Empire: World History - 27. The Siege of Cyprus

Episode Date: January 10, 2023

Selim II leads the Ottomans. Marco Brigadin the Venetians. They will clash over the island of Cyprus. But who will be victorious, and who will be defeated (and flayed)? The two sides meet on this mediterranean island in the run-up to one of the greatest naval battles in history - the Battle of Lepanto. Listen as William and Anita are joined by Barnaby Rogerson to discuss the Ottoman siege of Cyprus, as they set the stage for Thursday's episode on the Battle of Lepanto. LRB Empire offer: lrb.me/xempire Twitter: @Empirepoduk Goalhangerpodcasts.com Producer: Callum Hill Exec Producer: Jack Davenport Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you want access to bonus episodes reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community. Discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcast, add free listening and a weekly newsletter, sign up to Empire Club at www.mpowerpoduk.com. Thank you for listening to the Empire Podcast. This particular episode is going to be a little bit gruesome. Yes, that's the word I'm looking for. So advice from friends, because William and I are friends of yours. We get a bit carried away.

So I don't listen to this with children. And welcome to Empire with me Anita Arnan. And me, William Durunple. Now, in the last episode, the superstar who is otherwise known as Mark David Baer, was talking about Suleiman the Magnificent and his failed Ottoman siege of Vienna in 1529. And do you know, a lot of historians, William, say this is the high watermark of the Ottoman Empire before it stabilized borders with Christian Europe in the decades which followed. And then it started declining and retreating and going back to its Anatolian kernel from whence it came.

But, but, but, we don't say that, do we, William? We do not say that. We say something else, don't we? We don't say that because we like to celebrate what we're going to celebrate on this episode, which is the Battle of Lepanto, which I first saw visiting Venice, There's a fantastic mural of it right across the roof and the walls of the Doge's Palace, where every sort of episode of the entire battle is replayed by, I think, Veronese or one of those great sort of Venetian painters.

And this battle in 1571 is arguably the greatest sea battle ever fought in the Mediterranean. I mean, it is. And I don't take issue with that, but I do take issue with it. Celebrate, are we toasting marshmallows on the burning depths? It's pretty gruesome stuff, mate. Well, the Venetians, the Venetians certainly did. Right. And what we forget is that, you know, to us, the Ottomans are far distant history.

It's exciting. It's interesting. It's exotic. But it isn't a threat to us personally. For the Venetians, it actually was. Because if you think where Venice is, on the corner of the Adriatic, the Ottomans coming very close to that by the 1570s. And they've already put a foothold in Otranto.

They've captured a port for just one year. They've captured a port in southern Italy. And if you're a Venetian, you can see this force coming towards you, getting close to Greece, until they're now in what's now Croatia. So for the Venetians, this really was a life and death issue. It's an existential threat. My favorite thing about what they do in response, and we're going to talk about today, is that they form something that sounds like a Marvel movie franchise, which is the development of the Holy League. Marble doesn't go for the Holy bit often

but yeah it definitely has a league of superheroes The Holy's Assemble I mean you could say that this is the cry from the Pope the Holy League So you're right

I mean because you know we have Trafalgar We talk about Trafalgo We have big monuments to Trafalgo It stopped the advance of Napoleon Battle of Britain stopped Hitler These are enormous moments In our history

Lepanto is that Exactly that And if you are not only in Venetian But if you are anyone on that end of continental Europe. This is arguably the turning point, but we'll come to that actually at the end because we have here,

one of the great experts on the battle, my great friend and the wonderful historian Barnaby Rogerson, author of The Last Crusaders, the 100-year battle for the centre of the world. And Barnaby, I think, also thinks that Lepanto is the crucial battle and it's not the siege of Vienna. Hello, Barnaby.

Hello, welcome to Enver. Can I just say, it feels as if somebody's, Carbon copied William and just slapped him on my screen. You can't see you people out there in Podland. But it's like I'm seeing double and someone hit me on the head. Has anyone pointed this out before? Has anyone said anything?

Has anyone mentioned this before, Barnaby? We have some friends in common. And for 30 years, there's a tremendous reluctance to get William and Barnaby around the same table unless there was just too much volume. Okay, so you look like him and you're as loud as him. Oh, this is fun. I'm really delighted by this.

