The Battle of Lepanto

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss The Battle of Lepanto, 1571, the last great sea battle between galleys, in which the Catholic fleet of the Holy League of principally Venice, Spain, the Papal States, Malta, Genoa, and Savoy defeated the Ottoman forces of Selim II. When much of Europe was divided over the Reformation, this was the first major victory of a Christian force over a Turkish fleet. The battle followed the Ottoman invasion of Venetian Cyprus and decades in which the Venetians had been trying to stop the broader westward expansion of the Ottomans into the Mediterranean. The outcome had a great impact on morale in Europe and Pope Pius V established a feast day of Our Lady of Victory. Some historians call it the most significant sea battle since Actium (31 BC). However, the Ottomans viewed the loss as less significant than their victory in Cyprus and, within two years, the Holy League had broken up.

→ Listen on BBC Sounds website

Guests

• Diarmaid MacCulloch 11 episodes
  Professor of the History of the Church at the University of Oxford
• Kate Fleet 2 episodes
  Director of the Skilliter Centre for Ottoman Studies and Fellow of Newnham College, University of Cambridge
• Noel Malcolm No other episodes
  A Senior Research Fellow in History at All Soul's College, University of Oxford

Reading list

• Crescent and Cross: The Battle of Lepanto, 1571
  Hugh Bicheno (Cassell, 2003) Google Books →
• Ottoman seapower and Levantine diplomacy in the age of discovery
  Palmira Brummett (State University of New York Press, 1993) Google Books →
• Victory of the West: The Story of the Battle of Lepanto
  Niccolo Capponi (Macmillan, 2006) Google Books →
• The Cambridge History of Turkey, vol. II: The Ottoman Empire as a World Power, 1453-1603
  Suraiya N. Faroqhi and Kate Fleet (eds.) (Cambridge University Press, 2013) Google Books →
• The Ottoman Empire and Early Modern Europe
  Daniel Goffman (Cambridge University Press, 2002) Google Books →
• Catholic Pirates and Greek Merchants: A Maritime History of the Mediterranean
  Molly Greene (Princeton University Press, 2010) Google Books →
• Agents of Empire. Knights, Corsairs, Jesuits and Spies in the Sixteenth-Century Mediterranean World
  Noel Malcolm (Allen Lane, 2015) Google Books →
• The Ottoman Turks: An Introductory History to 1923
  Justin McCarthy (Longman, 1997) Google Books →
• Empire and Holy War in the Mediterranean: The Galley and Maritime Conflict between the Habsburg and Ottoman Empires
  Philip Williams (I. B. Tauris, 2014) Google Books →

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Programme ID: b06nrqv8

Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/b06nrqv8

Auto-category: 940.2 (Early Modern Europe)

Hello (First sentence from this episode)

Hello. In 1571, the fleets of the Holy League and the Ottomans went into battle at Lepanto in the Gulf of Patras on the western side of Greece.