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HISTORY - Lepanto Battle |
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‘… marvelous in our eyes’[1]: placing Lepanto in history Michel de Montaigne
(1570s)[2]
I learnt of the miracle of Lepanto at
St Finbarr’s convent, Brisbane, in the late 1940s when the nuns also told us
that if it looked like rain on the morning of the school fete they would put
the statue of the Virgin into the yard because Jesus would not let his mother
get wet. Both stories circulated at a time of heightened devotion to the Virgin
and to the Rosary promoted by world tours of a statue of Our Lady of Fatima to
advance the five-million strong Blue Army’s Crusade against Godless Communism,
and by Father Patrick Peyton who had been reading about Lepanto in 1942 when he
started to preach that ‘the family that prays together, stays together’, taking
to radio and television to publicise the Rosary. Pius XII in 1951 crowned Our
Lady of Fatima as Queen of the World and declared his devotion to the Mother of
God by naming 1954 as the church’s first Marian Year.[6]
These convictions thrive among members
of the American Society for the Defence of Tradition, Family and Property who venerate
Pius XII, wish that the Second Vatican Council had never happened, and
attribute not only Lepanto but also the 1565 relief of Malta, the withdrawal of
Soviet forces from Austria in 1955 and the 1964 military coup in Brazil to the
Rosary.[7]
John-Paul II put his survival from the 1981 assassination attempt down to Our
Lady of Fatima who, he told his assailant, had deflected the bullet.[8]
To most contemporary Australians, such claims sound quaint and even many Roman
Catholics respond uneasily from within a culture where the TV dinner has long
ago overtaken the family Rosary and Sunday roast. No usable idea is ever utterly lost and
the Neo-Con Crusaders resurrected the defeat of Islam at Lepanto for their war
on Terrorism after 9/11.[9]
The title of Capponi’s 2007 Victory of
the West set the New Criterion’s
Donald Johnson off cannonading ‘then as now’: ‘Lepanto’ is a word that has only lost
its symbolic power in the last generation. In our parish church in Kensington,
there is a stained glass window that depicts the battle. As the church was
bombed in the Blitz, this window dates only from the post-war period. There is
nothing unusual about this. Lepanto is there to remind the faithful that their
civilisation is under constant threat, whether from the Ottomans or the Nazis,
and be defend by force of arms. Not for nothing is the church dedicated to Our
Lady of Victories. Johnston’s
theology overlaps with that of the Tradition, Family and Property in seeing the
Holy League as ‘a coalition of Catholicism and capitalism.’ Despite deploring
the triumph of secularism, even he dare not mention the miraculous power of the
rosary.[10] Before
unraveling the relations between ideas and action on 7 October 1571, historians
of every stamp must navigate the errors of detail that will beset collective
memory about any event. First, the battle did not take place at Lepanto
(Navpatros) but forty nautical miles to the west around what had been the
Curzolaris archipelago until silting extended the shoreline three nautical
miles to the south, leaving Oxia as the only island.[12]
Timing has fared no better than location so that the drift in the Julian calendar
‘between the astronomical and the legal’ means that the battle was fought on
the 17 October.[13] By
adjusting the dates in 1582, Gregory abolished the fortnight in which Lepanto’s
eleventh anniversary would have fallen. Moreover, for the Ottomans, the year
was not 1571 anno domini but 978
dated according to the Prophet’s emigration (Hijri). From 1968, Andrew J. Hess ended the reliance of Western
scholarship on European archives when he also spotlighted the bias of Western
historians in giving next-to-no notice to the Muslim triumph at Djerba in 1560
while lavishing attention on Lepanto.[14]
In a further instance, Western writers treat ‘Turk’ as synonymous with Islam,
despite north Africans supplying not only a sixth of the Ottoman fleet but its
commanders supposing themselves to be direct descendants of the Prophet and
thus superior to the Turk. These corrections
are always in danger of sinking under the weight of Orientalist presumptions
barnacled onto legends about supernatural forces.[15]
Does Lepanto qualify as a miracle?
The outcome was in no sense contrary to the order of nature. It came as a shock
because of the 150 years of Ottoman dominance of the Eastern Mediterranean, but
was no greater surprise than the relief of Malta had been six years earlier.
Had the Holy League fleet become airborne, or had the Venetian provveditore generale of the sea,
Agostino Barbarigo, plucked that fatal arrow from his eye with no loss of
sight, then there would have be something marvelous to investigate. Instead, we
have the coincidence of the Christians reciting the rosary and the fact that
they were triumphant later that day.[16]
Hume’s proposition that there are never enough credible witnesses to a miracle
does not apply. Ten of thousands said the rosary and lived to recount their
victory. The temporal connection is not in dispute. Missing is any violation of
the natural order or to the law of probability. None of these aspects made any
difference to true believers at the time, or to their inheritors today. How would a practitioner of the materialist concept of
history account for Lepanto? From the start, we accept that morale is potent in
any fight, and not only those to the death since, as Marx writes, ‘theory also
becomes a material force as soon as it has gripped the masses’.[17]
Chants, beating shields with swords, trumpets, praying and any form of social
bonding can contribute to victory.[18]
During the English Civil War, both Puritans and Royalists employed astrologers
to assure each side of success.[19]
All such actions are of this world, the behaviour of human beings whose
psychological states are subject to social and physiological stresses and
explanations. What is beyond belief is that Christ or his angels descend on
battlefields.[20] It is,
of course, possible that fighters will convince each other that something of
that sort is happening and are thereby encouraged to fight more effectively. In this vein, materialists deny the
appearance of angels over Mons in 1914, yet we accept that retreating soldiers ached
for some supernatural sign, a need which also ensured that tales about an apparition
would be pushed at home for recruitment. Unable to trace even one of witness of
angelic presence, David Clarke wondered whether talk of the miracle of Mons had
had its origins in a short fiction in which St George and the archers from
Agincourt killed 10,000 Germans without leaving a mark on their bodies. Did a
rumour about a heavenly host merge with this neo-Gothic yarn to become accepted
as fact?[21] In the
early stages of that retreat, a wounded major at St Quentin on 27 August rallied
two broken battalions by beating out the British
Grenadier and Tipperary on a child’s
drum while his bugler played the tunes on a tin whistle. The troops responded because
they had been socialised to recognise the tunes and had been trained to discipline.
The drum and whistle, though bought from a toyshop, were of that man’s world.
The incident allows a place for an individual since other officers had taken
the train to Paris. The men’s reaction expressed esprit, not an emanation from the spirit world.[22] To account for why
both sides at Lepanto convinced themselves that they were armed with supernatural
swords and shields involves documenting the worldly actions that encouraged
such beliefs. Fighters for the Holy League heard the Papal Bull granting total
indulgence to those who died fighting the infidel.[23]
The League’s commander and distaff brother to King Phillip II of Spain, the twenty-four-year
old Don Juan of Austria, promised freedom to the criminals among his rowers,
unchaining and arming them for combat. The Ottomans made the same offer to
their slaves in the expectation that success would fill the benches with new
captives.[24] Although the victory soon became
identified with the Virgin and the Rosary, the emblem that the victors had ‘continually
before their eyes’ on the day itself was that of the crucified Christ. On each
vessel, Jesuits and Capuchin friars, crucifixes in hand, urged on the troops,
chanting the mass and Ave Marias every day.[25]
Don Juan toured his fleet holding aloft the ivory crucifix he had seized during
his recent repression of the Moors around Granada. His flagship, the Real, displayed the papal gift of a
life-size crucifix atop its mainmast.[26]
No less puissant was his exhibiting the head of the Ottoman commander, Muezzinzade Ali Pasha, from the top of his captured
flagship, before sending it around the fleets on a frigate.[27]
The Christogram IHS, taken from the
first three Greek letters in Jesus IHSOYS, was the focal point of the
Papal banner handed to Don Juan to bless the League’s formation, and which he
carried onto the Real,[28]
as well as a pennant with IHS high at the stern.[29]
Around the time of Lepanto, the Jesuits extended IHS to IHSV for In hoc signo vinces, ‘in this sign ye
shall conquer’.[30] As a
call to arms, IHS had been crucial to Christianity because of the legend about
the conversion of the Roman Empire. Before the battle of Mulvian Bridge in 312,
superstition again gripped Constantine the Great, who, fearing the magical
power of his rival, prayed to his dead father’s preferred deity, the Sun. After
the emperor saw a cross blazoned
over the sun with ‘In this conquer’ across the sky, he ordered ‘the heavenly
sign of God’ to be painted on the shields of his troops. Constantine
commissioned a battle standard of gold and precious stones forming Chi and Rho,
the first letters of Christ. The scientific basis for the sighting is the ‘halo
phenomenon’ caused by ice crystals in sunlight, comparable to the drops of
water that form rainbows. Classical scholar A.H.M. Jones severed the tread
between fact and myth: No matter how much the ‘conversion’
has been embroidered and reshaped, it was not a spiritual experience.
