Empires of the Sea: The Final Battle for the Mediterranean, 1521-1580 [Hardcover]

The conflict between Ottoman Turkey and Christian Spain for mastery of the Mediterranean basin had a huge influence on the development of the modern world, yet is probably not something you know very much about, even if you studied history at school. Roger Crowley deals with the key period of this struggle during the 16th Century in a page-turner of a narrative peopled with almost larger-than-life personalities - Suleiman the Magnificent, Bluebeard the Pirate (actually there were father and son Bluebeards) - Andrea Doria, the mercenary Admiral, and a supporting cast of Kings and Popes. What becomes clear is how very close the Ottomans came to extending their Empire into France, Italy and Spain, and how much better organised they were than the European powers who faced them.
The centrepiece of the book is the siege of Malta. The heroism of the defenders would not be believed if it were fiction, and the complex tale is told with exemplary clarity.
You may find parallels in the 21st Century, but Roger Crowley wisely doesn't labour them. Read it twice!

This is a pacy, easy-to-read overview of the steady westward movement of the Ottoman Empire in the Sixteenth century Mediterrean and it's crunching full stop at the Battle of Lepanto in 1571. Like the many books on the Crusades, it has modern resonances and maintains an even-handedness throughout.

The strengths are the descriptions of the siege of Malta- in particular - and the cataclysmic battle of Lepanto. The weaknesses are a little bit of 'reaching' to make this area, perhaps, more fundamental to modern Europe than it actually was - describing the conflict as a 'world war' for example and the failure to convey what the combatants in a naval battle are actually trying to do or achieve. How does a sea battle 'work'? I am sure the author was trying to avoid the level of detail that takes a book like this - very much a popular history - into a military history sales cul-de-sac, but I felt this undercut some of the tension. The siege description was far more gripping.

Nevertheless in a decent epilogue, Roger Crowley makes the pithy point that rising prices and cheap labour costs in the Christian West did as much to undermine the Ottomans as Don Juan's galleys. Capitalism wins again!

Empires of the Sea - The Final Battle for the Mediterranean, 1521-1580, by Roger Crowley (Faber & Faber paperback, London, 2008)

After the Muslim Ottoman Turks conquered Christian Constantinople (Byzantium), the eastern capital of the last remnants of the Roman Empire, in 1453 AD, the victorious Sultan there saw himself as the successor to the Byzantine emperor, as the new Caesar, destined to rule not only over the former Eastern Empire around Constantinople (now Istanbul), but eventually over the whole of the former Roman Empire in western Europe too, even in Rome itself.

The consequence of this vision was that for most of the next 250 years the Ottoman Empire operated a two-pronged campaign against Christendom. One prong, by land, thrust north and northwest from Constantinople/Istanbul, through the Balkans, Hungary, the fringes of Poland and Russia, and into Austria itself. The second prong, though again aimed ultimately at the conquest of Christian territory, consisted of sea-borne invasions south and west into the eastern and western Mediterranean, trying to mop up the remaining islands and fortresses that were still in Christian (often Venetian) hands around Greece and Turkey in about 1500, and then aiming for total control of the Mediterranean so as to threaten all the islands and coastline of Christian southern Europe, from the Adriatic to the straits of Gibraltar. Crowley tells the story of this second, Mediterranean prong, between 1521 and 1580.

For decades, one Christian bastion prevented the Muslim fleets from being able to dominate the Mediterranean: the tiny island of Malta, which the Knights Hospitaller of St John, driven out of Rhodes by the Turks thirty years earlier, had turned into a fortress. The first half of Crowley's book deals with the climactic attack on Malta by an overwhelmingly stronger Turkish fleet and army in 1565, and the dogged defence of the island by the Knights, backed by the total commitment of the native Maltese civilian population, with promised but ever-delayed support from the Papacy and the Christian countries to the north. Eventually, a Christian relief force did arrive on Malta, the Turkish besieging army was routed and their fleet driven off, with huge Turkish losses in men and ships. Thus in 1565 the greatest Turkish threat so far had been repulsed.

The second, and even more crucial Mediterranean battle, described in the second half of Crowley's book, was the naval battle in 1571 at Lepanto, in the Gulf of Corinth on the western side of Greece.

As Crowley points out, before Lepanto the Muslim-Christian wars in the Mediterranean had been largely about the capture of forts and cities and islands, with the fleets being involved as part of the larger strategy of land conquest. But in 1571 the Christian powers of Western Europe (the papacy, the Holy Roman Empire, Spain, Venice and Genoa - with the notable exception of France) had assembled a fleet that sailed east to face the rebuilt Turkish fleet, and although on both sides the leadership was divided as to whether it was wise to risk its whole fleet in one throw of the dice, in fact the Muslim fleet left the protection of its shore batteries to challenge the Christians on the open sea, and the Christian fleet, under the command of the young and inexperienced but charismatic Don John of Austria, made the decision to accept this challenge. The ensuing battle ended with the total destruction of the Muslim fleet and the eclipse of Turkish naval power in the Mediterranean.

Crowley's book links very usefully with another publication in 2008, The Enemy at the Gate (Andrew Wheatcroft, Pimlico, London, pb), to my review of which I refer the reader. Wheatcroft's book tells the story of the land-based northern prong of the Muslim thrust at the heart of Europe, where the decisive battle came much later, at the Turkish siege of Vienna in 1683. A Muslim victory there would have opened the whole of Western Europe to Turkish domination. But Vienna was saved by the arrival of relieving Polish troops in the nick of time, the Turkish army was routed, and the next 250 years saw the Turkish frontiers in Europe pushed back gradually to their present enclave, the city of Istanbul and its environs.

Crowley usefully reminds us that the confrontations between Islam and Christendom were waged against a background of ongoing internal power struggles in both the Christian and the Muslim worlds. In western Europe, the birth and growth of Protestantism led to religious wars which split Christendom; France and the Holy Roman Empire (plus Spain) struggled to be the dominant power in Europe; Genoa, Venice, France and Spain competed for Mediterranean trade. France comes out very badly from all of this. It invariably set its own political interests above those of the Catholic Church and Christendom as a whole, often weakening the Christian stand by allying with the Turks against the rest of Christendom or with the Protestants against the Papacy and the Holy Roman Empire. The Muslim world also faced rivalries, both religious and territorial like the Sunni/Shi'a divide, but also fresh waves of invaders from Asia into eastern Muslim lands, conflict with Iran, and North African intra-Muslim struggles.

One book cannot be a total history of all the centuries of interlocking Christian and Muslim history, Near Eastern, European, Mediterranean and North African, but
Crowley's book, like Wheatcroft's, helps to explain why fear of the Turks dominated the Mediterranean and Central European Christian nations for so many centuries - the unrelenting Turkish pressure against Christian frontiers, until Turkish defeat at Lepanto in 1571 and before Vienna in 1683 and the subsequent gradual decline of Turkish power.