The Naval History Of Turkey

(Concluded from the February, 1942, issue)

The wanton attack of the Turks upon Cyprus, their infamous violation of the terms of capitulation, the inhuman treatment inflicted upon the Venetian Commandant Bragadino and his surviving troops, as well as the warlike stir and preparations in all the Turkish seaports, aroused the fear and fury of Mediterranean Europe and served to allay the chronic strife and jealousy among the Christian States. Pope Pius V, the moral leader of Europe, energetically exerted himself and succeeded, after long delay and difficulties, in forming a maritime league for offensive and defensive action against the Turks. The principal members of this coalition were Spain, Venice, and the Papacy; but all the Christian States bordering on the Mediterranean, excepting France, were enrolled; and volunteers from every part of Catholic Europe hastened to embark in the new crusade. Philip II of Spain, son of the Emperor Charles V and the most powerful monarch of Christendom at this time, was accorded the leadership of the confederacy. He furnished 77 royal galleys, numerous smaller vessels, and the bulk of the troops. The Venetians, under their Admirals Veniero and Barbarigo, brought 108 galleys and 6 immense galleasses, probably the largest vessels and certainly armed with the heaviest artillery hitherto used in naval warfare. The Papal States contributed 12 galleys under Mark Antony Colonna; the Republics of Genoa, Florence, and Lucca, and the Duke of Savoy furnished complements of either ships or troops. The sum total was 215 galleys and galleasses with 29,000 troops on board, besides 70 vessels of smaller rating. Don John of Austria commanded the whole armada; though but 24 years old, he was already famed as a commander and a gallant warrior; he was aided by two of the greatest captains of the age, Alexander Prince of Parma and the Genoese Gian Andrea Doria, nephew of the great antagonist of Barbarossa. Among the members of the Spanish contingent was a soldier in the ranks, poor and unknown at the time, whose name and fame now outshines the highest placed officer in the fleet—Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra.

The coalition fleet assembled at Messina late in August, 1571. Bickerings among the commanders and violent storms prevented it from putting to sea until September 16. The armada first sailed across the Ionian Sea to Corfu in quest of the enemy, and failing to find him there headed southward. Between Cephalonia and the Albanian mainland the scoutships of the League described the Ottoman fleet anchored in the deeply indented Gulf of Patras off Lepanto. The Turks had 208 galleys and 66 galleots, or smaller vessels, carrying 25,000 fighting men besides crews and slaves at the oar. Muzinade Ali, the Capudan Pasha of the whole fleet, was supported by the Beyler Beys of Algiers and Tripoli and by the Beys of 15 other maritime sanjaks, or provinces, each of which brought his squadron and displayed his banner as a Prince of the Sea.

The opposing fleets, as is seen, were not greatly disparate in numbers of ships and personnel. The galleys of the League possessed the heavier artillery, and the Christian commanders had exercised greater care in equipment of their vessels and in selection of crews and fighting men. All of their marines were armed with firearms, while a large portion of the Turkish fighting men were bowmen. The Turks were conscious of these deficiencies, and two of the Ottoman commanders, Uluch Ali and Pertev Pasha, advised against battle. The fighting ardor of the Capudan Pasha, however, and the pride of former victories at sea overruled their prudent counsels and declared for an engagement. The result was the Battle of Lepanto, October 7, 1571.

Each commander in chief, indeed, lost little time in seeking the other out and coming to battle. As the Christian galleys entered the Gulf of Patras, the Ottoman fleet loosed from its moorings at Lepanto and stood seaward to meet them. Don John formed his line as he advanced, placing his best fighting ships in the center in the form of a bulging crescent and taking his station in the van flanked by the squadrons of Veniero and Colonna. Barbarigo commanded at the left with 53 ships; Doria held the right wing with 54; and the Spanish Marquis of Santa Cruz was stationed with a reserve squadron of 35 galleys in the rear. The most remarkable and original feature of Don John’s formation was the stationing of the 6 Venetian galleasses at long intervals well in advance of the main battle line. These vessels, the superdreadnoughts of their day, stood like a line of floating fortresses between the Christians and their foes.

