Books like Empires of the Sea: The Final Battle for the Mediterranean, 1521-1580

Cervantes, of the "Don Quixote" fame, was in one of these battles. He was a 24-year-old volunteer.Now I know that hundreds of years ago the Mediterranean Sea and its surrounding land areas were considered the center of the world and were a battleground for two great conflicting forces: the Muslims (Turks/the Ottoman Empire) and the Christians (the French, Spaniards, Venetians, the war-waging Popes, etc.). The Muslims and Christians call each other "infidels" and had a deep desire for each other's extinguishment. There were also pirates on both sides of this religious divide which the author preferred to call "corsairs."They already had guns and cannons on those days. The gun was called "arquebus" which was fatal only at short distances. Warships were powered by rowers done by galley slaves often chained to their rowing benches to prevent escape or suicide. Gut-wrenching were the descriptions of battles and pillages, but it was no less so of these poor, miserable creatures:"In the heyday of Venetian sea power in the fifteenth century, galleys had been rowed by volunteers; by the sixteenth, the muscle power was generally conscripted. The Ottoman navy relied heavily on an annual levy of men from the provinces of Anatolia and Europe, and everyone employed chain labor--captured slaves, convicts, and, in the Christian ships, paupers so destitute they sold themselves to the galley captains. It was these wretches, chained three or four to a foot-wide bench, who made sea wars possible. Their sole function was to work themselves to death. Shackled hand and foot, excreting where they sat, fed on meagre quantities of black biscuits, and so thirsty they were sometimes driven to drink seawater, galley slaves led lives bitter and short. The men, naked apart from a pair of linen breeches, were flayed raw by the sun; sleep deprivation on the narrow bench propelled them toward lunacy; the stroke keeper's drum and the overseer's lash--a tarred rope or a dried bull's penis--whipped them beyond the point of exhaustion during long stretches of intensive effort when a ship was trying to capture or escape another vessel. The sight of a galley crew at full stretch was as brutal as any a man could wish to be spared. 'That least tolerable and most to be dreaded employment of a man deprived of liberty,' wrote the eighteenth-century English historian Joseph Morgan, conjuring up the vision of 'ranks and files of half-naked, half-starved, half-tanned, meagre wretches, chained to a plank, from whence they remove not for months at a time...urged on, even beyond human strength, with cruel and repeated blows, on the bare flesh, to an incessant continuation of the most violent of exercises.' 'God preserve you from the galleys of Tripoli,' was a customary valediction to men putting to sea from a Christian port."Disease could decimate a fleet in weeks. The galley was an amoebic death trap, a swilling sewer whose stench was so foul you could smell it two miles off--it was customary to sink the hulls at periodic intervals to cleanse them of shit and rats--but if the crew survived to enter a battle, the chained and unprotected rowers could only sit and wait to be killed by men of their own country and creed. The nominally free men who made up the bulk of the Ottoman rowing force fared little better. Levied by the sultan in large numbers from the empire's inland provinces, many had never seen the sea before. Inexperienced and inefficient as oarsmen, they succumbed in large numbers to the terrible conditions."One way or another the oared galley consumed men like fuel. Each dying wretch dumped overboard had to be replaced--and there were never enough..."When a town, settlement, fortress or city is captured--always after a siege long or short--there wouldn't be just a change of government. The victors would loot and ransack the place, take whole able-bodied populations as slaves, and those whom they find no need for (like the sick or the very young or the very old) they would hack to pieces or have their skulls split open.In one battle there was a negotiated surrender. The leaders were offered safe passage by the victorious Ottoman chief. But his Christian counterpart exhibited haughtiness even in defeat. So the Ottoman had the latter's ears and nose lopped off. Then he ordered him skinned alive. He died only after half of his body's skin was gone.A great historical narrative helped a lot by the fact that those warring forces were the world's superpowers at those times and had each other's atrocities faithfully recorded to show how great human beings and their religions were, with their deeds of valor watched by their common god they call by different names.