Part 4 (1/2)
At dawn on 24 June--the day of battle--the wind was blowing fair into the mouth of the Eede, but the tide was ebbing, and the attack could not be driven home till it turned, and gave deep water everywhere between the banks of the inlet. King Edward used the interval to array his fleet and get it into position for the dash into the river. His s.h.i.+ps stood out to sea on the starboard tack, a brave sight with the midsummer sun s.h.i.+ning on the white sails, the hundreds of banners glowing with red, blue, white, and gold, the painted s.h.i.+elds hanging on p.o.o.p and bulwark. On the raised bows and sterns of the larger s.h.i.+ps barons and knights and men-at-arms stood arrayed in complete armour. The archers were ranged along the bulwarks, or looked out from the crow's-nest-tops over the swelling sails.
Old Barbavera must have longed to cut las.h.i.+ngs, slip cables, drift out on the tide, and meet the English in the open, but he was in a minority of one against two. And now the tide was dead slack and began to turn, and King Edward's trumpets gave the expected signal for action. As their notes rang over the sea the shouting sailors squared the yards and the fleet began to scud before the wind for the river-mouth, where beyond the green d.y.k.es that kept the entrance free a forest of masts bristled along the bank towards Sluys.
The English came in with wind and tide helping them, several s.h.i.+ps abreast, the rest following each as quickly as she might, like a great flock of sea-birds streaming towards the sh.o.r.e. There could be no long ranging fire to prelude the close attack. At some sixty yards, when men could see each other's faces across the gap, the English archers drew their bows, and the cloth-yard arrows began to fly, their first target the ”Great Cristopher”
on the flank of the line. Bolts from cross-bows came whizzing back in reply. But, as at Crecy soon after, the long-bow with its rapid discharge of arrows proved its superiority over the slower mechanical weapon of the Genoese cross-bowmen.
But no time was lost in mere shooting. Two English s.h.i.+ps crashed into the bows and the port side of the ”Cristopher,” and with the cry of ”St. George for England!” a score of knights vied with each other for the honour of being first on board of the enemy. The other s.h.i.+ps of the English van swung round bow to bow with the next of the French line, grappled and fought to board them. King Edward himself climbed over the bows of a French s.h.i.+p, risking his life as freely as the youngest of his esquires. Then for a while on the French left it was a question of which could best handle the long, heavy swords, made not for deft fencing work, but for sheer hard hacking at helmet and breastplate.
Behind this fight on the flank, s.h.i.+p after s.h.i.+p slipped into the river, but at first attacked only the left division closely, those that had pushed furthest in opening with arrow fire on the centre and leaving the right to look helplessly on. The English archers soon cleared the enemy's tops of their bowmen, and then from the English masts shot coolly into the throng on the hostile decks, their comrades at the bulwarks shooting over the heads of those engaged in the bows. The English arrows inflicted severe loss on the enemy, but the real business was done by the close attack of the boarding-parties, that cleared s.h.i.+p after s.h.i.+p from the left inwards, each s.h.i.+p attacked in turn having to meet the knights and men-at-arms from several of the English vessels.
But the French fought with determined courage, and hour after hour went by as the attack slowly worked its way along the line. The slaughter was terrible, for in a sea-fight, as in the storming of a city wall, no quarter was asked or given. The crews of the captured s.h.i.+ps were cut down as they fought, or driven over the stern into the water, where, for the most part, their heavy armour drowned them.
It was past noon, and the tide was turning when the left and centre, the squadrons of Kiriet and Bahuchet, were all captured. Then the attack raged round the nearest vessels on the right, tall s.h.i.+ps of the Genoese. Most of these, too, were taken, but as the tide ran out King Edward feared his large s.h.i.+ps would ground in the upper waters of the estuary, and the signal was given to break off the attack, an order welcome even to the weary victors.
Barbavera, with a few s.h.i.+ps, got clear of the beaten right wing and lay up near Sluys, while the English plundered and burned some of their prizes and took the best of them out to sea on the ebbing tide. In the night the Genoese admiral slipped out to sea, and got safely away. The French fleet had been utterly destroyed, and the Genoese sailors had no intention of further risking themselves in King Philip's quarrel. They thought only of returning as soon as might be to the Mediterranean.
King Edward went on to Ghent, after landing his fighting-men, and sending his fleet to bring further forces from England. Henceforth for many a long year he might regard the Channel as a safe highway for men and supplies for the war in France.
The victory of the English had cost them a relatively trifling loss. The French losses are said to have been nearly 30,000 men. Strange to say, among the English dead were four ladies who had embarked on the King's s.h.i.+p to join the Queen's Court at Ghent. How they were killed is not stated.
Probably they were courageous dames whose curiosity led them to watch the fight from the tall p.o.o.p of the flags.h.i.+p as they would have watched a tournament from the galleries of the lists, and there the cross-bow bolts of the Genoese found them.
