Episode 378 - The Battle of Lepanto

Hey, everybody, Joe here.

Good news, I suppose.

Our October 4th show in Glasgow, Scotland is sold out.

We have sold out the second biggest venue we've ever done a show at.

But good news, if you still want to see us, we will be live streaming it.

There's no limit on however many live stream tickets are available.

You can get it at the link below.

It also comes with video on demand, so if you can't stay up that late, depending on your time zone or whatever, you'll still have the video available for you when you wake up and want to watch it at your own convenience.

So check out the show notes, see the live stream link, and get your tickets for October 4th.

Thanks.

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Hello and welcome to the Lines of My Donkeys podcast.

I'm Joe and with me is Tom.

We've been captured by the Ottoman Navy and pressed into service as rowers on war galleys.

Each day we take to the benches below the galley deck and row and row.

Every few minutes our taskmaster cracks a whip across our backs to encourage us.

But we've decided enough is enough and we're plotting a way to break out of here.

We have no weapons, so we'll have to do the next best thing.

We're going to creep out the taskmaster.

The next day, as we're rowing, he's whipping us.

Instead of crying out and bleeding, we moan with pleasure and wink at him.

Disgusted, he gets up from his seat and races over to us, fists bald.

Once he gets close enough, though, Tom reaches out.

His back and arms grotesquely massive and yoked from years of forced rowing, and tears him apart with his bare hands.

He then steals the man's keys and we quickly free ourselves, sprinting out of the galley hold on our knuckles.

I don't know why, but I assume we have been mutated into a rowing machine that is mostly ape.

So we're running on our knuckles.

Ripping apart my row master like he's just a piece of lavash.

Exactly, yeah.

We couldn't ask for the keys because the Turkish taskmaster would just do the ice cream cone thing with us and be like, oh, keep it away from us.

Tom, how are you doing?

We have been morphed into ape org things

to row.

How are you doing, buddy?

I'm excited to be Janissary Maxing.

I have been watching a series of videos about the diet of the average Ottoman soldier, which is quite interesting.

Quite a lot of onions.

Yeah, to match the hats.

Yeah, it's lots of onions, lots of barley and rice.

Other than that, I'm good.

I

had the solution to

men's mental health for any man who's living in the UK.

In that I got given two tickets to see Oasis last Friday, two hours before they went on stage.

That's a score.

I think those tickets were quite expensive, weren't they?

Yep.

It was really fun.

It was about as expected.

It was full of drunk, middle-aged men, and the entire stadium smelled like ferrets.

But it was

really good.

I don't usually keep beer in my house, but I had coincidentally bought some Stella.

I was going to watch a movie and just like chill out.

And yeah, then I was just absolutely caning cans of Stella in my apartment because luckily I live like 10 minutes away from Wembley.

So

this is why this happens is like people will be like, oh, here's a, you live with Wembley.

I can't make it.

You go.

So men's mental health absolutely cured by seeing the Gallagher Brothers perform live.

Did they get in a fist fight?

No, and it was the perfect timing as well.

Anytime Noel songs happened to get up and go for a piss or go get another beer because I really don't care about the Noel songs.

I just want to hear, you know, rock and roll star, supernova, cigarettes and alcohol.

I want to hear the hits.

I don't care about the weepy man who wishes he was Morrissey.

Fair enough.

It's like the second time in a few months you've had a surprise concert because last time I was in town, I was like, do you want to go see a day to remember?

Because it's my birthday and I don't want to go alone.

Yeah.

Yeah, it was fun, though.

Another gig that was filled with the farts of middle-aged men.

Yeah, yeah.

Surprisingly

varying in age.

I guess this kind of goes into our question from the Legion at the end of this episode.

When I looked around the audience, I realized like, there's an awful lot of young people here.

And I also didn't kind of realize they were still making music quite frequently.

It reminds me of my last time at Warp Tour a very long time ago when I looked around.

I was still in my mid-20s, but I looked around like, I'm officially too old to be here.

Yep.

I didn't get to go to any concerts in the last month, but what I did do, Tom, for my mental health was I found something in the dumpster.

Okay, so I was walking my dog and I found, we don't really have a dumpster near us.

I have like these weird swing gate garbage cans that go underground.

Anybody who's lived in the Netherlands will know what I'm talking about.

But they're very small.

You could only fit like a small to medium sized trash bag into it.

Okay.

Which leads to at the end of the month, everybody just throws their shit next to it and figures the municipality will figure it out.

And I found a flat, two flats actually, of energy drinks unopened and still sealed, just laying on the sidewalk.

It's a brand called Naco or Noko.

I'm sure I'm pronouncing it wrong because that's something I do, but it's N-O-C-C-O.

Yeah.

I had never heard of it before.

But it's, you know, 24 free energy drinks.

And I, of course, I took it.

I took one.

I didn't take two because I was still walking my dog and I didn't have enough free hands and everything.

I got to say, as a resident podcast energy drink raider, It's on the bottom of the totem pole here.

It's not very good.

When I chug an energy drink that I find on the sidewalk in the heat of a summer's day in the Netherlands, I really want it to hit like a cinder block to my frontal lobe like a white monster.

Whereas this is more like just having another cup of coffee.

It's not really good.

So I guess if you're someone who's sensitive to energy drinks, this would be a good one.

And then the only other place I've ever seen these is when I went to the UK.

And if you've been listening to our bonus series, Lions Up by Robots, you've already heard me bitch about this gym.

But they had a fridge downstairs and they were only selling this energy drink.

Yeah.

So it's two reasons I don't like it.

I love that the failed plan of the Turkish government to capture you by leaving two pallets of energy drink outside failed because they went to lunch.

Yeah, they should have just had like a big cage with a rope hanging on top of it.

They would have caught me like an acme cat or something.

A large cardport box with it being held up by a twig.

yeah and just kicked out by the local kebab guy yeah

oh actually you have a uh you texted me yesterday about something you saw in the gym and i lost my mind yeah okay so nate isn't here so this is kind of accidentally turning into the rich piano memorial wellness the rich piano memorial wellness quarter which means

Nate's not here to act as podcast dad, so we are going insane.

So we do a thing over the lines of by robots uh side series where we talk about gym related dumb shit and nate isn't here and we just recorded lines of by robots so i really don't want to wait a month to tell this story but yesterday i went to the gym i won't say where it is but it's uh or what the gym is but it is in the hague it's kind of like a grungy bodybuilder type gym like it's not a bougie place so you can't you tend to see people there who they know what they're getting into when they get a gym membership there not a lot of weird shit uh and i'm not hating on anybody who who doesn't really understand the gym.

It's just getting under their feet, of course.

Anytime it's better than never to learn.

But there's these two guys.

They were not young, mid to late 20s, who were boxing in the middle of the gym.

Yeah.

And I don't mean like fucking around.

I mean, they brought equipment.

This place does not have boxing lessons, I should point out.

So they had to bring their own boxing stuff.

And they're boxing between the dumbbells of the cable stands, just absolutely taking up like half the gym.

And everybody is looking at them.

And this, again, this is like an older school bodybuilding gym.

So everybody there kind of looks a certain kind of way.

And they're all eyeing these two guys like, what in the fuck are you doing?

Somewhere in the distance in the sky, all you hear is, hell yeah, brother.

Like, I'm looking around and I'm expecting to see a camera.

Like, maybe we're being.

uh made victims of some stupid prank video or something but no these dudes are fully going at it they're throwing kicks and shit and they're not wearing any, they're wearing shoes and no protective gear.

They have all of the boxing capabilities like Homer Simpson during that episode where he would just get punched in the head until his opponent got tired.

It was insanely dangerous.

They were completely incapable of sparring.

They did not know how to box.

And they're just windmilling punches at one another.

To the point that it's like, it's only a matter of time.

