How the West Won: The Neglected Story of the Triumph of Modernity (49 page)

The Turks attacked these fortifications again and again, but all they accomplished was to incur heavy casualties and further depress morale. Where the fighting was hottest, Grand Master de Valette always appeared, setting a ferocious example for his younger Knights. The incredible superiority of the Knights is attested by engagements in which hundreds of Turks were killed and only one or two Knights.
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A rapidly growing sense of doom prevailed in the Ottoman camp. The invaders’ daily casualties ran at a very high rate, and they were growing short of supplies—not only food and water but also powder and even cannonballs. By early September the Turks were preparing to reboard their galleys and go home, but then a force of Spaniards arrived to reinforce the Knights. The resulting attack on the dispirited Turkish forces was a huge massacre, with only scattered elements of the Ottoman force able to reach their ships. When the siege of Malta ended, two-thirds of
the Knights were still alive. Ottoman casualties may have been as high as twenty thousand. Whatever the total, it was a resounding defeat.

As the news spread, there were celebrations across Europe. Suleiman, however, chose to dismiss the defeat at Malta as if it had never happened: he ordered that rewards be given to all who had taken part.

Disaster at Lepanto

A few months after the failure to take Malta, Suleiman died, a sad and lonely man. Only his least competent son, Selim, survived him. The others died in conflicts with one another—except, that is, for Mustafa, his most talented and most loved son: Suleiman had had one of his body-guards strangle Mustafa, while he watched, for plotting against him, only to discover later that the charges had been false.

Selim was said to be lazy and something of a drunkard. Still, the Ottoman policies of conquest seem to have been self-perpetuating, and rumors circulated constantly that the Ottomans were going to attack again in Europe. Philip II, who commanded the major Christian forces in the Mediterranean, was too busy fighting elsewhere to give much attention to the Ottoman threats: he had to cope with English attacks on Spanish treasure fleets from the New World, ongoing battles with the rebellious Dutch, and never-ending French machinations. Nevertheless, Philip was sufficiently farsighted to have a hundred new galleys completed by 1567.
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Pope Pius V had subsidized the Spanish naval construction program, because he was dedicated to creating a Holy League to defeat the Ottomans once and for all. Philip and the Venetians had resisted the pope’s efforts until the Turks attacked Cyprus in 1570, committing a number of atrocities. This meant war.

Preparations to meet an Ottoman fleet began with the assembly of a naval force under the command of John of Austria, the bastard son of Charles V and therefore the half brother of Philip II. Don John turned out to be an excellent choice. He was only twenty-two but had already distinguished himself in battle, and he was intelligent and eager to fight. Moreover, he was given a fleet designed for victory.

Although the Holy League galleys came from many sources, including Spain, Venice, Genoa, the pope, Savoy, and the Knights of Malta, nearly all of them were of a new Venetian design that maximized firepower. The
traditional ramming beak at the front of a galley was replaced by a low prow that facilitated forward firing by two huge cannons and up to six smaller cannons, and the stern of the new galley was weighted to balance the guns up front.
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The new galleys needed no ramming beak because they meant to blow an enemy galley to kindling well before any ramming could occur. These galleys required about 300 rowers and 40 sailors, and they carried about 250 soldiers. The rowers aboard the Venetian galleys were mostly free citizens who could be depended on to take up arms when needed. Most of the other rowers in the Christian fleet were criminals sentenced to the galleys. In cases of dire necessity the criminal rowers could be motivated by promises of freedom at the end of the fighting.

In addition to the new forward-firing galleys, the Holy League fleet had a devastating new weapon: the galleass, which adapted to galley warfare aspects of the powerfully armed carracks and galleons sailing the Atlantic. The galleass carried three masts as well as oars, and it rode so high in the water that it could sustain a lower gun deck with broadsides of as many as ten heavy cannons per side.
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Six of these new galleasses joined the Holy League navy, along with 202 galleys.

