The Men
The wind had dropped after midnight, leaving the sea calm, flat and grey as beaten lead in the cold light of a moon waxing towards full. Here and there the still water caught the glow of a lantern from one of the galleys, scattered all across the wide bay where the Holy League fleet was at anchor.
More than two hundred ships, waiting out the last few hours before the battle every captain had told the men would decide the fate not only of Christendom, but their own families.
The men aboard the Santa Catalina were silent now, or close to it. Some – the oldest of old hands and exhausted new oarsmen – snored. A few spoke together in hushed voices, most sat or lay silent, stomachs churning as their minds kept returning to visions of the horrors the day would quickly bring.
Somewhere out there to the east lay an even bigger host of warships: The gigantic fleet put together by Selim the Sot, the drunkard son of Suleiman, whom the Turks called “Magnificent” and despairing Christians had branded a blood-soaked monster.
It was now more than a year since the young Ottoman Sultan had unleashed his navy on Cyprus, where the Muslim horde they carried to war slaughtered scores of thousands of Christians. Every man on the Catalina had heard the lurid accounts of the horror. Fear and the thirst for vengeance vied to keep them awake.
It was the same on all the other Spanish, papal and city state ships. If the rumours were true, the new day would decide whether Cyprus would be avenged, or whether the Turkish infidels would turn the Mediterranean into a Mohammedan lake and fill it with the blood of every Christian still living on its shores.
Word was that the Sultan himself had sworn to raze Rome, the Eternal City, to the ground. The Spaniards and southern Italians especially knew exactly what another Mohammedan victory would mean back home.
On the deck of this Spanish galley, a small group of men huddled beneath a canvas awning stretched between the gunwale and the mainmast. They sat close against the chill of the October night, their backs pressed to crates of shot and coiled lines.
The smell of the sea, tar, and old sweat clung to everything. Pedro clutched his woollen cloak tighter about him and shifted on the smooth-worn planks of the deck. He was a soldier, not a sailor, from the mountains, not the coast, but he had already grown accustomed to life at sea.
Partly to keep warm, partly to be ready for action, each man was already wearing his brigandine. The metal plates sewn between the rough wool outer and the scratchy linen inner weren’t exactly comfortable, but the weight was reassuring and it was better than having your teeth chatter and the other think you were shivering from fear.
Their helmets—some morions, others simple iron caps—sat beside them, ready. They were infantería de galera, supposedly seasoned shipborne soldiers trained to fight on cramped, blood-slicked decks or storm the narrow streets of enemy ports with sword and pike.
Pedro’s own steel cap sat heavy in his lap, his short boarding sword hung from a wide leather belt alongside a dagger. He wasn’t seasoned at all; the only blood he had seen at sea was on the backs of the men flogged for infringing the iron discipline of the fleet.
“Cold, lad?” came a voice beside him.
Pedro looked up. Martin, they called him. No one knew if it was his real name. Whispers had it that he had killed his wife and another man, and joined the infantería to disappear, but no one dared to ask him if this was true. Martin was as wiry as his temper was short. Leather-skinned, his hair the colour of ash, with a beard to match. He’d been rowing and fighting since before Pedro was born, but there wasn’t a scar on his face.
“Don’t be scared of a man with scars,” he had told Pedro one evening, when a saved-up wine ration had briefly put him in a kindly mood. “Worry about meeting the man who gave them to him.”
Was he cold? “No, I mean—yes. A little. Not too much.”
Martin chuckled softly. “Your cloak’s as thin as my patience”. A long pause. “Wish you were back in the hills tonight?”
“Guadix,” said Pedro, absent-mindedly hearing the question as a query as to where he came from. “Near the Sierra.”
“No mountains here. Though we’ll be scrambling over piles of spilled guts and severed heads in a few hours. Maybe one of your arms or legs. Or your cock”.
There was a low murmur of laughter. The little band sat in the half-light like ghosts, faces etched with toil, eyes gleaming in the glow of the charcoal in the small brazier between them.
“Leave the boy alone,” said Esteban, a broad-shouldered Galician with scarred knuckles and a voice like gravel under nailed boots.
“He’s tough enough,” sneered Martin. “He’s seen more battle at home than plenty of men out there tonight. The Morisco revolt was no child’s tale.”
Pedro nodded, remembering it vividly: the night his uncle’s house burned, the screams in the gorge, the injured rebel he’d finished off in a red-mist madness of terror, grief and boundless hate.
