The Ottoman Navy — Imperial Ottoman

The Ottoman fleet was, for a time, the most powerful naval force in the Mediterranean. Built up systematically from the early fourteenth century, expanded in the reign of Mehmed II after the conquest of Constantinople in 1453, and reaching its apogee under Suleiman the Magnificent in the sixteenth, the imperial navy played a central role in the conquest of the Aegean islands, the blockade of the Mamluk coast, the struggle for the western Mediterranean, and the long contest with the Spanish, Genoese, Venetian, and Hospitaller fleets. A general account of the Ottoman military gives the wider context; the most famous admiral of the fleet is treated in his own article on Hayreddin Barbarossa.

Key dates

c. 1321 — First Ottoman naval operations under Orhan, ferrying troops across the Bosphorus.
1354 — Ottoman capture of the Gallipoli peninsula; the fleet becomes a strategic arm.
1387 — Salonica taken with the help of the fleet.
1453 — The Ottoman fleet carries the army across the Bosphorus, blockades the Golden Horn, and prevents Christian relief.
1538 — Battle of Preveza; Hayreddin’s decisive victory over the Holy League.
1551 — Ottoman capture of Tripoli from the Knights of St John.
1571 — Battle of Lepanto, 7 October; the fleet’s heaviest defeat, partially reversed within a year.
1645–1669 — Cretan War; the fleet supports a long siege of Candia (Heraklion).
1770 — Battle of Çeşme, 5–7 July; the Russian squadron under Orlov destroys the Ottoman fleet in the Aegean.
1827 — Battle of Navarino; the Ottoman-Egyptian fleet is destroyed by the combined British, French, and Russian squadrons.
1853 — Battle of Sinop; the last major action of the Ottoman sailing fleet.

Origins and the early fleet

The Ottoman navy had its origins in the small flotilla of the early Ottoman emirate on the Sea of Marmara, and expanded rapidly after the conquest of the Gallipoli peninsula in 1354. The early fleet was built in local shipyards on the south coast of the Sea of Marmara, and it was used principally to transport troops across the straits and to support the Ottoman land campaigns in Thrace. The first major expansion came under Bayezid I, and the Ottoman capture of Salonica in 1387 and of many Aegean islands in the early fifteenth century were made possible by a strong, if not always successful, fleet.

The conquest of Constantinople in 1453 was a naval as well as a military operation: the fleet carried the army across the Bosphorus, blockaded the Golden Horn, and prevented relief by sea. Mehmed II, recognising the importance of sea power, ordered the construction of a large new fleet in the Golden Horn, and the conquest of the Greek archipelago, the emirate of Karaman, and the Khanate of the Crimea (as a vassal) followed in the next decades. The chronicles record that Kritoboulos of Imbros, the Greek historian of the siege, gave the naval blockade credit second only to the bombards in deciding the outcome.

The Golden Horn and the imperial arsenal

The principal shipyard of the Ottoman fleet was the Tersane-i Amire, the imperial arsenal, on the north shore of the Golden Horn at Kasımpaşa, in what is today the district of Beyoğlu in Istanbul. Founded by Mehmed II and expanded by his successors, by the seventeenth century it was one of the largest shipyards in the world, with a labour force of several thousand shipwrights, caulkers, riggers, and ancillary workers. The arsenal also produced anchors, oars, sails, gun-carriages, and the cannon that were the standard armament of Ottoman warships.

The basic warship of the fleet was the kadırga, a galley around 35–40 metres long with a single bank of oars, fore- and aft-castle, and a main armament of heavy cannon. The kadırga was fast, manoeuvrable, and well-suited to the calm waters of the Mediterranean. In the sixteenth century the fleet also built the larger mahmîye and the baştarde, capital ships with two or three masts and a heavier armament. From the late sixteenth century the fleet began to adopt the kalyon, the sailing ship-of-the-line borrowed from Mediterranean Christian practice: heavier than a galley, capable of mounting a broadside of heavy cannon, and increasingly dominant by the seventeenth century. The kalyon displaced the kadırga as the fleet’s capital ship by the 1620s, and the rowed galley survived mainly for the small craft of the corsairs.

