571: the last galley war

On 7 October 1571, in the Gulf of Patras off the coast of Greece, more than 400 galleys met in what became the last great galley battle in the Mediterranean. In a single afternoon the fleet of the Holy League destroyed the main battle fleet of the Ottoman Empire, whose navy had been the dominant sea power in the Mediterranean since the fall of Constantinople in 1453.²

The fall of Cyprus

The war began over an island. In 1570 the Ottoman Empire set out to take Cyprus from Venice, and Venice, unable to save it alone, turned to the pope for help. Famagusta, the last Venetian stronghold on the island, fell in 1571. The Ottoman commander, Lala Mustafa Pasha, then broke the terms of the surrender and put the Venetian commanders to death.³

The Holy League

After the Ottomans invaded Venetian Cyprus in 1570, Pope Pius V forged, in May 1571, an alliance that Christian Europe had long failed to build: Spain, Venice, the Papal States, Genoa, Savoy and the Knights of Malta. Command went to Don John of Austria, the 24-year-old half-brother of the Spanish king, who welded rival captains into one fighting line. According to the New Catholic Encyclopedia, Spain paid half the cost of the war, Venice a third and the pope a sixth. The fleet gathered at Messina in Sicily that summer: about 206 galleys and six galleasses, against an Ottoman fleet of some 210 to 230 galleys.⁴

Don John's line of battle

Don John split his fleet into a center and two wings, with smaller squadrons held back in reserve. He took the center himself, flanked by the Venetian commander Sebastiano Venier and the papal admiral Marcantonio Colonna. The left wing went to the Venetian Agostino Barbarigo and the right wing to the Genoese Gian Andrea Doria. Facing them, Ali Pasha held the Ottoman center, Mehmed Suluk (also written Saulak) the Ottoman right, opposite Barbarigo, and the corsair Uluj Ali the left, opposite Doria.⁵

The battle opened on the Christian left, and Barbarigo was mortally wounded there. In the account of the Maltese historian Charles Savona-Ventura, Suluk tried to slip galleys around the inshore end of Barbarigo's line, but his wing was pinned against the coast, Suluk was killed, and many of his crews ran their galleys aground and fled inland.⁶

Floating fortresses

The League's edge was firepower. Six Venetian galleasses, huge merchant galleys bristling with cannon, were towed in front of the fleet and tore great gaps in the Ottoman line before the main clash even began. Behind them, Spanish and Italian soldiers packed the decks with arquebuses, outshooting the Ottoman archers at close range.⁷

Oar to oar

The battle became a storm of boarding actions, ship lashed to ship. In the center Don John drove straight at the Ottoman flagship; its commander, Ali Pasha, was killed and his great banner hauled down. On the wings the fighting swung both ways, but only the corsair Uluj Ali extracted a squadron and escaped. The rest was destruction.⁸

What the day decided

Some 170 Ottoman galleys were taken or sunk, tens of thousands of men were lost, and roughly 12,000 to 15,000 Christian galley-slaves were freed from the benches. The Ottomans rebuilt their fleet within a year, so the strategic map changed less than the legend suggests. But the spell was broken: the idea that the sultan could not be beaten at sea died at Lepanto, a battle that ranks among the greatest battles of the Ottoman Empire, alongside the fall of Constantinople in 1453 and the Siege of Vienna in 1683.⁹

Cervantes at Lepanto

Among the soldiers of the Holy League was a young Spaniard, Miguel de Cervantes, serving in the company of Captain Diego de Urbina aboard the galley Marquesa. He was sick with fever on the morning of the battle, yet he refused to stay below and asked for a post of danger. He was hit by arquebus shots in the chest and in the hand, and his left hand was crippled for life. The sworn statements of his comrades, quoted by the historian Susana García Ramírez, add that he said he would rather die fighting for God and his king than shelter below deck, that he fought at the skiff where his captain placed him, that Don John raised his pay by four ducats, and that he needed almost seven months in the hospital at Messina to recover. Decades later, as the author of Don Quixote, he still called Lepanto the greatest occasion that past and present ages had seen, or future ones could hope to see.¹⁰

Why the Ottomans rebuilt in a year

The victory did not undo the Ottoman fleet for long. Within a year the empire had rebuilt virtually all the ships it lost at Lepanto. In 1573 Venice made a separate peace with the sultan and gave up its claim to Cyprus, ending a war that had begun in 1570. Cyprus stayed in Ottoman hands: Lepanto had broken a fleet and a legend, not the empire's grip on the eastern Mediterranean.¹¹

The last battle of the galleys

Lepanto was in one sense the end of an age. Fought in 1571 between the oared galleys of the Holy League and the Ottoman navy, it was the last great Mediterranean battle decided by fleets of rowed ships ramming and boarding in the ancient manner. Galleys stayed in use in the coastal warfare of the eastern Mediterranean through the eighteenth century, until the ship of the line with its heavy artillery made them obsolete. Its immediate effect was on morale. Cervantes, who fought there, later wrote that on that day the nations were cured of the belief that the Turks were invincible at sea, and the historian Ernest Tucker notes that the battle gave a psychological boost to a Catholic world then locked in conflicts across Europe. Read more sea fights in the greatest naval battles in history, from the galleys of Salamis and Actium onward, and see the empire at its height under Suleiman the Magnificent.¹² › Battle of Diu, 1509

Test yourself with the Ottoman battles quiz or play today's Battle of the Day.