Naval Power in the Mediterranean
By the middle of the 16th century the maritime primacy—commercial and military—of long-standing naval powers Venice and Genoa was gradually supplanted by great imperial actors forming in the Western and Eastern ends of the Mediterranean Sea. Ottoman power in the Levant first annihilated the last vestiges of Byzantium in the second half of the 15th century and proceeded in the 16th century to capture one after the other the strongholds of the Venetians, the Genovese, and the Knights of Saint John Hospitaler. Spain in the 16th century became an intercontinental power with security and commercial interests spanning large stretches of the Atlantic seaboard of the Americas, the Atlantic Ocean, its considerable European possessions beyond Spain proper, and the Western Mediterranean. These new and geographically dispersed military responsibilities and economic opportunities meant that Spain expand massively its naval power and presence. Spain’s main military competitor in the Mediterranean, at least, was France, and consequently, self-interest made France and the Ottoman Empire geopolitical bedfellows. Other important naval powers of the age—the English and the Dutch—were also present in the Mediterranean, albeit in secondary power positions. Their primary purposes were to promote and support commercial rather than political-territorial interests.
The bipartite division of the Mediterranean Sea into a mainly Western security zone dominated by Spain and a mainly Eastern security zone dominated by the Ottoman Empire crystallized late in the 16th century and following the Battle of Lepanto on October 7, 1571. With the last possessions of the West in the Levant—Cyprus, Rhodes, Crete—either captured or under imminent threat of invasion, with the fresh memory of the failed siege of Malta of 1565 in mind, and with Ottoman power bleeding into the territories of the Venetian Empire in the Eastern littoral of the Adriatic and Ionian Seas, Spain, Venice and the Papacy formed the Holy League to arrest Ottoman expansionism in the Mediterranean Sea. The adversaries met at the mouth of the Gulf of Corinth, on the Ionian Sea, directly south of the Adriatic Sea. The Battle of Lepanto was a geopolitical game-changer. Massive Ottoman losses put an end to the Turks’ trans-Mediterranean expansionism. Ottoman naval power in the Western Mediterranean was almost exclusively exercised as late as the first quarter of the 19th century through its North African proxies in Tunis and Algiers.
If the 16th century’s naval geopolitics of the Western Mediterranean Sea were dominated by Spain, the 17th century’s were defined by expanding French power and territorial interests. At the dawn of the Europe’s modern states, Venice and Genoa were gradually eclipsed as important players. Dutch commercial interests in the Mediterranean region succumbed to security concerns closer to home (in the North Sea), and to the prioritizing of mercantile interests in South East Asia. Importantly, more than a century after the expansion of Europeans globally, it was increasingly meaningless to distinguish each ocean or sea as an independent security or commercial space. The Mediterranean Sea’s pivotal role in antiquity and the medieval period as the most significant epicenter of trade was now gradually diminishing. Intercontinental trade of much greater geographic scope supplanted its central function. To some degree the Mediterranean Sea was becoming a relative economic periphery in a world increasingly becoming defined by new global connections and circuits of capital. This novel optic in naval strategy, supported by technologies, and surpluses of mercantile finance capital, gave rise to a new naval architecture. The oared galley that won the Battle of Salamis, helped Rome project its power across the Mediterranean Sea, protected Byzantium for a thousand years, and made Venice and Genoa commercial superpowers, was incompatible with the new environment—the Atlantic, the Indian, and later the Pacific Oceans—where European power was being projected. The galleon as a fully rigged ship of the line would replace the oared galley to become the main tool of European naval geopolitics in the 17th and 18th centuries.