A Brill Calendar: October 7

The Battle of Lepanto

Few events in maritime history stick as tenaciously in the collective memory of the Western World as the ‘Battle of Lepanto’.

This was an engagement between the fleets of Ottoman Turkey and an ad-hoc alliance of Christian forces; waged on October 7, 1571. Lepanto can’t be found on modern maps; but search Návpaktos, Greece and the bay will appear where the Turks assembled their vessels just before the clash between Half Moon and Cross..

In a sense, it was a ‘much ado about nothing’: Sultan Selim II had cast his eye on the island of Cyprus – then under Venetian control – since he was determined to drive Venice out of eastern Mediterranean waters, off the shores of his realm; a realm which included Egypt under its aegis. The battle was lost by Selim’s enormous fleet, which was commanded by three distinct dignitaries with three distinct tempers & agendas. Still, Venice surrendered Cyprus to him after a two-year hiatus and a proper bargaining process. The Sultan was too clever by far to consider seriously the chance of conquering all of Christian Europe.

Yet: “winner takes all”. The victors of Selim’s extravaganza, capturing more than a hundred galleys and thousands of his subjects, returned to Venice, Rome and Barcelona as saviours of the entire Christian civilization, allegedly on the brink of annihilation by a sinister and godless foe.

It is seldom that the demand for information concerning the devilish phenomenon of the Turk rose so sharply in Western Europe. The ‘linguistic mysteries’ of the adversary were barely known in scholarly circles. Lepanto quickly caused an interest in languages spoken in the Middle East. When Leyden University was founded just four years later, the Arab language graced the roster and curriculum almost from the beginning, thanks to the Academy’s Printer, who was capable of plying typography in this exotic script.