And nobody's defending themselves.

There's like full on taking clean shots to the head and face.

It's only a matter of time before one of these dudes just rocks someone just correctly on the button, like on the jaw or whatever, and you sleep your friend and they million dollar baby themselves on the incline bench, you know?

It's just like, what in the fuck are they doing?

And finally, one of the other guys goes to the owner of the gym, very old, retired professional bodybuilder.

And it's like, what are they doing?

And he's like, I don't know, but I think they think they're boxing.

And like, the gym isn't that busy.

So he didn't like tell them to fuck off or anything.

He's like, Yeah, if I knew you guys want them to move, I'll tell them to move.

But like, I don't really give a shit.

They signed a waiver.

But that's what I had to deal with yesterday.

I was going to try to snake a picture of it because I thought it'd be funny.

And then the devil came off my shoulder and realized that I don't want to be that guy in the gym.

So I wasn't.

But yeah, don't do that.

If you want to learn how to box, go to a boxing gym or a Muay Thai jib or an MMA jib, literally literally anywhere with mats and not sharp objects on every turn yeah you decided out of respect for our dearly departed Hulk Hogan to not be gawker and not uh record and release footage of these two men yeah but to to honor the dearly departed racist union-breaking piece of shit Hulk Hogan I decided not to bury those two young men

because that's something he loved to do.

I'm in hell and Satan's using my balls as a punching bag, brother.

He had to die because he didn't want

some other celebrity death to outshine him when he died.

So he had to immediately go because that's the Hulk Hogan way.

Yeah, he couldn't let Ozzie Osborne be the most famous person who died this week.

But Tom, going way far before then, you were talking about Turkish people attempting to capture me with a big old net, a box on a stick on the side of the road.

And that leads into our main script here, 15 minutes in.

Because this is what happens when Nate takes a week off of work.

Yeah, you're going to listen to me doing riffs of Turkish Hulk Hogan throughout the entirety of this episode.

That doesn't work for me, Pasha.

Because today's episode brings us back to the 1500s, that rare time during this podcast where we talk about the rise of the Ottoman Empire.

Rather than that time that they were collapsing so badly, they decided that murdering and stealing from my dirt farming family was a good way to pay off their debt.

It's the era where the Ottoman foothold in Western Europe was a very real idea.

Even when the Europeans did score some victories over the Ottomans at places like Malta in 1565, they were still on the back foot.

It was the era of Eastern Europe falling, Rhodes being taken, Cyprus being invaded.

Not that time, the other time.

Not that time either, the other time.

Which would eventually fall.

Again, not that time, the other time.

They're not ready for Hulkomania and Constantinople, brother.

And Ottoman ships raiding off the coast of Italy.

Europe's infighting and the comparative unified front of the Ottomans only made all this easier.

That is when, at the urging of the Venetians, Pope Pius V oversaw and sponsored the creation of alliance to deal with the Ottoman threat, dubbed the Holy League.

The worst league of college sports.

I feel like you could call the Holy League that's professional cornhole.

The only holy sea that I respect, brother, is the Pacific Ocean looking out of California.

Fuck up.

Me and Pope Vincent K.

McMahon.

Me and Pope Vincent K.

McMahon.

We're going to dethrone Pope Pius.

The Venetians.

The Romans.

We're going to dethrone them all.

Vincent K.

McMahon, the only head of a wrestling federation who has committed more sex crimes than your average pope.

Hulk Hogan, much like many people who feature on this show, did not have a dight with enough fiber in it.

The reasons for this are quite obvious for the Venetians.

They were the European power getting their shit the most kicked in by the Ottomans at this point.

Their trading hubs are being raided.

Some of their territories along the coasts are being taken.

And even with with all of this going on, they were still paying massive bribes to the Ottomans to try to get them to leave them alone.

In comparison to the Ottomans, Europe was mostly made up of small regional powers, generally tied together with a very complex series of marriages and alliances that could go sideways at any moment, especially because this has been going on for long enough that pretty much all of them are related.

So why not add another one of those to the mix, but plus the Pope this time around.

And to be clear here, the Ottoman Empire was actually mostly the same there's also a lot of infighting there's a lot of politicking backstabbing beefs over religion and regions the main difference was is they were just simply better at it at the time and they were a unified body from the outside the european states were using steinermaths to calculate their chances of winning and that never works out

especially at sacrifice

this is going to be a very heavy wrestling episode.

It's about time.

It just took Hulk Hogan to die and then us wait a month and a half.

Great Evil has been defeated.

Everyone who was like into wrestling turned their head like they're watching the Angelus on TV in Ireland at the bell tolling of Hulk Hogan's death.

Yeah, we had to wait a month and a half to make Hulk Hogan jokes for the simple fact is now we're clear and free of people saying, it's too soon, which is something I never agree with when the guy's a real piece of shit.

I'm pretty sure I saw like the TMZ

tweet about

Hulk Hogan dying maybe 40 seconds after it had been posted, and then saw right above it a joke about Hulk Hogan dying.

And one of them was me.

So, some lore for people who maybe didn't catch this in real time, but Hulk Hogan died of a heart attack in his house in, I believe, Palm Beach, Florida.

And TMZ got scooped by a guy on Reddit.

There's a guy on Reddit that lived like down the street from Hulk Hogan.

And the guy's like, there's an awful lot of cops and ambulances at Hulk Hogan's house.

I think I see someone coming out in a stretcher.

I think he might be dead.

Don't do too much cocaine in the 80s, brother.

Say no to drugs, except for the Hulkster.

Then do loads of cocaine and steroids and destroy your heart.

Yeah, it's definitely the steroids that caught up to him.

And then afterwards, he went because there's like, you know, however many ambulances and cops.

And the Redditor went and asked one of the paramedics, like, what's going on?

And the paramedic looked him dead in the eyes.

He's like, Hulk Hogan's dead.

And I should point this out to you as a former healthcare worker in an ambulance who once upon a time held a valid EMT license.

You don't do that ever.

It gets posted to Reddit.

I think it was like 10 minutes before TMZ caught on to it.

So shout out to HIPAA violations.

The only good Redditor is the one that informed us of Hulk Hogan dying.

Like, Hulk Hogan dying is great.

Imagine what it's going to be like when Vince McMahon dies.

God willing.

Now, the Holy League covered most of the Italian state, as well as the most powerful European empires of the day, the Spanish.

And of course, the Knights Hospitaler, known then as the Knights of Malta, since they were now located in Malta.

However, France, Portugal, the Holy Roman Empire, and England stayed out of it.

The Holy Roman Empire's reason for this was they kind of sorta had a neutrality deal with the Ottomans at the time.

The French were temporarily allied with the Ottomans to weaken the Spanish.

The Portuguese were too busy fighting in Morocco.

And England just didn't see any of this as their problem.

Yeah, England was like, need to keep the supply of kebabs coming into country.

Bush.

They did Brexit several generations early.

Doing Brexit to have stronger international ties to Turkey.

to increase kebab supply is an incredible move.

I'm really happy that 15th century Eric Adams could make this possible.

Now, the league was made up of people who absolutely hated one another and, in many cases, had been in each other's throats for several generations in the past.

I mean, a lot of this Italian city-states slash states politics we're talking about.

So, kind of goes without saying it's quite chaotic.

There's also Spain involved, who have multiple claims over several of those same states.

Meanwhile, the states themselves, like Genoa and Venice, or Venice and the Papal States, or Venice and pretty much everyone else in Italy, had been killing each other over trade since forever at this point.

At the time, we're not talking about massive land-based invasions either.

The Holy League knew that any confrontation with the Ottomans would almost certainly involve a naval battle in the Mediterranean.

So the Pope commanded the League to rally their naval forces and make for Messina, Italy.

So they did.

