Though the present Turkish Navy as reckoned in ships and personnel must be classed as a minor fighting force1, the possession of the Dardanelles and the Bosporus which the Ottoman State has held for nearly 600 years and which in 1936 it reclaimed the right to fortify, in itself makes Turkey a highly important sea power. Holding these vital waterways from which, judging by World War I experience, she could be driven only by a military operation of the greatest magnitude, Turkey controls the most strategic sea route of the Near East. She can either bar or allow, as she sees fit, sea communication between Russia and Britain. She can perhaps keep out the Axis forces by her military power; she can certainly admit them, if she wills, into her territories and adjacent waters for an attack on the vital oil fields of the Caucasus. All these are obvious strategic considerations of major importance which students of the war have to keep constantly in mind.
Turkey has an astounding and, in the minds of her rulers and people, a glorious naval past. For a century and a half her sea power was dominant in the Eastern Mediterranean. The past exerts a mighty influence on peoples, particularly in war, as is supremely exemplified by the heroism of the British people today. In the not unlikely event that Turkey is drawn into the maelstrom of the present conflict, the remembrance of her past—of Mohammed the Conqueror, of Solyman the Magnificent, Barbarossa and other great sultans and admirals—will be a living force in her war conduct and aims. A survey of Turkish history with stress on sea power should therefore be of interest at the present time.
The Ottoman Turks originated in the pasture lands of Transcaspia in western Central Asia where their kinsmen, the Turkomans, dwell with their flocks and herds today. Driven westward by mass pressure of the Mongols, their first appearance in history dates from the early years of the thirteenth century A.D. A small horde wandering in Asia Minor, they rendered important service to the sultans of the decadent Seljukian Turkish Empire. First as feudatories, then as independent allies, finally as supplanters in power of the Seljuks, their rise, considering their small original numbers2 and the period of the world’s history, was meteoric. Through the genius of their early chieftains they founded a great and enduring military power. This power, while consolidating itself in Anatolia, the heart of Asia Minor, constantly expanded at the expense of the dying Eastern Roman, or Byzantine Empire. So rapid was the Ottoman success that by the beginning of the fourteenth century they had penetrated the Asiatic frontier of the Byzantine Empire and defeated its forces in pitched battles. A fleet and army of Catalans, hired as mercenaries by the Emperor Andronicus II, halted the Turks momentarily; but turning treacherously against their employers and making common cause with the Infidel, they ran amuck in a wild course of plunder and destruction which kept the Empire in turmoil for 12 years. During this time the Turks made steady progress. By 1330 they had taken Nicaea and virtually swept the Byzantine power from Asia Minor. About the same time, too, this Central Asian people, drafting the aid of their conquered Greek maritime subjects, took to the sea, infested the Aegean with their pirate craft, and crossed in large plundering expeditions to Europe. Many severe defeats were inflicted on their fleets by the Byzantine and Italian squadrons. The Knights Hospitalers of St. John of Jerusalem, who had seized the Byzantine island of Rhodes in 1308, battled heroically in that stronghold against the Turkish sea power. But the efforts of the Christian maritime powers to stem the flood of barbarism proved ineffectual. The small Byzantine fleet, save during a few short intervals, was sunk in a state of lethargy and decay. The Venetians and the Genoese who, if united, might have driven the Turks from the sea and saved Constantinople, were engrossed in the pursuit of commerce and in mutually destructive warfare. On sea and on land, the Turks reappeared in greater numbers after each reverse. Their armies made permanent conquests in Europe, occupying Adrianople in 1357 and Salonica in 1387; their fleets took many of the Aegean Islands and large portions of continental Greece. They were aided by the selfishness of the Italian naval powers which even in the Empire’s dying agony could not refrain from encroachments. The Venetians seized and fortified Tenedos off the mouth of the Hellespont. Genoa, in 1437, dispatched a fleet and force of 10,000 men with the deliberate intention of occupying Constantinople. These would-be conquerors, however, were bloodily repulsed and driven to their ships. The Byzantine fleet, being at this moment in a state of efficiency, sallied forth under the brave Leontairius and captured or destroyed most of the Genoese galleys.