Luckily, he's better dressed and far more stylish. So before we get into Lepanto, can we get into a little bit of prying? I mean, it is prying. Where did you meet? What's he really like? How come your friends? The thing we love is other people's food, wine, talk, monuments. And we both have got brothers who we adore, but are sort of competitive friends in our lives.

But the big difference between Bada Bibi is that his life. father was a sailor. And therefore, he was brought up on naval history in a way that I wasn't, which is, I think, possibly one reason why you gravitated to this extraordinary subject. Okay. And do you also, are you with us or a Guinness, when we say, the siege of Vienna is not the crucial moment that people bang on about, and that it's actually Le Panto? Very, very much not. And almost insult to all your listeners who are not obsessed about Western European situation is the sort of global reach of the Ottoman Empire. And they're much greater concern with the real enemy for them culturally and everything else, which was the Persian Shiite

empire. And so it's a bit of a sort of Western obsession to constantly go on about Vienna. And it was important, very important if you're Austrian and even more important if you're Habsberg, but just one of the sort of 90 dials in which the Ottoman Empire was interested in. That's very important point. We from the West always think of the Ottoman advance to the West as being their main concern, as if they're focused entirely on us. In actual fact, their big rivalry is with Persia. And the Safavid kings of Persia, at this point, building Isfahan, commissioning some of the most beautiful manuscripts in the world, the Shahnameo Shatamas, being the great masterpiece. This is all going on. And this is the main focus. And in the sense,

what's happening in Vienna and Lepanto is in many ways a sideshow. I mean, we're going to talk about this in the next podcast a lot when we talk about the Levant company. But actually, Britain does register on the dial at all. I mean, there are pleas to the Ottomans. Could you send us an ambassador? We'd like an ambassador. We'd want to be friends. When you send us an ambassador, we'd really make an ambassador feel really cozy. And they just never bother. They don't care. This is why I love this period. We are absolutely, you know, with tidal rocks so obscure, so unimportant. And, you know, we can possibly observe this whole thing in a way that, as William said earlier, Venetian can't. I mean, they refer to Queen Elizabeth. I think in

One thing I've seen is Queen Isabella of the Little Island. They don't even get her name right. You can see them sort of waving their hands in the background. There is a slight rather wonderful secret arrangement between Morocco and England, changing, you know, the English are very keen on getting hold of their gunpowder supplies which they get from Morocco. And there's a mad scheme that English ships are going to take a Moroccan army over to South America and conquer the Spanish Empire there.

It's definitely, you know, eight from the back of the row waving mad, trying to be important. And the king of Morocco actually suggests Queen Elizabeth at one point that he helps her colonize Virginia. Because he says that my people will be better suited to the climate than your people who are used to the snow, the cold and the rain. What? It's one of the most extraordinary moments in history. The Moroccans offer to help Queen Elizabeth colonize North America. I just imagine if that offer had been accepted. We'd have a Moroccan colony now in Virginia.

But the geopolitics has shifted, I mean, the tectonic plates have shifted so, so much. Can I read you something just before we get into? Because I think it's really nice to understand the background of the two countries and the sort of the measure of these, you know, the West and whatever you want. I mean, the Levant, what do we, the Ottoman Empire, you know, I mean, it's just so not in Kyoto. Because Elizabeth I first, when she's quite good friends with Marad III, or she wants to be, She writes him a letter where she just blatantly lies. It's just so marvelous.

She lies about how important she is. So this is how she introduces herself. Elizabeth, by the grace of the most mighty God, the only creator of heaven and earth, of England, France, and Ireland, Queen. No, you're not. No, you're not. I mean, England, yes.

France, definitely not. Ireland, hmm, you know, it's just such a patent lie. And they don't, I mean, she feels that she can write this, I suppose, because they don't really check up on her homework. It's not important enough to check. And my favourite fun fact on that theme is that in, I mean, it's a little bit beyond our period. In 1620, there were more captives, white slaves in North Africa than were British settlers in the whole of North America. Wow. Really? That's shocking. So that gives you a scale of how important we were, really, you know, providing slaves

rather than the other way around. We're going to be going into this very much an Lovant company episode in the next thing. But yes, there were Ottoman slaving raids in Cornwall. Ottoman slavers going inland and minehead and places like this, taking slaves and carrying them back to Algiers. Anyway, William, get us back on track because this is like one of those dinner parties, but two of you were never going to stick to the point ever. Okay.