The kadırga was a complex piece of engineering. The hull was built of timber — typically pine, oak, and cypress, with the keel cut from a single great tree — and the seams were caulked with pitch and oakum. The oars, generally 25 to 30 per side, were manned by convicts, slaves, and paid volunteers; the kürekçi (oarsmen) sat in fixed benches and were organised into squads of three or four oars per squad, each with its own officer. The rowers were expected to keep time to the music of the davul and the zurna, the same instruments that marched the Janissary army on land.

The Kapudan Pasha

The admiral of the Ottoman fleet held the title of Kapudan Pasha (literally “Captain Pasha”), and the office was one of the most prestigious in the empire. The Kapudan Pasha commanded the fleet at sea, administered the imperial arsenal, and — from the late sixteenth century — governed the maritime provinces of the empire as a vizier. Beneath him sat the reîsülküttâb, the chief of the naval secretariat who handled admiralty correspondence and the legal business of the fleet, and the reis (captains) of individual squadrons. The early Kapudan Pashas were drawn from the devshirme; from the sixteenth century onwards, the post was frequently given to corsair captains from the western Mediterranean, and to members of the prominent families of the imperial court. The corsair beys of Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli — nominally subordinate to the Kapudan Pasha — enjoyed wide de facto autonomy throughout the 16th and 17th centuries, and that autonomy is the structural reason the “Barbary regencies” functioned more as allied states than as Ottoman provinces.

The most famous of the early Kapudan Pashas were the corsair brothers Oruç and Hayreddin, the sons of a Turkish potter from the island of Midilli, who were admitted to Ottoman service in the early sixteenth century. Oruç captured Algiers in 1516, and Hayreddin, after his brother’s death in 1518, became the basis of Ottoman power in the central Mediterranean. Hayreddin was appointed Kapudan Pasha in 1533, and he held the post until his death in 1546. His career is treated in the article on Hayreddin Barbarossa.

The sixteenth-century apogee

The reign of Suleiman the Magnificent (1520–1566) was the great age of Ottoman naval power. Suleiman recognised that the conquest of the central and western Mediterranean required a fleet that could match those of Spain, the Italian states, and the Knights of St John, and he invested heavily in the arsenal at the Golden Horn. Hayreddin’s victory at Preveza in 1538, the conquest of Tripoli in 1551, and the long blockade of the Italian ports are the most striking episodes of the period.

The battle of Preveza, fought on 28 September 1538 off the coast of Epirus, was the apogee of Hayreddin’s command. The Holy League fleet, gathered by Venice, the Papal States, and Spain, was approximately equal in size to the Ottoman fleet, and it was commanded by the experienced Genoese admiral Andrea Doria. The battle was fought in a calm sea, with both fleets using their oars to manoeuvre, and the outcome was decided by the superior discipline and gunnery of the Ottoman galleys. The Christian fleet was driven back to its bases, and the eastern Mediterranean became the primary theatre of Ottoman naval operations for the next two decades. The victory is the central naval event of the reign, and is commemorated in modern Turkey by the great monument to Hayreddin on the Bosphorus.

The fleet’s task was not limited to the Mediterranean. Ottoman naval power extended into the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean, where the Ottomans contested Portuguese expansion in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The conquest of Aden (1538), the occupation of Massawa and Suakin, and the long war with the Portuguese in the Indian Ocean are part of the same expansion. Roger Crowley’s case that the Portuguese-Ottoman struggle in the Indian Ocean has been relatively neglected, in comparison with the Atlantic, is in my view correct.

The battle of Lepanto, 7 October 1571

The fleet’s heaviest defeat came at Lepanto, on 7 October 1571. The Holy League — the alliance of Spain, Venice, the Papal States, and several Italian powers — had gathered a fleet of some 200 galleys under the command of Don John of Austria, the half-brother of King Philip II of Spain. The Ottoman fleet, under Kapudan Pasha Müezzinzade Ali Pasha, was approximately the same size and sailed to intercept the Christians off the coast of Greece.