This battle was virtually the last in which the Byzantine navy was engaged. The Byzantine sea power disappeared from history as the Byzantine Empire slowly perished from inanition and suffocation. As early as the year 1400, its sway was confined to the region of Constantinople and a few outlying, detached districts. Four sieges of the Capital by the Sultan Bayezid I in 1397 and 1402, by the Sultan Musa in 1412, and by the Sultan Murad II in 1422, were repulsed with difficulty. The Turks meantime had crushed the military power of the Slavonic peoples of the Balkans; and when, in 1453, the Sultan Mohammed II appeared before Constantinople with 140,000 effectives and a fleet of more than 200 light galleys commanded by Baltoglu, a Bulgarian renegade, the capital was doomed unless powerful aid should arrive from the West. Such aid was not forthcoming. The gallantry of three large Genoese galleasses and an Imperial transport, which fought their way belching cannon through the entire Turkish fleet and entered the Golden Horn with reinforcements, was not sufficient to save the city. Barely 8,000 men were available to defend the wide enceinte of its fortifications. On May 29 the final assault took place; the terrible Janissaries pierced the shattered defenses after a desperate struggle and entered Constantinople over the bodies of her heroic defenders, including the last of the emperors, the gallant Constantine XI. The New Rome of the first Constantine had become the City of the Sultans, the seat of a naval power which was soon to engulf the Aegean, the Levant, and the greater part of the Mediterranean.
Established permanently astride the unexcelled natural fosses of the Bosporus and the Hellespont, the conqueror of Constantinople, Mohammed II, rightly appraised the value of sea power and made fullest use of his naval heritage; he left nothing undone to control the seas that washed his rapidly expanding dominions and to extend his conquests by means of his fleet. While his rule was being consolidated over the Slavs of the Balkans, his navy mopped up the remaining fragments of the Byzantine Empire by subduing Trebizond on the Black Sea in 1461 and the Peloponnese a year later. Venice and Genoa soon felt the power of the Ottoman navy, which seized Euboea, Lesbos, Lemnos, Cephalonia, and other Greek islands and districts most of which had been held by the Italian republics since the Latin Conquest in 1204. A powerful Turkish fleet and army likewise expelled the Genoese from the Crimea where they had long maintained a flourishing colony and carried on a lucrative trade. The construction on either side of the Hellespont and the Bosporus of castles, bristling with huge cannon for which the medieval Turks were famous, shut out European commerce completely from the Black Sea.
Mohammed the Conqueror’s greatgrandfather, Bayezid I, had boasted that he would stable his horse at the high altar of St. Peter’s, Rome; and the dream of conquering Italy was one which Mohammed himself strove to realize throughout his life. In 1477 his armies overran the Venetian hinterland and retired with rich booty. Venice hastened to conclude a treaty of peace and defensive alliance with the Turks.
Mohammed’s next attack on Italy was by way of the sea. Two great maritime expeditions sailed from Constantinople in 1480. The first descended on Apulia and took the strongly fortified city of Otranto, which was designed to serve as a base for the conquest of the peninsula. The second expedition was directed against Rhodes, strongly held by the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem, whose stout galleys and active valor were a serious menace to communications between Constantinople and Italy. Though blockaded by 160 galleys and pounded by heavy artillery, the Knights led by their Grand Master, Peter D’Aubusson, heroically withstood assault after assault of the Turks, who were unable to reduce the stronghold. Mohammed was preparing to repeat his attack on Rhodes and to extend his operations in Italy when death suddenly overtook him.
The foothold of the Turks in Italy was lost early in the reign of Mohammed’s weak successor, Bayezid II, but the growth of their sea power went steadily on. Kemal Reis, first of the great Turkish admirals, won fame by ravaging the coasts of Christian Spain in response to an appeal from the hard-pressed Moors of Grenada to the Sultan as “Lord of Two Seas and Two Continents” (1483). Venice meantime had re-entered the war. Kemal, in 1499, defeated the Venetian fleet in a furious battle off Sapienza in the Ionian Sea and made possible the taking of the town of Lepanto, the key to the Gulf of Corinth. In the last years of the century Kemal successfully kept the sea in the face of the vastly superior combined fleets of Venice, Spain, and the Papacy. He was the bane and terror of many Christian lands in the Mediterranean.
