The Battle of Preveza

The battle off Preveza, fought on 28 September 1538 at the mouth of the Gulf of Arta on the western coast of Greece, was the decisive naval encounter that secured Ottoman command of the Mediterranean at the height of the empire under Sultan Suleiman. The Ottoman fleet was led by Khayr al-Din Barbarossa, the corsair-admiral of Algiers whom Suleiman had made Kapudan Pasha, grand admiral of the empire; against him Pope Paul III had gathered the Holy League, the combined navies of Venice, Genoa, the Papacy, Habsburg Spain and the Knights, under the Genoese admiral Andrea Doria. The league fleet was far the larger, perhaps three hundred ships against Barbarossa's roughly one hundred and twenty galleys and galliots, but at Preveza the wind failed and the advantage passed to oars: Doria's heavy sailing-galleons lay nearly becalmed while the swift Ottoman galleys closed at will. The great Venetian galleon, the Galeone di Venezia, was surrounded and fought for hours, doing real damage with her guns, but Doria would not commit his whole fleet to a general action and drew off under cover of night, leaving the field and the victory to Barbarossa. The win was decisive in its consequences. It gave the Ottomans the mastery of the eastern and central Mediterranean for roughly the next thirty years, confirmed by the capture of Tripoli and the victory at Djerba in 1560 and unbroken until the check at Lepanto in 1571, and it set the empire's corsair-captains ranging the coasts of Italy, Spain and North Africa. The Ottoman naval tradition recorded the campaign in the Gazavat-i Hayreddin Pasa, the chronicle of Barbarossa's wars, and Katib Celebi (rahimahu Allah) set it in its place in his history of the Ottoman sea-wars, the Tuhfetu'l-Kibar fi Esfari'l-Bihar; Mustafa Ali noted it among the great events of Suleiman's reign. This scene depicts the morning of the engagement seen from the deck of an Ottoman galley: oarsmen and gunners at the rail, a white crescent on the lateen sail and the red banners overhead, a second galley closing alongside, and beyond the bows the Preveza headland and the two fleets scattered across a bright and almost windless sea, with the powder-smoke of the bow guns and no graphic depiction of the slaughter.