So, Barnaby, in the lead-up to Lepanta, let's start with Salaman the magnificence failed siege of Malta, the end of his reign. He's conquered the whole of Egypt, of Iraq, the beginning of the North African literal, he's an extraordinary success. But when he sends his boats against the Knights Hospitlers in Malta, it's one of his few failures. Tell us about that and what happens there. It is a failure and it's a famous failure, but it's a It was also an incredibly well-planned organisation. It hit the island exactly where it meant to. There were 190 a marred of fleet taking the army over.

There were 90 galleys protecting it. They unloaded ordnance for that siege. They had all the equipment ready. It was also quite bold when you look at the map. Sicily, as we all know, is just above Malta. And that was ruled by Philippa Spain, a part of the Kingdom of Naples. So you were really going deep into enemy territory. and we're trying to take the knights out.

And almost certainly, even if he destroyed Malta, one wonders if he'd been able to hold it. So it's the most stirring record. And part of my childhood, I grew up as a tiny little baby in Malta. And Gozo, Malta was full of stories of Dragu and Barbarossa, even before the siege. It's very much on the front line with this extraordinary element, of course, of the Maltese speaking Arabic.

And so when you go to a Catholic church in Malta, we did, you heard, you know, the mass in Arabic, and you had this really strong frontline feel. The other thing, of course, is Solomon was used to sieges. His father had tried to take out roads, failed, but then he comes back and takes it early on his reign. Belgrade was hit famously by two different sultans, Murad and his father, Mehamed the Conquer, before Solomon finally takes it. So Ottomans were very used to a progressive warfare. They were used to, you know, to trundling out the army on each occasion. So although we might celebrate,

you didn't win Malta, that was quite business for usual for the Ottoman Empire. They would, you know, we've done that, we've investigated that, we'll see if we want that, or they actually turned their campaign

and the next time they had opportunity to take out the other base, which was the Spanish, Italian base at La Goleta, which holds the Tunisian Bay, and that they took out very quickly. We can talk about that later. Where's that on the mainland?

So that's on the mainland of North Africa. It's an enormous fortress, almost like the Verdun of the 16th century, constantly changing hands and with Tunis. And to a certain extent, the emperors decide, well, that would be something we can take and hold. And Malta was always going to be something on the edge of what we can achieve. The sultans could do everything, as we know, on their campaigns, but they're aware that running a maritime siege, which they've done in Cyprus, they've done in roads, took a lot of planning. I mean, probably about four years. So whenever a siege is happening, both sides know it's going to happen. And in every occasion, the walls are re-fortified.

You know, the Knights of Sir John knew where the Ottomans were coming. Everybody knew what was happening. So there's no element of surprise. It was a little bit, it wasn't their theme. They really liked a land army. And they love that tension in spring when the world was waiting. Was the standard going to be planted on the Asian shore? Was it going to be in Ramele?

The army was highly mobile to move quickly. but taking on a Christian island, gosh, that was a slog. That was four years of logistics. Do you know, I read somewhere that, as you say, sieges, you know, they weren't done by stealth. You could see them coming, you could hear the drums. You could smell the burning torches. That often actually the fortifications did more damage

to heritage sites and old ruins than the siege itself or the invaders themselves. Absolutely true. I mean, I partly got into this as a guidebook writer. So time and time again, you'd come to places like Mardia or Nicosia, and you find out the medieval city had not been destroyed by the Ottoman, and it had been destroyed by a quick, glassy artillery fortress run up in 1560.

And, you know, the process of the artillery war is absolutely fascinating because it's also war by finance. The Duke of Ghee's writes and head of the Pope saying, if you're going to take out even a moderate fortress, you need 24 large siege artillery, you need 10,000 shot, you need 100,000 pounds of gunpowder. These are financial dispositions that require, you know, backing organisation.