Bayezid’s son, the great warrior Sultan Selim I, used his fleet as an effective auxiliary in his conquest of Syria and Egypt from their Mohammedan rulers. He attached such value to his navy that he personally supervised the construction of 150 new warships, including galleys of 700 tons. These ships were used early in the reign of his successor, Solyman I, the Magnificent, in a vast expedition against Rhodes. The power of the Knights, after a long heroic resistance, was worn down and weakened, and they were glad to accept the Sultan’s offer of honorable capitulation and withdrawal from the island with their movable property. This magnanimous gesture combining generosity and policy was bitterly regretted by Solyman before the end of his reign.
The conquest of Rhodes, which freed communications between Constantinople and Egypt, established Turkish naval supremacy in the Levant. Venice, after her defeat at Sapienza, had welcomed peace and consented to pay tribute and do homage to the Sultan for Zante and Cyprus.
That the Turks, a people of Central Asian origin, should have developed a great naval power is one of the astounding facts of history. The explanation is to be found in the genius of the extraordinary line of Sultans of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and in the necessities which confronted a warrior race suddenly possessed of an empire straddling the sea between two continents.
The Turks themselves have never been, and probably never will become a race of sailors. For navigation and shipbuilding they have always depended largely upon subject maritime races or foreign mercenary aid. During and after the conquest of the Byzantine Empire, the Ottoman rulers found in the Greeks, particularly of the Aegean Islands and the coast of Asia Minor, as skilled a race of seamen as existed in the Mediterranean. Their services were secured partly by force but more by liberal donatives and the prospect of riches held out to them. Thousands of Greeks, lured by the opportunities for plunder in the service of organized piracy, turned renegade to their race and religion, voluntarily entered the Turkish navy, and were instrumental in spreading misery and desolation over countless Christian coasts. The same was true of other Christian subject races of Turkey. As Creasy points out, during the height of Turkish power in the reigns of Solyman I and Selim II in the sixteenth century, at least 12 of the best Turkish generals and 4 of the most renowned admirals were supplied by renegades from Christian Croatia, Albania, Bosnia, Greece, Hungary, Calabria and Russia.3 In ships built and navigated by men of Christian extraction and propelled by Christian slaves chained to the oars, the Turks, supplying the element of fighting men, or marines, so indispensable in mediaeval sea warfare, made their power felt over the whole Mediterranean and all but dominated it.
The sixteenth century, moreover, saw the beginning of a long and cordial partnership between the Sultans of Constantinople and the Moslem seafaring peoples of North Africa—Tripoli, Tunis, and Algiers. These pirate states, stretching from Egypt to Morocco, had waned since the conquest of the Mohammedan power in Sicily by the Normans. They were hard pressed by the Christian naval powers of the Western Mediterranean, particularly Spain, and were threatened with the conquest which actually overtook them in the nineteenth century. By an alliance with the Sultan and acknowledgment of his suzerainty, their political, or rather, piratical existence was prolonged for three centuries; and the Ottoman sea power and influence at the same time were immensely strengthened and extended.
The man principally responsible for this politico-naval-piratical pact was the most celebrated of Turkish admirals, Khairred- din Pasha, or Barbarossa, as he is generally called by European and American writers. Born in the island of Lesbos, Barbarossa, like many or perhaps most of the high- spirited youth of the Archipelago, was drawn into the life of a corsair though occasionally also engaging in honest commerce. Adventure led him and his elder brother Arouj to the Western Mediterranean where the dangers and awards of piracy were alike greater than in the Levant. We presently see the brothers serving as daring and successful rovers under the Sultan of Tunis, rapidly acquiring wealth and power and assuming ever greater independence. Arouj was killed in battle, leaving Barbarossa in sole command. Besides ruling a large fleet of raiders, he seized some small towns on the African coast and later the strong city of Algiers.
To found a new state, particularly a piratical power, however, was one thing; to hold it, another. Barbarossa perceived the comparative feebleness of the Barbary potentates, who keenly resented his intrusion and aggrandizement. He saw that to maintain himself against rivals and, above all, to withstand the attacks of the great Christian naval powers, he would need constant, reliable, and powerful support, both naval and military. He turned his eyes naturally to the Ottoman Empire whose might, wealth, and conquests were the marvel of the age. His overtures to Selim I in 1519 were graciously received and rewarded by the gift of two galleys, the loan of a force of 2,000 Janissaries, and the insignia and title of Beyler Bey, or Governor General of Algiers. Barbarossa, in turn, acknowledged the suzerainty of the Sultan. He sent regular reports of his operations to Constantinople and loyally obeyed the orders of his sovereign.
