WEST COMES EAST 221virtual carcass for vultures to pick over, the Ottomans could still muster
damaging military strength.
Historians identify two seminal military defeats that spelled the begin-
ning of the end for the Ottomans, though both went more or less unno-
ticed by the Turks at the time. One was the battle of Lepanto, which took
place in 1571. In this naval engagement, the Venetians and their allies de-
stroyed virtually the entire Ottoman Mediterranean fleet. In Europe, the
battle was hailed as a thrilling sign that the heathen Turk was finally, finally
going down.
In Istanbul, however, the grand vizier compared the loss of the fleet to
the shaving of a man's beard: it would only make the new beard grow in
thicker. Indeed, within one year, the Ottomans replaced the whole lost
fleet with an even bigger and more modern fleet, featuring eight of the
largest ships ever to ply the Mediterranean. Within six months after that,
the Ottomans won back the eastern Mediterranean, conquered Cyprus,
and began to harass Sicily. Small wonder that contemporary Ottoman
analysts didn't see the battle of Lepanto as any big turning point at the
time. It would take at least another century before European naval dom-
inance would become fully evident and the significance of that domi-
nance unmistakable.
The other seminal military event took place a bit earlier with a follow-
up much later. The earlier bracket was Suleiman the Magnificent's failure
to take Vienna. Ottoman forces had never stopped pushing steadily west,
and in 1529 they reached the gates of Vienna, but the sultan set siege to
the famous Austrian city too late in the season. With winter coming on, he
decided to let Vienna go this time and conquer it the next time around.
But there was no next time for Suleiman, because other issues cropped up
and he got distracted-the empire was so big, after all, and its borders so
long, that distractions were constantly sprouting up on those borders some-
where. The sultan never made another attempt on Vienna but his contem-
poraries saw no sign of weakness in this. "Conquer Vienna'' remained on
his to-do list always; it's just that the man was busy. He was fighting and
winning other battles, and his rule was so successful that only a blithering
idiot would have suggested that the Ottomans were in decline in his day
just because they had not taken Vienna. It wasn't a military defeat, after all,
just a failure to score the usual crushing victory.