THE SWORD AND THE SEA 151of Sinope in 1853 is probably symptomatic of most of them—a larger,
more advanced European force cut up a smaller Turkish squadron. Turkish
naval forces were overwhelmed by the Italians when the latter took Tripoli
in 1912, and in 1913 they failed to make any impact on the small Greek
fleet. More recently, in 1983 Libyan patrol boats were massacred by an
American carrier group in the Gulf of Sidra—as pathetic a mismatch as
can be imagined.
There is, though, one pleasant souvenir of Ottoman naval greatness still
to be found in the modern world. On the western shore of the Anatolian
Peninsula is the small town of Bodrum. This coastal village was once an
important shipbuilding base for the great Ottoman fleet of the fifteenth
through seventeenth centuries. Today, it no longer builds galleys, but cer-
tain yards specialize in a superbly designed and distinct little two-masted
yacht called thegulet.It is nice to think that these pleasant little craft may
be the descendants many times removed of the sultan’s galleys.
CHRONOLOGY
649 Arabs attack Cyprus.
655 Abdullah Sehr defeats a Byzantine fleet near Fenike.
668 First Arab land and naval attack on Constantinople
674–77 Arab land and naval attacks on Constantinople
715 Caliph Suleiman bin Abdumelik launches a combined land-
naval attack on Constantinople.
782 Harun ur Rashid attacks Constantinople.
827–31 The fleet of the Spanish Caliphate attacks and occupies Sicily.
1000–1400 Muslim seapower in decline because of Crusades and Mongol
invasions.
1440 Venice demonstrates the utility of naval power to the Ottomans
in the first of three Venetian wars.
1453 Constantinople captured by a combined land-naval attack.
1520s Khayr-ad-Din, or Barbarossa, leads Algerian and Turkish
squadrons in operations against the Italians.
1550 Tripoli captured
1565 Malta successfully defended