Today in history, on October 7, 1571, one of the most cataclysmic clashes between Islam and the West — one where the latter for once crushed and humiliated the former — took place.
In 1570, Muslim Turks — in the guise of the Ottoman Empire — invaded the island of Cyprus, prompting Pope Pius V to call for and form a “Holy League” of maritime Catholic nation-states, spearheaded by the Spanish Empire, in 1571. Before they could reach and relieve Cyprus, its last stronghold at Famagusta was taken through treachery.
After promising the defenders safe passage if they surrendered, Ottoman commander Ali Pasha — known as Müezzinzade (“son of a muezzin”) due to his pious background — had reneged and launched a wholesale slaughter. He ordered the nose and ears of Marco Antonio Bragadin, the fort commander, hacked off. Ali then invited the mutilated infidel to Islam and life: “I am a Christian and thus I want to live and die,” Bragadin responded. “My body is yours. Torture it as you will.”
So he was tied to a chair, repeatedly hoisted up the mast of a galley, and dropped into the sea, to taunts: “Look if you can see your fleet, great Christian, if you can see succor coming to Famagusta!” The mutilated and half-drowned man was then carried near to St. Nicholas Church — by now a mosque — and tied to a column, where he was slowly flayed alive. The skin was afterward stuffed with straw, sown back into a macabre effigy of the dead commander, and paraded in mockery before the jeering Muslims.
News of this and other ongoing atrocities and desecrations of churches in Cyprus and Corfu enraged the Holy League as it sailed east. A bloodbath followed when the two opposing fleets — carrying a combined total of 600 ships and 140,000 men, more of both on the Ottoman side — finally met and clashed on October 7, 1571, off the western coast of Greece, near Lepanto. According to one contemporary:
The greater fury of the battle lasted for four hours and was so bloody and horrendous that the sea and the fire seemed as one, many Turkish galleys burning down to the water, and the surface of the sea, red with blood, was covered with Moorish coats, turbans, quivers, arrows, bows, shields, oars, boxes, cases, and other spoils of war, and above all many human bodies, Christians as well as Turkish, some dead, some wounded, some torn apart, and some not yet resigned to their fate struggling in their death agony, their strength ebbing away with the blood flowing from their wounds in such quantity that the sea was entirely coloured by it, but despite all this misery our men were not moved to pity for the enemy. … Although they begged for mercy they received instead arquebus shots and pike thrusts.
The pivotal point came when the flagships of the opposing fleets, the Ottoman Sultana and the Christian Real, crashed into and were boarded by one another. Chaos ensued as men everywhere grappled; even the grand admirals were seen in the fray, Ali Pasha firing arrows and Don Juan swinging broadsword and battle-axe, one in each hand.
In the end, “there was an infinite number of dead” on the Real, whereas “an enormous quantity of large turbans, which seemed to be as numerous as the enemy had been, [were seen in the Sultana] rolling on the deck with the heads inside them.” The don emerged alive, but the pasha did not.
When the central Turkish fleets saw Ali’s head on a pike in the Sultana and a crucifix where the flag of Islam once fluttered, mass demoralization set in, and the waterborne mêlée was soon over. The Holy League lost twelve galleys and ten thousand men, but the Ottomans lost 230 galleys — 117 of which were captured by the Europeans — and thirty thousand men.
It was a victory of the first order, and Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestants rejoiced.
Practically speaking, however, little changed. Cyprus was not even liberated by the Holy League. “In wrestling Cyprus from you we have cut off an arm,” the Ottomans painfully reminded the Venetian ambassador a year later. “In defeating our fleet [at Lepanto] you have shaved our beard. An arm once cut off will not grow again, but a shorn beard grows back all the better for the razor.”
Even so, this victory proved that the relentless Turks, who in previous decades and centuries had conquered much of Eastern Europe, could be stopped. Lepanto suggested that the Turks could be defeated in a head-on clash — at least by sea, which of late had been the Islamic powers’ latest hunting grounds. As Miguel Cervantes, who was at the battle, has the colorful Don Quixote say: “That day … was so happy for Christendom, because all the world learned how mistaken it had been in believing that the Turks were invincible by sea.”
Modern historians affirm this position. According to military historian Paul K. Davis, “More than a military victory, Lepanto was a moral one. For decades, the Ottoman Turks had terrified Europe, and the victories of Suleiman the Magnificent caused Christian Europe serious concern. … Christians rejoiced at this setback for the Ottomans. The mystique of Ottoman power was tarnished significantly by this battle, and Christian Europe was heartened.”
No matter how spectacular, however, defeat at sea could not shake what was first and foremost a land power — so that more than a century later, in 1683, some 200,000 armed Ottomans had penetrated as far as and besieged Vienna.
But that — to say nothing of Turkey’s many other jihads down to the present — is another story.
Historical quotes in this article were excerpted from the author’s Sword and Scimitar: Fourteen Centuries of War between Islam and the West — a book that CAIR and its Islamist allies did everything they could to prevent the U.S. Army War College from learning about.
Very interesting.