However, immediately the arguments began to be started over who would actually be in charge of the Holy League's forces.

Due to all their rivalries involved in the league, nobody was willing to be subordinate to the other.

For some of them, this was like a glory thing, you know, princes in line for the throne really wanting to make a name for themselves.

For others, it was more of a personal grievance owing to previous battlefield defeats.

But nobody was willing to give an inch.

But in the middle of all of this, there's one guy, John of Austria.

He's 24 years old, quite young, but, you know, seasoned combat veteran, attested a naval leader for the Spanish Navy.

He's also the bastard son of the former king of Spain, who was also the former Holy Roman Emperor, as well as former king of a dozen other things.

Yeah.

His half-brother, Philip II, is now king of Spain.

And previous to this, Philip II was worried that John might try to politic his way to the throne or be used by others his legitimate heir to try to overthrow him.

So instead of killing him outright or exiling him, he decided to just win influence with him.

He inducted the bastard into the royal family, named him Don Juan the Austria,

which is a wonderful string of words.

I like to call him Don Juan the Austria.

They have lots of little pastries, they have the mountains, and skiing is very good.

They have Hitler.

They will have Hitler in approximately 400 years.

And they also made him a general of the sea, which is just a much better title than Admiral, in my opinion.

All of this to win him over.

He was never allowed, however, to walk, march, ride, or sit with the rest of the royal family.

He was allowed into the fold, but not really.

Like, people nicknamed him the Prince Without a Crown, and people would call him His Majesty, things like that but Philip absolutely never did so he's Shane McMahon oh yeah I guess he is yeah it's like he will just be completely passed over for a large steroid fueled blonde man and like Shane uh John much more impressive in the ring than he'd any reason to be

in short he was perfect for everyone in the league He was not in line for the throne.

He was not technically part of any court.

Any glory he got being the commander of the league's navy would be worthless to him because he was as high as he was ever going to get.

So Don Juan, who I will call Don Juan the rest of the episode, because how often do I get the excuse to use that title, was named commander.

But of the other leaders of the various league representatives, all thought that he was politically weak and young, which meant he would just be a figurehead and be able to be bent to their will.

And holy shit, were they wrong?

By his very background of being a bastard that people kind of wanted to kill for a while, the dude only ever got anywhere in life for being very good at his job and unyielding in anything that he wanted to do.

And there's also the fact that he was an absolute religious zealot.

Over the course of the next few months, 206 ships were mustered at Messina, with the majority of them being Venetian.

The Venetians also supplied something called Galaiuses, and they supplied six of them.

Galauses were massive floating fortresses.

They were over a hundred feet long, powered by 50 oremen, armed with cannons, gunmen, bowmen, spearmen, swordsmen.

And in total, Don Juan had 80,000 men under his command by that time

when the fleet came together.

It's a huge navy.

Though I should point out here, tens of thousands of those are oremen.

Ormen back in those days were mostly slaves.

For the Christian side, this was other Christian slaves as well as captured Muslim slaves.

And weirdly enough, the occasional freelancer who just became an orman for a job.

Yeah, it's just like a guy who graduated from like Oxford or Cambridge who like is taking a gap year and is like, was really good at rowing in college.

He's like, yeah, mate, I haven't found myself yet.

And it's like, yeah, I'm just going to enroll in like the Papal States War against Turkish hulk hogan you look across the aisle and there's just like very very hungry looking slaves from the ottoman empire like you could eat those shoes yeah but how is don juan gonna defeat turkish hulk hogan a man who famously could fight 400 battles in one year that's true uh the answer to that is very very simple

and that is spanish the ultimate warrior

listen here brother i got this thing called chorizo and it's great for protein.

You have a bite of it on the ship while you're rowing, and you're going to take down Turkish Hulk Hogan.

I will say, of all of the wrestling people I can think of in Hulk Hogan's era, Ultimate Warrior is the most Spanish-coated.

Yeah.

And that's because he was known for working for only about 10 minutes per match.

He did so much cocaine.

What you don't realize is Spanish Ultimate Warrior Warrior needs a little nap in between matches.

You ever heard of Slim Jim's little let me tell you about slim plates, little small plates of food.

Okay, that was Macho Man.

Macho Man was the Slim Jim guy.

Yeah, sorry, sorry, Ultimate Warrior.

You bastard.

Yeah, it's fine.

And Ultimate Warrior ended up becoming turbo-religious and homophobic slightly before he died.

Also, he legally changed his last name to warrior.

I mean, that's cool.

That is fucking cool.

Now, just to underline here the weight between the amount of oremen and the amount of soldiers, only about 30,000 of the 80,000 people at play here are soldiers.

So a lot of dudes paddling.

Though they will become important for more than paddling in a little bit.

For those numbers to make sense, we have to talk about just how naval warfare worked back then.

And I promise, this is not a deep dive into the minutiae of naval tactics in the 1500s.

It's because they're actually quite simple.

Naval warfare of the time looked a lot like land warfare, just on boats.

Men had guns, matchlocks, and wheel locks, and cannons are very much a thing, but their accuracy and range were dog shit.

Most killing was done at close quarters, whether by gun or sword or pike or bow or what have you.

So in order for navies to fight, they would smash into one another, lash their ships together, and then deploy their infantry across decks to slaughter each other.

So it was just floating land warfare.

Yeah, it's like the sequel to the wonderful Zack Snyder movie 300, aka 302.

Yes.

What a terrible film.

What an incredibly brown era of movies.

Yeah.

Brown.

Look, I don't like Zack Snyder for a lot of things, but I fault him the most for making us a deal with Gerard Butler for 20 years.

Yeah, Gerard Butler seems like an okay dude.

He's not a good actor, though.

No, I'm not saying this as a barb on his personality.

I'd just be get off my TV.

He's the poor man's Russell Crowe.

I think Russell Crowe is the poor man's Russell Crowe in 2025.

Russell Crowe is a surprisingly good actor.

He's a very good comedic actor.

He is.

He's in quite a few good movies, but I will say he is a man that is magic.

And I say that not because of his acting capability, but his capability to it's like Russell Crowe cast in this film or that film.

And it just shows a picture of him from six months before looking wildly out of shape and just getting drunk on the beach.

And then by the time shooting comes around, he has done the most MMA weight cut known to mankind.

and is just absolutely yoked and ready to film.

I have no idea how he's still alive.

He's the goat.

Everyone should watch the Pope's Exorcist to watch him going around Italy on that little scooter.

It's so fun.

So, the average soldier manning the League Navy may have had a wheel lock arcubus, a wheel lock pistol.

Some of these were so small they could have acted as something like a carbine.

Blunderbusses were also making their early appearances, and everyone still had a fallback weapon of a sword or an eight-foot-long pike, which was weirdly effective for naval warfare because you could just stab from one ship to the other once they got close enough.

Subman did have old-timey firebombs known as Granados.

These were clay pots filled with a small amount of gunpowder and something that would catch fire like pitch, turpentine, or oil.

Then a wick would be set, lit, and then thrown.

It obviously would break apart and spread fire on a ship because just about the worst thing that can happen to you when you're on a boat is also being on fire.

Yeah, I hate fighting 16th century bomberman at the sea.

Well, there's a second worst thing that can happen to you when you're on a boat, but you have to be, in this specific case,

Lord of the Mountbotton

and find a package mysteriously secreted into the lower deck of your yacht.

Yeah, he didn't really understand that Amazon Prime next day delivery doesn't really deliver to boats, and he shouldn't have opened it.

Hey, he got Seamus Prime instead.

Seamus O Prime.

Not that many people in Ireland actually call Seamus.

I know.

I don't think I've ever met one.

You'd be much better off saying like Michael or Patrick.

Yeah, I know.

But it's less funny that way.