“Still, this is different,” said Juan, a lanky Catalan musketeer, who kept his beard tidy, his boots polished and his weapon spotless. He flicked his fingers toward the eastern sky, where there was perhaps a hint of false dawn. “That’s where they’ll come from. And it’ll be like nothing you’ve ever seen. They were fighting treacherous peasants in Granada, not Janissaries.”
Martin spat. “Janissaries. They’re tough. Christian flesh and blood, with the damned souls of infidels. But slash their bellies and they spill their guts and squeal like the pigs they really are.”
Pedro said nothing. He’d sharpened his sword three times that evening, then said his prayers twice. And still the fear gnawed his innards.
Silence fell again. Someone stirred the embers with a stick. Sparks danced upward like souls flying up to heaven and judgement.
“Were you snoring, or did you see it?” Martin asked suddenly.
Pedro frowned. “See what?”
“The comet,” said Esteban. “Last night. Split the sky like the edge of a blade.”
Juan crossed himself. “It was no comet. It was a sign. The tail forked in three, like the Trinity.”
Martín spat into the brazier. “Then let’s hope that’s how we fight—three parts, one cause. If the grand Almirantes don’t work together, this will be another Los Gelves and we’ll all be feeding the fish by next nightfall.”
No one argued. They knew it was true; any weakness or mistakes and the Turks and Moors would smash this, the last Christian fleet, as they had destroyed so many ships off the coast of Tunisia a decade earlier. Even the Genoese and Venetians had kept their quarrels in check these last two days, knowing what lay ahead.
Pedro swallowed, and strove to keep his voice steady and low. “Do you think we can win?”
Martín leaned back and scratched his chin. The fire glow just showed the angles of his face, like an old carving on a church wall by candlelight. “Lad, I’ve seen battles lost that we should’ve won, and battles won by fools with luck and the saints on their side. But this… this is different.”
He pointed toward the blackness where the Ottoman fleet waited.
“They’ve got more ships. More men”. He gave a sour chuckle. “But they’re stretched thin. And they think we’ll scatter. They don’t reckon on us standing fast. Not the Venetians. Not the Pope’s men. And certainly not Spain.”
He paused, then added, more quietly, “And they don’t reckon on the fury that burns in this fleet. Not after Cyprus.”
A hush settled again. A faint gust of breeze came from the west, where the outline of the coast showed as a darker line higher than the horizon. A light gust, a mere hint of a night-time land breeze, stirred the sea. The ripples slapped gently on the hull, but nothing else broke the silence. Even the galley seemed to have stopped its incessant creaking.
Pedro had heard the stories, like everyone. Of Nicosia, where the defenders had been slaughtered. Of Famagusta, where they’d surrendered under promise of mercy—and been butchered. Of Bragadino, skinned alive and stuffed for a trophy. Of the girls hauled off to slavery or perverse torture. Of the dozens of boys who died for every eunuch who lived to be sold in the market in occupied Constantinople.
Of how Joseph Nasi, the Sultan’s advisor, moneybags and purveyor of fine wine, had manipulated his drunken master into slaughtering the Christians of Cyprus, in order to have the empty land for his own tribe of Christ-killing infidels.
He thought of the village priest who’d wept as he gave him absolution, and of his mother’s pale face when he boarded the galley in Málaga. Then of his father, his eyes gouged out and throat slit at the very start of the Morisco rising.
Esteban broke the silence. “They think they can do the same to our people, one port at a time.”
Juan nodded. “Christ’s blood. That’s what we’re here to stop.”
Pedro felt a strange calm fall over him. These men, weathered and foul-mouthed and scarred, were not frightened. Or if they were, they carried it as a familiar burden, one to which they would never admit. He only had to do the same.
Martin, still gazing out into the darkness, which was now something less than dark, spoke again. “If not us, then who?”
It wasn’t meant to be profound. He said it as if he were commenting on the weather. But it struck Pedro hard. He sat still, the words repeating in his head.
“If not us, then who?” Then another question sprang up unbidden to join it. “If not today, when?”
The brazier hissed as Juan tossed in a scrap of salted cod skin he’d spotted on the deck in the now fast-growing light. Smoke curled upwards. Normally, the smell would have made Pedro hungry, but not now.
Esteban reached into the neck of his brigandine and pulled something out. “You must take this,” he said, holding it out to Pedro.
Pedro blinked and stared hard to confirm what it was. A little wooden cross, which he’d seen the man take out and kiss when an autumn storm had hit them a few days earlier. He’d seen then that it was darkened with age and sweat.
“But it’s yours. You need…..”
“An old soldier gave it to me just before we sailed to relieve Malta. It’s brought me through worse than a scuffle on the briny. You wear it today. Pray with it. Fight with it.”