Constantine knew and cared nothing for the metaphysical and ethical teaching of
Christianity when he became a devotee of the Christian God: he simply wished to
enlist on his side a powerful divinity, who had, he believed, spontaneously
offered him a sign. His conversion was initially due to a meteorological
phenomenon which he happened to witness at a critical moment of his career. Constantine’s
conversion was typically syncretic, blurring the Unconquerable Sun with the Christ,
whose followers venerated Sun-day. The bishops knew better than to try to
correct the theology of the Pontifex Maximus as they had the heresy of Arius.[31]
Shortly after the emperor’s death in 337, his mother, Helena, was being
credited with the discovery of the true cross.[32]
These marvels were known throughout the Holy League. Their improbability had no
bearing on the effect they had on the morale of men fearing judgement as much
as death. Earlier in the sixteenth century, the
Papacy had revived the story about the Donation of Constantine according to
which the Emperor had granted the Western Empire to the bishop of Rome - a new Pontifex Maximus. After Lutherans
revived its discrediting as a Medieval forgery, a succession of popes commissioned
six cycles of paintings around Constantine. In the early 1590s, the workshop producing
the cycle for the Lateran Palace inserted a depiction of Lepanto – ‘projected
with the dramatic immediacy of a report from the front’ - between those of
Constantine’s vision of the cross and his Donation.[33]
Additions to the fourth-century Arch of Constantine put Lepanto on its left,
his Mulvian Bridge victory on the right and, across the centre, Pius’s the obsession
of Pius to retake Constantinople on the way to reclaiming the Sepulcher in
Jerusalem.[34] Although Christians were certain that the
Rosary could affect the outcome, Pius V intensified his prayer and fasting out
of fears that God would again give the day to the Infidel in order to scourge
His One True Church for the sins of Venetians and Spaniards, not to mention
Protestants.[35] With
the Ottoman flagship displaying a banner into which the name of Allah had been embroidered
29,800 times with gold thread, Islamic iconoclasm did not put its warriors at a
psychological disadvantage.[36]
Similarly, in place of receiving Absolution and the Blessed Sacrament as preparations
for entry into heaven, the Muslims knew from the Prophet that ‘cleanliness is
half the faith’ and so performed the
ablutions stipulated for formal prayers or in order to kiss the Qur’an.[37]
This predilection for ‘cleanliness in war’, as an English traveler noted, did
bring military disadvantages because the handling of small arms made the
fighters’ hands ‘black and sooty, their clothes full of spots …’, encouraging
many of their noblest to stick to swords and bows.[38]
Muslim expectation that prayer would
deliver a miracle was less than in Christianity. Islam recognises three primary
forms of prayer: the Salat five times a day; Dhikr, a ritual not unlike the Rosary,
for remembering the Divine Name; and Du’a as a personal plea.[39]
Every day, all of Ali’s men performed the Salat. On the day of the battle, most
would have been able to do so safely only at dawn – and the survivors perhaps before
sleep. One line of theologians insists that the Salat be performed even during
battle, albeit in a reduced form, Salat al-Khawf. One variant is that the faithful
take it in turns of praying and standing guard, which would have been possible only
on the galleys not engaged by noon. Had the main fleet followed the strict
interpretation, a host of angels would have been necessary to protect them as
they bowed towards Mecca.[40]
However, throughout the hours of ‘fear’, all could ceaselessly recite any of
the ninety-nine names of Allah, Dhikr, a devotion which the Prophet had
declared would secure greater esteem on the Day of Resurrection than a man who
‘wielded his sword against unbelievers and idolaters until it was broken.’[41]
Islam is grounded on two miracles:
creation and the Qur’an, in which divine thought is rendered as earthly speech,
and revealed to the Prophet by the angel Gabriel.[42]
Mohammad had been granted no miracles though the Qur’an records those carried
out by Jewish prophets and some attributed to Christian saints, notably Mary,
mother of Jesus. Believers could recall that, in the time of the Prophet, angels
had intervened to help believers at the battles of Badr and Hunayn, though it
would have been presumptuous to pray for their reappearance. All could have
drawn hope from the teaching that miracles remind believers that the unjust
will be annihilated. Muslims had the surety that Allah would not grant a
miracle to the enemy since their point was to convert unbelievers. Moreover, a
number of folk tales grew up about miraculous happenings so that it is likely
that, many among the 30,000 Ottoman troops from a jumble of cultures and
traditions, looked forward to a ‘clear sign’ of Divine favour. On top of such
accretions, Sufis were masters of legerdemain and known for their sorcery.
Superstition flared when a flight of crows hovered over the fleet as it emerged
from the gulf of Lepanto - was it a good omen, or ill.[43] Without
erasing the significance of religious belief for morale, its contribution to
success has to be set against the massiness of men, money and materials, in
this case, securing the funds to marshal 200 ships and 30,000 troops. Receiving
the consecrated host on the morn of battle stiffened morale but could not
supply the physical energy needed to pull on an oar, haul a cannon or wield a
sword so that ‘without the wheat and biscuit from Naples and Sicily … Lepanto
could not have taken place’.[44]
Equally important were the ‘Three Graces’, the term given to the taxes,
including one on the sale of indulgences (cruzada),
that the Pope again allowed Phillip II to extract from the Spanish clergy in
1570 to win him to the League.[45]
The prospect of higher revenues sent Genoese bankers to Madrid with loans at
favourable rates of interest, thereby underwriting the fleet.[46]
Underpinning all Spanish policies were exactions on the peasants, the least of which
was the war tax, fonsadero.[47] Hence, bringing the three rivals
together involved filthy lucre to underwrite the preparations plus an agreement
on how to divide the spoils, with Spain promised half. Although the prospect of
earthly gain often requires a patina of religious conviction, in no sense did
the Christians agree to engage the Ottomans merely to get their hands on booty.
To the extent that commercial interests operated they did so to secure existing
territories or access to trade in the longer term, a blessing which Spain,
England, Venice and France mostly secured by treaties with the Porte.[48]
If the prospect of loot spurred valour as had happened on the Crusades, it also
resulted in the impotence of the League after its surprising success. So fierce
was its falling apart over future spoils,[49]
that a distant observer could be forgiven for wondering whether its signatories
had forgotten to recite the Rosary. Reports
of an alliance between Spain, the Vatican and Venice had set off rejoicing in
advance of the arrival of Spanish ships. Don Juan inspired confidence because
he came from suppressing the Moriscos uprising across Andalusia.[50]
He won yet another victory before the enemy had been sighted by integrating the
rival forces and securing their agreement on the limited objective of smashing
the infidel fleet. He reported that his greatest victory had been over his own
emotions in order to maintain the alliance after the Venetian commander, Sebastiano Venier, almost wrecked the League five
days before the battle when, without consulting Don Juan, he hanged four Spanish
fighters whom he alleged had instigated a murderous brawl on one of his galleys.