A suggestion being made that a council be called before the battle, Don John stoutly replied, “The time for councils is past; give no thought now to anything but fighting.” He then entered his cutter and sped from galley to galley, giving final instructions to the commanders and words of encouragement to the men. The banner of the League, emblazoned with the figure of the Savior and consecrated by the Pope, was unfurled, and every man in the fleet fell upon his knees and prayed for victory to the Lord of Hosts.

The battle opened around noon. The Turks were forced to crowd and break their line as they passed between the Venetian galleasses, which they did not stop to engage but from whose point-blank artillery fire they suffered terribly. Taking their losses heroically, however, the Moslem galleys surged onward with terrific clangor of drums and fifes and came to grips with the main Christian battle line. The Capudan Pasha gallantly laid his flagship aboard Don John’s galley and a murderous combat lasting two hours took place between his Janissaries and the Spanish arquebussiers, each seeking to prevail by concentrated musketry fire or by boarding the other’s vessel. Other galleys near at hand came to the aid of their admirals, and a knot of entangled vessels formed the broken stage of a combat on decks slippery with blood and strewn with dead and dying. Over a large part of the line of battle similar groups speedily joined in separate combats that partook of the nature of land fighting on the water.

In the fight centering about the commanders in chief, the Papal Admiral Colonna at last adroitly succeeded in ramming his vessel hard along the poop of Muzinade’s galley as far as the third rowers’ bench; the Papal marines swarmed over the side and poured a cross fire into the ranks of Janissaries and Turkish bowmen. A musket ball in the head laid low the Capudan Pasha; his galley, boarded from two sides at once, was cleared of living defenders after a desperate struggle. At sight of the banner of the League flying from their admiral’s masthead, the whole Turkish center became panic-stricken and gave way, closely pursued by the Christians. Scores of Moslem galleys surrendered; others were sunk or carried by boarding.

At the extremities of the battle line, meantime, the fighting had been equally desperate and far more doubtful. Mohammed Shaulah, Bey of Negropont, commanding the Turkish right, had succeeded in outflanking the enemy’s left and attacking him from front and rear. At least 8 Venetian galleys were sunk by the rams of his vessels and several were taken. Fighting with the utmost fury, however, and maddened by the thought of the atrocities in Cyprus, the Venetians at length succeeded in repulsing the Turks and then forcing them to beach on the coast. Both Mohammed Shaulah and Barbarigo fell in the fighting.

Opposite the Christian right wing, taking advantage of a seaward maneuver of Doria to avoid being outflanked, Uluch Ali had skillfully doubled back and fallen upon the extremity of the victorious but exhausted Christian center. The capitana of the Knights of Malta was boarded and every soul aboard her slain. Other Christian vessels were overwhelmed in the terrific fighting, and for a time Moslem shouts of victory rose over the water. The critical situation was saved by the attack of the Marquis of Santa Cruz and his reserve squadron. Don John also collected 20 manageable galleys and headed them around against Uluch Ali; while Doria was rapidly coming in with the right wing intact. Outnumbered, almost surrounded, and seeing that his countrymen elsewhere were hopelessly defeated, Uluch Ali hoisted the signal of retreat and followed by 40 of his Algerine galleys set his sails and escaped to sea. This ended the battle. The rest of the Moslem fleet that remained afloat was surrendering or beaching on the coast, the crews endeavoring to flee ashore. Nearly 50 Turkish galleys were sunk or burned, and more than 180 galleys and galleots were captured, though many of these were unfit for further service. Twenty thousand Moslems were estimated to have perished, and about 7,000 were taken prisoners. The most gratifying result of the battle was the release of 15,000 Christian galley slaves chained to the Turkish rowing benches. The losses of the League were reported as 15 vessels sunk, though many others were damaged beyond repair. Seventy-five hundred in the coalition fleet were slain, besides innumerable wounded. The casualties included many of the highest officers of the fleet and some of the noblest blood of Christendom.