Tasso’s epic captures the Christian mood at the moment the battle was joined:

“The day of wrath, that dreadful day, Shall sweep the guilty world away.” — Torquato Tasso, Gerusalemme Liberata (1581), Canto V.

The battle was a decisive tactical defeat for the Ottomans. Ali Pasha was killed, some 200 Ottoman ships were lost, and the Holy League gained temporary control of the eastern Mediterranean. The strategic consequences were, however, much less than the Christian powers hoped. The Ottoman fleet was rebuilt within a year, often using the same shipwrights and the same timber, and by the early 1570s the Ottomans were again contesting the central Mediterranean. Lepanto is therefore a turning point in the symbolic history of the fleet — Cervantes lost the use of his left hand in the battle — but it is not, in the long run, the disaster it appeared to be.

The battle was fought in the Gulf of Patras, off the coast of western Greece, in three distinct engagements: a left wing commanded by the Venetian admiral Agostino Barbarigo, a centre commanded by Don John of Austria himself, and a right wing commanded by the Genoese admiral Andrea Doria. The Ottoman fleet, in roughly equal force, was organised in a single line of battle. The battle was decided in the centre, where the flagships of the two fleets grappled and the Christian infantry — mostly Spanish arquebusiers — boarded the Ottoman galleys and overwhelmed the Janissary deck-crews. The loss of the Ottoman flagship, the Sultana, and the death of Ali Pasha broke the Ottoman line, and the rest of the fleet was driven onto the shore.

The seventeenth century and after

The seventeenth century was a long period of relative naval decline. The wars with Venice (1645–1669) and the defence of the Cretan archipelago against the Venetians were expensive; the war of 1683–1699 coincided with the disastrous siege of Vienna; and the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries saw the steady erosion of the Ottoman maritime position. A second blow came at the battle of Çeşme on 5–7 July 1770, when a Russian squadron under Admiral Alexei Orlov, with British tactical advice from Admiral John Elphinstone, trapped and destroyed the Ottoman fleet in the Aegean — the worst single defeat the fleet had suffered since Lepanto. The Russian annexation of the Crimea in 1783, the loss of the Ottoman squadron at the battle of Sinop in 1853, and the progressive displacement of sail by steam left the Ottoman fleet in a defensive position by the end of the nineteenth century.

The fleet’s most surprising late success came at the battle of Gallipoli in 1915, when the Ottoman naval forces, supported by German advisors, fought off an Anglo-French attempt to force the Dardanelles by sea. The land campaign that followed is the better-known part of the operation, but the naval campaign of February and March 1915 was its necessary prelude. The defence of the straits in 1915, in which a handful of mines laid by the minelayer Nusret and the fire of the shore batteries held the entrance to the Dardanelles, was a striking echo of the older defence of Constantinople.

Ottoman military and warfare — A chronological overview of the Ottoman military institutions, of which the fleet was a major arm from the 1350s to 1918.
The Janissary corps — The elite infantry that the fleet transported on amphibious operations across the Mediterranean.
Hayreddin Barbarossa — The corsair-admiral who became Kapudan Pasha in 1533 and made the Ottoman fleet the dominant naval power of the western Mediterranean.
The battle of Gallipoli — The 1915 naval campaign at the Dardanelles, the last great operation of the Ottoman fleet.
Ottoman gunpowder siege warfare — The Ottoman siege trains that depended on the fleet for transport and amphibious supply.

Sources and further reading

Roger Crowley, Constantinople: The Last Great Siege, 1453 (Faber, 2005); Empires of the Sea (Faber, 2008).
Caroline Finkel, Osman’s Dream: The Story of the Ottoman Empire 1300–1923 (Basic Books, 2005).
Gábor Ágoston, Guns for the Sultan: Military Power and the Weapons Industry in the Ottoman Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2005).
Rhoads Murphey, Ottoman Warfare 1500–1700 (Hurst, 1999).
Virginia Aksan, Ottoman Wars 1700–1870: An Empire Besieged (Pearson, 2007).