“What doesn't happen in ‘Lepanto’.” The point is, there's no way on God's green earth that one is going to find out what happened at the battle of Lepanto by reading Chesterton's pep-rally tub-thumper. That's the kind of poem it is, and it's very good of its kind. It's also a phantasmagoric slide-show with martial allegro (Beethoven) music. But some of the mundane details which Chesterton treated with such cavalier nonchalance must be considered.

The battle of Lepanto, in which Ali Pasha was crushingly defeated by Don John of Austria, took place, October 7, 1571, just south of the town of Lepanto (now Naupaktos), Greece, in the Gulf of Lepanto (Naupaktos), which adjoins the Gulf of Patras on the west and the Gulf of Corinth on the east. It is thirty miles east of Byron's Missolonghi and sixty miles east of Ulysses's Ithaca. Chesterton does not offer to locate Lepanto, which does not appear on twentieth-century maps.

A Turkish fleet of some 330 ships (273 galleys) was attacked by a Christian fleet of 320 ships including eight galeasses and 208 galleys. This force was sponsored by the Holy League¹ which was chaired by Pope St. Pius V (1504-1572) and mainly supplied by the republic of Venice and by Philip II (1527-1598) of Spain. In compliment to that great monarch, the supreme command of the Christian expedition was given to his illegitimate half-brother, Don John of Austria. Don John had four admirals under him: Andrea Doria (Genoa), Barbarigo (Venice), Colonna (Papal States), and that admirably named crusader, Santa Cruz (Spain). Ranged against him were Ali Pasha, Mahomet Scirocco, and Uluch Ali, the first two of whom were slain. Chesterton names none of these; nor does he say anything about the strategic elements of the battle, which are quite well documented.

Chesterton begins his poem, “Lepanto” with a flamboyantly symbolist caricature of “the Soldan of Byzantium,” the Sultan of Turkey (the Ottoman empire), Selim II (1524-1574). Chesterton makes Selim a mighty figure “of all men feared,” with a daunting dark forest of beard, and “blood-red crescent” of sneering lips. History tells us that this convivial Selim was content to let his grand vizier, Sokollu, do all the dirty work of government and conquest.

This impressive portrait is counterpointed with that of Philip of Spain, and not at all to the latter's benefit. It may be that Selim's sobriquet, “the drunkard,” prejudiced Chesterton in his favour—our last glimpse of the Soldan is of “the Lord upon the Golden Horn [the Bay of Constantinople] laughing in the sun.” The great Philip (actually a handsome man) appears as a fungus-faced necromancer skulking in a secret chamber “hung with velvet that is black and soft as sin,” surrounded by lurking, obsequious “dwarfs,” and toying with his sinister “crystal phial [of] death.” This eclipsing denigration of His Most Catholic Majesty serves to set off the glowing account of his fiery bastard brother who figures as the rising sun (“Love-light of Spain—hurrah!/ Death-light of Africa”), to be contrasted not only with the benighted Philip but also with the setting sun of Selim, vaingloriously laughing “in the courts of the sun,” unwitting of his approaching downfall.

Don John was the natural son of the great Holy Roman emperor Charles V (1500-1558) and of Barbara Blomberg of Ratisbon (then an Austrian city). He was a career soldier and Muslim-basher (and, later, a Protestant-basher in the Netherlands); but his later career was consistently insidiously undermined by the inscrutable Philip II, and this fiery one-time hero died of the fever in the Netherlands at the age of thirty-three, “heartbroken at the failure of all his soaring ambitions, and at the repeated proofs that he had received of the king his brother's jealousy and neglect.”² Don John was an exceptionally good General-Admiral, but not otherwise a particularly admirable man. Nevertheless, Chesterton catches him at his apogee (in his brilliant twenty-seventh year), and uses him as a personification of the heroic Christian spirit fighting for the right, and laughing at his losses because he knows that his cause is just—Don John lost 8,000 men at Lepanto.

Chesterton wants Don John to stand alone as a man of unshakable faith, and of altruistic zeal for the defence of “Christendom.” Philip, on the other hand, is shown communing with his own “leprous” soul in his black solipsistic chamber. We see “the cold queen of England … looking in the glass.” The reference is to Elizabeth (1533-1603) who was Philip's narcissistic female counterpart, his eternal hater, and his almost-wife. We see Charles IX of France (1550-1574), “the shadow [the shadow-king] of the Valois … yawning at the Mass.” This King is not interested in holy wars—though almost exactly a year later, he authorised the St. Bartholomew's Day massacre, because his mother, Catherine de Medici (1519-1589), told him to do so. None of these self-imprisoned megalomaniacs can see past the ends of their noses. “Only a crownless prince” stirs, and rises from his “doubtful seat and half attainted stall.”³ His action represents Catholic self-reliance, the outgoing giving of self, as opposed to Calvinist self-absorption, the ingoing hoarding of self. But the heroic aloneness of Don John is not how history sees the battle. The Eleventh Edition of The Encyclopedia Britannica closes its Lepanto article thus:

