Say what you like about the armies of Islam, they certainly show persistence. In AD732, they got as far as the Loire, to be stopped at the last gasp by Charles Martel near Poitiers. In 846, they sailed up the Tiber and looted St Peter's, only being prevented from ransacking the heart of Rome by the remaining Aurelian walls. There followed a few centuries of respite with the crusades (counter-crusades, technically) before Jerusalem, and then in 1453 the greatest jewel of them all, Constantinople, fell to the soldiers of Allah, this time in the form of the Ottoman Turks. It was under their ruler, Suleiman the Magnificent, that Islamic imperialism reached its most dangerous high-water mark, and it is this period that Roger Crowley, having previously written a fine account of the fall of Constantinople, now covers in this magnificent new narrative history.

During the six middle decades of the 16th century, Europe was threatened on every side. The flower of Hungarian chivalry was destroyed at Mohacs, and Vienna besieged. The Knights of St John were finally driven from Rhodes, and fell back on Malta. Barbary pirates from Tunis and Algiers raided throughout the Mediterranean with virtual impunity, and even carried off “white slaves” from the villages of Cornwall and Ireland. (Africans enslaved Europeans first, oddly enough.) Meanwhile the Venetians, the Swiss bankers of the age, were interested only in neutrality and gold, even when St Mark's basin was blockaded; and the rest of Christendom squabbled hopelessly among themselves, Valois against Hapsburg, Catholic against Protestant, and rarely showed a united front. In 1543, indeed, the treacherous French collaborated with the Turks to sack Nice, then a Hapsburg possession.

Such a messy background only makes the few episodes of genuinely valiant resistance shine the brighter, and it is on these thrilling set pieces that Crowley largely concentrates. The Siege of Malta in 1565 (some 600 Knights of St John versus an Ottoman army of around 30,000) was arguably the single most heroic siege in history, and Crowley does full justice to the relentless drama of those four scorching summer months, when the roar of Turkish cannon could be heard in Sicily, 120 miles away, and even Protestant England prayed for the salvation of Malta. The European powers dragged their heels atrociously over actually coming to help, however, even though they knew that should Malta fall to the Turks, Suleiman would then be Lord of the western Mediterranean as well as the East. The Knights and their gallant Maltese auxiliaries fought on alone, with unimaginable bravery, with all “the visceral brutality of the Homeric bronze age”.

There is the implacable Jean de la Valette, head of the Order of St John, refusing to give one inch of ground. There is the Spanish knight, Captain Miranda, unable to stand for his wounds, hauling himself into a chair and fighting on, sword in hand. There is an Italian traitor, “tied to a horse's tail and beaten to death by children with sticks” (always this bewildering mix of barbarity and extreme valour). When the outlying fortress of St Elmo finally fell, the Turks mutilated the last survivors and floated them across to St Angelo nailed to wooden crosses, a “gruesome flotsam”. La Valette's instant riposte was to execute all his Turkish prisoners and fire their severed heads back over into the Ottoman camp. Geneva Convention, no. But such granite resolution wore down the Ottoman army, even the incomparable janissaries in their ostrich-feather shakos, advancing on the Walls of St Angelo time after time, chanting verses from the Koran. Malta stood firm and the Turks eventually sailed home.

The other great set-piece here is the Battle of Lepanto in 1571, the largest naval engagement until Jutland in 1916, and this time a shattering defeat for the Ottoman Empire, now ruled by Suleiman's son, the unprepossessing Selim the Sot. Again Crowley shows a novelist's eye for vivid scene-painting: Don John of Austria, 25 years old, dancing galliards on deck as he sails into battle; his pet marmoset pulling arrows from the mast and breaking them with its teeth; and towards the end of the battle, in a scene of surreal horror, both Christians and Turks running so short of missiles that they start throwing oranges and lemons at each other amid exhausted laughter, adrift in a sea almost solid with corpses. Forty thousand men died in four hours. Not until Loos in 1916, Crowley notes, would this rate of slaughter be surpassed. Yet to one who fought in it, a bookish young Spaniard whose left hand was permanently maimed, it was “the greatest event witnessed by ages past, present and to come”. Fortunately, he was right-handed. His name was Miguel de Cervantes.

Gibbon famously wrote that had the march of Islam not been halted in 732, the schools of Oxford might now teach the religion of Muhammad. (Actually, they do now, but for rather more complex reasons.) The same could surely be said of the desperate, sometimes superhuman European resistance to the Ottoman onslaught of the 16th century. And what did those vast dreams of an Islamic world empire finally achieve? Nothing but suffering and slaughter. Only two months after Lepanto, Don John wrote, ‘I spend my time building castles in the air, but in the end all of them, and I, blow away in the wind.' As Crowley adds, “It is an epitaph that might serve all the empire builders of that violent century.

Empires of the Sea by Roger Crowley
Faber £20 pp341

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