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The complete width of the entrance to the bay of Lepanto was now a scene of mortal combat, though the vessels were so lost under a pall of smoke that none of the combatants could see far to the right or left. The lines, indeed, were broken up into small detachments, each fighting the antagonists in its front, without regard to what was going on elsewhere.
Aboard the Spanish vessel there broke a terrible cry of "Asad-ed-Din" the name of the most redoubtable Muslim corsair since the Italian renegade Ochiali the Ali Pasha who had been killed at Lepanto. Trumpets blared and drums beat on the poop, and the Spaniards in morion and corselet, armed with calivers and pikes, stood to defend their lives and liberty. The gunners sprang to the culverins.
By that time the Christians had taken 117 galleys and 20 galliots, and sunk or burnt some fifty other ships of various sorts. Ten thousand Turks were captured and many thousands of Christian slaves rescued. The Christians lost 7500 men; the Turks, about 30,000. It was an overwhelming victory. As far as the tactics go, Lepanto was, like Salamis, an infantry battle on floating platforms.
On the day before the Antwerp massacre, four days before the publication of the Ghent treaty, a foreign cavalier, attended by a Moorish slave and by six men-at-arms, rode into the streets of Luxemburg. The cavalier was Don Ottavio Gonzaga, brother of the Prince of Melfi. The Moorish slave was Don John of Austria, the son of the Emperor, the conqueror of Granada, the hero of Lepanto.
Don John of Austria won Lepanto at twenty-five, the greatest battle of modern time; had it not been for the jealousy of Philip, the next year he would have been Emperor of Mauritania. Gaston de Foix was only twenty-two when he stood a victor on the plain of Ravenna. Every one remembers Conde and Rocroy at the same age. Gustavus Adolphus died at thirty-eight.
There stood the young conqueror of Lepanto, his brain full of schemes, his heart full of hopes, on the threshhold of the Netherlands, at the entrance to what he believed the most brilliant chapter of his life schemes, hopes, and visions doomed speedily to fade before the cold reality with which he was to be confronted.
The oath to stand by each other was then solemnly renewed, and a parting health was drunk. The captains then returned to their ships. As the Lepanto warrior, Don Juan d'Avila, saw the little vessels slowly moving towards him, he summoned a Hollander whom he had on board, one Skipper Gevaerts of a captured Dutch trading bark, and asked him whether those ships in the distance were Netherlanders.
When he first heard of the glorious victory at Lepanto, his countenance had remained impassive, and he had continued in the chapel at the devotional exercises which the messenger from Don John had interrupted. Only when the news of the Massacre of St. Bartholomew first reached him, had he displayed an amount of cheerfulness equal to that which he manifested at the fall of Antwerp.
The recent victory of the Christian forces at the famous battle of Lepanto checked the spread of Mohammedanism in Eastern Europe, and turned men's thoughts back into the old channel of the Crusades; so that Gregory XIII., who ascended the pontifical throne about the time that Tasso had resumed the writing of his Gerusalemme, had actually planned an expedition to the Holy Land, like that which his predecessor, Urban II., had sent out.
Had it occurred twenty-four hours later, the destinies of the world might, and most probably would, have been completely changed; for Waterloo was one of those decisive battles which dominate the ages through their results, belonging to the same class of combats as do Marathon, Pharsalia, Lepanto, Blenheim, Yorktown, and Trafalgar.
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