Money, honey. Money, honey. Just as we saw in the last episode, at this point, the Ottomans are not worried about money. They've seized vast territories. They're an incredibly rich power. Now, we left the last episode with the death of Salaman, the Magnificent. Tell us about the man who succeeds him, his son, Selim the Second.

Sell him the Second. I'm rather fond of, because you call a sot. He was fond of poetry, mysticism, eating. drinking, drinking. William would have got on with him very well. Oh, and Barnaby, you might have got on with him too. He loved building, he had really good taste. He was a good man. Unlike William and myself, he fell over on a marble floor and killed himself, rather unglamrously in the hammam, slipping one imagines after the third bottle.

The tragedy, he was the least good of all of the sons on offer. And we have the hidden side of your previous story about Roxalana. Oh, yes. She knew that terrible thing. You're not just fighting for your life. You're fighting for your children's life. And so there's this sort of dark plot when she gets rid of Ibrahim Pasha, the best thing in the Devan councils of the empire ever,

only after Solomon's revered mother dies Hafsa. And then things start crunching up as she gets rid of the rivals. And the rival she gets rid of is Prince Mustafa, much loved by the Junissaries, much loved by the people, brilliant young warrior. And when he's throttled by the death mutes of Solomon and Magnificent on a campaign, you feel something passionate dies in the heart of the empire. And then it comes to the contest between Bayez-Zitt and Selim. And Beers-It was also the preferred candidate to Selim.

So when Selim comes in, no one likes him. He's not sporty, a bit too clever. And he realizes that. When his father dies, there's a music. The army. The empire looks so strong on the outside, but one realizes very like the Roman Empire. The genusories are like the Praetorian Guard. And they want to be led by a soldier. They want to be led by somebody who's going to offer them conquest, war, glamour, booty, the chance of sack and rape of a fallen city. And Selim is not going to do that. But he does have a brilliant vizier, doesn't he? Socolou Mehmet Pasha. He does have a brilliant vizier. And the succession of viziers, and we're talking in a way, This is the abjee of the empire. The Visias take the Ottoman Empire on for the next 150 years as a great institution.

Crete doesn't fall to the 17th century and the advance in Russia. The empire continues as a great expansion of falls for another 150 years after Lepanto. But there's a tragic moment in Ottoman history is that Solomon the magnificent led 13 campaigns personally, risked himself at the head of his army. It was a defeat. It took out the Sultan as well. An extraordinary sort of gift for an army to be led by their own sovereign. And Selim never leads the palace. And to that extent, you know, the military zeal. The Ottoman Empire is a war machine. It's like a perfectly organized slim-line imperial version of Sparta. It's there to fight. And they've suddenly lost their leader with Selim. Yeah. And, you know, you've got to do the face-time and the hand-pressing if you are the Ottoman leader, particularly with the Janissaries. They have so much power. if you don't get in with them, they can kill you. I mean, they are trained to kill.

Others say that, apart from being unsteady on his feet in bathrooms, he made a terrible error in his reign, which is to break the peace treaty that he had with the Venetians and attack their most important Mediterranean possession. That was Cyprus. And that's 1570, isn't it? I mean, why did he do it?

It's so unpopular. If you've got a code of honour, which the Ottomans do have, If you've got Janusairus who believe in that code of honour, was it popular with them? Did they like it? What do they think about that? It's always popular, leading the army a conquest. There was a tradition that you couldn't build a new royal mosque unless it's from booty. So there was an absolute sort of inner code, nothing written, but a sultan could only build another great monument from what he'd captured. And Selim wanted that, both the mystique of building another great mosque, which he did in the end.

He built the greatest mosque of all time at Ederne from the booty of Cyprus. but he also, a bit like Claudius, Emperor Claudius, he wanted to have a conquest to make himself stand beside his fantastically over-powerful ancestors and to be part of that tradition. To be honest, there's too much sort of chatter about the importance of Cyprus. The Venetians never really love Cyprus.

As William's going to explain in the next incident, the real heart of everything it did was the Levant trade. They could have given up their empire tomorrow. What they needed was the fleet, a couple of bases, and the Levant trade. I can't remember the exact thing of us, but there's roughly like 8 million coming for Levant trade and sort of tens of thousands on their island territories. They paved terribly badly to the Cypriots, and they oppressed the Orthodox Church.

