The Father of Us All: War and History, Ancient and Modern (10 page)

In contrast, Donald Kagan set out to chronicle the entire war in all its complexity. He did just that for much of his scholarly career while teaching at Cornell and Yale. His four volumes,
The Peloponnesian War
, were published over nearly twenty years, beginning with the 1969 work on the origins of the conflict and ending with the 1987 work on the utter defeat of Athens. Kagan ranges widely throughout European history, invoking ancient wars to elucidate Spartan or Athenian strategy. He frequently poses counterfactual questions and often doubts Thucydides (most famously about the latter’s judgment that the war was inevitable and arose from Spartan fear over growing Athenian power). Kagan asks practical questions about the financing of the war, criticizes Pericles’ judgment, and occasionally labels Thucydides a revisionist whose sober grand assessments did not always reflect the data of his own narrative.

It was not especially prudent of Kagan to begin a career by starting a grand multivolume narrative about an ancient war—especially at Cornell at a time of another unpopular war and general campus unrest, and when most scholars were more interested in social, economic, and cultural history, turning out scads of articles and monographs for promotion and tenure rather than sober four-volume masterpieces. But Kagan persevered, and more than forty years after the first volume appeared, his work endures for a variety of reasons besides its proven reliability, accuracy, and comprehensiveness. He went toe to toe with the great triad of German historians of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Georg Busolt, K. J. Beloch, and Eduard Meyer—most of whose work remains untranslated—and helped to reintroduce them, not always with approval, to a modern American audience. Kagan reminds us of the role of factions within the city-states: Athens did not simply execute the Melians or Spartans seek a break in the hostilities, but rather particular groups of Athenians and Spartans did so, and in constant friction that reflected their own wide disparities of wealth, property, and lineage.

But Kagan’s greatest achievement is to remind us of the personal—the irrational—element in war, what Thucydides himself called “the human thing.” (This is also a theme of Kagan’s later book
On the Origins of War
.) It is not always cosmic ideas or profit or ideology that start wars, but often very human urges of real people transferred to a grand scale—urges like honor, fear, prestige, and perceived (rather than real) grievances. The result is that his Peloponnesian War, like Thucydides’ own, serves a wider didactic purpose than the preservation of old facts and ancient men’s lives.

Kagan’s history reminds us that fickle and weak people often say one thing precisely so that they can act on another. I wish our current observers would read the professions and excuses of the hurt Spartans and aggrieved Athenians and then ask in a similarly skeptical mood why we should listen to what bin Laden says caused his jihad. For Kagan, Sparta was no more doomed to go to war than Hitler needed lebensraum. Sparta went to war primarily because it thought it might win a cheap victory over an imperial Athens, and thereby increase its stature without much cost; and it knew that if it crossed the Attica border in spring 431
B.C.
, there was not one thing Athenian hoplites could do to keep its army out.

The Thebans attacked Plataea not simply because it posed a danger, or because they needed more Boeotian farmland, but because the likely capture of Plataea would prove a testament of Theban power, and so offered an easy opportunity—an opportunity more psychological than material. Britain needed the Falklands no more than did Argentina, but the dictatorship of the latter saw a chance for a quick, cheap victory that could placate domestic unrest, while England for its future security could not afford the dangerous precedent of letting a second-rate power attack a great nation with impunity. States then do, as Kagan reminds us, fight over perceptions with plenty of professions (
prophaseis
)—not always for sheep and rocky windswept islands in the South Atlantic.

In the 2003 single-volume edition, condensed by 75 percent from the four-volume original, Kagan tries to make the Peloponnesian War come alive as a story, derived for the most part from a judicious reading of Thucydides, Xenophon, Plutarch, and Diodorus. The astute comparisons to later wars, the footnotes, and the scholarly controversies of the earlier volumes are gone. They are replaced by a fast-paced narrative, with plenty of maps, that presents the Peloponnesian War year by year in very short titled subsections. His earlier perceptions and judgments remain, but they are implicit and fade into the narrative. It is now the train of events that must take center stage.

