The Republic of Venice was a sovereign state for over a thousand years, a maritime empire whose end only came with the opening of new trade routes and a New World.
On 7 October 1403, a Venetian fleet defeated the then French controlled Genoese at the Battle of Modon, the Peloponnesian town now known as Methoni. This was one of the last flare-ups of a fight for maritime supremacy lasting almost two centuries.
On 7 October 1513, Spanish and German forces crushed the Venetians at the Battle of La Motta, one of the last flare-ups of the War of the League of Cambrai.
Alongside wars of nations and kingdoms lay wars of religion. The leader of the Germans at La Motte, Georg von Frundsberg, would become a bit player in the Reformation by speaking words of encouragement to Martin Luther at the Diet of Worms in 1521.
In south and southwestern Europe, it wasn’t so much the Protestants, it was the Muslims, in particular the fall of Constantinople and the rise and rise of the Ottomans under Suleiman the Magnificent; a name and dream lingering in a protagonist of Amazon Prime’s “Jack Ryan”.
Suleiman died in 1566. On 7 October 1571, a fleet of largely Venetian ships largely financed by former foe Spain defeated the Ottoman navy in the Battle of Lepanto. Whether it was a material victory didn’t matter; for a western Christian Europe it was a huge morale-booster.
One participant in the Battle of Lepanto was Miguel de Cervantes, the author of Don Quixote. Some say he was captured by the Ottomans and was imprisoned at the formerly Venetian stronghold of Modon! I think the more correct version is that he emerged victorious but wounded. He was captured four years later and sent to Algiers, but that’s the most of it.
Tables, like ships, turn. A quarter millennium on, a French expeditionary force was busy in the Peloponnese helping the Greeks revolt against their Ottoman rulers. On 7 October 1828, the citadel at Patras fell, while the fortress at Modon fell a day later.
Almost another two hundred years on, the battle between east and west, between Europe and Asia, and among the great diaspora of the Abrahamic belief systems began afresh; on 7 October 2001 US forces landed in Afghanistan; the first phase of the War on Terror had begun. The Jack Ryan of “Jack Ryan” saw service there.