When the Turks landed in Cyprus, the Greeks rose in rebellion against the Venetians. It wasn't unpopular in the Levant. They were much hated. And the Venetians were pretty much hated everywhere in Europe because they were so rich and so powerful. It's a bit like being a Manhattan or London banker, you know, coming to Hampshire or anywhere. People don't like very successful bankers all over the world. They're loved. And so taking out Cyprus is actually a pretty good idea.

It rounded off the territory. It controlled more of the eastern Mediterranean. There was a little bit of slipshod work about it. It had very briefly been an advanced Omead province. And so there was a legal reason the land of Islam could be reconquered. Oh, so they had to get a legal underpinning? They did have. Oh, they did.

He often went to the Mufti and the head clerics, and they said, you must break this. We've done our research, and we realised this is a land of Islam that's been lost to the Crusaders, and it's your duty as our leader to lead the conquest. And it's a great pity he didn't go on that fleet and lead the conquest, because it was quite easy to achieve the fall of Cyprus, apart from these tremendously expensive and classic sieges against Nicosea and then Famagusta. Well, we're going to come to Nicosia in the same because it's so interesting and gruesome are just so Game of Thronesy.

But to do that in a second. But just with Cyprus, I mean, the people of Cyprus, they were never loved by the Venetians, and they didn't love the Venetians either. Would they have welcomed Ottoman rule more? I mean, the Ottomans, we talked about this in past pods, that they would allow people to practice their religion as they saw fit.

So would they have thought, actually, rather be, if we're going to be under someone's boot, rather be an Ottoman boot than, you know, the Venetians who've made everything that we are difficult? Oh, yes. time and time again we forget that because of our obsession about recent history. The Orthodox would always prefer Turban to the Tiara. Going as a Catholic still to some Greek islands, sometimes the doors will be closed to you.

And certainly not only to the Ottomans were welcomed by spontaneous, well, spontaneous, I'm sure they helped organise the Greek revolts, but they also broke the old Venetian serfdom clauses and gave the Greek farmers freehold use of their lands. So there's actually a revolution, and we forget about that again and again, how appalling, without sounding like some doctrinaire communist, how appalling the Christian regimes were. The Hungarian nobility, the tripartiteite code is cited as one of the worst most abusive bits of repressive legislation ever. A Hungarian peasant had the right to nothing, even his clothes, his tools, his land. He was totally, the only thing he could sell was labour.

And so time and time again when the Ottoman Empire comes, they were liberating. And the third thing I really want to say is they weren't keen on converting. The Ottoman Empire lived from its minorities. The Poltax from all the Christians from the Jews was a major source of revenue. So all this sort of worry about the fall of Vienna doesn't really matter. Even if Vienna had fell, they'd have left them there as Christians, get some poll tax from them. Things would not really have changed. But they did also take, they also took their boys.

I mean, you know, I've had this cringe before because my... My boys are exactly the age. You know, they are exactly, between eight to, you know, what is it, 14. They could levy this blood tax and take little boys and turn them into januaries, not to come home again. William and I just think, you know, seven or eight, time they were packed off, it's no more than going to a boarding school of being educated to become a Mandarin elite, you know. It doesn't seem so odd for a certain minority. It explains a lot. And the Soprian Mehama'hama'i, Pasha, you know, was.

was from a minor dynasty of Serbian gentry. And one wonders how often they weren't, it was almost like a competitive examination. Could I join, you know, this year's sampling? Because it wasn't just genissaries, officials, gardeners, boatmen, the whole apparatus of the empire was run by these. I like to call them as young boy converts or, you know.

And Sakolou Mehmet Pasha kept in touch with his Serbian family, didn't he? I mean, it wasn't like they broke and, you know, changed identity. And indeed, Sinan, the great archivates. who's also live at this time building these extraordinary monuments, beginning his career with the Soleimanii, carrying on building for someone we'll hear more about in this episode, Kulich Ali Pasha and his gorgeous mosque on the shores of the Bosphorus. These people keep in touch with their families, whether they're Armenian or Serbian, and send goodies. It's like a remittance economy. They send money off to the Balkans and to Armenia.