See, Armenians, we don't really have all that because all of us really are just named Armin.

And you know who was being armed?

DIRA.

To round out the European fleet, the Pope sent 30 cross-bearing friars to just kind of stand around and chant.

This is some like Dark Souls shit.

It's combat clerics, pretty much.

Meanwhile, the Ottoman commander Ali Pasha was mustering his own navy at Lepantho in the Gulf of Patras.

It was larger, both in ships and men.

222 ships, nearly 90,000 men, but they also had the same split between soldiers and oremen.

The oremen, like the Europeans, were mostly slaves, though their slaves are mostly Christians.

They also had a few freelancers, dudes in it for the love of the game, you you know, getting the worst payday imaginable.

I don't know how shit your life has to be to be like, oh, fuck it.

I'll guess I'll row this boat around with these guys that aren't being paid at all.

I can't even be a shit shoveler anymore.

My dirt farm has gone tits up.

The Ottomans had not adopted gunpowder weapons as widely as the Europeans had, that they still had some, and what they had was pretty much the same as the Europeans.

And the same goes for their ships as well.

The reason for this is actually quite funny.

When the Ottomans took over a lot of territory from the Europeans, namely the Venetians, Venetian shipbuilders, gunsmiths, engineers, all that stuff, had decided to stay and work for the Ottomans because the Ottomans paid them about three times more than they're getting paid normally.

Because if they did accept the paycheck, well, then they just got enslaved.

Yeah.

And did it for free.

So the same guys who built the European guns and ships had also built the Ottoman guns and ships.

It's effectively pier on pier here in the weirdest way possible.

Yeah, pulling up to the naval battle doing the Spider-Man point at your enemy.

Those ships look suspiciously similar.

The main difference being that the Ottomans, due to their tactics that they had adopted, limited gunpowder weapons mostly to the Janissary Corps.

Because the Ottomans were simultaneously, there's religious rules around it.

They didn't quite trust a lot of their line soldiers to carry gunpowder weapons.

They saw them as something that needed more training than a sword or a spear or a bow.

So they gave them to their most loyal soldiers, the Janissary, who also were really the first professional unit of the Ottoman military.

They were deathly loyal thanks to, you know, being kidnapped as children and being raised in it.

And they're the best trained.

Outside of that, their forces mostly relied on composite bows to get their shots off.

And of course, swords and spears and stuff like that.

As a fun fact, one of the Ottoman Navy's favorite tactics was to sail at a crescent moon formation,

which is a little too on the nose.

Obviously, this is an Islamic symbol and it is the Ottoman flag, but it's also kind of an ingenious naval tactic.

Think of the shape of a crescent moon

when applied to a battle formation.

If you catch yourself on the inside of that crescent moon, that means you will be surrounded,

which is exactly what they did.

The edges of their moon formation would encircle an enemy navy, and then by the time they realized where they were, the i.e., oh God, there's boats on both sides of us and in front of us, the ends of the moon formation would close.

Listen here, brother, if there's one thing that Turkish naval commander Hulk Hogan loves, it is worshiping the moon, Turk.

Even at sea, ask me at any point I could point to Mecca.

We were all praying on the boats, brother.

Prayed 400 days a year, brother, because I was flying between the Ottoman Empire and Japan.

I'm praying 400 times a day, brother.

I am connected directly to the moon Turk.

We got the Moon Turk.

We get the Sea Turk.

Now we just need the Land.

I suppose the Land Turk is just the one that killed my family.

The Land Turk is on the boats on the Sea Turk.

That might be more of a barnacle Turk situation.

Yeah.

Because there's no Land per se.

I don't know.

We'll have to get more into our various esoteric Turkism later on.

Yeah, Turkish Hulk Hogan has decided to fight for the Ottoman Empire because if there's one thing that he hates more than, you know, any other wrestler, it is unions.

Fuck, that is true.

Say what you will about Turkish Hulk Hogan.

He definitely would not have joined the committee for Union of Progress.

The word union would have turned him off immediately.

Instead of wearing the fucking bandana, he's wearing a face.

Someone please draw that.

The Ottomans brought with them a team of drummers and brass gongs so they could play sick beats to intimidate the Europeans as they sailed towards them as well, which I love when armies do that.

It fucking rules.

It's like when you watch Mad Max and there's the guy playing guitar on the flame-throwing speakers and shit.

It's so stupid, but I love it.

Also, best job out of any army to have.

What do you do?

I play the gong.

I stay way the fuck away from danger and I hit this big ass gong.

The Ottomans also had a very strange ally in the middle of all this.

A pirate fleet under the command of an Italian who went by the name Oceali, which roughly translates to scabs on his head.

It's on me, scab head.

I've decided to fight for the Turkish because they have wonderful food.

They invented kebab and not the terrible, terrible Greeks.

This was thanks to a really bad case of ringworm he had on his head and face as a child.

So he's got the power of worms.

He's RFK, Maxing.

I don't know.

It is not confirmed, and Ochiali has never denied if the worms had made it all the way to his brain.

Ochiali has never killed a bear and dumped it in Central Park.

Not that we're aware of.

I just assume he's standing at the head of his pirate ship with worms.

like Cleopatra

out of his skull and like a One Piece character or something.

He's like a Gorgon.

Yeah, exactly.

The Ottomans effectively allowed Mr.

Scabs and his pirates to keep anything they stole when they prayed on the Venetians.

So it's a pretty sweet deal.

And we've actually talked about other Ottoman pirates before.

This was something that the Ottomans did quite frequently, grabbing like a local corsair that showed promise.

owing to his strength and skill and just kind of folding them into the Ottoman navy, giving them rank and privilege and titles, buying their loyalty.

So when they did go out and do pirate stuff, they would target Ottoman enemies, even if they weren't officially at war.

It's the same thing as a privateer, effectively, except Scabby here had direct access to the Sultan.

Ali Pasha and the Ottoman tactics at large were based on continuing to hit individual European holdings, hoping that the league would break up as each state would be more worried about their own possessions rather than Europe as a unified whole, which to be honest here, pretty solid gamble to make.

For example, he wanted to keep hammering Venetian stuff, Venetian towns with the raids and Venetian ships, hoping that the largest part of the League navy would say, fuck you, I'm sick of waiting around.

I need to go protect my stuff, which would then weaken the Holy League as a whole.

Meanwhile, in Messina, the Don Juan was running into problems.

The attitude around the fleet turned into something like a crusade.

And by that I mean it brought a fuckload of volunteers who were largely just untrained random dudes.

Don Juan was smart enough to not turn people away though, because he needed people who could physically fight, but it also meant that he would need to train them.

Normally in the history of this show, this is where we tell you that he just didn't train them.

He ignored that need, but he actually didn't.

Instead, he made sure they got a uniformed, basic training around firearms, and even made sure to overrule the various in-fighting European powers to put these volunteers on their ships to make up for states that sent undermanned galleys so they could be filled out.

The rest of the soldiers were also forced to take part in this training around firearms like wheelocks and cannons because Don Juan believed, when you believe it, that soldiering is something you kind of can't just do once.

It's kind of a

vocation, really.

Yeah, it is.

It's shocking how fast you lose it.

If you gave me a rifle right now, I would absolutely not qualify.

Fucking blow your own foot off.

I would put one into my own leg.

I would just reflexively start doing drugs in a cramped bathroom and make bad life choices.

Then came the infighting.

Don Juan and the Venetians, who were commanded by a 75-year-old named Sebastiano Venier and the Pope, wanted to set sail and immediately go on the offensive.

Meanwhile, virtually every other representative present wanted to remain on the defensive and protect things on the Mediterranean coast.

This is where the statesmen and military leaders realized that they had underestimated Don Juan.

He was young and, like his volunteers, saw himself on a holy crusade, a holy mission from God to defeat the Ottomans.