Don Juan overruled advice from eight of his eleven officials to do the same to
Venier, instead, excluding him from their councils.[51]
To reduce the chance of desertion, the flagships of Spain, the Republic and the
Papacy fought side by side in the center squadron, while galleys from each ally
were intermingled.[52]
As they confronted the enemy, the wind changed, forcing the Ottomans to furl
their canvas and start rowing.[53]
Don Juan gave thanks to God by dancing a galliard.[54]
Setting boundaries to the impress of
the spiritual is one matter. The disposition of the Christian navy is another. The
effectiveness of the Venetian squadron was improved because each warship
carried its own carpenter, caulker and oar-maker who overcame difficulties
which no priest could solve by prayer alone.[55]
Faith without work leaves fighters for dead. Naval historian, J.F. Guilmartin, underlines
that ‘galley warfare was a chancy business. A moment of indecision, panic or
lack of thorough planning could bring sudden and complete disaster upon a
superior fleet.’ As the hours passed, Lepanto proved a rarity in military history: a battle
in which both sides fought skillfully and well, where the random strokes of
chance which infest the battlefield were largely neutralized by the skill of
the commanders against whom they fell, and where the stronger side won – though
by a narrow margin and not in the expected way. Guilmartin
attributes the victory to three elements: ‘the greater weight of the Christian
Center, the inability of the Muslims to outflank the Christian fleet and
precipitate a melee … and the disruptive effect of the fire of the galeasses on
the Muslim array …’ Galleasses were a Venetian innovation which carried five
times as much artillery as an ordinary galley while their higher freeboards impeded
landing parties and helped gun crews to keep firing. Venice could not match the
Ottoman Empire galley-for-galley but her galeasses were more than a match for
several of them, a fact of death which Ali Pasha had not learned, perhaps
because of his recent victories over Venetian forces.[56]
Galley battles were not duels. Ships
moved in dense formations to fight with small arms and at arms length, deploying
artillery as a last-minute prelude in order to disable as many infantry immediately
prior to a head-on ram for boarding. Hence, the cannon barrels were filled with
anti-personnel shot. More devastating, because of their rate of fire, were the
swivel-mounted harquebuses which disgorged a deadlier rain than could Ottoman archers.[57]
The aim was to capture not sink the opposing fleet since its ships, including
their equipment and slaves were booty for the commanders, with the rest being
grabbed by surviving victors.[58]
The renewal of Greek fire by the commandant of the Papal Guard, Gabrio
Serbelloni, accounts for why so many Ottoman vessels were burnt beyond salvaging.[59] Since broadsides were a little way in
the future, and a cannon cost nearly a quarter the price of the hull,
commentators have wondered why navies had spent on them at all if they could be
used only once and to little effect (except against fortresses). The
conventional view has been that cannons were of limited use because, first, there
was not enough time to reload, secondly, the gunners were exposed to arrows, thirdly,
there was little chance of reaching a distant target in choppy seas and –
finally - should a shot happen to hit anything, a metal ball would do little
damage, although stone ones splintered causing havoc on deck. A recent counter-view
does not overturn the consensus but shows that multiple cannon shots were
possible and useful. The gunners were at greater risk when preparing to fire
than during a reload since they then had the protection of the corsia because recoil had driven the gun
and its mount back eleven metres to a pad of ropes just short of the main mast.
Once reloaded, a 50-pounder weighing 2,400kg could be on the bow again within
seven seconds thanks to oarsmen yanking it on a well-greased oak sled. Lepanto became
the prime instance of multiple cannon shots after Don Juan told his captains to
fire whenever they thought they could do the most damage but to retain two
rounds for the ramming. A first-hand account from 1572 says that the centre
squadron of the Christian lines fired as many as five times thereby preventing some
of the enemy from discharging all their guns, several of which were found
loaded upon capture.[60]
The hail of shot from the Holy Alliance seems no less providential than
repeated Hail Marys. Although word of the outcome did not
reach Rome for fourteen days, the Pope enjoyed an epiphany on the night of the
7 October, which, out of modesty, he kept to himself until after the Venetian
courier arrived; reports of this visitation advanced the cause of his
beatification in 1672.[61]
A depiction of His Holiness’s foreknowledge imagines the Virgin and Child
floating above the battle as if it were visible through the Papal windows. The
pictorial ordering is a conventional arrangement of interior/exterior but here
represents a mental interior – revelation of victory – against an exterior
hundreds of kilometers to the south-east; the crucifix on the left recalls the
one he had sent to Don Juan and its reproduction on the banner. One need be
neither Protestant nor unbeliever to treat these reports and portrayals for
what they are. It is quite possible that Pius, the erstwhile Grand Inquisitor,
did experience some such apparition in a state of altered consciousness induced
by ruthless fasting and a diet of asses’ milk to treat the stomach ailment that
killed him seven months later.[62] Following
the Crusades, which had left the Infidels in control of the Holy Land, the
rival faiths had pushed each other back and forth, when not destroying or betraying
their co-religionists. This see-sawing of power brought victory for the Grand Turk
at the island of Djerba in 1560, defeat at Malta in 1565, and the capture of Venice’s
last hold on Cyprus at Famagusta two months before Lepanto. Indeed, the author
of the four-volume The Papacy and the
Levant, Kenneth M. Setton, writes that ‘[t]he Christian Expedition of 1570
to save the island of Cyprus from the Turks was to be one of the notable
failures of the century’.[63] Above all, the Ottomans had not been
defeated at sea since 1416.[64]
A Christian victory in what proved to be the last of the galley confrontations made
the ascription of a miraculous power at Lepanto as inevitable as were celebrations
recalled for their magnificence.[65]
The maritime triumph was ‘[I]mmortalised in a massive literature, on canvases
of Heroic dimension, in epic poetry, on commemorative medals, and in
Renaissance music.’[66]
The pageantry in Barcelona outlasted the Holy League by decades, voicing
concerns inimical to the dominance of Phillip and his successors.[67] Typical of the initial mythopoeic was
a lost painting by Domenico Tintoretto which had Christ and his Mother being
worshipped by Pope, Doge and King and their respective commanders, Marcantonio
Colonna, Sebastiano Venier and Don Juan.[68]
One 1572 engraving shows the three Christian leaders, with apposite saints, in
a galley ‘dragging the whole Turkish fleet behind them in a great net’.[69]
Giorgio Vasari’s ‘The Christian fleet at Messina before the battle of Lepanto
in 1571’ is an elaborate figurative allegory against a naturalistic backdrop of
ships at anchor. In the lower left, the three powers are depicted as females
with the Papal figure wearing the triple Crown; in the front centre, putti
support a framed map of the area; to the right, a skeleton looms over weeping
and slaughtered Ottomans. The top half details the Christian fleet with the
Venetian galleasses standing out from flanks of saw-toothed galleys jammed
together. Titian’s ‘Phillip II after the victory of Lepanto, offers the prince
Don Fernando to victory’ is an oblique tribute to the League, perhaps masking
the ‘Prudent King’s’ suspicion that Venice stood to reap where Spain had sown. Six large canvases by Luca Cambiaso in
the Escorial from the mid-1580s and a suite of portraits in Santa Maria
Maggiore of Venetian captains such as the Prince of Urbino in gilded armour, stand
out from scores of paintings by artists, like Andrea Vicentino, known now only
to specialists. Emerging unscathed from one of the most lethal battles in
history, individuals attributed their safety to their favourite saint; for
instance, an anonymous Greek donor commissioned a stock-in-trade icon painter
to honour St Cyprian, patron of Cyprus - which Venice was about to surrender.[70]
A further essay would be required to analyse relevant works by Veronese in
terms of perspective as symbolic form and allegory as a Mannerist device falling
out of favour since the Council of Trent.[71] Lepanto fever spread to Protestant England
where King James’s 1585 poem Lepanto,
which identifies Don John as that ‘Papist bastard’, could be read as an
allegory for the persecution of Protestants;[72]
as the author of a manual on how to identify a witch, James had no trouble in accepting
the appearance of the Archangel Gabriel at Venice to urge commitment to the
League.[73]
The battle and the poem were at the back of Shakespeare’s imagination when he
penned The tragedy of Othello the Moor of Venice for a 1604
performance at the court of the new crowned monarch.[74]
Notwithstanding commemorations without