He seized more cities on the Barbary coast and extended his power inland over the Berber and Arab tribes. The wildest devil-may-care spirits of the Moslem world flocked to his standard and became cogs in a vast fighting machine controlled by his master mind. His lieutenants, Dragut, Salih Reis, Sinan, Aydin Reis surnamed “Drub Devil,” and others, acted and fought like so many arms of Barbarossa. His squadrons scoured the central and western Mediterranean each year, seized hundreds of Spanish, Venetian, and Genoese merchant ships, and took countless Christian captives who were promptly chained to the galley benches or put to work on the land fortifications. His corsairs sailed past Gibraltar into the Atlantic and seized Spanish galleons from America laden with gold and silver. The Algerine rovers thought nothing of imposing contributions on the Balearic Isles and of making formidable descents on the Spanish coasts, where they rescued in a few years 70,000 Moors of the conquered kingdom of Grenada and carried them off to new homes in Africa or to serve at sea against the hated Spaniards. This was not all. Barbarossa and his lieutenants dared attack two large convoys guarded by strong squadrons of royal Spanish galleons and took nearly every vessel. The Penon d’Alger, an island stronghold in front of Algiers that had been held for 14 years by a Spanish garrison, was stormed by his forces. The pirate king was not only preying on the merchants of every Christian land of the Mediterranean but he was lifting his hand against the greatest of Christian monarchs, Charles V, Emperor of Germany, King of Spain, ruler of the Netherlands, and master of the newly discovered riches of Mexico and Peru.
In 1533, at the behest of Solyman the Magnificent, Barbarossa sailed with 18 Algerine galleys to Constantinople, where he was cordially received by the Sultan and placed in command of the entire Turkish navy. A titanic sea contest was impending, and the Algerine sea king was chosen by the greatest of Turkish rulers to lead the Moslem naval forces in the struggle for the Mediterranean.
The Christian sea powers, on their part, were straining every nerve to win naval supremacy. Their maritime resources were greatly superior to those of the Moslems, and their efforts were favored by a leadership little, if any, inferior to Barbarossa’s. Charles V now dominated Christian Europe by land and sea. He was enabled by the wealth flowing steadily from his new World possessions to build and maintain a large fleet in his home Spanish ports. He also controlled the maritime resources of Italy with the exception of Venice, whose rulers as usual strove to keep peace with the Turks. Francis I of France, whose very existence was threatened by Charles, had desperately thrown in his lot with the Sultan ; but his navy was too small and inefficient to play an important part.
In the Genoese Andrea Doria, whom Charles V had made High Admiral of his fleet, the Emperor had a redoubtable fighter and a naval commander of high order. Like Barbarossa, he was now advanced in years, and his enthusiasm for naval command was stimulated by the vast wealth which he had gained from operations of a piratical character, not always directed against Moslems, while warring vigorously for his sovereign against the Turks.
Doria, at the moment when Barbarossa was summoned to the Bosporus, had just finished two successful campaigns on a large scale off the west coast of Greece. Coron, Patras, and other Ottoman strongholds had been taken and garrisoned; shoals of captives had been carried off; and Moslem shipping had been swept from the Ionian Sea and a large part of the Levant. Returning to Sicily with his fleet laden with plunder and swollen by prizes to more than 100 vessels, he barely missed the Algerine rover who was destined to give him so much trouble.
