An Epic Clash for the Dominion of Europe

Book Review by Matthew Price

Empires of the Sea: The Siege of Malta, the Battle of Lepanto, and the Contest for the Center of the World By Roger Crowley
Random House, 336 pp., $30

When Ottomans sacked Constantinople in 1453, Christian Europe shuddered. A fearsome Islamic empire had vanquished a city that, along with Rome, was a spiritual hub of the church. After the Ottomans took Egypt in 1517, Pope Leo fretted, "Now that the terrible Turk has Egypt and Alexandria and the whole of the Roman eastern empire in his power and has equipped a massive fleet in the Dardanelles, he will swallow not just Sicily and Italy but the whole world."

The pope's fears were perhaps exaggerated, but they were not unfounded. The Ottomans set their sites westward, pushing into Hungary, and took aim at the Mediterranean. The Ottoman ruler, Suleiman the Magnificent, fancied himself "Padisha of the White Sea," and his ambition unleashed a nearly 50-year struggle that would pit a divided Europe against a determined foe, heroic knights against crack troops of Ottoman janissaries, Christian against Muslim, and culminate in one of the most savage naval battles in history at Lepanto in 1571, where a coalition of Venetian, Italian, and Spanish ships routed Suleiman's navy off Greece.

In "Empires of the Sea," British historian Roger Crowley brings a keen grasp of early modern warfare and a gift for vivid writing to his absorbing and relentlessly bloody account of the conflict. Crowley has a fine eye for both the broad outlines of grand strategy and the horrific details of combat, as well as for the dramatis personae who shaped the conflict - the ambitious Suleiman, who led the Ottoman Empire at the height of its power; Charles V, the sickly but cunning Spanish king and Hapsburg emperor; the brave Jean de La Valette, grand master of the Knights of St. John, who led his men against a numerically superior foe at Malta; and Hayrettin Barbarossa, the ferocious corsair turned Ottoman naval commander.

Lepanto marked the close to a struggle that favored the Ottomans from the start. They first struck at Rhodes, the outpost of the knights, "a freak Christian survivor from the medieval Crusades located within touching distance of the Islamic world." The Christian presence on the island was an affront to Suleiman, who expelled the surviving knights from the island. Rhodes was a preview of things to come. The loss of the island spread alarm through Europe. Ottoman ships harassed Spanish outposts in Northern Africa. Barbarossa terrorized southern Italy, burning villages and enslaving their populations. Charles fought back, but, as Crowley points out, the Catholic monarch spent "more time, money, and energy fighting the French and the Protestants than he ever devoted to war with Suleiman."

By the 1560s, Suleiman had conquered most of the eastern Mediterranean. But the Knights of St. John remained a thorn in his side. From a base at Malta, where they settled after Rhodes, they harassed Ottoman ships in heavily armed galleys, taking Mecca-bound pilgrims as slaves.

The book highlights the siege of Malta in 1565. Once again, the knights would be on the front lines. A giant armada descended on the barren island. Here, Crowley describes the landings: It "was as if all the flamboyant spectacle of Asia had erupted onto the European shore. There were unfamiliar clothes, brilliant colors, outlandish hats: impressively mustachioed janissaries in trousers and long coats, cavalrymen in light mail, religious zealots in white, pashas in robes of apricot and green and gold, semi-naked dervishes in animal skins . . ."

The gaudy display could not conceal the fact that Malta was up against some of the best fighting men in the world. Aiming their canons at Fort Saint Elmo, "the key to all other fortresses of Malta" as one commander put it, they slowly pulverized the Maltese defenses. The battleground became a laboratory for the emerging gunpowder era. The Christians hurled primitive grenades at their foes, and deployed arquebuses - an unwieldy forerunner of the rifle - "that fired stones the size of pigeons' eggs.

The fight seesawed back and forth, leaving Malta devastated. Crowley writes, "Malta was unfinished business that lacked a conclusion." Lepanto brought about that conclusion. The last major naval engagement to feature oared galleys, a technology that looked back to ancient Greece, the fleets of the Holy League met the Ottomans - roughly 200 ships on either side - in a thunderous, five-hour collision in October 1571. A young Spanish sailor and would-be writer - Cervantes would later pen "Don Quixote" - called it "the greatest event witnessed by ages past, present, and to come." It was also a bloodbath. Historians have tended to downgrade the long-term significance of Lepanto, but a great empire suffered a catastrophe that marked a turning point in European history.

Matthew Price is a critic and journalist in Brooklyn.