surcease, any notion that Lepanto might have ‘left an indelible mark upon the
history of modern Europe’[75]
is truer for story-telling than for lived experience during the 1570s. The
Christians proved more adept at internecine warfare than at following through
on their miraculous gift.[76]
Central to this inability to recombine were disputes over who should get what
from territories yet to be won back from the heathen. Don Juan wanted a tenth
of all the spoils from Lepanto and imagined himself on the way to being the
king of Albania, or Algeria, if not both.[77] Tracing the mutual suspicions of the
three Holy League signatories, Setton observes that the ‘colossal expense’ of
the 1572 ‘expedition achieved nothing but the capture of a Turkish galley’.[78]
In August, French Catholics were too busy massacring Huguenots to join the
defence of their faith, having signed a commercial treaty with the Turk in
1568.[79]
Venice ceded Cyprus during 1573, a loss which the Signora felt as an amputation
of an arm while the Grand Turk could dismiss Lepanto as a singed beard which
would regrow. Indeed, spearheaded by the Algerian galleys that had escaped
Lepanto, an Ottoman fleet larger than either at Lepanto blocked any Christian
re-conquest of lands to the east before turning westwards to raze Spanish forts
between Sicily and North Africa as steps towards retaking Tunis in 1574. Spain
squandered resources on religious wars in the Netherlands,[80]
thereby contributing to that reverse and to the recurrence of state bankruptcy
a year later, 1575.[81]
Phillip II parleyed with the Moor before the catastrophe at Alcazar in 1578
brought the death of Portugal’s king Don Sebastian, leading Setton to conclude that
‘[t]he Porte was more firmly established in North Africa after Lepanto than it
had been previously.’[82]
By 1580, the Ottomans faced no contest there but made no further attempt to
retake Spain. Instead, ‘[A]ll along the military frontier in the western
Mediterranean, rulers had concluded that an appeal to religious warfare would
not substantially change the space of respective civilisations.’[83]
Small wonder then that Voltaire mocked believers for elevating the importance
of Lepanto since its aftermath might well lead one to ‘imagine that the Turks
had won’,[84] though,
by 1759, he surely knew that the 1570s had seen an end of the expansion of
Islam. Two
hundred years further on, Fernand Braudel claimed a perspective which allowed
more impact to Lepanto in its own day yet reduced its significance by several
orders of magnitude.[85]
A battle won or lost is what Braudel and the Annales School look down upon ‘as a glaring example of the very
limitations of “l’histoire evenementielle”,’
in contrast to the ‘longue duree’ built
upon demography, climatology and mentalite.[86] Hence, Braudel re-evaluated Lepanto by
tracking the 200-year drift away from the Mediterranean into the Atlantic as
the cockpit of global power and trade, beginning with the Portuguese assault on
the Gran Canaries[87]
and continuing with their slaving raids along the Africa’s west coast until
they rounded the Cape to reach India by 1498, Canton in 1517 and Japan by 1543.
Venetians, ever alert to their profits through the Levant, recognised the
threat of competition from sea routes to the spice islands and in 1504 proposed
reopening the canal through Suez.[88]
The sea-borne empires
found technical expression during the four years prior to Lepanto when the
Flemish mathematician, Gerardus Mercator, (who named America), devised a method
for the cylindrical projection of charts and published one integrating these
new worlds.[89] Navigators
had redrawn more than maps. By remaking the sinews of war through command over hitherto
unimaginable resources of labour, precious metals and luxuries, a scattering of
tiny ships had had more impact on the future of Venice, the Hapsburgs and all
Muslims than did the 500 galleys crammed together in a corner of the
Mediterranean for a few hours on 7 October 1571. The defence of Goa and of Chaul
that year against Muslim forces from India and Indonesia ‘was rightly regarded
by contemporaries as the Portuguese equivalent in the Indian Ocean of Don Juan
of Austria’s victory over the Turks at Lepanto.’[90]
‘adequate
causation’ Scepticism about the results from Lepanto sails close to
Max Weber’s commentaries on the historiography proposed by Eduard Meyer[91]
in 1902 when he singled out the Greek victory over the Persians at Marathon in
490 BC as having guaranteed the persistence of Classical virtues and arts.[92]
Meyer took no interest in how those ideas contributed to the outcome. His claim
was that the Athenians had secured the survival of certain ideals across two
millennia.[93] That
Marathon has been recalled from time to time is beyond dispute. For instance,
Veronese’s The Family of Darius before
Alexander (c.1570) was viewed as an allegory of Lepanto; the oration in
Venice for those who had died there compared the Grand Turk with Xerxes.[94]
That Athenian ideals became the matrix of social, cultural and political
practices for more than two millennia is of a different order. Must a Persian
victory mean no Caesars, no Christianity, no feudalism, no capitalism? By
dissolving the actualities of the past into the transmission of ideas, Meyer convinced
many of his contemporaries that it did, succeeding, in part, because his
embrace of Greek ideals was code for reactionary Romanticism and chauvinism.
Nothing horrified him more than the extension of Athenian democracy to the
German proletariat. In keeping with these preferences, Meyer and his ilk
marginalised three Athenian practices which did persist without a break into
the twentieth-century: slavery, empire and war.[95] Like Meyer, Weber did
not interest himself in the Persian Wars as military operations, beyond arguing
that victory at Marathon had been decisive only because it allowed the Greeks
to build a fleet for Salamis where they inflicted a greater defeat eleven years
later.[96]
Embedded in Weber’s response is his view that, in order to demonstrate that one
battle could have had anything like the consequences attributed to it by Meyer,
social scientists, including historians, would have to forge links in a chain of
‘adequate causation’ between 490 BC and late nineteenth-century Europe, a
reconstruction which he initiated by arguing that the Greek victories had
strengthened the hand of the civic-minded faction in Athens against its magical
cultists, so that any effect from Marathon was not exogenous upon a distant
battlefield but endogenous to Athenian power structures. Weber was reiterating
his fondness for administration, rationalism and belief as the elements through
which to interpret social behaviour. Like every aspect of human action, each
of Weber’s trio of terrains deserves to be explored with more precision than
can be attained by interpolating an event into a longue duree, and each merits greater significance than is achieved
by distinguishing short, medium and long-term consequences. All consequences are
tied to causes, whether long-chain or proximate, through shifts in a ‘hierarchy
of mediations’, the heuristic failure that Sartre identified among Fifties
French Marxists.[97] In
the spirit of meeting that criticism, our pursuit of the impact of faith on the
Christian victory at Lepanto has credited the power of prayer and a belief in
miracles to sustain morale and has traced the this-worldly means by which
particulars of faith were actualised. Despite treating an acceptance of the
supernatural with seriousness, if not at face value, any attempt to interpret sixteenth-century
convictions concerning the efficacy of the Rosary encounters questions more
profound than can be met by balancing the fire-power of galleasses against Ali
Pasha’s tactics, or weighing the appeal of Papal Indulgences against Qur’anic
promises of Paradise. Testing as it is to measure those considerations, the
insurmountable obstacle is that everyone at Lepanto understood every aspect of
their experience through a cosmology light-years from our acceptance of a heliocentric
solar system whirling as specks through a universe which has been expanding for
more than thirteen billion years. Moreover, Christians in the late sixteenth
century inhabited a world in which a divine intervention was nothing out of the
ordinary but one more expression of a world sustained by an omnipotent,
omniscient and ever-present personal tripartite Deity who, surrounded by choirs
of angels and galleries of saints, was looking down on the earth as the
pinnacle and purpose of his works. The incarnate second person of this divinity
paid especial heed to his Blessed Mother when she sought his aid on behalf of
sinners for whose redemption he had suffered and died on the cross. Into the 1700s,
Malebranche defended a Cartesian dualism by representing every human action as
the creator’s bridging of mind and body.[99]
Today’s contributors to the Catholic
Historical Review endorse such doctrines but not even the Holy Father, having
absorbed deep time and constant change, is able to rewind his apprehension of
the natural world into the common sense prevalent during the Catholic
Reformation. Hence, the question of how it was possible for the best educated of
that era to expect a miracle does not arise any more than does the almost
universal acceptance of alchemy, astrology and the burning of witches. Accepting that mentalites differ across the centuries is the first step.