In the spring of 1534 Barbarossa, having supervised the building and equipment of a new fleet in the dockyards of Constantinople, sailed from the Bosporus with 84 galleys including his own Algerines. He staged a surprise raid on the toe of Italy, sacked Reggio and other strong places, nearly secured the most famous beauty of Italy, Julia Gonzaga, for the Sultan’s harem, and carried off numerous ships and hundreds of captives. Shuttling south across the Mediterranean to Tunis, which he had long coveted, he turned the guns of the Turkish fleet against its forts, quickly reduced the city, and drove the native Moslem ruler from his throne. A well-nigh fatal surprise and check, however, met him at this point. A fleet of 400 galleys and transports under Doria, carrying a large army of Spanish, Italian, and German veterans commanded by the Emperor Charles V in person, suddenly landed before Tunis, stormed the fortifications, and took possession of 80 ships in the harbor. Barbarossa was barely able to escape with a remnant of the garrison. A part of his war fleet, however, was safe in Algiers; and sailing away with 27 galleys, he descended upon the island of Minorca, sacked Port Mahon and swept away 6,000 captives and immense booty, which he carried back to his Algerine lair. When Barbarossa returned to Constantinople in 1536, he was greeted by the Sultan with the title of Capudan Pasha, or High Admiral of the Turkish fleet.
In 1537, Barbarossa again ravaged the Italian coasts; he also recovered Coron and drove the Venetians, who had again been goaded into war, from most of their remaining possessions in the Aegean. His crowning achievement came the next year when, at the head of numerically inferior forces, he worsted in a battle off Prevesa, near the scene of the sea fight of Actium, the combined fleets of the Emperor, Venice, and the Papacy, commanded by Doria. Using the maneuver devised by the Athenian Phormio, the father of naval tactics, and employed by a long succession of sea fighters—that of breaking the enemy’s line—he brought his fleet to bear with crushing force upon scattered portions of his adversary’s fleet. Doria fled before him, and only the coming of night enabled him to escape with comparatively small losses. Venice made peace with the Sultan at the price of territorial cessions in Greece and a cash indemnity (1540).
After two more successful campaigns at sea and important services rendered to the Sultan’s ally, Francis I of France, Barbarossa retired from active service in extreme old age. He died at Constantinople in 1546; and the beautiful tomb of the old corsair and sea lord was still seen last century beside the Bosporus. He was the greatest admiral of his age. Daring and furious as a fighter, an able strategist and tactician, he was also gifted with prudent, statesmanlike qualities which gave vision and scope to his enterprises. He defied and vanquished the whole naval might of the Emperor Charles V and of Venice, and he carried the Ottoman sea power to the zenith of its greatness.
The work of Barbarossa—successful operation of the mutually advantageous alliance of Turkey and the North African naval power—was valiantly carried on by his lieutenants and successors. Dragut, imitating his great chief, seized Tripoli and adjacent coast towns, which he held as vassal of the Sultan. Yearly he ravaged the coasts of Italy and Spain and was nearly as great a scourge as Barbarossa himself. Piali Pasha, a native of Crotia, won fame by capturing Oran and by inflicting a disastrous defeat on an expedition of 200 vessels dispatched by Genoa, Naples, Sicily, Malta, and the Pope against Tripoli. More than a fourth of this fleet was destroyed or taken, and nearly all the landing forces were killed or fell into the hands of the Turks.
The Ottoman sea power not only triumphed in the Mediterranean during the long reign of Solyman the Magnificent but made itself felt in the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean by the operations and conquests of the fleets of his admirals, Piri Reis and Sidi Ali, on the coasts of Arabia, Persia, and northwestern India.