Pedro took it, clumsy with surprise. The little cross was warm from Esteban’s chest.
“Thank you,” he whispered, dropping his head lest the others see the tears in his eyes.
“Don’t thank me yet,” Esteban muttered. “Just give it back tonight.”
Martin gave a low snort. “Stupid boy! He’s planning to die gloriously. I, on the other hand, intend to crawl back to Cartagena drunk and find myself two plump, talented, whores.”
Laughter again. Softer this time. Not because the joke was better, but because, in their own very different ways. they were all picturing the same things: Return; home, and a future.
A bell clanged across the water. Then another. And another. The bell of their own ship answered. The watch changed; cold, weary men grumbling in the night. The stars wheeled slightly in the sky and the moon sank even further towards the west. The brazier was dying now, the warmth ebbing and the glow fading in the growing light of this most dreadful day.
Footsteps approached. A young voice, sharper than needed, rang out from beside the mast.
“¡Carajo! What in God’s name is this lousy mess? Who tied a line across the deck like that? Get it clear, you fools. Now. And that awning — down. You want men breaking their Goddamned legs before the Turks so much as show themselves? If we had time, I’d have you flogged.”
The group stiffened. The voice belonged to the Alférez, barely older than Pedro, his breastplate already buckled, his tone wavering between command and fear. A green boy, but a green boy who could have a man whipped half to death for a hint of defiance, or for hesitating to obey some damn-fool order.
He stepped closer, spotted the dying brazier, and swore again. “¡Hostia! And put that bloody fire out — do you want us to go up in smoke before we even weigh anchor?”
“Someone can’t sleep,” muttered Martin, though he was careful to do so low enough that he wouldn’t be heard. “Louse-ridden pup.”
Juan smirked and began folding back the awning. Esteban moved to untie the rope and coil it away into his snapsack. No one complained. But, all too soon, the job was done and each was left still and alone with his thoughts. Juan leant against the mast, the others sat down again, though no-one bothered to lie down and go back to trying or pretending to sleep.
Out over the bay, trumpets sounded. Drum beats began to float over the water. From below deck came the first crack and creak of timber: the groan of men shifting in the rowing benches, and the muffled voice of an overseer.
A command rang out. From the bow came creaking of the windlass and rattling of chain on the deck as the anchor was hauled up. A rope hissed across wet wood. Then another shout of command, followed by a powerful drum beat. The ship lurched forward.
The drum beat again, and again. Slow at first, then faster. The Santa Catalina trembled as the oars dipped and pulled. They were under way.
The whole fleet was stirring, the noise spreading like a waking city. Across the bay, sails began to shake out where the wind allowed it. Not many — not yet.
Galley sails, with their great lateen yards, could move these mighty warships at a seemingly irresistible speed. Once the sea breeze picked up later in the day the sails would fill again, taking them to whatever fate awaited, but for now the power had to come from the banks of oars.
Pedro sought to calm his churning guts with the thought that, however bad it was to be a soldier, it was better than being a convict down below the deck, chained to an oar, governed by a whip, and doomed to drown like an unwanted kitten in a sack if an Ottoman ram caught the Catalina amidships. He shuddered, and gripped his sword for reassurance that he did at least have a hand in his own fate.
The huge Venetian galleasses further out to sea were raising their spars in the hope of catching a breeze. The great masts on the Real, Don Juan’s flagship, loomed above the others, but the flags at their mastheads barely moved. The crosses under which her crew would fight and die were still hidden from view.
Pedro looked out with growing awe. He could make out more ships every moment as morning put the last stars to flight. Their hulls, dark in the half-light, began to show flashes of colour. The stern of the Real was red and gold, most of the galleys around her had hulls of maroon with black stripes. On the closer vesselsd, the men could make out heraldic beasts on painted shields and streamers. The sea reflected it all in broken shards. Banks of oars rose and fell in perfect rhythm.
They were going to war. But, for now, the action was for the oarsmen. All the soldiers could do was to wait. Or to saunter up to the heads and squat over the holes over the sea, pretending that it was just a matter of morning routine, rather than an urgent need as their guts turned to water.
Then they stood in their little knots of special comradeship, stretching aching limbs and rubbing their arms. Pedro remained sitting, the cross in his hand. Martín stayed beside him.
Eventually, Pedro spoke again. “Were you afraid? In your first battle?”
Martín didn’t answer at once. Then, softly: “I pissed myself halfway to the boarding rope.”
Pedro grinned despite himself.