The loss of life in the battle was enormous, being put at 20,000 [sometimes 25,000] for the Turks and 8,000 for the Christians. The battle of Lepanto was of immense political importance. It gave the naval power of the Turks a blow from which it never recovered, and put a stop to their aggression in the eastern Mediterranean. Historically the battle is interesting because it was the last example of an encounter on a great scale between fleets of galleys [oar-driven ships], and also because it was the last crusade. The Christian powers of the Mediterranean really did combine to avert the ruin of Christendom. Hardly a noble house of Spain or Italy was not represented in the fleet, and the princes headed the boarders. Volunteers came from all parts of Europe, and it is said that among them was Sir Richard Grenville. … Cervantes was undoubtedly present, and had his left hand shattered by a Turkish bullet.⁴

This summation is far from suggesting that Don John was quite alone in his martial zeal, but otherwise it confirms the general sense of Chesterton's version of Lepanto—especially his calling it the last “crusade” in the last line. And, of course, Chesterton cannot resist the Cervantes allusion, and he gives that great right-handed poet the all-but-last word in “Lepanto”:

Cervantes on his galley sets the sword back in the sheath
(Don John of Austria rides homeward with a wreath.)
And he sees across a weary land a straggling road in Spain.
Up which a lean and foolish knight forever rides in vain.

From a worldly perspective, Cervantes rides on in valor, but he is on the road, nevertheless, to the eternal city of light and love. The “straggling road in Spain,” up which Don Quixote, Chesterton's favourite knight, is about to set out on his timeless adventure, distinctly echoes the “winding road” in Spain, up which Don John, his second-favourite knight, has just come to the last crusade.

Nevertheless, if Chesterton cannot resist the marginal Cervantes, he can resist all the salient material and technical elements and all but one of the major actors of the battle. He is not even interested that Ali Pasha was slain in ship-to-ship combat with Don John. He describes only an incandescent Don John “purpling all the ocean” and liberating myriads of galley-slaves, and his singular “brave beard” flying “for a flag of all the free.”

The poem was originally called “The Ballad of Lepanto,” and it is a ballad in the sense that it is meant to be popular and is meant to be sung (chanted),⁵ but not in the sense that it is a narrative poem. We are given no picture of a sea battle, and nothing like a consecutive account of an action. And the happy warrior of the poem is quite divorced from the tense and driven power-quester of history. He is simply an ideal heroic personification of the Church Militant—and momentarily triumphant. In a sense, “Lepanto” is a ballad of signal gallantry and derring-do, like an operatic version of Scott's “Bonnie Dundee.” It is also a kaleidoscopic magic lantern show (with Beethoven's Eroica music) of the Mediterranean world in crisis—diversified with a supernatural, but not at all surprising, leap “above the evening star,” to Mohammed's (“Mahound's”) epicurean “paradise,” the “peacock gardens,” where the vexed prophet summons up, in vain, three mighty Islamic angels and three classes of Islamic demons to confound the rising Christians and their one intrepid spirit.

This scene is balanced by a more down-to-earth visit to the Pope's chapel, in which St. Pius V⁶ sees, “as in a mirror,” the “cruel crescent” of the Soldan's slave-propelled ships. Mohammed had seen the cruel swords of Richard, Raymond and Godfrey, with whom Don John is identified; for in Don John's voice Mohammed hears “the voice that shook our palaces—four hundred years ago.” Chesterton is not concerned with the details of a battle; he is concerned with the sound, or the reverberations, of an heroic voice.

The sound of “Lepanto” is still quite wonderful, even to jaded modern ears. In this poem which occasionally echoes Swinburne,⁷ Chesterton hardly ever makes a mistake. It is probably worthwhile for the modern reader to locate Lepanto, and to identify “the shadow of the Valois”; but, having checked these facts, the reader should file them away again and forget them. He should not spoil his enjoyment of “Lepanto” with some craven scruple of thinking too precisely on the event. He should allow himself to revel in the sound of “It is Richard, it is Raymond, it is Godfrey at the gate!”⁸ (the sound of the clash of arms and the surge of the sea, the sound of “the noise of the crusade,” the sound of the Eroica, adagio and allegro and a touch of the scherzo too. Remember only “Dim drums throbbing, in the hills half heard” and “In the gloom black-purple, in the glint old-gold.” Must any reader be reminded to remember and to rejoice? What happens in “Lepanto” is elation, if one is ready for it.

Notes

1. The Holy League was formed to prevent the Turkish fleet from gaining supremacy in the Mediterranean.

2. Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th ed., s.v. “Lepanto,” by David Hannay.

3. Chesterton's only allusion to Don John's bastardy.

4. Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th ed.

5. John Buchan wrote to Chesterton (June 12, 1915): “The other day in the trenches we shouted your Lepanto.” Quoted in Maisie Ward, Gilbert Keith Chesterton (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1943), p. 371.

6. This sainted Pius was a stellar legislator and administrator, but apparently a less than genial personality.

7. Especially compare the rhythms of Swinburne's “The Triumph of Time.” One might also compare the rhythms of Kipling's “Cold Iron.”

8. Richard I, “Coeur de Lion” (1157-1199); Raymond IV. Count of Toulouse (1060-1105); Godfrey de Bouillon, Duke of lower Lorraine (1061-1100). Godfrey was elected King of Jerusalem, July 22, 1099. The Collected Poems of G.K. Chesterton (Newodd, Mead, 1941) misprints the end of the line as “Godfrey in the gate.”