Specifying the structure of previous ones is harder. Getting one’s mind inside
an opposed way of seeing the world to ‘re-experience the feeling’ (Nachfuhlen) of an individual from a prior
age is closer to the impossible. From the 1870s, German social thinkers, often
neo-Kantians, sought to do just that in order to counter the materialisms merging
the natural and social sciences, and being absorbed by the German
working-class. As one reassertion of ‘spiritual forces in public affairs’, Wilhelm
Dilthey, professor of philosophy at Berlin from 1882, published Introduction to the Science of the Mind.
Intellectual honesty kept him searching for a method to write history as if one
could re-live the past. Accepting that his first attempts had reduced ‘life’ to
the psychological, but repelled by any purely physical explanation of thought
processes, he came to an uneasy rest with phenomenology. Dilthey faced the
egocentric problem: if knowledge is inner consciousness, how can we know a mind
other than our own?[100]
Materialists reason that because language, and thereby thinking, are social
products, we can reduce the distance between mentalites.[101]
In keeping with
Dilthey’s hope that poetry opened the path to the ‘sympathetic understanding’
essential for historians,[102]
Meyer claimed the privileges of a poet to intuit an utterly subjective account
from the chaos that he saw in human life.[103]
Weber bridled.[104]
Determined to rebut Meyer’s lop-sided Idealism, he was no less anxious to hold
the line against the mechanical materialism of the Marxists of his day by wedding
‘value-free objectivity’ onto an ‘empathetic understanding’ (verstehen) of motives to the neglect of
actions and outcomes. Just as Weber judged Meyer a better historian than
historiographer, Mary Fulbrook proposes that Weber’s empirical investigations
benefited from his failure to practice in them what he preached.[105] Self-evidently, to
the extent that religions claim that empirical facts or causal influences on
empirical facts have their origin in some sort of ‘supernatural’ [force] [these
religions] must come into conflict with every scientific truth. Weber’s method in cultural studies leaves no more room
for spooks than does Marx’s materialist conception of history. No amount of
intellectualising, Weber realised, will stop believers from accepting miracles:
The steady and slow influence of the
practical consequences of our conception of nature and history will perhaps
over time lead to a fading away of these ecclesiastical powers …. But no manner
of anti-clericalism, oriented towards ‘metaphysical’ naturalism, can bring that
about.[107] He does not put his hope in his ‘conception’ of nature
and history but in its practical consequences, an expectation in keeping with
Marx’s view that religion will fade away only through the abolition of the
conditions that make it necessary.[108] The persistence of those everyday conditions has
sustained belief in a second sequence of miracles, one which is so remote from
the morale-boost of praying together in the face of death as to require a
different line of explication. The first case is how to interpret a conviction among
Barcelona’s faithful that the figure of Christ (known as ‘Santo Christo’) on
the life-size crucifix from the topmast of Don Juan’s flagship had assumed its
right-leaning posture in order to get itself out of the way of a cannon ball.
The absence of any contemporary report of this miracle has bequeathed a
richness from its retellings. Here, a materialist investigator would first
compare the look of this crucifix with those being produced around Rome in the
second half of the sixteenth-century to see whether the pose was unusual. Materialists, nonetheless, will not be
surprised to hear that the miracle of an agile stick figure has spawned a further
miraculous intervention. Suspended in front of the chapel containing the bent crucifix
in Barcelona’s Santa Eulalia basilica is a model of Don Juan’s Real, the direction of which indicates
where fisherman should seek their catches. Local sceptics attribute the
movements of this ‘supernatural wind-vane’ to the draughts from opening and
closing the cathedral doors.[109]
Similar forensics are
called for if we are to understand the attribution to the apostle James of the
human remains found early in the ninth century in the north-west of Spain when
a star hovered over the field where a corpse lay buried. James then became the
patron warrior saint of Christians during their re-conquest with the battle cry
Santiago y cierra Espana! (St James
and close in, Spain!).[110]
Galician atheists know that there is no heaven from which James can intercede
on behalf of tourist promoters along the pilgrimage Santiago de Compostella
but, after 1,300 years of Christian propaganda, Iberian unbelievers find it
harder to accept that James might never have set foot on their peninsula. Despite the outcome
of wars being conditioned by beliefs about another world, neither Virgin nor
Prophet can interfere with the course of events in this one. A measure of the
vulgarity of bourgeois historians is that almost none of their accounts of the battle,
Capponi excepted, so much as mentions the military efficacy of prayer.[111]
Materialists acknowledge the significance of mass belief during battle as
thoroughly as we spurn the capacity of dead wood to defy the laws of physics.
Although Marxists nowadays can dismiss any notion of inanimate objects shifting
stations as absurd without being accused of crude reductionism, we still are
obliged to account for the creation and persistence of the legends around the ‘Santo
Cristo’, as we do those regarding Santa Diego at the opposite corner of Spain.
Irrespective of one’s beliefs about the Real’s
crucifix, the wellsprings of its 400-year veneration as an exemplar of the
Cross’s triumphing over the Crescent have never been confined to a single naval
battle at the far end of the Mediterranean but continue to invoke a crusade
fought out for more than a thousand years in every corner of the patria. On 19 May 1939, Generalissimo
Franco presented his ‘sword of victory’ to the Primate of all Spain under the
banner that Pius V had given to Don Juan.[112]
The manipulation of In hoc signo for
political ends in Madrid would have lost some of its credibility had it not been
threaded through the daily miracle of putting fish on Catalan tables. It is
from within such ‘sensuous human activity’ that practitioners of the materialist
conception of history begin our quest for explanations of belief in the
supernatural, ever mindful of Montaigne’s caution: How
many of the things that constantly come into our purview must be deemed
monstrous or miraculous if we apply such terms to anything which outstrips our
reason![113] [1] Psalm 118: 23. [2] Michel de Montaigne, Essay XXVI, The Complete Essays, Allen Lane The Penguin Press, London, 1991, p. 200. [3] Ludwig Pastor, History of the popes from the close of the Middle Ages, volume 18, Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., London, 1929, pp. 443-4. [4] Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the age of Philip II, Fontana, London, 1973, pp. 1088-1142; Hugh Biceno, Crescent and Cross, The Battle of Lepanto 1571, Cassell, London, 2003; Andrew Wheatcroft, Infidels: a history of the conflict between Christendom and Islam, Random House, New York, 2003, pp. 3-35; Niccolo Capponi, Victory of the West, The Great Christian-Muslim Clash at the Battle of Lepanto, DaCapo Press, Cambridge, MASS., 2007; Lincoln Paine, The Sea and Civilization A Maritime History of the World, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2013, pp. 434-6. [5] The New Catholic Encyclopedia, volume 12, Thompson Gale, Detroit, 2003, pp. 373-6; Marina Warner, Alone of All Her Sex, the myth and cult of the Virgin Mary, Vintage, London, 2000, pp. 305-14; Hugh H. Davis, ‘A Rosary Confraternity Charter of 1579 and the Cardinal of Santa Susanna’, American Catholic Historical Review, 48 (3), October 1962, pp. 321-42. Muslims, especially Sufis, use Rosaries to tell the ninety-nine Names of God. [6] New Catholic Encyclopedia, ‘Fatima’, vol. 5, pp. 643-44; ‘Fr Peyton’, vol. 11, p. 222. [7] www.tfp.org [8] Ali Murat Yelt, ‘Fatima, The Pope and
Mehmet Ali Agca”, Islamic Studies, 32
(4), Winter 1993, pp. 447-60. [9] Hans-Gerog Betz and Susi Meret,’Revisiting Lepanto: the political mobilisation against Islam in contemporary Western Europe’, Patterns of Prejudice, 43 (3-4), 2009, pp. 313-34. [10] New Criterion, June 2007, pp. 75-79; a review by Gregory Melleuish, Quadrant, April 2008, pp. 62-65. [11] Ernst Troeltsch, The Social Teachings of the Christian Churches, vol. II, Harper Torchbook, New York, 1960, pp. 1002-4, quoted Paul Peachy, ‘Marxist Historiography of the Radical Reformation: Causality or Covariation?’, Sixteenth Century Essays and Studies, 1, January 1970, p. 8. [12] Peter Throckmorton et al., ‘The Battle of Lepanto, Search and Survey Mission [Greece}
1971-72’, International Journal of
Nautical Archeology and Underwater Exploration, 2 (1), March 1973, pp.