The Ottoman fleet that sailed forth to attack the Holy League consisted of 206 galleys and 45 galliots—smaller than a regular galley but faster. The Ottoman ships were copies of somewhat out-of-date European designs—the sultan hired shipbuilders from Venice and Naples—and they were built of inferior materials.
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The Ottoman galleys also had far fewer, and much smaller-bore, cannons. All rowers in the Ottoman fleet were slaves, many of them Christian prisoners; during onboard fighting, therefore, they often rebelled and aided the attackers. Moreover, many of the Ottoman galley captains were Greek and Venetian mercenaries, some of them deserters.
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The Ottoman fleet gathered at Lepanto Bay, off the western coast of Greece, under the command of Ali Pasha, Sultan Selim’s brother-in-law. The Christian fleet arrived on October 7, 1571, and immediately deployed for battle. By a swift and brilliant stroke, Don John’s forces trapped the Ottoman fleet within the bay, limiting their ability to maneuver. As the battle began, the Turks mistook the galleasses, which were positioned about a half mile in front of the rest of Christian fleet, for merchant supply ships and launched an all-out attack on them. When the closely bunched Turkish galleys got within short range, the galleasses unleashed their broadsides with catastrophic results. The other Turkish galleys fared
little better, being blasted apart by the forward-firing Christian guns and overrun by Spanish boarding parties. Spanish borders seized Ali Pasha’s flagship, killed him, and then waved his head aloft from the end of a pike. By 4 p.m. it was over. The Ottomans had lost 210 ships, sunk or captured, whereas the Christians had lost 20.

Only seventeen years later, the Spanish Armada sailed against England—130 great ships, compared to which the galleys of Lepanto were quaint relics of a bygone age. But the Ottomans clung to galleys for many generations longer, although they had enough sense not to commit them against the West.

A bizarre footnote to the Battle of Lepanto: victorious Christian sailors looting Turkish vessels still afloat or gone aground discovered an enormous fortune in gold coins in
Sultana
, the captured flagship of Ali Pasha. Fortunes nearly as huge were found in the galleys of several other Muslim admirals. As Victor Davis Hanson explained, “Without a system of banking, fearful of confiscation should he displease the sultan, and always careful to keep his assets hidden from the tax collectors, Ali Pasha toted his huge personal fortune to Lepanto.”
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Ali Pasha was not a peasant hiding harvest surplus but a member of the upper elite. If such a person could find no safe investments and dared not leave his money at home, how could anyone else hope to do better? It was precisely this repressive command economy that explains the lack of progress in the Ottoman Empire and why, in order to compete with the West, the Ottomans had to buy military technology and experts from Europe.

Illusions about Islamic Culture

It has long been the received wisdom that while Europe slumbered through the “Dark Ages,” science and learning flourished in Islam.
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The well-known historian Bernard Lewis advanced this view when he wrote that Islam “had achieved the highest level so far in human history in the arts and sciences of civilization” and that, intellectually, “medieval Europe was a pupil and in a sense dependent on the Islamic world.”
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But then, Lewis argued, Europeans suddenly began to advance “by leaps and bounds, leaving the scientific and technological and eventually the cultural heritage of the Islamic world far behind them.”
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Hence the question Lewis posed in the title of his book:
What Went Wrong?

Nothing
went wrong. The belief that once upon a time Muslim culture was superior to that of Europe is at best an illusion. To ask what went wrong is the equivalent of asking why Spain fell, when in fact the collapse of the Spanish Empire revealed that Spain had never risen but had remained a backward medieval society. So too with Islam.

