• Military Menu                       

• Introduction
• Systems
• Facilities
• Agencies
• Industry
• Operations
• Countries
• Hot Documents
• News
• Reports
• Policy
• Budget
• Congress
• Links

• WMD
• Intelligence
• Homeland Security
• Space

Ottoman Navy - Early History

The Ottomans, initially inexperienced in naval affairs, were eager to take lessons. The Turkish navy had been of slow growth, chiefly because in early days there were always people ready to act as sailors for pay. When Murad I. wished to cross from Asia to Europe to meet the invading army of Vladislaus and Hunyady, the Genoese skippers were happy to carry over his men for a ducat a head, just to spite their immemorial foes the Venetians, who were enlisted on the other side.

It was not till the fall of Constantinople gave the Turks the command of the Bosphorus that Mohammed II resolved to create for himself a naval power. When Mohammed II issued forth with a fleet of one hundred galleys and two hundred transports, carrying seventy thousand troops, and ravished the Negropont away from Venice in 1470, he had only to repass the Hellespont to be absolutely safe. All that the Venetian admirals, the famous Loredani, could do was to retaliate upon such islands of the Archipelago as were under Turkish sway and ravage the coasts of Asia Minor. Superior as they were to the Turks in the building and management of galleys, they had not the military resources of their foe. Their troops were mercenaries, not to be compared with the Janissaries and Sipahis, though the hardy Stradiotes from Epirus, dressed like Turks, but without the turban, of whom Othello is a familiar specimen, came near to rivalling them.

There was another naval power to be reckoned with besides discredited Genoa and tributary Venice. The Knights Hospitallers of Jerusalem, driven from Smyrna (in 1403) by Timur, had settled at Rhodes, which they hastened to render impregnable. Apparently they succeeded, for attack after attack from the Mamluk Sultans of Egypt failed to shake them from their stronghold, whence they commanded the line of commerce between Alexandria and Constantinople, and did a brisk trade in piracy upon passing vessels. The Knights of Rhodes were the Christian Corsairs of the Levant ; the forests of Caramania furnished them with ships, and the populations of Asia Minor supplied them with slaves.

Rhodes fell, after an heroic defence, at the close of 1522. For six months the Knights held out, against a fleet which had swollen to four hundred sail and an army of over a hundred thousand men commanded by the Sultan in person. The fall of Rhodes removed the last obstacle to the complete domination of the Ottoman fleet in the eastern basin of the Mediterranean. Henceforward no Christian ship was safe in those waters unless by the pleasure of the Sultan. The old maritime Republics were for the time reduced to impotence, and no power existed to challenge the Ottoman supremacy in the Aegean, Ionian, and Adriatic Seas.

By the time of the Battle of Lepanto (1571), the primarily unwritten doctrine and tactics of galley warfare in the Mediterranean had been perfected to such a state that each side could have been considered masters of the naval art. Indeed, the battle was fought much the same as a joust between knights, with all of the formalities accorded gentlemen under arms. Althoughthe Christian commander at Lepanto, Don John of Austria, was Spanish, the ships were virtually all from Italian city-states, the largest contribution coming from Venice. The Christian fleet numbered well in excess of 200 galleys, galleasses, and subsidiary ships of sail, and the Turkish fleet had roughly the same strength. The Christians had superiority in numbers ofcannon, roughly 2.4:1.

The Turkish commander-in-chief, Ali Pasha, fought a brave battle butin the end lost his life, and his force was defeated. The battle appears to have turned, in part, due to Christian superior firepower, technology (ship construction, providing protection for the crew, and personal armor), new ship design (galleasses), favorable winds, and doctrine/tactics (galleasses placed ahead ofthe galleys and cannon used more freely and at point blank range). Lepanto signaled the virtual end to traditional galley tactics and the age of oared ships and ushered in the superior ships of sail.