Not until the close of this mighty Sultan’s reign was a consequential defeat sustained by his forces. The Knights of St. John, as we have seen, had been allowed by Solyman, after their defeat, to depart in a body from Rhodes with their movable property. After several years of wandering over the Eastern Mediterranean, they had been permitted by Charles V to settle on the rocky island of Malta, which they speedily converted into one of the strongest fortresses in Europe. Their small but very efficient fleet, co-operating with the navies of Spain and of every foe of the Crescent, preyed with amazing success upon Moslem shipping in the Levant. To put an end to these religious corsairs and to strengthen his hold on the Central Mediterranean, Solyman in 1565 dispatched against Malta a fleet of 181 vessels, two-thirds of them galleys of the largest size and heaviest armament, under Piali, and an army of 30,000 veteran troops commanded by his general Musta- pha. Dragut joined the expedition with a strong squadron from Tripoli, as did Uluch Ali with a few ships from Egypt. The siege commenced on May 19, and is unique in military history for the stubborn bravery of the besiegers and the undaunted heroism of the besieged Knights under their French Grand Master, La Vallette. The defensive works of Malta consisted of two large connected forts, St. Michael and St. Angelo within the harbor, and a smaller one, St. Elmo, commanding its entrance. Two terrific assaults, or series of assaults, were necessary to carry St. Elmo. Its garrison of 300 Knights and 1,300 soldiers died fighting to a man and sold their lives at the price of 8,000 slain Turks, among whom was Dragut. Heavy reinforcements to the besiegers arrived from Algiers, and ten general assaults, including one from the sea, were delivered against the main fortress. Every attack went down to defeat before the unconquerable fighting will of the defenders. The stupendous losses of the Turks were offset by a corresponding reduction of the numbers and physical strength of the Knights. The fate of the garrison depended upon the arrival of outside aid. Philip II of Spain had instructed his Viceroy of Sicily, Don Garcia de Toledo, to carry relief to the besieged, but the latter had delayed month after month for fear of the redoubtable Turkish fleet. The summer wore away, the last reserves of the Knights were exhausted, and their works were reduced to ruins by the Turkish cannon when at last, on September 6, the Viceroy succeeded in crossing from Sicily and landing under cover of darkness an army of 6,000 Spanish troops on the island. The discouraged remnant of the Janissaries and the Turkish marines abandoned their trenches and cannon, and fled incontinently to the ships. The siege was ended. Twenty-five thousand Moslems had perished, and of the Knights and their followers only 600 remained able to bear arms.4
The successful defense of Malta was the turning point in the fearful struggle between the Turko-African alliance and the Christian maritime powers. Had Malta fallen, Sicily and Southern Italy would certainly again have become battlefields between followers of the Cross and the Crescent. As it was, Ottoman prestige in the Central Mediterranean had been dealt a staggering blow, and the Christian seafaring peoples were encouraged and spurred to greater efforts.
The war at sea and the devastations of the African corsairs, however, went steadily on. The rovers of Tripoli and Algiers descended each year on the coasts of Spain, Italy, and the great Mediterranean islands; many a rich Christian argosy plying in the western waters was carried to the Barbary lairs. Though the repulse before Malta had resulted in serious losses of fighting men and prestige to the Turks, it had scarcely affected the Moslem sea power at all. The Crescent still held the ascendancy in the Mediterranean.
The great Sultan, Solyman the Magnificent, was succeeded in 1566 by his son, Selim II. Fortunately for his people, this degenerate ruler was largely, though not wholly, dominated by his able Grand Vizier, Mohammed Sokolli, who kept the army and navy in a state of efficiency.
Venice, as we have seen, had made peace in 1540 and for 30 years sedulously cultivated amity and commercial intercourse with the Turks. Sokolli also wished to maintain good relations with Venice, but his policy was reversed and his hand forced by his moronic master. Desirous of holding rule over the island where his favorite Cyprian wines were produced, the bibulous Sultan compelled his Grand Vizier to break with the Lagoon merchants and wantonly and treacherously wage war for Cyprus, a Venetian possession for nearly a century. A fleet under Piali Pasha and a huge army under Lala Mustapha descended upon Selim’s prey (May, 1570). At the cost of 50,000 Turkish lives prodigally expended, the garrisons of Venice were overwhelmed and her power completely extirpated all over the island.
(“The Naval History of Turkey” will be concluded in the March issue.)
1. The chief unit of the Turkish Navy today is the battle-cruiser Yavuz (ex-German Goeben), 23,100 tons, refitted in 1931 and 1938. According to Jane's Fighting Ships (1940 ed.) there are also 2 obsolete light cruisers; 4 destroyers built in 1931; 8 submarines including 2 mine layers; 5 surface mine layers; 2 light gunboats; 2 yachts; 3 motor torpedo boats; and 6 small miscellaneous vessels.
2. The original tribe when it first entered Asia Minor under Ertoghrul is estimated to have numbered between 2,000 and 4,000 souls. From Ertoghrul's son Osman they acquired the name of Ottomans or Osmanlis (followers of Osman).
3. Sir Edward Shepherd Creasy, “Turkey” (Revised and edited by Archibald Cary Coolidge, Ph.D. and W. Harold Claflin, M.A. New York, 1907), page 101.
4. The entire garrison at the beginning of the siege amounted to approximately 9,200 fighting men including 700 Knights.