I don't know what, see, I don't know what to think and feel about this. Maybe we should do a whole thing about the genoceros. Because on the one hand, we've talked about this before and I did my little hand-wringing mother thing. You know, again. But, you know, on the one hand, I hear that you had people who were hiding their children away, and they went on the run just so that, you know, when this harvesting of young boys was taking place. And on the other hand, I've also read that people would bribe officials, take my child because, you know, we could get a better life. What is true here? Both are probably true. You could imagine in different circumstances either being true or both. I think William's totally right. I think there was, you know, there was a draft when the war had gone badly and, you know, we need more. cannon fodder. That must have been a time when you were worried about your boy going off. But at other times, it was an absolute career of opportunity. And we're probably talking about

him later, but one of my heroes, Ulujali, one of the Ottoman admirals at Lepanto. And he was taken as a 17-year-old, fully formed Calabrian. You know, what greater sort of cultural identity can you have than being Italian, Calabrian, Catholic, a fisher boy? This is the other name for the guy I just talked about, Kilich Ali Pasha. They're the same person, yeah. He converts, but probably you'll get a reader or immediately be able to reply. But I can't think of a single major Ottoman converter to Islam who went and joined the empire, whoever betrayed, or ever reverted back to being a Christian.

And time and time again, you sadly are access to what was happening. I'm very keen on the North African province of the Ottoman Empire, comes from prisoner accounts. And they're being sort of paid by missionary societies to say how awful it was. But reading between the lines, you get that the real problem, there were so many converts. And so you went to the court's airports, and instead of being redeemed, you said, no, actually, this is a freer, more meritocratic world, open to men of talent, not so mad and snobbish. To be a knight of St. John, you had to prove you had no blemish, i.e. you were noble on eight

quarterings of your family tree. I mean, these are mad, racist, ethnic snobs, I know, running things. and the Ottoman Empire was sort of was like a sort of dream world of Canada and America, open to come, bring your talent. Talking about the renegades, the Archbishop Lord actually writes

a special service for the reconversion of a renegade, someone who's been converted to Islam, then somehow makes his way back to England. And it's so common that there's actually a service written that's sent around the country to formally reconvert renegades to Christianity.

Whoa, I love that. That's a brand new fact. I want to hear that. That's Nabil Matar, who we must get on this series at some point. We must. We must. Nabi will be fantastic. Now look, we are, I mean, this is actually, I can't see him, but I think our producer has perhaps one hair left on his head. Because we have built this about Lepanto.

And it is turning into a Panto. Oh, yes, it is. It is. And we've not even got to the most important event in the whole build-up to Lepanto, the Ottoman invasion of Cyprus and the siege of its capital, Nicosie. No, we have not. And so let's take a break there. And when we come back, we're going to get straight into that. Welcome back. So the year is 1570. Selim the second is the Ottoman sultan and he's planning to invade Cyprus. Just to give you a bit of context on this. This is just after the Pope has decided to excommunicate Elizabeth I of England. And there is a plot afoot to unseat her and put Mary Queen of Scots on the throne. So it's a really very busy. year. Let's talk about the Ottoman side, though, and the fact that this is the most pivotal moment in the run-up to the Battle of Lepanto. It is. So, Barnaby, Selim plans this siege and

attack well in advance, doesn't he? Yes, there's a theory that he was actually working on the plans on behalf of his father in the last year of Solomon and the magnificent reign. And so not only did he want to have a conquest of his own, he might have felt he was fulfilling something he'd been working with his revered, magnificent father on at the end of his life. This was a big deal. I mean, they had to build up a fleet. They had to do, I mean, is it amphibious landings? What's the, what's the style of an invasion of a Mediterranean island in the 16th century? Well, just to remind you, those who can't picture Cyprus, it's not really part of the Aegean, it's really part of the Levant from one of the mountains you can see Syria at sunset.

And there's a long, wonderful spine on the north coast that looks at Turkey. There's a great, great big platter in the middle and sort of rough limestone hills on the south. And there are three good ports there. There's Famagusta looking at Syria, at the Levant. There's Carina looking at Turkey. And there's Limassol looking at the west towards Crete and the rest of the Gien. And Cyprus's own very particular mood. It's both tangibly Anatolian when you walk on the landscape and also part of Greece. And as we know, it was entirely a Byzantine Greek island, felt with the Crusaders, this odd Lucignan dynasty ruled there for 150 years. So this is a French dynasty transplanted to an island in the Aegean?