First of all no where not once in the great and honourable Turkish history has there ever been such cases if anything it was the Christians them selves that did the torturing of Muslim Turks most remembered was vlad tapes vlad the IMPALIER OF WHO PUT 20,000 MUSLIMS ON THE STAKE AND SUPPOSEDLY DRANK THERE BLOOD don’t k ow what kind of a sick individual would do such a thing plus NAILED A NAIL IN TO THE TURBAN OF A MESSENGER TO HIS SKULL TBATS O E CASE. SECONDLY THE SO CALLED ARMENIAN GENOCIDE right now the Armenian peoples were actually very close to the Turkish Muslim peoples and were put in to high ranked places with in the ottoman empire 1 question doesn’t fit my mind Armenian and the Turks lived together for over 1,000 years since the battle of manzikert commander being sultan alparslan and duri g those 1000 years more into the ottoman periods like I said were rich and wealthy very wealthy actually the Armenians all lived along the shores of the bosphores had palces with like 3 to 4 levels and were in the goldsmith trade the Armenians were always dealing in trade and were exempt from any military recruitments and even had low taxes to pay not to mention in high government positions even to vizier now if the Turks had so called did a genocide against the Armenians question here is why would they not do such thing of that nature earlier in time and what they waited hundreds of years to do such a horric horrible act like yeah nahh not really the reason for the Armenians had been rounded up for a displacement was that the ottoman empire had the Russian foe that were advanceing towards the Turkish ottoman lands were majority of the Armenians were living at the time they were I was time very loyal subjects to the ottoman state but it was these nationalisim natinalalistic gangs of Armenians that was remaking havoc from the eastern border all the way up to ankara today’s capital the things that they did to Turks are beyond belief and regecniton like scans out of a freddie crugger movie if not worse rape burn torture cut limbs tongs arms legs generals sticking o
Got branded metals into the sorry to say viginas of there victims and they plenty of times skinned young Turkish boys alive countless it was those gangs that even killed there own kind fellow Armenians just cause of the fact that they did not want part in there crimes and were quated saying no we are brothers they never treated us badly agiants there old friends they were also murded these are the same gangs that would show the Russian army the way in to Anatolia and bearing arms with them this was the reason the government couldn’t trust some of the Armenians from the East so they rounded up and deported them to verious areas of the empire not one time in Turkish history has Turkish people ever done a genocide a giants any peoples so it was really the Armenians that cleaved the Turks not the other way around it is always the west’s twisted brainwashing and one sided view so much that they don’t even except there archives so then again I wish for the two peoples that had been friends over a 1000 plus years to forget the horrors of the past that both nations expirenced peace at home and peace in the world
First of all no where not once in the great and honourable Turkish history has there ever been such cases if anything it was the Christians them selves that did the torturing of Muslim Turks most remembered was vlad tapes vlad the IMPALIER OF WHO PUT 20,000 MUSLIMS ON THE STAKE AND SUPPOSEDLY DRANK THERE BLOOD don’t k ow what kind of a sick individual would do such a thing plus NAILED A NAIL IN TO THE TURBAN OF A MESSENGER TO HIS SKULL TBATS O E CASE. SECONDLY THE SO CALLED ARMENIAN GENOCIDE right now the Armenian peoples were actually very close to the Turkish Muslim peoples and were put in to high ranked places with in the ottoman empire 1 question doesn’t fit my mind Armenian and the Turks lived together for over 1,000 years since the battle of manzikert commander being sultan alparslan and duri g those 1000 years more into the ottoman periods like I said were rich and wealthy very wealthy actually the Armenians all lived along the shores of the bosphores had palces with like 3 to 4 levels and were in the goldsmith trade the Armenians were always dealing in trade and were exempt from any military recruitments and even had low taxes to pay not to mention in high government positions even to vizier now if the Turks had so called did a genocide against the Armenians question here is why would they not do such thing of that nature earlier in time and what they waited hundreds of years to do such a horric horrible act like yeah nahh not really the reason for the Armenians had been rounded up for a displacement was that the ottoman empire had the Russian foe that were advanceing towards the Turkish ottoman lands were majority of the Armenians were living at the time they were I was time very loyal subjects to the ottoman state but it was these nationalisim natinalalistic gangs of Armenians that was remaking havoc from the eastern border all the way up to ankara today’s capital the things that they did to Turks are beyond belief and regecniton like scans out of a freddie crugger movie if not worse rape burn torture cut limbs tongs arms legs generals sticking o
Got branded metals into the sorry to say viginas of there victims and they plenty of times skinned young Turkish boys alive countless it was those gangs that even killed there own kind fellow Armenians just cause of the fact that they did not want part in there crimes and were quated saying no we are brothers they never treated us badly agiants there old friends they were also murded these are the same gangs that would show the Russian army the way in to Anatolia and bearing arms with them this was the reason the government couldn’t trust some of the Armenians from the East so they rounded up and deported them to verious areas of the empire not one time in Turkish history has Turkish people ever done a genocide a giants any peoples so it was really the Armenians that cleaved the Turks not the other way around it is always the west’s twisted brainwashing and one sided view so much that they don’t even except there archives so then again I wish for the two peoples that had been friends over a 1000 plus years to forget the horrors of the past that both nations expirenced peace at home and peace in the world