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Contro ogni previsione: uno scontro navale nel Mediterraneo moderno... 541

The ensuing encounter between the Ottomans and the English has
been the subject of both European and Ottoman accounts with varia-
tions both in length and in facts. Contemporary Ottoman authors
(chronicles by Topçular Katibi, Katip Çelebi, Karaçelebizade Abdülaziz
Efendi and the travelogue of Evliya Çelebi) chose to keep their narra-
tives of the battle rather concise. European accounts offer a definitely
more expressive depiction, the foremost being Paul Rycaut’s Turkish
History. The French newspaper of the time (Gazette) and the reports
of the Venetian, Dutch and Austrian embassies in Istanbul also pro-
vide us with some information that can be best described as divergent.
In modern literature, Guillaume Calafat paid particular attention to
this naval engagement by relying on Venetian and British documenta-
tion . The most comprehensive and yet-to-exhaust narration is pro-
59
vided by The National Archives in London: the copy of a letter penned
by Thomas Spaight, the English sailor who survived the fight and fell
prisoner to the Ottoman grand admiral; and a note of explanation re-
garding the event by the grand vizier to Sir Peter Wyche, the English
ambassador at the Porte .
60
The first task at hand is to deliberate the date of the engagement.
With reference to Evliya Çelebi (the eccentric Ottoman traveller of the
seventeenth century), Calafat suggested that the event took place on
the first day of the feast of sacrifice (kurban bayramı) in the lunar year
1042, corresponding to 18 June 1633 . The eyewitness of the event,
61
Thomas Spaight corroborates the date to a great extent, saying that it
was the White Sunday, i.e., 19 June 1633 . So, it must have taken
62
roughly ten days for the Ottoman fleet to cover the distance between
Istanbul and Kassandra. The activities of the English merchants in
the meantime are best described by Thomas Spaight himself.
When the English vessels had arrived in the Aegean Sea several
weeks before, as Spaight suggested, they had been informed that the
Gulf of Volos (Volo) offered fine opportunities in terms of grain . After
63
waiting for five days around Volos, which served both as an outlet for
the grain coming from central Greece and as a biscuit production centre
for the Ottoman fleet , they were eventually betrayed by an Ottoman
64
subject (Turke) who had promised to provide them with grain. In the
ensuing ambush, they suffered five casualties (two of them fell dead and

59 G. Calafat, Une mer jalousee. Contribution a l’histoire de la souverainete (Medi-
terranee, XVIIe siecle), Le Seuil, Paris, 2019, pp. 252-265.
60 Letters are available under Tna, Sp, 97/15, f. 204r. and 206r.
61 Calafat, Une mer jalousée, p. 256.
62 Tna, Sp, 97/15. Negroponte, 1 July (English Style) 1633, f. 204r.
63 ibidem.
64 C. Imber, The Ottoman Empire, 1300-1650. The Structure of Power, Palgrave-
Macmillan, Basingstoke and New York, 2002, p. 313.

Mediterranea - ricerche storiche - Anno XX - Dicembre 2023
ISSN 1824-3010 (stampa) ISSN 1828-230X (online)