“But I went over,” Martin added. “And I’ll do it again today. And you will too. There’s nothing wrong with being scared. A man’s not a coward because he’s frightened, but only if he lets fear unman him. Which you won’t, even if you do shit yourself. Stay close to me. You’ll be fine once it starts.”
They sat in companionable silence once more. It wasn’t just the eastern sky which was light now. It was, indeed, the day.
“Get yourselves ready. Break your fast. Prayers and blessings at the next bell. Sunday mass early today, we’ve got God’s work to do.” Even the Alférez sounded reasonable for once and Martin didn’t mutter his usual contempt.
Instead, he simply stood and stretched his back, joints popping.
“Well, that’s that. Time to die, or to earn a little more pay and a bit of extra wine. Remember Cyprus if you want, I’ll remember those two plump whores.”
Pedro followed him to his feet, hoping that Martin - tough, dauntless Martin - wouldn’t see he was trembling. His sword was ready at his side. Esteban’s cross was in his hand.
More ships were sliding ahead now, cutting the glassy water like sharp knives through meat. Officers barked orders; the thudding of the drums kept time, the beating giant heart of a fleet which nothing could resist – unless it was the even bigger one which rumour said had been assembled by the Turks.
The infidel fleet, whose masts Pedro was suddenly sure he could make out to the east. Hundreds of them. God, what was he doing here? The boy crossed himself. Martín clapped him on the shoulder.
“Remember Cyprus, lad. And the ones back home. Keep your head low. And your faith high.”
Pedro nodded. Took a breath. And eased his sword an inch from its scabbard.
“If not us…”
“…. then who?”
Lepanto, Its Consequences, And an Age-Old Question
Our hero Pedro and his equally nervous comrades represent the 60,000 or more men who served in the fleet mobilised in the Holy League effort to check the rampant aggression of the Ottoman Sultan. Worries about Muslim expansionism had been brought to a head by the invasion of Cyprus, where the Greek defenders and civilians had been massacred by the scores of thousands.
Lepanto, known today as Naupactus, is a coastal town in western Greece, situated on the northern shore of the Gulf of Corinth. It lies near the narrow entrance to the Gulf of Patras, a strategic chokepoint for fleets entering or leaving the eastern Mediterranean.
The Christian fleet which challenged the Turks at Lepanto was made up of some 40,000 oarsmen and sailors. Most were free men, convicts promised freedom, or volunteers. The Ottoman ships were rowed by slaves, including thousands of Christian prisoners.
Pedro would have been one of roughly 25,000 soldiers. Mainly Spanish tercios – pikemen and musketeers - Italian infantry, papal troops, and volunteers from across Europe, they were stationed on the galleys for boarding actions.
The Holy League commanders were so worried about the engagement that, shortly before the fighting began, the order was given to unchain the convicts and arm them, so they could join in the fight to repel Turkish boarding parties.
The clash, on Sunday 7th October, 1571, ended in a decisive victory for the Holy League. The Turks lost 180 of their 250 ships. Christian casualties were about 7,500 dead, while the Ottomans lost an estimated 25,000 to 30,000 men, with 12,000–15,000 Christian galley slaves freed.
Most of the Christian dead fell in the Venetian ships, so the chances are that Pedro would have been able to give Esteban back his cross, and that Martin made it back to Cartagena.
All of Christendom rejoiced as news of the victory spread. Lepanto marked the end of Ottoman naval dominance in the western Mediterranean. It was the largest naval battle of the age of oared warships, and it was a turning point in the history of the Mediterranean – and beyond.
Its long-term importance lay not in territorial change - Cyprus remained lost to the Ottomans - but in the psychological and strategic check it placed on the great Muslim power of the age. The myth of Ottoman supremacy at sea was shattered.
Turning Point
Though the Holy League dissolved soon after, and the Ottomans quickly rebuilt their fleet, the latter never again attempted large-scale naval offensives into the western Mediterranean. The victory secured Christian control of key sea lanes and gave breathing room to vulnerable states like Venice, the Papal States, and southern Italy.
Had Lepanto gone the other way, the whole of the central Mediterranean would have been at the mercy of the victorious Ottoman fleet. This would not have reversed the Reconquista of Spain, which had been sealed by the crushing of the Morisco revolt, but Malta, Sicily and the coastal settlements of Italy would have been threatened.
More important still, Lepanto gave Europe time. The battle did not end the Ottoman threat, but it stalled its momentum at sea - buying time that Christendom used to transform itself. Over the following century, Christian states - especially Spain, the Dutch Republic, and England - invested in new naval technologies: ocean-going sailing warships, improved artillery, and better logistics.