Dhimmi Culture

To the extent that Muslim elites acquired a sophisticated culture, they learned it from their subject peoples. As Lewis put it (without seeming to fully appreciate the implications), Arabs inherited “the knowledge and skills of the ancient Middle East, of Greece and of Persia.”
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That is, the sophisticated culture so often attributed to Muslims (more often referred to as “Arabic” culture) was actually the culture of the
dhimmis
, the conquered people. It was the Judeo-Christian/Greek culture of Byzantium, combined with the remarkable learning of heretical Christian groups such as the Copts and the Nestorians, plus extensive knowledge from Zoroastrian (Mazdean) Persia and the great mathematical achievements of the Hindus (keep in mind the early and extensive Muslim conquests in India). This legacy of learning, including much that had originated with the ancient Greeks, was translated into Arabic, and portions of it were somewhat assimilated into Muslim culture. But even after having been translated, this learning continued to be sustained primarily by the dhimmi populations living under Muslim regimes. For example, as the scholar Samuel H. Moffett observed, the “earliest scientific book in the language of Islam” was a “treatise on medicine by a Syrian Christian priest in Alexandria, translated into Arabic by a Persian Jewish physician.”
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As in this example, not only did dhimmis originate most “Arab” science and learning, but they even did most of the translating into Arabic.
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That did not transform this body of knowledge into Arab culture. Rather, as the remarkable historian of Islam Marshall G. S. Hodgson noted, “those who pursued natural science tended to retain their older religious allegiances as dhimmis, even when doing their work in Arabic.”
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The highly acclaimed Muslim architecture also turns out to have been mainly a dhimmi achievement, adapted from Persian and Byzantine origins. In 762, when the Caliph al-Mansur founded Baghdad, he entrusted the design of the city to a Zoroastrian and a Jew.
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One of the great masterpieces attributed to Islamic art is the Dome of the Rock in
Jerusalem. But when Caliph Abd al-Malik had the shrine built in the seventh century, he employed Byzantine architects and craftsmen, which is why it so closely resembled the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.
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In fact, many famous Muslim mosques were originally built as Christian churches and converted by merely adding external minarets and redecorating the interiors. As an acknowledged authority on Islamic art and architecture put it, “The Dome of the Rock truly represents a work of what we understand today as Islamic art, that is, art not necessarily made by Muslims … but rather art made in societies where most people—or the most important people—were Muslims.”
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Similar examples abound in the intellectual areas that have inspired so much admiration for Muslim learning. In his much-admired book written to acknowledge the Arabs’ “enormous” contributions to science and engineering, Donald R. Hill admitted that very little could be traced to Arab origins and that most of these contributions originated with conquered populations. Many of the Muslim world’s most famous scholars were Persians, not Arabs.
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That includes Avicenna, whom the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
ranks as “the most influential of all Muslim philosopher-scientists,” as well as Omar Khayyám, al-Bīrūnī, and Razi. Another Persian, al-Khwārizmī, is credited as the father of algebra. Al-Uqlidisi, who introduced fractions, was a Syrian. Bakht-Ishū’ and ibn Ishaq, leading figures in “Muslim” medical knowledge, were Nestorian Christians. Masha’allah ibn Atharī, the famous astronomer-astrologer, was a Jew. This list could be extended for several pages. What may have misled so many historians is that most contributors to “Arabic science” were given Arabic names and their works were published in Arabic, that being the official language of the land.

Consider mathematics. The so-called Arabic numerals were entirely of Hindu origin. The splendid Hindu numbering system based on the concept of zero was, in fact, published in Arabic, but only mathematicians adopted it—other Muslims continued to use their cumbersome traditional system. Thābit ibn Qurra, noted for his many contributions to geometry and to number theory, is usually identified as an “Arab mathematician,” but he was actually a member of the pagan Sabian sect. Of course, there were some fine Muslim mathematicians, perhaps because it is a subject so abstract as to insulate its practitioners from any possible religious criticism.

The same might be said for astronomy, although here, too, most of
the credit should go not to Arabs but to Hindus and Persians. The “discovery” that the earth turns on its axis is often attributed to the Persian al-Bīrūī, but he acknowledged having learned of it from Brahmagupta and other Indian astronomers.
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Nor was al-Bīrūī certain about the matter, remarking in his
Canon Masudicus
that “it is the same whether you take it that the Earth is in motion or the sky. For, in both cases, it does not affect the Astronomical Science.”
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Another famous “Arab” astronomer was al-Battānī, but like Thabit ibn Qurra, he was a member of the pagan Sabian sect (who were star worshippers, which explains their particular interest in astronomy).