He also happened to have a trump card in the form of a letter from the Pope, fully putting him in command over everyone else, Pope included.

Just a quick question.

what time of year is this all happening in we're rounding up on fall now all okay so yeah so when other european representatives are like oh no we need to wait he would just hold up the pope's letter like fuck you you can't tell me anything dad says so it's my turn on the naval fucking ships it's my turn on the naval controller

The fleet was then hit by a storm.

Now, this didn't cause any real damage, but people immediately began saying it was a bad omen.

And to be fair, superstition was part of it, but not all of it.

Like I said, it's autumn, it's fall in the Mediterranean, this is generally considered storm season.

And it was considered good policy at the time to wait until winter before undergoing any large voyages to dodge the storms.

Don Juan all hopped up on that power of Jesus, decided he doesn't need to fucking wait.

And on September 18th, 1571, he orders the fleet to leave port.

I should point out here, in case you're wondering, and waiting for the fleet to inevitably get its ass kicked by a storm, it doesn't happen.

This ends up being a correct gamble to make.

However, the Don Juan does not really know where he is going.

There's no solid intelligence on where exactly the Ottoman fleet was.

So throughout September, he and his fleet just kind of sail around looking for them.

He sends out scouts, but they largely bring him back nothing of use, only saying they kept finding more and more places that had been raided by the Ottomans.

So that Don Juan kind of did like traumatic calculations and was able to put two and two together, following the path of destruction all the way back to the fortified port of Lepanto, where he's like, well, they must be there.

Following the smoldering heaps of ruins and screams of pain, they're probably there.

However, he has no idea what their actual strength is.

And to make matters even more confusing for him, a Christian spy and the employee of the Ottomans, who is pretending to be a volunteer within League forces, said that, don't worry, there's only a hundred Ottoman ships anchored at the port, and the crews are half dead with plague.

Of course, none of this is true.

Meanwhile, Ottoman scouts painted a rowboat black and slipped right into the League's fleet in the middle of the night, just kind of paddling around, counting the entire fleet one by one.

You just see a black boat and loads of weirdly onion-shaped things floating on the water.

Paddling with those little sticks they use to steal people's ice cream.

They actually just have like a straw going up through the onion head hat, and they're just like under the water, breathing through the hat.

They may have not invented the first submarine, but they did invent the first submarine hat.

The first life jacket that you wear on your head.

Exactly.

Life hat.

And this works fantastically well.

The painted black rowboat does not get detected.

And they count the league fleet almost perfectly.

He miscounts like 10 of them, but Alipasha pretty much knows exactly what he's getting into.

Eventually, though, the Don Juan knows that he needs to change the league formation of how they move their ships, right?

Like he has fought the Ottomans before.

He knows about the crescent moon formation, so he needs to think of a way to defeat that formation if he has any hope of beating them, even if he does think they're going to be fighting 100 galleys with half-dead plague victims on it.

How do you defeat someone who's going moon mode?

Obviously, if this is a Pokemon situation, you have to get by the sun version.

He forms three staggered lines of ships.

So that would be able to kind of counter the edges of the moon as it would pass over their formation and attempt to surround them.

There would always be another line staggered back to fight the Ottoman flanks.

Furthermore, one of the league's commanders, Genoa's Giovanni Doria, came up with a different but very good idea.

The prow, that being the front of a galley that they were using, all came up at an elevated point.

And he decided, hey look, if we put our gunmen on that thing, they're going to shoot too high because they're going to shoot elevated with the prow.

So why don't we take all the gunmen off, put them on the Galeases, which are so tall and out of the water that they cannot be boarded, and replace them on the galleys with whole broadsides of cannons.

I hate when you shoot too high because you put the gunman on that thing.

It's also very funny to think about when like, yeah, the gunmen are going to shoot too high because the prow is facing the air because all gunmen back then had the mind of like an NPC.

an age of empires where they're like no we will only shoot straight up if the ground is elevated at all also as well like the the barrel of like an archebus is like quite long as well so like factoring in a kind of pitch battle of like two levels some of them are the wheel locks that they're using are often compared to carbines or pistols so they're quite short okay and specifically for naval use but they do have the full barreled ones which they're staffing in the gliases and the idea is let's just put a ton of cannons on the set of these boats because the normal galley, consider them the front line of the naval formation.

And you put as many cannons on the front line and wait until they get close enough and fire the cannons.

And you put the softer targets, the gunmen, on the Galauses, and you can really pack them in there because they don't need as much room as cannons.

So the Galaiuses become home to 500 gunmen each.

Jesus.

So on October 7th, Don Juan deploys his fleet fleet in his new battle formation.

He makes sure each ship is so close to the other that no Ottoman ship can pass between them.

And then he holds Mass, where a priest stands up in front of the gathered soldiers and sailors and reminds them one simple command.

There's no heaven for cowards.

Which, not a religious guy, but that slaps.

The next morning, the Ottoman fleet left port, now 300 ships strong and in their crescent moon formation.

Remember, the Europeans out there fighting 100 ships, staffed by plague corpses?

Now they're facing down a fleet that was so much larger than them that even in the crescent moon formation, which by its very nature arcs around you, it was 3,000 feet longer than the European lines.

Ah, that's not good.

Things do not seem good.

And this was not actually supposed to happen.

Alipasha had been told by Mr.

Scabs himself that the League's fleet was actually still at Messina.

He told him that despite knowing it was a lie because he believed that Alipasha was not nearly a good enough commander to see them through this battle.

He thought that any battle that Alipasha fought would be an absolute cluster fuck and he hoped he could postpone it until he could find a way to leave.

Yar, the worms are telling me not to trust Alipasha.

Listen to me worms, boy.

If there's one thing in this life I've learned, it's I have to listen to the worms that live in my skin.

Yeah, not enough people.

Well, actually, I was about to say not enough people have worms in their skin anymore, but it's no, quite a lot of the world's population do have worms in their skin.

Yeah, and the worst population of people have ringworms, and that being dudes who do Brazilian jiu-jitsu.

Yep.

That's why they're scooting on the ground.

Yeah.

Got to get rid of them worms.

People who do PHIJ are like dogs.

I mean, they have the intelligence of dogs or barely above it, so they gotta scoot on the ground to wipe their own ass.

Look, as someone who did BJJ for many years, I do have a dog's brain.

Tactically not wiping your ass so you could use it as a chemical weapon in BJJ

when you're grappling with someone.

I'm tactically a labradoodle.

Now, upon seeing the way the league's fleet was arrayed, Scabs knew that this formation is specifically made to defeat ours.

It's only made to counter our formation.

So he suggested to Alipasha, why the fuck are we gonna fight in a battlefield that they prepared for?

Why don't we pull back, go back towards port, and would force the League's fleet to squeeze through the narrow gulf choke point to get there?

That way they could fight them in like the world's...

largest naval hallway, like a Turkish version of that scene from Old Boy.

However, Alipasha rejected rejected this, saying any retreat, even a fake one, would shame the Sultan.

Like, no, you don't understand.

Using battle tactics is embarrassing.

We have to just sail directly for them.

And with that, Alipasha ordered his fleet forward directly towards the League's fleet, directly towards a formation meant to defeat his.

And the drums began to beat.

The gongs began to get slammed.

There's also throat singers involved.

Yes.

Yes.

Like, look, the Turks had great, you know,

pomp with all of their military.

You got to give credit where credit's due.

Don Juan passed orders that nobody was to fire until the Ottoman fleet was directly in front of them.

Or as he put it, until you're close enough to be splashed by Ottoman blood.

That

doesn't seem like the best idea.

Yeah, as we have laid out, they all have ringworm now.

They've all been in too close quarters with the man being commanded by the worms that live in his head.