The victory of the League was due, apart from imponderable forces, to the heavier metal of its artillery and to the superior weapons of its marines. Bows and arrows, the sole weapons of many of the Turkish fighting men, were no match for the muskets and arquebuses of the Christians. The Venetian galleasses, armed each with 40 large cannon, inflicted important losses at the beginning of the fight, and they must also have created terrific havoc as the Turkish galleys drew back. In seamanship and tactics, however, the Turkish fleet was clearly superior since the Christians allowed themselves to be outmaneuvered and outflanked on both wings.

The Battle of Lepanto was a blow to Ottoman naval prestige from which the Turks never recovered. For nearly a century the fleets of the Crescent had come off better in sea fighting and controlled the Eastern Mediterranean. Now, in the words of Cervantes who fought bravely in the battle and was twice wounded, “on that day so happy to all Christendom . . . the world was disabused of its error that the Turks were invincible at sea.”¹ Never again did the Moslem sea forces when opposed by any large part of the naval might of Christendom seek a battle, never again did they win a great victory at sea.

Though shattering and fatal as Lepanto was, in the long run, to Turkish naval prestige, its immediate results were singularly barren and negative owing to the lack of cohesion and concord among the Christian powers. Within three weeks after the battle the Venetians and the Spaniards had all but come to blows over the division of the spoils. The fleet returned to Messina where the contingents separated and returned to their home ports. Uluch Ali, meantime, with the 40 Algerine galleys which he had saved from Lepanto, had gathered to his command small squadrons and single warships at Turkish stations in the Aegean, and late in December he sailed up the Bosporus with a fleet of 87 galleys. He was well received by the Sultan and raised to the rank of Capudan Pasha. Under his supervision and that of Piali Pasha, immediate steps were taken for the restoration of the Turkish navy. Even the degenerate Sultan Selim showed a gleam of patriotic enthusiasm by giving a large portion of his seraglio gardens for a new arsenal and dockyard. A fleet of 150 new galleys was laid down and rushed to completion in a few months—an amazing feat which no single Christian State at that day was capable of performing. As Creasy says, “While the rejoicing Christians built churches, the resolute Turks built docks.”² At the head of 250 galleys Uluch Ali sailed in the spring of 1572 to the west coast of Greece. Don John, after considerable delays, collected with difficulty from the League a fleet numerically inferior to the enemy’s and crossed the Ionian Sea. The Capudan Pasha prudently declined battle but kept his fleet well in hand. Later in the summer, with somewhat augmented strength of galleys, Don John tried to bring Uluch Ali to battle and forced him to take refuge under the guns of Modon. The Christian Commander was disposed to attack the enemy even in that situation but was dissuaded from the risk by the united voice of his council. Unable to lure Uluch Ali out to battle, he reluctantly ordered the return of the squadrons to their home ports for winter.

This was the end of naval operations under the banner of the League. Venice, in the following spring, discouraged by the progress of the war and suffering from financial exhaustion, concluded a separate peace with the Turks and consented to relinquish all claim to Cyprus and to pay a war indemnity in return for peace and restoration of trade privileges in the Levant.

Don John, it is true, in September, 1574, crossed the Mediterranean at the head of 200 Spanish and Italian galleys and took possession of Tunis, which had been retrieved by the Turks after its conquest by Charles V. A strong fortress was now built, and 8,000 Spanish troops were left to garrison the place. The next year, however, in Don John’s absence, Uluch Ali attacked with a powerful expedition, recovered the city, reduced the fortress, and nearly exterminated the Christian garrison. Tunis thereafter for 3 centuries remained under Turkish suzerainty and completed the unbroken chain of Mohammedan lands of the Mediterranean extending from Albania around to the Atlantic.