To Cyprus, sold by that absolute villainous sort of paranoid, murdering character called Richard the Lionheart, you know, passing it on to the Lucignan for cash. They are a rather wonderful, become partly Hellenized and almost at the end of their career have a sort of fusion, Levantine state, which is rather beautiful when you come across monuments there, but they get squeezed by the Genoese and the Venetians. Eventually, the Venetians encouraged the last Lucienian king to marry a Venetian lady, and then they have a coup and take over the island. Never loved. What date is that, by the means? A rough sort of guess, 1480, 1480, 1460, so they've been there for a hundred years. Right. Okay, so this gives the Venetians a quite

tentative hold then. I mean, it's not, it's not sort of steeped in history. The roots aren't deep. No. And they're, the, Katerina Karano is, you know, the widow is crowned queen of Cyprus and then makes a formal abdication to the Venetian Republic. It's definitely a military coup squeezed out. And it's unattractive in the detail. The listeners are rather sweet to become part of the Levantan world. They've actually, in some complicated way, who decided to pay tribute to the Mamaluk Emirs in Cairo, and it becomes sort of folded in to the Levantine world. And when Venice takes over, it's definitely to build a sort of fortress. point, and they impose the Roman Catholic Church in a way that the Lucigniards had let things

almost slide together. I mean, the Orthodox and Catholic Church are separate apart, but you can see in the architecture how much they're leaning into each other. And the last really good, Lucigniigneur king has a choice of two Greek wives and his mistress, is also Byzantine. You know, they feel part of the mood. So the Venetian presence is entirely military when you're there. There's a beautiful Lucigniore Cathedral built in Nicassia and in Famagusta. still stands today. Yeah. Still stands today,

converted to mosques and survive in that way. And they evade claims to be kings of Jerusalem. It's a wonderful heritage at Lucianoe moment. And whenever you, and I've explored the island very thoroughly, I wrote a guidebook as a young man there, know it quite well, love the island.

But Venice is always just military. And there's something about getting to know the architecture. It's just steeped in power and walls and fortresses. And so the Ottoman set off from Istanbul with an enormous fleet that they've been building for three or four years in what, 1570? Yes, they land of 1570, terribly well organised. And Nicosia is right inland. They've got to get their army inland.

Their risings of the Greeks being, feeling liberated by the Turks, being their old sort of serfdom under the Venetians is broken, and the Turks give them freehold of their land, not only recognize the Orthodox Church, but end the Catholic presence on the island. So it's a form of liberation that's similar. that's happening in Eastern Europe. And the Ottomans are past masters at using any division. So whether you're Protestants or Catholics or Orthodox, they're in there and the quick and manipulating those differences, freeing the Greeks and concentrating all of their firepower, as it were, purely on the Venetians. Initially, on the great walled city of Nicosia,

impossible city to defend right in the middle of the island. So Venetians can't supply, can't use their navy. I mean, they should have declared an open city, and right from the start, concentrated all the strength on Famagusta. Carina, the other great fortress, is surrendered by the Venetian commander, who was later accused of treachery and put in a prison and never gets out of that prison in Crete. So Famagusta is the great testing siege in the end, and those fortresses are still magnificent. I've wandered around them. They are still awesome elements of military engineering.

Counter-scarps, glasses, barbicans, every technique designed to withstand a cannon bombard. And ultimately it's a big success for the Ottomans. They capture this really without too much difficulty, despite brave defence of Brigadino. It's a surrendered truce. They lose 50,000 men in the conquest of Nicosia and Famagusta. So there's a big casualties. And they found it quite difficult to persuade him in the soldiers to stay as Turkish settlers on the island. So there is high cost in blood of the fall of Cyprus, but there's a inevitability about it. And when you look at the map of the Levant, you see how neatly Cyprus will fit into the Ottoman provinces in Levant, Middle East. So the soldiers march out, they're allowed to take their

horses with them? They're allowed to take their weapons and their flags. Initially, the Venetian say, we want the same wonderful truce of dignity that Solomon and the magnificent offered to the Knights of St. John from the siege of Rhodes, the second siege of Rhodes, which again, fascinating was a powerful Ottoman siege, but it was a negotiated surrender. Ottomans had this finesse of not pushing things to the final sack and destruction and in the process would take over an inhabitable fortress. And that is a blisteringly expensive siege. The Turks in Cyprus still talk about 50,000 martyrs, and everybody knows what that means.