123-7. [13] Niccolo Capponi, Victory of the West, The Great Christian-Muslim Clash at the Battle of Lepanto, DaCapo Press, Cambridge, MASS., 2007, pp. viii, xv and 253-4. [14] Andrew C. Hess, ‘The Battle of Lepanto and
Its Place in Mediterranean History’, Past
& Present, 57, November 1972, pp. 53-73; Andrew C. Hess, ‘The Moriscos:
An Ottoman Fifth Column in Sixteenth-Century Spain’, American History Review, 74 (1), October 1968, pp. 11, n. 41. Hess
had worked as foreman in a steel-mill before mastering Middle-Eastern languages
and history. [15] Tamin Ansary, Destiny disrupted: a history of the world through Islamic eyes,
Public Affairs, New York, 2009, p. 221; Lepanto makes it into Edward W. Said, Orientalism, Penguin, London, 1995, p.
74. [16] David Hume, Theory of knowledge: containing the Enquiry concerning human understanding, etc, Nelson, Edinburgh, 1951, pp. 119-21. [17] Marx-Engels
Collected Works (M-ECW), vol. 3,
Lawrence & Wishart, London, 1975, p.
182. [18] Kenneth M. Setton, The Papacy and the Levant, 1204-1571, volume 4, American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia, 1984, p. 1056. [19] Henry Rusche, ‘Merlini Anglici: Astrology and Propaganda from 1644 to 1651’, English Historical Review, 80 (315), April 1965, pp. 322-33. [20] Setton, p. 1056, quoting an eye-witness chronicler, Gianpietro Contarini. [21] David Clarke, The Angel of Mons, Wiley, Chichester, 2004, pp. 229-46; reprinted in Clarke, pp. 247-50. [22] General Sir Tom Bridges, Alarms and Excursions: reminiscences of a soldier, Longmans Green, London, 1938, pp. 86-9; William Philpott, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, volume 7, OUP, 2004, p. 594. [23] Setton, pp. 964 and 967; Pastor, pp. 425 and 441. [24] Capponi, pp. 255 and 260. [25] Carlos Fuentes, El Espejo Enterrado, Fondo de Cultura Economica, Mexico, 1992, p. 171, my thanks to Peter Curtis for this reference; Seddon, p. 964. The power of the sacrament did not convince priests to venture into the typhus-infected lower decks, Seddon pp. 975 and 1010-11. [26] Capponi, p. 264; Pastor, p. 414-5; Setton, p. 1024. [27] Pastor, p. 421; Setton, pp. 1058, 1060, cf. 1067; Robert Appelbaum,’War and Peace in The Lepanto’, Peter C. Herman (ed.), Reading Monarch’s Writing: The Poetry of Henry VIII, Mary Stuart, Elizabeth I, and James VI/I, Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Tempe, 2002, pp.197 and 317, lines 829-41; Setton’s divergent accounts cannot shield Don Juan’s reputation from so barbaric a deed given so many more to his credit in Andalusia and the Netherlands. [28] Michael Aronna, ‘The Mapping of Empire,
Evolving Notions of Christendom and Europe in the Poetry of Fernando de Herrera
Commemorating the Battle of Lepanto’, Andrew Davison and Himadeep Muppidi
(eds), Europe and its boundaries: words
and worlds, within and beyond, Lexington Books, Plymouth, 2009, pp. 145-70;
Wheatcroft, 2003, p. 3. [29] H.S. Vaughan, ‘The Santo Cristo of Lepanto’, The Mariner’s Mirror, X (4), October 1924, p. 331; Pastor, p. 430, n. 2. [30] Kirsteen Noreen, ‘Ecclesiae militantis triumphi: Jesuit Iconography and the Counter-Revolution’, Sixteenth Century Journal, 29 (3), August 1998, pp. 698-715. [31] A.H.M. Jones, Constantine and the Conversion of Europe, Collier Books, New York, 1962, pp. 84-90; for an attempt at redemption, H.A. Drake, ‘Constantine and Consensus’, Church History, 64 (1), March 1995, pp. 1-15; Fergus J. King, ‘In hoc signo A literary and social analysis of Constantine’s dream’, St Mark’s Review, 225, August 2013 (3), pp. 16-26; New Catholic Encyclopedia, ‘Constantine, volume IV, pp. 179-83; ‘Donation’, pp. 860-1. [32] J.W. Drijvers, Helena Augusta, the Mother of Constantine the Great, and the Legend of her Finding the one True Cross, E.J. Brill, Leiden, 1992, pp. 79-146; Stephen G. Nichols, ‘In Hoc Signo Vincis: Constantine, Mother of Harm’, Marilyn Aronberg Lavin (ed.), Piero della Francesca and His Legacy, Studies in the History of Art, 48, 1995, pp. 37ff. [33] Jack Freiberg, ‘In the Sign of the Cross:
The Image of Constantine in the Art of Counter-Reformation Rome’, Lavin (ed.),
pp. 76-8 and 86; Pauline Moffitt Watts, ‘A Mirror for the Pope: Mapping the
“Corpus Christi” in the Galleria Delle Carte Geografiche’, I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance, 10, 2005, p. 182n. [34] Pastor, p. 441; Iain Fenlon, Music and Culture in Late Renaissance Rome, OUP, New York, 2002, pp. 155-6. [35] Pastor, pp. 399, 401 and 423-4. [36] Pastor, p. 420; determined to acquit Pius of conniving in the Bartholomew Eve Massacre, A Lynn Martin fails to notice the Papal gaze fixed eastwards, ‘Papal Policy and the European Conflict, 1559-1572’, The Sixteenth Century Journal, 11 (2), Summer 1980, pp. 35-48. [37] ‘Ghusl’, Encyclopedia of Islam, E.J. Brill, Leiden, 1965, vol. II, p. 1104; Cyril Glasse, ‘Ablutions’, The Concise Encyclopedia of Islam, Stacey International, London, 2008, pp. 15-16. [38] Quoted Halil Inacik, ‘The Socio-Political effects of the diffusion of fire-arms in the Middle East’, V. J. Parry and M.E. Yapp (eds), War, Technology and Society in the Middle East, OUP, London, 1975, p. 199. [39] ‘Du’a’, Encyclopedia of Islam, vol. II, 1965, pp. 617-8; ‘Salat’, 1995, vol. VIII, pp. 925-35; ‘Dhikr’, 1965, vol. II, p. 223-6; Concise Encyclopedia of Islam, pp. 355-7 and 130. Specific prayers exist, including, not surprisingly, one for rain, istiska’. [40] Encyclopedia of Islam, 1995, vol. VIII, pp. 934-5. [41] Quoted Glasse, p. 130. [42] ‘Mu’djiza’, Encyclopedia of Islam, 1971, vol. VII, p. 295; ‘Karama’, 1975, vol. IV, pp. 615-6; Jane Dammen McAuliffe (ed.), Encyclopedia of the Qur’an, E.J. Brill, Leiden, 2003, vol. 3, pp. 392-99; Maxime Rodinson, Muhammad, Taurus Parke, London, 2002, pp. 69-107. [43] Capponi, p. 257. [44] Geoffrey Parker and I.A.A Thompson, ‘The Battle of Lepanto, 1571 The Costs of Victory’, The Mariner’s Mirror, LXIV (1), February 1978, p. 14; H.G. Koeningsberger, Government of Sicily under Phillip II; a study in the practice of empire, Staples Press, London, 1951, p. 130; Setton, pp. 959-60, 1002-3 and 1020; Pastor, pp. 395-7; Braudel, pp. 1096-97. [45] Patrick O’Banion, ‘The Crusading State: The Expedition for the Cruzada Indulgence from Trent to Lepanto’, Sixteenth Century Journal, 44 (1), Spring 2013, pp. 97-116. [46] Parker and Thompson, p. 15; Koeningsberger,
chapter 5; Setton, pp. 959-60, 1014-7 and 1078; Pastor, pp. 7-9, 373, 386, 390,
399, 404-7 and 411; Patrick J. O’Banion, ‘Only the King Can Do It: Adaption and
Flexibility in Sixteenth-century Spain, Church
History, 81 (3), September 2012, pp. 561-3 and 572-4. [47] Julius Klein, The Mesta: A Study in Spanish economic history, 1273-1836, Harvard University Press, Cambridge Mass., 1920, pp. 424-28. [48] De Lamar Jensen, ‘The Ottoman Turks in Sixteenth Century French Diplomacy’, Sixteenth Century Journal, 16 (4), Winter 1985, pp. 451-70; in the weeks before the battle, the French were trying to bring Venice and the Grand Turk back into alliance, Setton, p. 1049. [49] Setton, pp. 1067 and 1074-5; Pastor, pp.