Instead, the crews on the league ships began planning for the inevitable boardings that would be coming.

This included laying trip traps, like rope, at like ankle height at the edge of their ships so people trip over them, fall over the edge into the ocean.

But also my personal favorite, spreading grease at any landing points to make people slip and fall.

Yes.

It's just the militarized version of home alone.

Listen here, brother.

What you got to do is you got to rub grease on your galleys.

You're too slippery to catch like an oiled up Hulk Hogan.

Please,

excuse me for the battle.

I got diarrhea.

I love the idea that one of the Ottoman soldiers is going to fight his way aboard, get down some stairs, and as he's climbing down the stairs, a paint can on a rope is going to fly down and hit him in the face.

They're doing home alone Connor McAllister things.

There's loads of marbles on the ground and little like Hot Wheels.

Yeah, yeah, you're gonna get kicked over into a pile of Legos.

Also, before anyone says, it's Kevin McAllister.

I just remembered.

I know someone's gonna be a nerd and correct me.

I don't know.

You made him even more Irish.

Conor McAllister is like, instead of two or three years, you send him to Dagestan, you send him to fucking Crumlin to train with Connor McGregor.

Listen here, little fella.

What you need to do when you're fighting the Janissaries and the Ottomans is you need to move like the moon.

Animals of the moon move in a certain way.

And in order to defeat the Ottomans, you gotta understand the moon.

He's gonna get arrested so soon for giving that kid way too much cocaine.

I mean, to be fair,

people think he did burn down his own pub recently.

Have you ever done so much cocaine you accidentally light your bar on fire?

Allegedly.

Allegedly.

Also, facing such a massive fleet, League ship captains did something that was kind of a coin toss.

They went down to the galley decks where the Roman were, unchained them, handed them swords, and said, Look, if we all survive this, you'll be freed.

Mind you, a lot of these dudes are Muslim slaves

who had been captured after fighting with the Ottoman forces.

So it's really a coin flip here.

And weirdly, none of them turn.

What?

Yeah.

Yeah.

They're all absolutely fine with fighting alongside the dudes who enslave them.

Small note here to really paint the portrait in your head.

They're all naked as well.

The slaves are kept naked in the galleys due to heat and just embarrassment and everything.

So now they have several thousand, tens of thousands of butt-ass naked dudes armed with swords joining them.

Hell yeah.

The Ottoman fleet begins to close in around the League fleet and the massive Galaises, which are acting as floating blockhouses, kind of like both behind the main lines of the galleys, but also on the flanks, open fire.

And there's so many gunmen on these Galauses that a single broadside from one, fired in a volley, because that's how they were trained to use their wheelocks or their matchlocks, was enough to absolutely blast the galley apart in one go.

At the beginning of the battle, at least 10 Ottoman ships get one-shotted like this, and the crescent moon formation begins breaking down around the edges as the two fleets legitimately start crashing into one another yeah the edges of the crescent moon uh formation really tactically important to the whole integrity of using this as a military tactic it turns out that the guys and the galaiuses have harnessed their inner like floridian and have decided they could just shoot at the moon and defeat it

that gave an opening to the league's cannons mounted on their galleys in place of gunmen.

They were still holding their fire, but now, with the Ottoman Navy so close, they could make out the faces of the men on board, the cannons opened fire.

They were so close they could not miss.

And to make matters worse for the Ottomans, remember we talked about that training earlier?

Yep.

Well, the Don Juan was pretty sure.

that victory would come down to firearms, being cannons, wheel locks, and matchlocks.

He really wanted his cannon crews to be able to fire, reload, and fire again twice before the Ottoman fleet was able to return fire once.

Not only did he succeed, but according to the tellings that we have here, his cannon crews are able to fire three times for every one of the Ottomans.

So, right from the outset, the Ottoman fleet is sailing directly into that final scene from the Devil's Rejects.

But, and free bird is now mixed with gongs and throat singing

the first ships to grapple with one another are actually the flagships of don juan and alipasha which is just something out of an action film

the commander ship crash into one another sailors lash them in place with ropes and cables and then in the middle of all this is the 75 year old veneer who's leading over the edge of his ship, pumping blunderbuss shots into the Ottoman Navy sailors after they collide with one another.

He's taking bites out of the Ottoman ships.

He just has these giant teeth that come out.

Yeah, I went the turkey once.

How could you tell?

So he was obviously 75 years old is old in any era, but it's especially old in the 1500s.

So he doesn't quite have the dexterity required to load a blunderbus.

And for people who don't know, who aren't firearms guys, even less than we are, a blunderbus is like a shotgun.

And this is before the era of like pre-packaged bullets.

So he has to like dump flashettes, multiple pieces of lead, whatever, whatever he's using, and then gunpowder down the barrel and then prime it and then fire it.

It's not something his 75-year-old hands can do.

So he just has a small team of aides to continuously feed him pre-loaded blunderbuses.

Bro, he's got teeth like Duckman and his dual-wielding blunderbuss.

The two sides begin dumping gunshots into each other at close range.

With Don Juan himself firing into the charging Ottoman sailors over the railings of his ship, like from the front railing, from where the two ships had crashed into each other.

He's on the front line, and his aides keep trying to drag him away to safety.

Uh, but he keeps pushing them away, giggling, and then firing some more.

Bam!

I'm starting to to think this man might be insane.

As Ottoman troops attempted to board Don Juan's ship, they got caught in net traps.

These were nets that were laying on the ground and then on ropes.

And as soon as Ottoman sailors/slash soldiers attempted to board, they got pulled.

And then the nets would just raise up to like waist height and kind of slingshot them into the sea.

Being defeated with ratchet and clank weapons.

I like to believe they get like going back to our sea-based home alone, they get thrown onto a pile of Hot Wheels or whatever.

The Hot Wheels of the Sea.

That's right.

Then Don Juan leads a counterattack with a group of gunmen and swordmen, only to be met by a hail of close-quarter arrows.

One of whom

hits him in the forehead, but like he's wearing something on his head.

Some say it's like a headband.

Others say it was like a helmet, but it glances off of him and saves his life.

And then more and more league men dump themselves on the Ottoman flagship.

Everyone on board Don Juan's ship joined in, including the naked sword-wielding freed slaves.

Well, temporarily freed slaves, I should say.

One of the soldiers that joined the charge from the Don Juan ship was a young soldier armed with a sword in one hand and a wheelock pistol in the other.

This was actually a woman dressed as a man named Maria Lebedona.

Oh.

The story behind that is actually quite interesting, where she had dressed up like a man, and by all accounts, very unconvincingly, to stay on the ship with her officer slash lover that was on the Don Juan ship.

And virtually immediately, everyone's like, that's a woman.

And because she was very bad at it, and they just allowed her to stay anyway.

Both commanders were on the deck of the Ottoman flagship, and the Europeans hit them with a game-changing tactic at sea.

Mass volley-fired guns at close quarters.

They did not turn to their swords.

Instead, they fired like you all imagine people fire a wheel lock, flintlock, smooth bore weapon.

This helped them cut a massive swath across the deck of the Ottoman ship to make room for more of their soldiers.

But also, it was terrifying to the Ottomans.

They weren't entirely sure what to do with it.

They were familiar with gunpowder weapons, of course, but not being used like this.

And as the volleys tore into the Ottoman ranks, they were left with a choice to wait for the next volley or try to charge at the opening or dive into the ocean and die.

A lot of them chose the ocean.

Yeah.

Maybe they were hoping that suddenly they would just be imbued with the powers of Aquaman and be able to swim to shore or something.

In the middle of all this, Ali Pasha was trying to command his men to push the Europeans back from his poop deck when a gunshot ventilated his skull and he dropped dead.

R.I.P., Ali Pasha.

