Victory of the West: The Great Christian-Muslim Clash at the Battle of Lepanto (review)

Emperor Heraclius (r. 610–41), leading his armies against infidel fire-worshippers (the Sassanians of Persia) who had stolen the True Cross from Jerusalem, was the first Crusader. A century later, the word Europeani was first used by a monastic chronicler describing Charles Martel’s victory over Moorish skirmishers at Tours. But as historians are careful to note, one always finds in Christian Europe multiple perspectives, each colored more by its particular vantage point that by a sense of cultural or civilizational identity. As Niccolò Capponi demonstrates here, this was true even for one of the rare instances in the sixteenth century when rival Catholic states (not including France) came together to battle infidel Muslims: the Holy League of 1570–73, whose sole, albeit spectacular, achievement was the destruction of the Ottoman fleet on 7 October 1571 (not at Lepanto, but off the Curzolaris Islands forty miles away). Yet historians have vantage points too. In 1571 northwestern Europe was remote from the clangor of battle in the Mediterranean or in Hungary. If Spain was pitted against the Ottomans, Protestant Dutch rebels saw it as one tyranny being opposed by another that was even worse. Decades earlier, Erasmus could write off papal Crusade plans as an unworthy pope’s transparent attempt to regain authority. Capponi’s work, written from an Italian perspective, makes us aware that scholarship in English often has a different vantage point, perhaps not untouched by polemics of long ago.

The book has been long in the making: Capponi has scoured European archives and libraries, making use where possible of Ottoman sources in translation, or with the help of specialists. Readers will get a vivid sense of how things looked from Italy’s capitals — Venice, Florence, Rome, and to a lesser extent Genoa — and a gripping story line that reflects not just Italian but also Ottoman strategic thinking, at least as it was seen by those who had a vital interest in fathoming it. Each side believed it could best protect its seacoast only by projecting power into enemy waters. Thus Sultan Suleyman the Lawgiver (1520–66) used Hayreddin Barbarossa to keep the Spaniards busy in home waters, while Charles V (1517–55) and Philip II of Spain (1556–98) backed campaigns in the eastern Mediterranean by Andrea Doria of Genoa and the Knights of Malta. Lower down the scale of power, Cosimo I, Grand Duke of Tuscany (r. 1537–74), founded the Knights of St. Stephen in part because “the security of his states depended on advancing his sea borders to the North African coast” (110). In effect, what one side saw as defense provoked the other to maintain a continuous low level of naval warfare, punctuated by major campaigns, like Charles Vs’ conquest of Tunis (1535) and his failure at Algiers (1541), or the failed Ottoman siege of Malta (1565). Venice had the largest Mediterranean war-galley fleet, and the keenest sense of the Sublime Porte’s longterm strategy — having watched Ottoman forces pick off its trade- and naval-stations one by one. But Venice also depended on peaceful trade with Ottoman lands, and nurtured a profound suspicion of Habsburg power, the more so after a brief alliance (1537–39) during which Hayreddin escaped unharmed from a larger Christian fleet commanded by Doria. The zealous Pope Pius V (r. 1566–72) got his Holy League together only because Venice was threatened by a massive Ottoman invasion of Cyprus (where Famagusta held out), and Philip II, though preoccupied by rebellion in the Low Countries, could not evade the responsibilities of his self-professed role as Christendom’s defender. Still, recriminations bubbled through the Christian fleet; on 2 October, cooler heads barely prevented angry Spanish and Venetian galley-captains from opening fire. Meanwhile, after the surrender, on terms, of Famagosta’s defenders, Lala Mustafa...