In 1570, a young man named Miguel enlisted in the Spanish marine corps, the Infanterîa de Marina. At the age of 23, with a good education and obvious signs of intelligence, Miguel was at the beginning of a remarkable life. He was assigned to the Spanish war-galley Marquesa, and in September of 1571, he sailed out of Messina with the Holy League, an unlikely
alliance of Christian-Mediterranean powers. In his first naval engagement, at the
battle of Lepanto, where the Christian force won a crucial victory over an Ottoman fleet, Miguel was shot twice in the chest and once in his left arm, costing
him its use. It was six months before Miguel de Cervantes was able to leave the
hospital. But Cervantes, one of Spain’s most famous authors
and an early pioneer of the novel, was among the lucky at Lepanto. All told, 180,000 men sailed into the straits where the battle was fought
on October 7th, 1571, and 40,000 lost their lives. Although the conglomerate
Christian forces at Lepanto were merely attempting to protect their cities,
territories, and trade lines from Ottoman interference, the bloody battle ended
up having far more significant consequences. For the Ottomans, the battle sounded the death knell of Ottoman dominance of the Mediterranean, and marked the sad end of almost an entire generation of Jannisaries, the most elite of soldiers
in the Ottoman armed forces. For
the Christians, their victory protected the European world from the threat of Turkish
hegemony, released tensions
placed on European economies, protected the New World from developmental
insecurities, and gave the Europeans a fleeting glimpse of the power of
unification. Without it, the New World would have likely looked very different.
