Book a stunning account of brutal battles between Christendom, Islam in 1500s

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By CHARLES STEPHEN / For the LIncoln Journal Star

(“Empires of the Sea: The Siege of Malta, the Battle of Lepanto, and the Contest for the Center of the World” by Roger Crowley,      Random House, 352 pages, $30 )

 They called it the Middle Sea and they called it the Center of the World, and both phrases seemed appropriate in the 16th century. We call it the Mediterranean.

Roger Crowley, an English scholar who has lived in and traveled through the Mediterranean basin, has a graceful writing style and even a touch of whimsy in this stunning account of the religious and ethnic warfare that rent the area for long years.

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Crowley begins his story in 1521 when Suleiman the Magnificent, the Muslim ruler of the Ottoman Empire centered in Turkey and eastern Europe, gathered his armies and ships and conquered the last Christian outpost in the far eastern Mediterranean, the island of Rhodes, only 11 miles from the Turkish coast.

For years its ships had ruled the nearby sea, attacking Muslim fleets carrying goods between Egypt and the Aegean and taking slaves.  With Rhodes conquered, Suleiman began destructive raids on lands bordering the western sea, Spain and Italy.

 A few years earlier, after the Ottomans had conquered Egypt, Pope Leo had sounded a warning: “Now that the terrible Turk has Egypt and Alexandria and the whole of the Roman eastern empire in his power and has equipped a massive fleet in the Dardanelles, he will swallow not just Sicily and Italy but the whole world.”

 When the Muslims attacked, churches were razed and slaves were taken. Miguel de Cervantes, who would later write “Don Quixote,” was enslaved in Algiers for five years.

The great barrier to the conquest of lands to the west was the small island of Malta, 30 miles south of Sicily.  It was “the key to the central Mediterranean,” the center of every invasion, migration and trading enterprise for centuries.

In 1565, a huge Turkish armada left Istanbul, sailing westward to destroy Malta.  The first half of this book is the story of that expedition and the bloody struggle that took place on Malta.

One must ponder the role of religious faith in all of the horror that took place there.

On one side was Pope Pius IV, writing of the “impious enemy,” and Philip II of Spain, both of whom sent vessels and men to bolster Malta’s defenses.

And on the other side was the powerful Ottoman Empire, with its huge fleet of ships and a host of military leaders whose troops had conquered eastern Europe as far north as present-day Hungary and along the northern rim of the Mediterranean almost to Gibraltar. Malta held after more than four months of siege, and what was left of the Muslim fleet and armies returned to Istanbul, proclaiming that God would entrust them with victory soon.

 The second part of the book is centered on the great 1571 sea battle of Lepanto, off the west coast of present-day Greece. Suleiman had died and Pius IV had died and was succeeded by Pius V, who was “filled with a fervent zeal to defend and enhance the Catholic Church in the face of its enemies, Protestants and Muslims. …”

He had excommunicated Queen Elizabeth of England, calling her “a slave of wickedness.”  And he was ready to help begin a new crusade against Islam.

Suleiman was succeeded by Sultan Selim, unpopular with the army and a bit lazy, but friend and foe alike knew, as Crowley writes, that “the idea of conquest was central to Islam.” And so new fleets were built and armies gathered.

The two great forces met at Lepanto, a well-protected harbor.  Ali Pasha, the Ottoman admiral, chose to keep his ships safely in port, but orders from Istanbul called on him to leave the harbor and confront the ships of what was called the Holy League.

“If God on high wants (a victory), no harm can come to us,” he said.  At the end of the mid-October day, the Muslim fleet had been demolished, and 40,000 men were dead on both sides. Nearly 100 ships were destroyed, and 12,000 Christian slaves (including Cervantes) were freed.

Modern readers might well wish that both sides had been destroyed. There is little to choose between arrogant Christians attacking Muslims and fanatic Muslims enslaving Christians — it was a world of mutual religious hatred, which has echoed down the centuries to our own time. In the year 1580, there was a truce of sorts, and Islam and Christendom disengaged in the Mediterranean.

Charles Stephen is co-host of "All About Books," heard weekly on NET Radio.