Kagan’s abridged
Peloponnesian War
is still important because the solid judgment of its author remains evident throughout. No one—not a majestic Pericles, a fiery Cleon, or the chameleon Alcibiades—can fool Don Kagan; he appreciates the genius of bad men he does not like, and he praises the inspiration of rogues he despises. Bad plans, like capturing Sicily, can work if implemented well; good ideas of good men can fail, as in the Delium campaign, for bad luck and the simple want of common sense. Things about radical Athens bother him, but not to such a degree that he denies its energy and dynamism. He admires Spartan discipline but not the blinkered society that was at the bottom of it all. Democracy was often murderous, but oligarchy and tyranny brought the same violence, only without the grandeur.

Finally, and most important, Kagan has no condescension for his subjects. Cleon and Brasidas, Nicias, and Lysander are not silly squabbling ancient peoples in need of modern enlightenment. They are men of universal appetites to be taken on their own terms, just like us, whose occasional crackpot ideas, fears, jealousies, and sins can sometimes—if the thin veneer of civilization is suddenly stripped away—lead to something absolutely god-awful. If you don’t agree, ask the Serbians, Rwandans, or Afghans—or, if we could, those with cell phones and briefcases who politely boarded planes to butcher thousands.

CHAPTER 7

Don Juan of Austria Is
Riding to the Sea

A Clash of Civilizations in the Sixteenth-Century Mediterranean
*

T
WO MILLENNIA AFTER
the Peloponnesian War, the entire Mediterranean witnessed a clash of civilizations far greater than the Aegean rivalry between the Spartan and Athenian alliances. The old ethnic, political, geographic, and cultural antitheses were now overshadowed by a religious divide beyond anything in the ancient world, an irreconcilable rift between a growing Islamic empire and its embattled Mediterranean Christian rivals.

The Gospel of Matthew is a long way from the Koran, but the Christian soldiers of the sixteenth century knew well enough that weakness in the face of the Ottoman galleys sweeping the Italian coast meant death or conversion. Until the next world, violence alone ensured the survival of a divided, poorer, and more vulnerable Christendom in the Mediterranean. And so, after their victory at the great Battle of Lepanto, Spanish and Italians butchered scores of defeated Turkish seamen thrashing in the bloody seas, determined that the sultan would lose all his skilled bowmen and rowers.

In their way of thinking, any jihadist left alive would mean only more Christians dead in the near future. The clash on the Mediterranean between the West and Islam often turned even more horrific. In the months before the battle near Lepanto, the Venetian captain Marcantonio Bragadin surrendered the garrison at Famagusta to an overwhelming Turkish invasion force. Despite Turkish promises of safe passage out of Cyprus, mass slaughter and rape ensued, with the heads of the Venetian lords lined up for display in the town square. Bragadin first had his ears cut off, then he was forced to carry earth as a captured slave. After having Bragadin hanged from a galley yard, the Ottoman commander Lala Mustafa ordered him flayed alive. He expired about halfway through the grisly torture, but his tormentors continued. His hide was stuffed with straw, clothed, and paraded as a trophy before being sent to Istanbul.

After the attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001, the landmark Christian-Muslim clashes of the past were continually evoked—often crudely and inexactly so—in popular dialogue, as if they were apparent ancient precursors to the current Western struggle against radical Islam. So Poitiers, the Crusades, the fall of Constantinople, Grenada, the sieges of Vienna, and Omdurman were all referenced—not just by Westerners, but perhaps more often by Osama bin Laden and his associates, whose fatwas blared grievances about the lost “al-Andalus” and the infidel “Crusader kingdoms” in the Middle East.

Yet no East-West clash resonates more than Lepanto, the great sea battle of October 7, 1571, which involved more than four hundred ships and eighty thousand seamen, and, along with Actium, Salamis, and Ecnomus, may well have been one of the most deadly single-day naval battles in history. Fought off the northwest coast of Greece near the Curzolaris Islands—not far south from Augustus’s great victory over Marc Antony and Cleopatra at Actium—Lepanto proved to be the last great clash of oared ships that resulted in a surprising victory of Christendom over the sultan’s feared Ottoman fleet.

