THE great clash of civilisations at the battle of Lepanto in 1571 captured the imagination of Europe, inspiring artists and writers for decades afterwards. The Ottoman Turks had begun the war the previous year, to drive and the Venetians from the eastern Mediterranean by invading their outpost of Cyprus. More than a century after the fall of Byzantium, Christendom was again facing defeat by its mortal enemy.

Europe rallied to the Venetian cause. Spanish and Italian galleys sailed for Cyprus, under the command of Don John of Austria, half-brother of Philip II of Spain and a swashbuckling military adventurer. To Christian Europe, the rampaging Turks seemed invincible.

The two fleets met at Lepanto, off the coast of Greece. It took Don John just four hours to annihilate the Turkish fleet, capturing 117 galleys and thousands of men — a brilliant victory, though one which in the long run could not halt the Ottomans.

Titian, Tintoretto and Veronese celebrated the victory in extravagant paintings. Even in distant England, Lepanto was hailed as a triumph. Shakespeare was 7 when the battle took place, and, 33 years later, the Bard made the Venetian defence of Cyprus the setting for one of his greatest tragedies. As Othello dies, he reminds the audience of Christendom’s titanic struggle: “Set you down this;/ And say besides, that in Aleppo once,/ Where a malignant and a turban ’d Turk/ Beat a Venetian and traduced the state,/ I took by the throat the circumcised dog/ And smote him, thus.”

The clash with the Muslim enemy was a common theme in Shakespeare’s time. Henry V, courting Kate, asks her whether they should not have a son “that shall go to Constantinople and take the Turk by the beard”. In France, 50 years later, Racine set one of his tragedies, Bajazet, in the court of sultan Amurat, who captured Babylon in 1638.

But warfare did not stop merchants trading, travellers exploring and emissaries negotiating. By the 17th century French and Engish traders had established footholds in Istanbul, along with the ubiquitous Venetians and Genoese. Working largely through Jewish and Armenian “dragomans” (interpreters), they exploited the trade concessions forced upon the sultans by the need for bullion, which had flooded Europe from South America.

The Europeans settled for co-existence. Five centuries earlier the Muslims were seen as the greatest challenge to Christendom, and successive Popes launched crusades. In the long run, all failed. But while these scarred the European psyche with suspicion of the Muslim infidel, the Ottomans were regarded differently. Religious zeal played less of a role than commercial and political rivalry. Byzantium had fallen. But trade went on.

And so it had for centuries. Even as the Ottomans closed in on Byzantium throughout the 15th century, the diminishing city-state had made alliances and deals. The Ottomans conquered a swath of territory that brought them up against the Slavs and the Venetians. Serbia had been beaten at the battle of Kosovo in 1389, a date that has echoed down its history. Periodically the Venetians and the Habsburgs raised the battle cry against the Turks, but the clashing empires worked out a modus vivendi. For years the French kings enjoyed an entente with Istanbul and even while the Turks were conquering Crete, French merchants bought carpets, spices and brocades and sold wool, clocks and luxury goods.

Ordinary Europeans had little contact, however. The big sea power, Portugal, clashed with Turkish forces at the entrance to the Red Sea. But Europe was by now looking farther afield — to America, Africa, India and China. Süleyman the Magnificent tried to conquer all the Mediterranean, but after the heroic resistance of Malta, defended by the Knights of St John during the long siege in 1565, made no further forays westwards.

In the Balkans, Ottoman power reached a high point at the second siege of Vienna, in 1683. But already the empire was decaying from within. By the 19th century the “Sick Man of Europe” was desperately trying to modernise its creaking empire. And by the end of the First World War it was over.