406, 421-2, 428 and 440. (No Protestant was more adept at separating faith from
profit than a Dutchman in Japan.) [50] Hess, ‘The Moriscos’, 1968, pp. 1-25. [51] Setton, pp. 1050-52; by February 1572, the Venetian Senate had been pressured into replacing Venier, p. 1073; Pastor, p. 417. [52] Setton, p. 1055. [53] Capponi, pp. 265-6; for much more on the weather J. H. Pryor, Geography, Technology and War: Studies in the Maritime History of the Mediterranean, 649-1571, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1988, and critique Renard Gluzman, ‘Between Venice and the Levant: re-Evaluating Maritime Routes from the Fourteenth to the Sixteenth Century’, The Mariner’s Mirror, 95 (3), August 2010, pp. 264-94. ‘Kamikaze’ was the divine wind that wrecked the Mongol invasion fleets headed for Japan in 1274 and again in 1281; weather wrought havoc through the Spanish Armada in 1588. [54] In February 1572, the Spanish ambassador
to Venice paid for some forty trumpets, cornets, shawms and recorders requested
by Don Juan, perhaps to replace ones damaged along with rest of his ship,
Michael J. Levin and Steven Zohn, ‘Don Juan of Austria and the Venetian Music
Trade’, Early Music, 33 (3), August
2005, pp. 439-46. [55] Ruggiero Romano, ‘Economic Aspects of the Construction of Warships in Venice in the Sixteenth Century’, Brian Pullan (ed.), Crisis and Change in the Venetian economy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Methuen, London, 1968, p. 61; B. Langstrom, The Ship, Allen and Unwin, London, 1962, pp. 330-48; Robert C. Davis, Shipbuilders of the Venetian Arsenal, Workers and Workplace in the Preindustrial City, Johns Hopkins Press, Baltimore, 1991, p. 16; booty from Lepanto and peace after giving up Cyprus stopped galley construction until almost 1590. [56] John Francis Guilmartin, Jr, Gunpowder and Galleys, Changing Technology and Mediterranean Warfare at Sea in the Sixteenth Century, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1974, pp. and 233-4 and 240; Inacik, 1975, pp. 195-202; S. Rose, ‘Islam Versus Christendom: The Naval Dimension, 1000-1600’, Journal of Military History, 63 (3) July 1999, pp. ?????; Jonathan Grant, ‘Rethinking the Ottoman “Decline”: Military Diffusion in the Ottoman Empire, Fifteenth to Eighteenth Century, Journal of World History, 10 (1), Spring 1999, pp. 179-201. [57] Paine, p. 435; Pastor believed that each galleass carried ‘36 large cannon and 64 smaller pieces to throw balls of stone’, p. 420, n.1. [58] Guilmartin, pp. 231-2; Setton, pp. 1058, 1060 and 1067. [59] Setton, p. 423, n. 3. [60] Joesph Eliav, ‘The Gun and Corsia of Early Modern Mediterranean Galleys: Design issues and rationales’, The Mariner’s Mirror, 99 (3), August 2013, pp. 262-74; ‘Tactics of Sixteenth-century Galley Artillery’, 99 (4), November 2013, pp. 398-409; for the galley’s last hurrah see Randal Gray, ‘Spinola’s Galleys in the Narrow Seas, 1599-1603’, The Mariner’s Mirror, 64 (1), February 1978, pp. 71-83. [61] Pastor, pp. 449 and 459; Pius V was cannonised in 1712; his tomb includes a relief of Lepanto. [62] Pastor, pp. 423-4 and 452-4. [63] Setton, p. 974; for the fall itself, pp. 1027-44. [64] Franz Babinger, Mehmet the Conqueror and his Time, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1978, p. 322. [65] E.H. Gombrich, ‘Celebrations in Venice of the Holy League and of the Victory of Lepanto’, Studies in Renaissance and Baroque Art, Phaidon, London, 1967, pp. 62-8; cf. Edward Muir, ‘Images of Power: Art and Pageantry in Renaissance Venice’, American Historical Review, 84 (1), February 1979, pp. 16-52 – the discussion of Lepanto on page 43 summarises Gombrich. [66] Hess, 1972, p. 53; Anthony Blunt, ‘El Greco’s “Dream of Phillip II”: An Allegory of the Holy League’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 3 (1/2) October 1939-January 1940, p. 63. [67] Michele Olivari and Jesus Villanueva, ‘Los Discursos Festivos en Barcelona tras la Battala de Lepanto: Alcance e Implicaciones de un Gran Acontecimiento Sentimental’, Historia Social, 74, 2012, pp. 145-166; I am indebted to Peter Curtis for his translation. [68] Blunt, 1939-40, p. 65. [69] Pastor, p. 444, n. 4. [70] R.M. Dawkins, ‘A Picture of Lepanto’, Journal of Hellenic Studies, 50 (1), 1930, pp. 1-3. [71] Staale Sinding-Larsen, ’The Changes in the Iconography and Composition of Veronese’s “Allegory of the Battle of Lepanto” in the Doge’s Palace’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 19 (3/4), July-December 1956, pp. 296-302; Richard Cocke, ‘Venice, Decorum and Veronese’, Massimo Gemin (ed.), Nuovi Studi Su Paolo Veronese, Arsenale Editrice, Venice, 1990, pp. 241-55; Claudio Strinati, ’Veronese and Mannerism’, Patrizzia Nitti (ed.), Veronese: Gods, Heroes and Allegories, New York, 2004, pp. 31-36; Edward Grasman, ‘On Closer Inspection – The Interrogation of Paolo Veronese’, Artibus et Historiae, 30 (50), 2009, pp. 125-34. [72] Appelbaum, p. 178. [73] James VI, ‘The Lepanto’, Herman (ed.), Lines 85-92, p. 295. [74] Samuel C. Chew, The Crescent and the Rose,
Islam and England during the Renaissance, OUP, Oxford, 1937, pp. 115-8,
125-30 and 521-3 – Chew calls James’s 915 lines ‘long, pompous and tedious’ (p.