But while Christian Europeans at the time saw their victory as a divine gift that saved their civilization, its geopolitical significance has always underwhelmed modern historians. The Christian League was an ad hoc alliance of convenience, riddled with internecine fighting and intrigue. It was never really much more than the galley fleets of Spain, the Papal States, and Venice. England and France kept clear; both had long ago cut their own deals with the Ottomans. Indeed, during the winter of 1542 the French had even allowed the Ottoman corsair Barbarossa the use of their harbor at Toulon to refit as he conducted raids along the Italian coast. For most countries with ports on the Atlantic, it was far better to get rich trading with the Turk than to fight him.

As Niccolò Capponi writes in his 2007 book,
The Victory of the West: The Great Christian-Muslim Clash at the Battle of Lepanto
:

By the beginning of the sixteenth century Christendom was in a very sorry state. Gone were the crusading ideals of old; people turned deaf ears to the alarmed utterances of preachers and popes about the necessity of stopping the Turkish advance. For most European governments the Ottoman threat was low on their list of concerns—they were more interested in maintaining their positions in the rich eastern markets—while a few states were quite ready to abet, or at least not hinder, the sultan’s expansionist policies for the sake of their own commercial interests.

So the battle was not quite an epic struggle of a consolidated Europe against the Eastern threat. While the Ottomans had united most of the Muslims of the Middle East under the Grand Porte, Europe was trisected by Orthodoxy, Catholicism, and Protestantism. The most effective admirals in the Turkish fleet were often Italian renegades. Galley rowers were in no small part chained Christian slaves. The best Turkish galleys themselves were either copied from Italian designs or captured from the Spanish and Venetians and refitted.

On the voyage out to meet the Ottoman fleet, Don Juan of Austria—the bastard son of King Charles V of Spain, half brother of King Philip II, and the nominal head of the allied Christian fleet—almost arrested some of his allied Venetian admirals. One, Sebastiano Venier, had hanged some murderous seamen employed by the Spanish, which nearly precipitated a war between the two allied fleets on the eve of the battle.

It was never quite clear how many Christian ships would actually show up to sail eastward toward Lepanto, the winter port of the Ottomans, or how the galleys were to be provisioned and their crews paid. By October and the onset of rough seas, many admirals in the fleet thought the season to go chasing the huge Ottoman fleet was long over.

Even when the Christians won and nearly destroyed the Ottoman armada, Europe was too disunited to capitalize on the enemy’s setback. It never recaptured the lost Cyprus, much less sailed up the Dardanelles to retake Constantinople. In contrast, the Ottomans quickly replaced their galleys, hired new crews, and went on the offensive again in the eastern Mediterranean, recapturing most of their fortresses in North Africa within a year. A little over a century later, the Ottomans would head up the Danube on their way to Vienna and the center of European culture.

So what is it about Lepanto that, more than six hundred years later, still makes it a symbol of a supposedly indomitable Christian West? The heroic efforts of an aged, obsessed Pope Pius V to cobble together a makeshift fleet of last resort to put a stop to the continuous westward surge of Islam? The singular calm of the twenty-six-year-old Don Juan, who danced a jig on his flagship
Real
in the very seconds before the battle—after offering one of the tersest pre-battle harangues in military history: “Gentlemen, this is not the time to discuss but to fight”?

Is the battle’s immortality due to its popularity in literature and art? The young Cervantes was wounded in the battle and later wrote that Lepanto was the “most noble and memorable event that past centuries have seen or future generations can ever hope to witness.” Massive canvasses by Titian and Tintoretto commemorated the victory. Or was Lepanto enshrined by the raw courage of the mortally wounded Antonio Barbarigo; the brilliant performance of the unshakeable Don Álvaro de Bazán, marquis of Santa Cruz; or the fire of seventy-five-year-old Sebastiano Venier, later doge of Venice?

Surprisingly, there has not been an accessible, scholarly one-volume history of the battle in English until this book by the Italian Renaissance scholar Niccolò Capponi. Drawing on new archival work and reexamining contemporary letters and inventories, Capponi offers a fresh view of both the fighting (he eschews the battle’s traditional nomenclature of Lepanto for the more geographically accurate Curzolis) and its strategic significance, rejecting the common opinion that the victory had few lasting consequences. His title,
Victory of the West
, thus refers to Western triumph in both the fullest tactical and strategic sense.

Only about thirty of the book’s four hundred pages are devoted to a narrative of the fighting. Capponi instead has given an account of the rise of the Ottomans and of the divisiveness and the bickering rampant in Western Europe. He also provides meticulous information about the mechanics and horrendous expense of galley warfare on the Mediterranean.