Thus closed the phase of sea conflict between the Cross and the Crescent made famous by the Battle of Lepanto. It might and should have ended with the complete destruction of the Ottoman sea power and perhaps the expulsion of the Turks from Europe and North Africa. Thanks to the divisions and discords among the Christian powers, the Turks actually emerged from the conflict with notable increases of territory and with the loss of nothing but their reputation as naval fighters. The latter, however, outweighed all else and was never retrieved. The Moslem peoples, while continuing for centuries to inflict untold losses and misery on the Christians by their piracies, never again seriously bid for Mediterranean, much less for universal, sea dominion. The attacks of the Turko-African sea power with overwhelming fleets on the coasts of Italy and Spain gave place to fugitive, localized raids of the cruisers of Tunis, Tripoli, and Algiers, which, though an awful scourge to commerce and to individuals, never menaced the existence of any Christian State.

The ties between the North African States and Constantinople, though not entirely severed, became weak and tenuous in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. A small tribute and infrequent naval aid were all the recognition given by the pirate Beys to the headship of the Sultans, who prudently demanded no more. The annals of the Barbary States cease, soon after the epoch of Lepanto, to belong to the naval history of the Moslem lords of New Rome, but emerge separately as a unique saga of national piracy.³

The naval history of the Turks henceforth is one of slow, almost continuous decline accompanying the progress of disorder and weakness in the Ottoman State. The Sultans after Solyman the Magnificent, with rare exceptions, ceased to be leaders of their people in peace and war but abandoned themselves to pomp and sensual pleasures. The Grand Viziers ruled the State, and the chief offices were sold to the highest bidders. Disorders crept into the army and navy which formerly had maintained such high standards of efficiency. Those services failed to keep abreast of scientific invention and fell further and further behind the Christian nations in their armament and equipment.

It was fortunate, indeed, for Christendom that such was the case. The Christian peoples of the Mediterranean in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with the exception of France, were in poor condition to repel a powerful naval attack. Prostrated by the virtual annihilation of her great armada in 1588 and other naval disasters, permeated by dry rot, Spain had all she could do to defend her Atlantic ports against the English and Dutch seamen, while battling the Barbary pirates in the Mediterranean. She was becoming year by year poorer, weaker, more helpless, both on land and sea. Her vigorous, rapidly expanding rivals, France, England, and Holland, far from opposing the Turks on the sea, sought friendship and trade relations with Constantinople. Most of the Italian peninsula, still partly under Spanish influence, was also sunk in decadence.

Venice, the one Mediterranean State able and disposed to resist effectively the still formidable though declining Turkish sea power, had descended from her high position of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and though still animated by a proud spirit, found herself in the second or third rank among European powers. The widespread Ottoman conquests had been heavy blows to her prosperity, imposing tolls of treasure and blood on her commerce and exposing her Levantine possessions to constant attack and encroachment. Worst of all, the voyage of the Portuguese Vasco de Gama in 1497 around the Cape of Good Hope had opened a new, easier, and cheaper commercial access to the Far East and brought a speedy commercial decline to the Lagoon merchants. Portuguese, and later, Dutch and English merchants began plying in their ships to the Orient and returned with the silks, spices, and gems which formerly had been carried at infinite cost, labor, and hazard across Asia by caravan to Constantinople or Alexandria and there delivered to the Venetians for distribution over Europe. As a result of this unforeseen competition springing from the discovery of the water route to Asia, Venice had lost by the beginning of the seventeenth century her most vital and lucrative commerce, the carrying trade in eastern products.

Venice was now reaping the harvest of her evil deeds. Having grown rich and strong from the spoils of her assault on Constantinople in 1204; having dramatically triumphed over her rival Genoa in the War of Chioggia in 1380, after barely escaping annihilation herself, she found herself forced in the century and a half after Lepanto to oppose on the sea, almost alone and with failing strength and resources, the naval power for whose existence in the Mediterranean her own selfishness and villainy were responsible.

