• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1226 0

received the report from Don John on the evening of November 2 in El Escorial, he was surrounded by his family and courtiers. The messenger, Don Lope de Figueroa, had traveled slowly, because he had been badly wounded in the battle, but also because he had been feted in every town through which he passed.55 The popular rejoicing for Lepanto was not limited to the nations that had participated directly in the battle. Even in France, where for political reasons the Most Christian King preserved good relations with the Ottomans, there were processions and church services in the smallest of towns and villages. In Protestant England, there were days of exuberant celebration in London. German towns went wild with delight. Perhaps for the last time, the sense of universal participation in a holy war transcended the chasm between Catholic and Protestant.56

WITHIN DAYS OF THE STORY FIRST BEING TOLD IN ANDALUCIA, “LEPANTO” was being reenacted as a play in the caves of the Sacromonte in Granada.57 In such “accounts,” moral truth mattered more than factual verisimilitude.58 What happened at Lepanto was compounded partly from the event itself and partly from the subsequent myths with which it was overlaid. Accurate details of the battle became widely known—from memoirs and pamphlets, or from stories told by travelers. Some of the profusion of woodcut images that appeared throughout Europe stuck to a remarkable degree to the factual truth. A pamphlet circulating in Germany within months of the battle had on its cover a depiction of a galleass at the moment of first contact. Its great guns belched smoke from its sides. The boarding nets and boiled leather shields were in place. The Turkish galleys were smashed to pieces; the sea was filled with turbaned figures and with wooden shields, blazoned with the crescent, floating on the surface of the waters.59 The response to the battle and the meanings drawn from it—its resonance—were extended, both in time and in place. For Sir Richard Lovelace, writing a century after Lepanto, it had become an eponym or shorthand for Christian triumph: “When the sick Sea with Turbants Night-cap’d was; / … This is a wreath, this is a Victorie.”

Lepanto was remembered in many different ways. Rome celebrated the return of Marc Antonio Colonna with a triumph worthy of a Caesar. He rode to the Capitol on a white horse, followed by long lines of soldiers and captive Turks, shackled in pairs and dragging heavy chains, all wearing his red-and-yellow livery.60 Another Colonna, Honorato, and his heroism in the battle are still commemorated each year in the little hill town of Sermonetta. Messina, which had greeted the returning fleet with tournaments and a vast catafalque to honor the dead, commissioned a huge gilded statue of Don John from Andrea Calamach. The admiral still stands to this day, his left foot on the severed turbaned head of a Turk, while all around the story of Lepanto is told in bas-relief. The Signoria of Venice commissioned Tintoretto, Pietro Longo, Andrea Vincentino, and Antonio Vassilachi to make a series of paintings for the Sala dello Scrutinio in the Doge’s Palace. In the city churches and the Arsenal, the Holy League and the divinely ordained victory were recalled in altarpieces, paintings, and marble plaques. The aged Titian, who had declined to produce a commemorative canvas for Venice, succumbed to King Philip. In a huge painting (Allegory of the Battle of Lepanto), the king is the dominant figure, offering up his infant son Don Ferdinand (born in the months after Lepanto) to heaven. Winged Victory hands down the victor’s laurels, while in the foreground a trussed-up Turk, his weapons and turban lying on the ground beside him, and a burning galley fleet in the background point to the great triumph.

The official memory of the battle was consolidated. In March 1572, the pope decreed that the feast of the Rosary should be celebrated on the anniversary of Lepanto. In the cathedral of Toledo a banner captured at Lepanto was displayed annually on the day of the battle, and a service of thanksgiving