Capponi is no triumphalist. Indeed, he announces at the outset, “I also admit to having something of a soft spot for the Turks as fighters, my great-great-grandfather, a Crimean War veteran, describing them as the best soldiers in the world.” In the midst of describing serial Turkish atrocities, he quotes an Ottoman official who deplored such savagery and notes that sometimes Christians were as likely to execute prisoners as were Ottomans.

How then did the Christians win the battle? They were probably outnumbered, both in ships and men. Lepanto was fought in Turkish-controlled waters near the Ottoman winter port at the mouth of the Gulf of Corinth opposite Patras, the present-day Nafpaktos. The Venetians had lost Cyprus and were demoralized from increasingly bold attacks on the coast of Italy.

Capponi summarizes the usual reasons for the incredible victory, previously outlined by others. The use of six galleasses—huge artillery platforms that were towed to the front of the Christian fleet—devastated many of the Ottoman armada’s first lines before they even engaged. These monsters fired from between forty and fifty cannon of various calibers, often blowing apart the light Ottoman galleys, which rarely had more than five or six guns, and sometimes even fewer.

Capponi draws on contemporary scientific accounts to emphasize the deadliness of these new contraptions. But in general, the rest of the Christian galleys had far more guns, composed of better-cast bronze, and superior training and discipline in ballistics. Their marines were armed with harquebuses in far greater numbers, and armor plate made them almost invincible to Ottoman archery.

Spanish and Italian captains tried to avoid fighting hand to hand with the more numerous Turkish swordsmen and instead relied on small- and large-arms fire to thin out the enemy galleys before boarding them. These advantages testify to the growing sixteenth-century technological gap between Western Europe and the Ottomans. The Turks’ lack of a sophisticated banking system and the unfettered intellectual pursuit of the Europeans, together with a changing maritime world outside the Mediterranean, made it ever more difficult to match the West in munitions and naval prowess. The Ottoman answer instead was usually more janissaries and more galleys, at precisely the time that lucrative East-West overland trade was drying up and a westward-looking Europe was increasingly unconcerned with what the sultan to the east had to offer.

The canard survives that Lepanto did not change a thing—a century later the Turks were still able to mount a great offensive against the West that would reach to the gates of Vienna, and the Ottoman Empire survived into the twentieth century. In the words of the Ottomans, they merely had their beard shaved at Lepanto rather than their arm lost like the Christians at Cyprus.

But Capponi emphasizes the battle’s more insidious psychological consequences. Before Lepanto, the Turks cruised with impunity along the southern coast of Europe; afterward, they were uncertain whether their galleys would be attacked and defeated anywhere in the Mediterranean.

More important still, galley warfare itself was coming to an end, as those European states with Atlantic ports—Britain, France, the Netherlands, Portugal, and Spain—found no need of either Mediterranean transit or Ottoman overland routes to tap the great natural wealth of the Orient and the newly opened Americas. In just a few years, a single galleon, crammed with cheaper iron cannon, could blast apart an entire Turkish fleet of galleys that were ill-equipped to venture out of the Mediterranean into the Atlantic, where the action increasingly was found.

As Capponi makes clear, galleys were ingeniously designed for the relative calm of the Mediterranean, where East and West were often only a few days—or hours—apart. So the problem was not so much with galleys but rather that the sea on which they traveled had lost its global centrality and proved a barrier, instead of a bridge, to the wealth of the ever more powerful West. In other words, Lepanto was the Ottomans’ last gasp. When the courage and numbers of the Turkish fleet at its zenith still failed to stop a divided southern Europe, then the future was set, as a parasitic Ottoman Empire increasingly lost its host.

It is to Capponi’s credit that he tells the riveting, human story of the battle while keeping in mind its larger historical and strategic implications. And while he is always sensitive to the often bizarre nature of the Ottoman Empire, with its
devsirme
(the conscription of Christian boys into imperial Ottoman service), harem, imperial court fratricide, and janissaries, he never falls into the politically correct fallacy that Istanbul’s religious and political values were just different from, rather than antithetical to, the worldview of a freer and more vibrant West. Indeed, it is the divide that we still see today.