After withdrawing from the league of Christian nations in 1573, Venice had spared no pains, and for 72 years had succeeded, in her policy of maintaining peaceful commercial relations with the Turks. Her possession of Crete, however, at length aroused the greed of that warlike people; and in 1645 the Sultan Ibrahim I availed himself of a pretext to launch a treacherous and powerful attack on the Venetian strongholds in that island. In the War of Candia—which took its name from the 20 years’ siege of Candia, the chief city of Crete—the Turks were barely able, in spite of immense numerical superiority of ships and men, to keep the sea against the Venetian fleet. The Ottoman navy suffered many and humiliating reverses, temporarily lost the islands of Tenedos and Lemnos, and was unable to keep the Venetian squadrons from penetrating the Hellespont and ravaging the coasts near Constantinople. Seventy Turkish ships were sunk or taken by the Venetian Admiral Macenigo in a battle off the entrance of the Hellespont. However, the overwhelming superiority of the Turks in military power, wealth, and resources, as well as their ability to replace fleets with great rapidity, told in the end. The Ottoman forces under the Grand Vizier Mohammed Kiuprili kept a death grip upon Crete, from which they could not be shaken. In 1669 Candia was forced to capitulate and Venice, brought to the verge of exhaustion, ceded Crete as the price of peace.

Sixteen years later, taking advantage of the crushing defeat of the Turks by the Polish King Sobieski before Vienna and the unequal struggle which the Ottoman Empire was forced to wage against Poland, Austria, Hungary, and Russia, Venice declared war on Turkey and threw an army into Greece. With the aid of the Venetian fleet, the great General Morosini succeeded in mastering portions of Dalmatia, Athens, Corinth, and the whole of the Peloponnesus. Venice could not have won, much less retained, these conquests single- handed, but with the powerful support of her northern allies she was awarded the bulk of them in precarious tenure by the peace of Carlowitz (1699).

Her revenge for the loss of Crete, though complete and sweet, was short-lived. In 1715, having inflicted a signal defeat on Peter the Great of Russia and forced him to suspend his aggressions, the Turks turned their whole strength against the Venetian Republic, now without allies. The Venetians were defeated on land and sea; their fortresses in Greece were taken; and they were expelled from the Peloponnesus and the last of their Aegean possessions. Only the intervention of Austria saved the Republic from the depths of humiliation. By the peace of Passarowitz the once proud Queen of the Adriatic was stripped of all her outlying possessions except the Ionian Isles and a few cities on the Dalmatian coast.

The decadence of Turkey in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was much more marked in her navy than in her army. The latter, thanks to the unsurpassed bravery of the Turkish soldier and despite admitted inferiority to European armies in weapons and discipline, continued to be, and still is, a force to be dreaded. On the other hand, the disorder and corruption in the naval administration at Constantinople, the failure of the Government to employ effectively modern arms and equipment, gradually reduced the Ottoman fleet to almost a nullity.

The decline of the Turkish naval power invited plundering attacks by the official and semiofficial fleets of various Christian sea powers and by innumerable private freebooters. The Knights of St. John, corsairs of French race mostly and veritable vikings of the Mediterranean, continued to conduct their operations from Malta un- flaggingly and profitably against every ship flying the Crescent. The Knights of San Stephano, a Tuscan order modelled after the Maltese, ostensibly private but having for Grand Master the Duke of Tuscany, owned a fleet of nearly 20 cruisers and throve by preying on Moslem commerce in the Levant and by making descents on the far-flung Ottoman coasts. English privateers in considerable numbers also plundered in the Eastern Mediterranean.