There is an old story that men feared to tell King Philip the news of the disaster, and the Court jester broke the tidings with a casual remark that the French must be braver than the English, for they jumped into the sea by scores, while the islanders stuck to their s.h.i.+ps. The defeat at sea prepared the way for other defeats by land, and in these campaigns there appeared a new weapon of war--rudely fas.h.i.+oned cannon of short range and slow, inaccurate fire--the precursors of heavier artillery that was to change the whole character of naval warfare.
It was the coming of the cannon that inaugurated the modern period. But before telling of battles in which artillery played the chief part, we must tell of a decisive battle that was a link between old and new. Lepanto--the battle that broke the Turkish power in the Mediterranean--saw, like the sea-fights of later days, artillery in action, and at the same time oar-driven galleys fighting with the tactics that had been employed at Salamis and Actium, and knights in armour storming the enemy's s.h.i.+ps like Erik Jarl at Svold and King Edward at Sluys.
[Ill.u.s.tration: A GALLEY _From an engraving by J. P. le Bas_]
[Ill.u.s.tration: A CARRACK OR FRIGATE _From an engraving by Tomkins_ MEDITERRANEAN CRAFT OF THE 16TH CENTURY]
CHAPTER V
LEPANTO
1571
The Turk has long been known as the ”sick man of Europe,” and the story of the Ottoman Empire for a hundred years has been a tale of gradual dismemberment. Thus it is no easy matter for us to realize that for centuries the Ottoman power was the terror of the civilized world.
It was in 1358 that the Ottomans seized Gallipoli, on the Dardanelles, and thus obtained their first footing in Europe. They soon made themselves masters of Philippopolis and Adrianople. A crusading army, gathered to drive the Asiatic horde from Europe, was cut to pieces by the Sultan Bajazet at Nicopolis in 1396. On the day after the battle ten thousand Christian prisoners were ma.s.sacred before the Sultan, the slaughter going on from daybreak till late in the afternoon. The Turk had become the terror of Europe.
Constantinople was taken by Mahomet II in 1453, and the Greek Empire came to an inglorious end. Then for more than a century Austrians, Hungarians, and Poles formed a barrier to the advance of the Asiatic power into Central Europe.
But the Turks during this century became a maritime power. They had conquered the Crimea and were masters of the Black Sea. They had overrun Greece and most of the islands of the Archipelago. They had threatened Venice with their fleets, and had for a while a foothold in Southern Italy.
They took Rhodes from the Knights of St. John, annexed Syria and Egypt, and the Sultan of Constantinople was acknowledged as the Khalifa of Islam, the representative of the Prophet by the Mohammedan states of North Africa--Tripoli, Tunis, and Morocco. In 1526 the victory of Mohacs made the Turks masters of Hungary. They had driven a wedge deep into Europe, and there was danger that their fleets would soon hold the command of the Mediterranean.
These fleets were composed chiefly of large galleys--lineal descendants (so to say) of the ancient triremes. There was a row of long oars on either side, but sail power had so far developed that there were also one, two, even three tall masts, each crossed by a long yard that carried a triangular lateen sail. The base of the triangle lay along the yard, and the apex was the lower corner of the triangular sail, which could be hauled over to either side of the s.h.i.+p, one end of the yard being hauled down on the other side. The sail thus lay at an angle with the line of the keel, with one point of the yard high above the masthead, and by carrying the sheet tackle of the point of the sail across the s.h.i.+p, and reversing the position of the yard, the galley was put on one tack or the other. Forward, pointing ahead, was a battery of two or more guns, and there was sometimes a second but lighter battery astern, to be used when the galley was escaping from a s.h.i.+p of superior force. Turks, in the Eastern Mediterranean, Moors in the West, recruited their crews of rowers by capturing Christian s.h.i.+ps and raiding Christian villages, to carry off captives who could be trained to the oar. This piracy, plundering, and slave-hunting went on in the Mediterranean up to the first years of the nineteenth century, when, after the Turks themselves had long abandoned it, the sea rovers of the Barbary States in the western waters of the inland sea still kept it up, and European nations paid blackmail to the Beys of Tripoli, Tunis, and Algiers to secure immunity for their s.h.i.+ps and sailors.
In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries no part of the Mediterranean was free from the raids of the Moslem pirates. Such was the peril of the sea that s.h.i.+ps used to carry two sets of sails, one white for use by day, the other black, in order to conceal their movements in the darkness. Thousands of Christian slaves were always wearing out their miserable lives in the galleys and prisons of the Mohammedan ports. Isolated expeditions were sometimes made by this or that Christian power for their deliverance. Two religious orders were founded to collect alms for their ransom, to minister to them in their captivity, and to negotiate for their deliverance. But all this was only a mitigation of the evil, and year after year there went on the enslavement of Europeans, men for the galleys, women for the harems.