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548 Mahmut Halef Cevrioğlu

In terms of Ottoman seafaring, Cafer Pasha’s military engagement
in Kassandra epitomized two mistakes at the same time. The first was,
as cited from Katip Celebi above, that the admiral was not supposed
to enter the combat in person. The second, and more technical, issue
was that the galleys were strongly advised not to ram the galleons di-
rectly. Because, as Katip Celebi admonished again, the galleys were to
keep galleons under cannon fire from afar until their «helms and masts
were broken» . That is to say, it was only after the galleons would be
93
immobilised by missile shots that the galleys had to attack and board
them. Apart from rendering the enemy vessels motionless, the con-
stant canon fire could have also incurred casualties among the enemy
crew and damage in the enemy vessels’ weaponry. It can hence be
argued that the leading attacks by Memi Beg of Rhodes and Uzun
Piyale were doomed to fail for not taking heed of this principle. And
the subsequent initiative of the grand admiral to ram the Hector with
his bastarda simply invited a further disaster.
By all means, Cafer Pasha must have been aware of the faulty na-
ture of his move. Because years ago, when Grand Admiral Halil Pasha
(of Kayseri) engaged a gargantuan Christian galleon named Karace-
hennem (or the so-called Red Galleon) in 1609, his first reaction, too,
94
was to launch an outright assault as Katip Çelebi called attention.
Nonetheless, he was immediately warned by the county governor of
the Peloponnesus, Murad Reis, who had earned his reputation as a
corsair of Algiers before his service in the imperial navy: «[the galleon]
ha[d] to be battered from afar». It was only after Karacehennem was
paralysed by artillery fire that the Ottomans boarded and captured
it . In short, Grand Admiral Halil Pasha had thus avoided a grave
95
mistake by listening to the admonitions of a seafarer by trade. Years
later, however, Cafer Pasha became so infuriated as to ignore the les-
sons of such vital a precedent and jeopardised himself (and the fate of
the whole Ottoman navy) after seeing his subordinate officials with-
draw one after the other from the combat. It needs to be emphasised,
hence, once more that Cafer Pasha’s quick rise to the admiralty due
to favouritism and, accordingly, his acute lack of naval expertise seem
to have caused the debacle.

93 Kâtip Çelebi, Tuhfetu’l-Kibar, p. 240.
94 Williams relates that the Ottomans captured, among others, two large galle-
ons «fitted-out in Malta and Leghorn» in 1609, one of which was probably this
Karacehennem, see P. Williams, The Sound and the Fury: Christian Perspectives on
Ottoman Naval Organization, 1590-1620, in R. Cancila (edited by), Mediterraneo in
Armi (secc. XV-XVIII), Palermo, 2007, pp. 557-592, on p. 585.
95 Kâtip Çelebi, Tuhfetu’l-Kibar, p. 183.

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