What if the Europeans' freed galley slaves rushed forward, cut the Pasha's head off, and stuck that shit on a pike and ran it up the Ottoman flagpole for all to see.

Then the hundreds of Europeans began looting the flagship as the battle was still going on around them.

Hundreds of ships, tens of thousands of men, all fighting and killing one another.

Meanwhile, these dudes are just pocketing everything that they could get.

On one of these ships were those friars we talked about that were armed with crosses.

Priests?

Yeah, battle priests.

They joined the battle without even hesitating, braining motherfuckers with their crosses.

Some of them did drop their crosses and pick up swords, which I assume is perfectly fine in whatever weird part of the Bible that they were already quoting from to make all of this okay in the first place.

But a lot of the, like, I think like half the friars end up dying.

But someone had a confirmed cross kill of the situation.

On one of these ships, the Marquesa, a young Spanish soldier, half dead from malaria, was forced out of his bed to fight on the deck.

He's delirious, he's sick, he's vomiting, he's shitting himself, but he and the others on board managed to defend their ship as hundreds of Ottoman soldiers pour over the side, slipping and falling on the grease traps and tripping on ropes and being thrown by weird child-built catapults or whatever.

The name of that soldier was Miguel D.

Cervantes, who you might know as the author of Don Quixote.

I'm

shocked.

I was waiting for someone of note to show up in this battle.

Yeah.

But things would continue to go wrong for the Ottomans in ways they maybe should have seen coming.

On the Ottoman right, Mahomet Sorako was busy hammering the League's counterpart, the Venetian Agostino Barbarino.

I can't.

I can't with these names sometimes.

He had already lost six ships, and the League's flank was wavering, bordering on failing.

And this would have turned the tide of the battle.

Sorako probably assumed he was about to to win when, suddenly, under his feet, his galley slaves broke free and revolted, arming themselves with hammers and knives and the occasional sword they found laying around and just began butchering the Ottoman crew.

By the time anyone figured out what was going on, it was far too late.

Sorako turned to fight this surprise slave revolt in the middle of the sea, got stabbed in the face and thrown overboard.

Venetians then found his body bobbing in the ocean, pulled it aboard, cut his head off, and ran it up the flagpole.

But with the Ottomans' right flank flagship falling due to a surprise slave revolt, the rest of the right flank broke and ran.

Many of the Ottomans on the right purposely crashed their ships into the shore, just so they could run away faster and not get caught at sea.

The Ottoman left flank was commanded by who else but Scabby McWormhead.

And like always, he was not exactly searching for combat.

This is a guy who knew this plan was dumb from the very beginning, and he knew that things were kind of not going great.

So he was attempting to goad his league counterpart into chasing him, moving his ships further and further away from the league flank to try to open a gap somewhere in there.

Don Juan saw this from the center and thought Scabs is trying to open a gap to strike directly towards him.

But that's not actually what was happening.

What was happening was much funnier than that.

Scabs knew the battle was over.

He knew his commander was dead.

And he had no goddamn intention of giving his life for a lost cause.

He also knew he cannot simply stroll into Constantinople empty-handed having fled from battle.

So he decided he could get away with running if he managed to snatch a prize first that would please the Sultan.

As he shot through the gap that he opened, he had taken clear of the rest of the League fleet and to safety.

along with the rest of his pirate crews who were his buddies.

But along the way he saw a ship crewed by the Knights of Malta, captained by one of the order's priors, Pietro Giestani, a guy Scabs knew personally due to previous battles and fucking hated him.

And he knew if he brought the Sultan, a prior of the Knights of Malta, that would give him his like get out of running away free card.

You know what I mean?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So Scabs and seven of his ships surround the knight ship and board it.

What follows is a desperate close-quarter slaughter as hundreds of pirates and only a few dozen knights hacked and slashed each other to pieces.

And when the smoke cleared, Scabs had taken the ship over, hooked it up to his own, and began towing it away as a prize.

However, seeing this, the league sent reserve ships over to try to stop him from jacking the knight's ride.

Scabs, again, was not looking to really fight over this, so he climbed aboard the knight's ship, grabbed its second in command, brought it back on his ship, and then cut the knight's ship free.

But Scabs was still not done.

Before he pulled away from the battlefield entirely, he jacked a different ship and then towed that one back with him.

And with that, the entire Ottoman left ran away because you probably shouldn't protect your flank using a pirate navy.

Yeah, a hired mercenary is not the best idea.

Yeah.

By 4 p.m., it was clear that the battle was over and it was a crushing defeat for the Ottomans.

The Ottoman force that was still alive had all surrendered minus one group, the Janissaries, who manned their own boats and decided they were going to fight to the death.

They fought on and on until they eventually run out of ammo for their guns, so they began to throw anything heavy they still had on board until they run out of that too.

According to some tellings of this tale, they begin to throw fruit at the Europeans, who laugh playfully and throw it back at them.

And that is until they get bored of it, go back to their guns, and they kill the last of the Janissaries.

The Gulf was turned red with blood and was a charnel house of corpses, boats, and wreckage.

25,000 Ottoman sailors and soldiers were dead, while 10,000 more were captured.

Ironically, seeing their future right in front of them as they were, you know, they turn in their swords for chains and an oar to replace the guys that the league captains had just freed to fight the last battle.

It's like, oh, tag in, homie, it's your turn to row.

I'm free.

Meanwhile, of the Ottoman fleet, the Europeans managed to free 12,000 slaves from the Ottoman hold, though I should point out here, thousands of them had died every ship that got sank uh that was like several hundred of them died

so 12 000 mostly christian europeans uh who were taken captive in previous battles with the ottoman were set free now oftentimes the battle of lepanto is framed as the historical turning point for the ottoman expansion like from here it goes no further which is true if you only focus on the mediterranean kind of like this is still before the battle of Vienna, for example.

We have other stuff still coming.

It probably could have been turned into a permanent reversal if the Holy League did anything to capitalize on their victory, but they really didn't.

Like during this, like Cyprus has been invaded, and while the fleet is at sea, it gets completely seized.

And Cyprus is obviously hugely important if you remember where it is on a map.

Maybe the Holy League could have spun around, freed Cyprus, could have done literally literally anything after they virtually wiped out the Ottoman navy, but they didn't do anything at all.

And the reason for that is I'm sure you are already batting this idea around in your mind.

It was infighting.

The same side who asked for the league in the first place, Venice, was while this battle is going on, negotiating with the Ottomans, with France as an intermediary for troops.

The Europeans find out about this, get pissed at them over it, and before you know it, they're back and screaming at one another.

The Holy League is effectively dead within two years or so.

Meanwhile, the Ottomans rapidly rebuild their navy within only a few months.

And as this entire story is part of one of many, many, many Ottoman-Venetian wars, things just keep rolling on.

The Ottoman Grand Vizier, commenting on the loss of Lepanto, compared it to the European loss of Cyprus, as to the Christians, losing Cyprus was like losing an arm, where the loss at Lepanto and the loss of their fleet was as if the Ottomans had simply had their beards trimmed.

It grew back.

And as sick of a line, that is, it's a bit of a revision from the Grand Vizier.

Yeah.

In reality, the Sultan was so infuriated by the loss at Lepanto that he came within a hair's breadth of ordering the slaughter of all the Christians within the Ottoman Empire, but he was talked down.

But since this is the Ottoman Empire we're talking about, this is more of a kicking the can down the road situation.

Also, the fleet that they popped up famously in about six to eight months was like a Potempkin navy.

It wasn't real.

They built a fuckload of hardly seaworthy ramshackle shitboxes.

That part is true.

It was mostly to remain at anchor.

And so the Christian spies, scouts could be like, there's 200 fucking ships again.

We have no idea how.

But the Ottomans...

purposefully never committed them to battle because they were not battle worthy.

They were hardly seaworthy.

