Two fleets of oared galleys met off Lepanto, on the western coast of Greece, on October 7, 1571, and the fighting lasted about five hours. The Holy League, an alliance put together by Pope Pius V from Spain, Venice, Genoa, the papal states and the Knights of Malta, had roughly 200 galleys and around 30,000 fighting men. The Ottoman fleet was larger. By the afternoon about half of it had been taken or sunk, and estimates of the Ottoman dead run between 20,000 and 25,000. Some 12,000 Christian galley slaves were freed that day.
The immediate cause was Cyprus, which the Ottomans had invaded the year before and whose last Venetian garrison at Famagusta had fallen in August. The pope had spent more than a year assembling the alliance, and the fleets sailed under a banner he had blessed. Command went to Don John of Austria, the 24-year-old illegitimate son of Charles V who had never commanded a fleet at sea. He had one new idea: four heavy Venetian galleasses placed ahead of the line, whose gunfire broke up the Ottoman approach before the rams met.
The galleasses did their work. The centre held. The Ottoman commander Ali Pasha was killed after his flagship was boarded, and his head was shown on a pike. Ships fought so close together that crews threw pots of quicklime and burning oil across the railings at one another, and accounts written afterwards say the water in the gulf was darkened with blood for miles around. Miguel de Cervantes, then a Spanish soldier, was hit three times and lost the use of his left hand; he wrote about it with some pride thirty years later.
The victory did not return Cyprus, and Venice signed a separate peace with the Ottomans in 1573 that gave up the island and paid an indemnity. What changed was the assumption that the Ottoman fleet could not be beaten at sea, which had governed Mediterranean politics since the fall of Constantinople. Lepanto was also the last large battle fought entirely by oared galleys, a type of ship that had carried war in that sea for two thousand years.