Europe surged ahead militarily and scientifically, reinforcing the maritime dominance that would shape the early modern world. The Ottomans, by contrast, remained committed to galley warfare and failed to keep pace with Western naval innovation.
Indeed, they fell steadily behind in terms of technology in general. Even the great Ottoman army which besieged Vienna in 1683 relied on artillery supplied by Louis XIV of France, as part of his broader policy of undermining the Habsburgs, his chief rivals.
This reminder of the long-standing problem of elite treachery brings us to the final consequence of the victory won by the courage and sacrifice of the men who fought at Lepanto: It severely weakened the power of Joseph Nasi, who for some years previously had been perhaps the most dangerous enemy of Christendom in general, and Spain and Portugal in particular.
Originally João Mendes, his Portugal-based family had feigned conversion to Christianity and taken the surname Miques. Nasi was a Sephardic Jew who took refuge in Ottoman Constantinople after being expelled from Iberia. He rose to high influence at the Ottoman court, first under Suleiman and later under his son.
Described by contemporaries as “the Sultan’s favourite”, Nasi harboured a deep hatred not only of the Habsburgs who had expelled his family from Spain, but also of Venice, which had confiscated some of his aunt’s assets and expelled his agents from Cyprus in 1568, when it was discovered that Nasi was plotting with local Jews to bring about an Ottoman takeover.
Joseph Nasi and his aunt, Gracia Mendes. Almost forgotten by mainstream historians, but hugely important, and dangerous to Christendom, behind the scenes
Nasi saw himself as the future king of Cyprus, which he aimed to turn into a Jewish colony, although both he and his aunt – the hugely wealthy and powerful spice merchant and money-lender Gracia Mendes Nasi - also funded Jewish settlements in Palestine.
Joseph Nasi became notorious across the whole of Catholic Europe as the man behind the invasion of Cyprus. It is also clear from Selim’s reaction to the disaster at Lepanto that he had also played a big part in persuading the Sultan to go to war against the Christian alliance which had been brought together by the Pope.
According to a report by Don Cesare Carafa to the Duke of Urbino, Venetian spies had informed him that on learning of the fleet’s destruction, Selim had reportedly sighed “so, these treacherous Jews have deceived me!”.
Nasi managed to survive the crisis, though on Selim’s death three years later his wealth was seized by the new Sultan, Murad III. Nasi was permitted to keep his titles and his pension, but his hopes of establishing a Jewish kingdom in the eastern Mediterranean were gone.
His effort to incite Islam against the hated Christians were not, of course, an isolated quirk. The phenomenon was already more than eight hundred years old, having been seen when Jewish leaders in what is now Spain invited the Moorish invasion and opened the gates of key cities, including the capital, Toledo.
Nor was it to end with Nasi. To give just one example, the so-called Young Turk revolution was dominated by Donmeh Jews – a sect of millennialist lunatics (widely condemned by mainstream Judaism as heretics - who became the Islamic equivalent of the fake conversos of Iberia.
This not only overthrew the Ottomans, but also led directly to the 1915 genocide of the Christian Armenians, Greeks and Assyrians. Coming right up to the present day, we see the unholy alliance between Zionists and the Sunni fundamentalists of Al Qaeda and Islamic State.
The way in which the Deep States of Britain and the US have long weaponised Islamist terror as a tool of foreign policy is likewise an updated version of the way in which Louis XIV of France provided the cannons which Mehmet IV used to besiege Vienna in 1683.
The uneasy but deadly relationship between fanatics and schemers among the two other “Peoples of the Book” is one of the oldest, though least known, factors in the history of Christendom, Europe and the Near and Middle East. Fortunately, however, it has always been countered by something even older:
The willingness of young men to stand up to such hatred, and to resist the tyranny and genocidal impulses which it unleashes. It has been seen from the first blows of the Reconquista at Covadonga, through the great victory at Lepanto, the charge that saved Vienna, and on through the liberation revolts and wars which restored freedom and European civilisation to the Balkans.
Unlike the Ottoman galley slaves and the kidnapped Christian boys who became brainwashed Janissaries, the vast majority of the defenders of Europe and Christendom at Lepanto were there of their own free will. It was their choice; they volunteered to fight.
Why? A few were no doubt escaping from something even worse; some were surely there for adventure, glory or the hope of personal enrichment. But surely, for most of them, it was the same small but burning question that has motivated freedom fighters and rebels throughout history.
The question that is once again set to become the most important of all as the men of the West face a new version of an ancient peril. “If not us, who?”