And this is more of like a psyop.

But it did work.

I'm falling for Turkish psyops, man.

Though in closing, we should talk about our victorious young commander, Don Juan John of Austria.

After the battle, people addressed him publicly for the first time as Prince or His Highness, which was not a title that he had.

It's not a title his brother gave him as king.

And it made him very, very unpopular with his brother and the queen and uh instead of granting him an actual role within the royal court he was sent to the low countries during what was known as the great dutch revolt to put down the protestants he did hold the office of governor of the spanish netherlands for a short amount of time before he was eventually brought down by history's greatest hater the fever

yes The end.

Yeah,

really like interesting period in history where, especially, like, technologically, it's like we were like really at a turning point where, you know, things were about to advance so quickly in the next like 60 to 80 years, particularly in like terms of like naval warfare.

So it's like this is kind of almost like in the twilight period of like simply like maybe 150 years beforehand, like just cannon warfare and you know boarding ship and hacking each other to death and even like a maneuver like instead of grabbing your swords, just like forming volley lines, it's just it's pretty cool.

Yeah, the battle of Lepanto is often known as like the Twilight of the Galleys.

Um, this is like the last hurrah of this kind of warfare, and you could see why the tactic had kind of come up against rapidly expanding technology.

Once you could put a meaningfully useful gun in a man's hands

that wasn't, you know, 40 pounds and needed needed to be held up with like sticks at the end.

Yeah, yeah, you kind of don't want to be going after him with a sword, yeah.

And especially as well, like, you know, the Ottoman like crescent formation of it, like primarily used for encirclement, doesn't really work if someone can shoot you from 50 feet away.

I have 500 dudes can be put on a floating fortress that you cannot board

and just gun you down at sea.

It's not a great way to go about things.

Save me, brother.

I'm drowning.

Pescians trying to get one over on me, brother.

But, Tom, that is a podcast.

We do a thing on this podcast called Questions from the Legion.

If you'd like to ask us a question, you could support us on Patreon.

You can ask us on Patreon or our Discord, which we occasionally ping for more questions.

Or you can put it in a boat and sail it in a crescent moon formation in the Mediterranean, and we will answer it on the show.

And today's question could mean a lot of things to a lot of different people, but what is the first moment that made you realize that, oh, I am an adult now?

I don't know.

See, like, I moved out of home when I was really young.

So.

Same.

Yeah.

It was not necessarily like one specific moment.

It's just like, like, I'm still shocked at like people who are my friends who are like the same age as me, aka 30, and like don't really know how to cook for themselves or like clean or whatever.

Do their laundry.

Yeah, it's like you should know that at like 19 years of age max.

I don't know.

I think maybe it was like moving to the UK.

It was like, because previously I just lived in Ireland and I was like, obviously, like quite close to my family.

Whereas like, it very much feels like when you move to a different country, like far away from and it's not considerably, it's not that far away.

But it's like, oh yeah, this is just like on my own now.

That and paying taxes.

That sucks.

Yeah.

The first time I did that, I was like, why is my paycheck so low?

And this is like fucking over a decade ago.

And I was like, oh, you have to pay money to the government.

I'm like, okay, why?

What is it being used for?

Like,

just give the government your money.

Yeah.

I also moved away when I was quite young.

And because of like family dynamics and stuff like that, like I already was doing my own laundry and cooking and things like that,

cleaning up when I was very young.

Just due to our dynamics as a household.

But I think for me, one of the things that made me realize,

and admittedly, my experience is different because I moved to the bottom of the child.

But you joined the army while you were still a child.

Yeah.

So like I was already paying bills and whatever, and I didn't really feel like an adult because the army doesn't let you feel like an adult.

But I think one of the things that really set me, like made me sit down and be like, huh, I'm getting older was that my friends started having kids on purpose.

Yeah.

That's a, that's a big one.

And like, I will say as well, like a lot of people kind of obsess about like oh you know feeling like an adult or like feeling like you figured it out the the answer is you never will it's just like yeah not at all that's just life life is an iterative process that you just have to like experience and yeah it helps to have plans and all that sort of thing but it's like you'll never not feel young you'll never not feel like oh i don't know what's going on it's just like that's just life and everyone's experiencing it pretty much the same.

I kind of go back and forth with how old old you feel is directly correlated to like how you think and how you think that is a limitation of like, oh, I'm too old to do X, Y, or Z.

Then you will feel that way.

Yep.

But those two things are not connected at all to like how put together you are because I'm not really.

I'm still in many ways a fucking man child.

But, you know, I pay my taxes on time.

I pay everybody at the show on time.

And I managed to keep a roof over my head.

Now I'm sitting down, I have to renew my visa because it's been two years since I've moved to the Netherlands somehow already.

I don't know what the fuck I'm doing.

Like, to the point, I feel like if you sat a child down, like, today we're going to teach you about calculus, despite the fact this is a process that I have feasibly gone through before.

But again, it's a renewal, not the first.

So it's slightly different.

And like, so I feel 100% lost again.

So, you know, it's, it's one of those situations that, yes, I know I'm an adult.

I am 37 years old.

But occasionally something happens that makes me feel like a big, dumb baby at least once a month.

But that's just life.

And like,

I think that I always think about is that like you have to like hold two things that are in tension with each other like kind of throughout life of like, I suppose.

for one aspect of it to be happy is that like, I think one of the worst things people do is

they lose a kind of like uh wonder and curiosity yes with the world as they get older obviously life is hard and difficult but a lot of people have that kind of stripped away from them and they don't look at life with like kind of any cure any curiosity or like willingness to experience new things but on the other hand is like people who refuse to engage with things that are you know designed for adults it's like you know if you enjoy marvel movies that's fine.

Maybe watch a Yodorovsky movie.

Maybe watch Come and See.

You don't necessarily have to watch stuff that's miserable, but like there are things in life that have much deeper emotional and kind of like just practical complexity that you should engage in as you get older.

It makes you a better person.

It makes you a smarter person.

It makes you that, you know, it is part of growing up.

And if you're just like re-watching the same stuff you did when you were 15,

maybe that's a problem.

Yeah, maybe.

Or, or you could get tickets to our live show, October 4th.

Yes.

The Flying Duck in Glasgow, Scotland.

There's still tickets available.

If you can't make it for whatever reason, we are live streaming it.

There's endless amounts of spots available for the live stream.

You can find both links in the show notes.

Make sure you buy tickets to the right one.

Nate has Photoshopped giant cartoon-ish cameras on one so you know it's being live streamed.

And if you want to read something new, buy a book.

I have a lot of them.

You can find any of my military science fiction or my book, The Hooligans of Candhar, wherever it is, you find books.

But Tom, you also host another podcast.

What is that podcast?

Beneath Skin's show about the history of everything told through the history of tattooing.

Probably by the time this comes out, all my books will have been sold out.

But keep an eye on my webshop, beneath skinshop.com, for

new stuff.

This is the only podcast that I host, host and you're already listening to it.

So thank you.

Consider telling your friends about it.

Share it on social media or wherever it is.

You do weird shit on the internet.

And also consider supporting us on Patreon.

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So support us on Patreon.

Leave us a review on wherever it is at least listening to podcasts.

It helps us immensely, especially when it comes to getting venues for live shows.

So if you want us to come to your neck of the woods, assuming wherever you live is not going to get several members of our cast kidnapped by ice,

if you leave us reviews, it does make it easier to find venues that will put up with our bullshit.

So please do that.

And

at the end of August, actually, I am going to be hanging out at the Nova Open in Washington, D.C.

I will not be there in like a career work situation.

I will be enjoying things to everyone else.

But if you see me, come say hi.

And until next time,

ponder the Earth, Moon, and Ocean Turks.

Ponder the moon, brother.

Ponder the moon.