Last week’s post was about a novel. This week’s will be about a poem. While I don’t intend to move sequentially through all the literary genres, this progression is so obvious as to seem nearly compulsory. But you may be surprised by the poem I choose: “Lepanto,” by G. K. Chesterton. Chesterton (1874-1936), a prolific author in several genres, is probably best known, to the extent he is generally known at all, for a series of mystery stories in which the detective is an unassuming Roman Catholic priest, Father Brown. Chesterton himself was a Catholic convert who, until eclipsed by C. S. Lewis, was probably the most successful popular high-brow apologist for literate Christianity in the English-speaking world.
“Lepanto” is a fairly long (more than 125 lines) poem devoted to a consequential naval battle that took place in the waters of southern Greece on October 7, 1571. As a possible essay topic, the battle of Lepanto came to me purely fortuitously from a snippet I read somewhere on October 7 just passed. Lepanto is a place-name, the western version of home base of the Ottoman fleet. The poem “Lepanto” is so raucously polemical and so overt in its political incorrectness as to be nearly breath-taking today. Chesterton, both in his own voice and in that assigned to the Turkish sultan, is almost enthusiastic in presenting the conflict as a renewal or a continuation of medieval crusades of earlier centuries. The names of crusading all-stars—Richard the Lionheart, Raymond of Toulouse, Godfrey of Buillon—are invoked with ungrudging awe by the sultan himself. But in terms of works of art, I know of few poems in which subject matter is better wedded to metrical form than this one. It is a military poem in which the brilliantly orchestrated rhythms suggest the patterns of marching feet, the orchestrated tempi of galley oarsmen, and percussive reports of canon fire that were the essence of the battle.
We may think of the sixteenth century as a golden age in Europe, but one macro-political truth was the increasing power of the Turkish Ottomans. The expulsions of the Christians from Constantinople (now Istanbul) in the fifteenth century was by no means the end of Muslim ambitions. Islam was still on the march. Lepanto begins with the image of a smiling “Soldan (Sultan) of Byzantium” whose increasingly bold corsairs are ravaging the Adriatic, including even the Venetians. The call of the Pope, Pius V, for a defensive crusade receives differing levels of support from the Catholic monarchs of Europe joined in alliance in their so-called Holy League. Their military leader is a very young bastard—a real bastard that is, for there was seldom a shortage of bastards around the royal houses of Europe—Don John of Austria. Don Juan was one of the illegitimate offspring of the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V. (Please remember that Voltaire would joke that the Holy Roman Emperor was neither Roman nor an emperor. I leave you to make your own judgment as to sanctity.) Young Don Juan was on the make, and he turned out to be one hell of a soldier. He became the Supreme Commander of a formidable galley navy charged with seeking out and destroying the galleys of the Ottomans. The two flotillas made contact among the channel waters of southwestern Greece. In one of the world’s most consequential naval battles the Christian fleet emerged absolutely victorious, destroying virtually all the “Saracen” fleet and liberating as many as ten thousand Christian galley slaves who had been conquered or kidnapped by the Turks. The outcome of the battle, though fully explicable on materialist grounds to modern historians, was regarded as semi-miraculous in the Christian West.
Chesterton’s poem tells this story in booming verse from a triumphalist point of view, focusing at the end on one obscure seaman who would later become rather famous in literary history himself, Miguel de Cervantes, the author of Don Quixote. Cervantes had been seriously wounded at the battle, losing the effective use of one of his arms. It is perhaps lamentable that religious, cultural, and political strife is a major topic of world literature from the Iliad to War and Peace and beyond. But to the extent that literature is a reflection of real life, there is little enough hope that this situation is likely to change. In his Art of Poetry Horace suggests that the only worthy subject of serious literature is the Trojan War. We have at least expanded that window. Tolstoy’s novel is one of several contenders for the title of the greatest novel ever written but it must compete with a few others, including one written by the famous Lepanto veteran, Cervantes, whose legendary hero is less chivalric hero than chivalric fantasist.
John of Austria is, for Chesterton, “the last knight of Europe” and “the last and lingering troubadour to whom the bird has sung”. But those compliments—and I do regard them as compliments, if rather fanciful ones—might better be bestowed on Cervantes. As he himself had spent some years in captivity to Barbary pirates, the ancestors of those alluded to in the phrase “the shores of Tripoli” in the “Marine hymn”, he may well have had a point of view about barbaric behavior. Among the results of the Battle of Lepanto was the liberation of as many as ten thousand kidnapped galley slaves of Christian birth. This dramatic emancipation may well have had a special meaning for him personally. Yet he is among the gentlest and most compassionate of our great writers, and his own most ingenious invention of character, that of the knight of La Mancha who has given us the indispensable English adjective quixotic, has to be among the most lovable of fictional characters in world literature.
What may seem the final acts of history often prove in the end actually to be temporary phases. Lepanto did put an end to Turkish piracy in the Adriatic, or at least severely limited it. And taken together with the earlier successful defense of Malta, besieged by the Ottomans in 1565, the stunning victory bolstered the military confidence of the Christian nations to a significant degree. But the Turks soon enough licked their wounds and rebuilt a fleet. Greece did not gain its independence from Ottoman satraps until the time of Byron and of the American marines on “the shores of Tripoli”. And if you are following the news out of Britain and France you can hear the strange, distorted echoes of an ancient clash of cultures yet today.
