| Description |
As the echo of the last cannon volleys faded into the smoke-filled breeze on the seventh of October 1571, the Battle of Lepanto evaporated from a concrete event and coalesced into a cloud of myth, repeating the same phenomenon of the Battle of Salamis some two thousand years before. Contemporary European chroniclers of the battle, followed by scholars through the middle of the twentieth century, placed Lepanto as a pivotal moment in Mediterranean history, a point at which everything changed. But twentieth and twenty-first-century studies highlighted the political and military irrelevance of the battle - the dread of the Grand Turk's navy remained. This thesis drives off the clouds of myth, whether from the fifteenth or twenty-first centuries, and gives Lepanto a new analysis. The Battle of Lepanto marked a sea-change in Mediterranean history, but not in the traditional military or political paradigms. Rather, the Battle of Lepanto heralded a shift in European consciousness and conversation regarding sacred kingship. Regnal sacrality receives definition in the scholarship of Ernst Kantorowicz and Francis Oakley, and then is centered in a world-historical context, including a new Taxonomy of Dominion. Both the Habsburg and Ottoman empires are examined, through that Taxonomy and in the build-up to Lepanto, culminating not in the heroics or the bloodshed, but rather in the philosophies of government espoused by Jean Bodin and Thomas Hobbes. Though the Battle of Lepanto received slight mention in either man's published works, it nevertheless looms like a low-hanging fog, permeating and surrounding their ideas of the Divine Right of Kings, and the Social Compact, respectively. The Battle of Lepanto did not alter fifteenth century political maneuvering or military gamesmanship in any significant manner, but it did catalyze a profound change in European discourses about authority, power, and presence. After Lepanto, the divine slowly receded from politics, first to a king invested with a divine right to rule, as Bodin advocated, and then to societal agreement, articulated by Hobbes, that eliminated the vox dei, and placed the vox populi supreme. |