In 1769, after the accession of their ambitious Empress, Catherine II, the Russians dispatched from the Baltic to the Mediterranean a fleet of 12 ships of the line, 12 frigates, and numerous transports carrying a strong expeditionary force. The expedition, though officially commanded by Count Orlov and Admiral Spiridov, was actually directed by Admiral Elphinstone and other distinguished British naval officers. Its object was to support a rising of the Greek people against the Ottoman yoke. Though failing in a descent on the Peloponnesus, the Russian armada defeated a numerically superior Turkish fleet off Chios and later completely destroyed it by means of fire ships in the small harbor of Tchesme where it had taken refuge. This brilliant stroke was executed under the leadership of an English lieutenant named Dugdale. A daring proposal by Elphinstone immediately after the victory to force the Dardanelles and attack Constantinople would probably have been successful if carried out; for the fortifications of the Straits had fallen into decay and complete panic reigned in Constantinople. Orlov, however, hesitated, and his delay gave the Turks time to strengthen the Dardanelles batteries under the direction of the Frenchman, Baron de Tott. An ineffectual attempt to reduce Lemnos virtually ended this outstanding and most successful episode in Russian naval annals.

These events were shortly followed by the Russian conquest of the Crimea from Turkey and the building of a Russian Black Sea fleet which presently rivalled and soon outclassed the Ottoman fleet at Constantinople. The first Russian naval victory in the Euxine was won in 1788.

The remainder of Turkish naval history down to 1923 may be summarized in the words, “almost complete ineffectiveness.” The Ottoman warships were unable to cope with the light, hastily improvised squadrons of the Greek revolutionists; in 1827 the Turko-Egyptian fleet was blown to pieces at Navarino, near the scene of the Battle of Lepanto, by the squadrons of the intervening powers, England, France, and Russia. Later attempts to create a modem fleet and to develop an efficient naval personnel were dismal failures. The Turks themselves refused to perform any duty at sea except to man the guns, and the quotas of subject seafaring races available for service rapidly dwindled and became increasingly unreliable. Turkish naval impotence was only accentuated when the navies of wood and sail gave place to those of steel and steam. Ironclads were built at huge cost in English shipyards for the Ottoman Government but proved utterly useless as the Turks were unable to furnish competent crews and engineers to run them.⁴ In no way was the “sick man of Europe” sicker than in his naval service.

The Crimean War opened with the complete destruction of a Turkish squadron at Sinope by the Russian Black Sea fleet. Neither in the Russo-Turkish War of 1877, in the Graeco-Turkish War of 1897, in the Italo-Turkish War of 1911, in the Balkan Wars of 1912-13, nor in the first World War, was the Ottoman fleet of any appreciable value in national defense, much less in offensive operations. To such a low state had the Turkish navy fallen, the navy which over three centuries before had swept the Mediterranean from end to end and carried terror and desolation to every Christian shore. Though possessing an unsurpassed natural situation for the development and exercise of naval power, the Ottoman Empire, like its Byzantine predecessor, let slip through its hands the most elusive of national possessions, dominion on the sea.

It would be a grave mistake, however, to assume that the Turks have forgotten their great naval past and that many of them do not dream of a revival of Ottoman sea power. This is convincingly indicated by events since the remarkable come-back of Turkey under Mustapha Kemal following his spectacular victory over the Greek army in Asia Minor (1922). The jealous insistence of the great dictator at the Convention of Lausanne in regaining Turkish rule over the Bosporus and the Dardanelles, and later, at the Convention of Montreux in demanding the right to fortify them, shows clearly the Turkish recognition of the indispensability of those waterways in the re-establishment of their sea power and their desire to ultimately retrieve some measure of naval strength.

Furthermore, since the treaty of Lausanne (1923) the Turks have spent large sums in developing a fleet calculated to aid effectively in the defense of their intersea waterways. From all reports the Kemalist and the present Government have succeeded in infusing discipline and efficiency into the naval personnel.

Viewing the long stretch of history since the Ottoman establishment in Europe— the century and a half of naval dominance and glory, then the long tragic period of decline; viewing also recent events down to the present time, it is the writer’s conviction that, despite apparent weakness and vacillation of the Ankara Government, the Turks will fight to the death rather than surrender Constantinople and the Straits to the Axis. To do that would be to betray the mighty past, to renounce the dream of re-creating national sea power, and to surrender irrevocably national independence.