129) – a rival for the ‘intolerable prolixity’ of an Italian versifier, Pastor,
p. 446; David M. Bergeron, ‘ “Are we turned Turk?”: English Pageants and the
Stuart Court’, Comparative Drama, 44
(3), Fall 2010, pp. 255-75; Emrys Jones, ‘ “Othello”, “Lepanto” and the Cyprus
Wars’, Shakespeare Survey, 21,
Cambridge at the University Press, 1968, pp. 47-52; F.N. Lees, ‘Othello’s
Name’, Notes and Queries, April 1961,
pp. 139-41; Lepanto was a figure of speech in the 1640s for Sir Thomas Browne:
‘Let me be nothing if within the compass of myself I do not find the battle of
Lepanto: passion against reason, reason against faith, faith against the devil,
and my conscience against all’, Religio
Medici, Cambridge at the University Press, 1963, p. 82. [75] Hess, 1972, p. 53; Parker and Thompson,
1978, pp. 13-22. [76] William J. Bouwsma, Venice and the defense of republican liberty; Renaissance values in the age of the Counter Reformation, University of California press, Berkeley, 1968, pp. 189-93. [77] Setton, p. 1067; Pastor, pp. 421-2. [78] Setton, p. 1086; cf. Pastor, p. 442; Braudel, pp. 1106-27. [79] Jensen, pp. 451-70. [80] Geoffrey Parker, Spain and the Netherlands, 1559-1659: ten studies, FontanaCollins, Glasgow, 1979. [81] Braudel, pp. 1134 and 1127-9; Mauricio Drelichman and Hans Joacim Voth, Lending to the Borrower form Hell. Debt, Taxes and Default in the Age of Phillip II, Princeton University Press, Princeton NJ, 2014. [82] Setton, p. 1096. [83] Hess, 1972, p. 72. [84] Voltaire, The General History and State of Europe, A. Donaldson, Edinburg, 1758, vol. 3, p. 31. [85] Braudel devotes sixty pages to the formation of the Holy League across five years, (which, on his timescale, seems not much more than an ‘event’,) two pages to the battle itself and three to whether the victory was as fleeting as sceptics have insinuated, pp. 1027-1106. [86] for early English reactions to the Annales school see Journal of Modern History, 44 (4), December 1972, and on the Ottoman and Spanish Empires, pp. 475-6. [87] Alfred W. Crosby, Ecological Imperialism The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900-1900, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1986, chapter 4. [88] C.R. Boxer, The Portuguese Seaborne Empire 1415-1825, Hutchinson, London, 1969; J.H. Parry, The Spanish Seaborne Empire, Hutchinson, London, 1966; Dennis O’Flynn and Arturo Giraldez, ‘Born with a “Silver Spoon”: The Origin of World Trade in 1571’, Journal of World History, 6 (2), Fall 1995, pp. 201-21. [89] Chandra Mukerji, ‘A New World-Picture: Maps as Capital Goods for the Modern World System’, From Graven Images, Patterns of Modern Materialism, Columbia University Press, New York, 1983, pp. 79-130. [90] Boxer, pp. 58-59. [91] Bruun and Whimster (eds), Max Weber, pp. 169-84; Fritz K. Ringer, Max Weber: an intellectual biography, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2004, pp. 80-89; cf. Max Weber, Critique of Stammler, Free Press, New York, 1977, pp. 119-25 and 145-55. [92] Bernard Knox, Backing into the Future, Norton, New York, 1994, pp. 137-41; for an over-the-top variant on Meyer’s hypothesis, Victor Davis Hanson, ‘No Glory That Was Greece The Persians Win at Salamis 480BC’, Robert Cowley (ed.), What if? The world’s foremost military historians imagine what might have been, G.P. Putman & Sons, New York, 1999, pp. 15-35. [93] Given that Marx spent a lifetime arguing that nothing in human affairs can be eternal or universal, it should cause no surprise that he broke off his planned ‘Introduction’ to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy to ponder how it was that the Greeks ‘still give us aesthetic pleasure and are in certain respects regarded as a standard and unattainable ideal’, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1970, pp. 216-7, and Grundrisse, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1973, pp. 109-11; by not reading beyond those scraps, Mohammad R. Nafissi condemns Marx for the ‘universality of his theory’, ‘On the Foundations of Athenian Democracy: Marx’s Paradox and Weber’s Solution’, Max Weber Studies, 1, 2000, pp. 58 and 60; for an informed analysis, Margaret A. Rose, Marx’s lost aesthetic, Karl Marx & the visual arts, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1984, pp. 83-91. [94] Cocke, 1990, pp. 252-3; see also Marie Tanner, The Last Descendant of Aeneas: The Hapsburgs and he Mythic Image of the Emperor, Yale University Press, New Haven, 1993, p. 221. [95] M.I. Finley, Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1983, pp. 44-61; M.I. Finley, Ancient History, Evidence and Models, Pimlico, London, 2000, pp. 85-6; Finley shows how little space Weber allows for legitimate opposition in his accounts of Greece, pp. 93-99. [96] For a scholarly take on the myth-making see Paul Cartledge, Thermopylae, the battle that changed the world, Pan, London, 2006, and After Thermopylae, OUP, Oxford 2013. [97] ‘Valery is a petit bourgeois intellectual, no doubt about it. But not every petit bourgeois intellectual is Valery. The heuristic inadequacy of contemporary Marxism is contained in those two sentences’, Jean-Paul Sartre, Search for a Method, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1963, p. 56; point taken, but Sartre’s assumption about the class nature of Valery as an intellectual because of his social origins is no less inadequate when compared with Marx’s insistence that ‘What makes them representatives of the petty bourgeoisie is the fact that in their minds they do not get beyond the limits which the latter do not get beyond in life, that they are consequently driven, theoretically, to the same problems and solutions to which material interest and social position drive the latter in practice’, Marx-Engels Collected Works, volume 11, Lawrence & Wishart, London, 1979, pp. 130-1. [98] H. Stuart Hughes found verstehen’‘to be the most difficult intellectual problem that I have confronted in the present study’, Consciousness and society, the reorientation of European social thought, 1890-1930, Knopf, New York, 1958, p. 187. [99] Steven Nadler, ‘Malebranche on Causation’, Steven Nadler (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Malebranche, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2000, pp. 113-7. [100] Arnold Bergstaesser, ‘Wilhelm Dilthey and
Max Weber: An Empirical Approach to Historical Synthesis’, Ethics, 57 (2), January 1947, p. 93; Wilhelm Dilthey, Introduction
to the Human Sciences, Wayne State University Press, Detroit, 1988, pp. 302-7; Michael Ermarth, Wilhelm Dilthey: The Critique of Historical
Reason, Chicago University Press, Chicago, 1978, pp. 291-303. The infiltration
of ‘shame-faced materialism’ into the Bolsheviks provoked Lenin in 1908 to
reaffirm the existence of a world outside our heads, Materialism and Empirico-Criticism, Foreign Languages Press,
Peking, 1972. [101] Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, “The German Ideology’, (M-ECW), vol. 5, 1976, pp. 27-54. [102] Bergstaesser, pp. 99-100. [103] Finley, 2000, pp. 52-3. [104] Hans Henrik Bruun and Sam Whimster (eds), Max Weber: collected methodological writings, Routledge, London, 2012, pp. 139-84. [105] Mary Fulbrook, ‘Max Weber’s “Interpretative Sociology”: A Comparison of Conception and Practice’, British Journal of Sociology, 29 (1), March 1978, pp. 71-82; Friedrich H. Tenbruck and Max Weber, ‘The Problem of Thematic Unity in the Works of Max Weber’, ibid., 31 (3), September 19080, pp. 316-. [106] Weber deploys inverted commas in Die Protestantische Ethik und der ‘Geist’ des Kapitalismus, a detail overlooked by most translators and commentators. Guenther Roth recognises that their ‘profusion …[is[ … an alienating device’ to show how he deploys ‘familiar terms with reservations, with a new meaning, or in an ironic sense’, ‘Introduction’, Economy and Society, volume I, Bedminster Press, New York, 1968, p. CI. [107] Weber to Ferdinand Toennies, 19 February 1909, Bruun and Whimster (eds), Max Weber, p. 400. [108] M-ECW, vol. 3, 1975. p. 177. [109] Vaughan, 1924, pp. 324-34. [110] William C. Atkinson, A History of Spain and Portugal, Pelican, Harmondsworth, 1960, p. 63. [111] Capponi, p. 264. [112] Paul Preston, Franco, HarperCollins, London, 1993, p. 330; hanging nearby was the
battle flag of El Cid from 1212; Franco had relied on Moorish mercenaries to
launch his campaign against the heirs of the Reformation. [113] Montaigne, Essay XXVI, ‘That it is madness to judge the true and the false from our own capacities’ p. 204.
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See also Marxism |