It's the 50,000 Turks who died trying to take Famagusta and Nicosea in that campaign. It was very, very bloodthirsty. The Venetians sort of knew that they were never going to win against the Ottoman Empire, but they always had to show that they were strong and tough and resolute. And they really were showing they could fight, but really in their end, at the end, they're going to have to make a piece of the Ottoman Empire, because they need the Levant trade. The Levant trade is their absolute lifeblood.

It's the arteries, the blood, the oxygen, everything that keeps the Venetian Empire going. And these empires are rather glorious sideshows, but they do a fantastic extraordinary job. And right at the end, there's a truce, and they agree to go, and there's a muddle because the Phoenicians had intercepted the Hajq caravan of pilgrims on their way to Mecca, and the Ottoman commander, Lala Mustafa, says, now we must swap prisoners, and what about the Hajq caravan?

And the Venetians laugh, and they said, oh, they were slaughtered. And the Ottomans lose their temper and break their truce and execute this callous Phoenician commander in his way. Red silk, pajamas. Wait a minute. You can't throw away that detail that cheaply. Go ahead. Quick.

How did they kill him, Barnaby? How did they kill him? Does he not know how we operate? First. Go on a full Game of Thrones detail. First of all, they bury him in the ground when he's quite annoying at the beginning and not respectful and cut off his ears. And then they dig him up and say, right now you can leave.

And then he's rude again. And then what do they do, Barnaby? You cannot just say that he just killed. him? What did they do, Barnaby? They tie him against one of the classical columns, and they skin him starting from a scalp. They flee him alive.

Halfway through the operation, like Marcius, and they stuff his skin with straw, and they hoist it up on the height of the Ottoman galley, and sailor passes a great sort of red balloon, but of the Venetian who had killed innocent pilgrims on the way to Mecca. That is one way of understanding.

We know that Famagostafel fell before Lepanto. So it's not like revenge for Lepanto. It's a normal bit of conquest. And the Ottomans wanted to take the island, give the Sultan his victory, you know, then get back to business with the Venetians. So it's quite difficult to understand about this terror campaign, because we know in earliest campaigns, the Ottomans were really respected for their word. They would, you know, the knights of Sir John from Rhodes were allowed to go in peace. quite often when you were defeated Serbian and Bosnian nobles were given opportunity to convert and would then join the Ottoman Empire as quite high-ranking ministers.

One of the great ways the Ottoman Empire expanded was by being decent victors. So it's not normal this. Right, so keep your word, yeah. Yeah, it's very, very highly publicised. And what did Bruggan say? What was it that really made them see red? According to my account, he was scornful about the request of Lala Mustafa, about the fate of the Hage pilgrims who've been intercepted by the Venetian fleet,

as if they didn't count and had been killed. Was that right in thinking there was a beloved nurse from the Harim who had been killed? There was something very personal about this. That might well be the detail we're looking for. There was a real need. But without becoming an apologist for the Turks, it's not their normal conduct to flay a Venetian senator. Okay, William, we find ourselves now in the summer of 1571.

The Ottomans have taken Cyprus from the Venetians. They have, I'm sorry to repeat this again and again, flayed their leader, Marco Brigadine. The stage is now set for one of the greatest naval battles in all history. It is, and it's Ottomans versus the Holy League, the Battle of Lepanto. I mean, it's such a good story of this. So, look, it's so important and actually so amazing. We want to tell this in great details.

So, William, how are we going to do this properly? Well, Anita, this week we're going to have to treat listeners to a second episode. We're going to get Barnaby back and we're going to go through the whole naval battle in a separate episode that will be coming out on Thursday. So please do join us again on Thursday for that. But for now, this is goodbye from me, Anita Arnand. And goodbye from me, William Derrimple.