Central
Europe.

But the Turks during this century became a maritime power. They had
conquered the Crimea and were masters of the Black Sea. They had overrun
Greece and most of the islands of the Archipelago. They had threatened
Venice with their fleets, and had for a while a foothold in Southern Italy.
They took Rhodes from the Knights of St. John, annexed Syria and Egypt, and
the Sultan of Constantinople was acknowledged as the Khalifa of Islam, the
representative of the Prophet by the Mohammedan states of North
Africa--Tripoli, Tunis, and Morocco. In 1526 the victory of Mohacs made the
Turks masters of Hungary. They had driven a wedge deep into Europe, and
there was danger that their fleets would soon hold the command of the
Mediterranean.

These fleets were composed chiefly of large galleys--lineal descendants (so
to say) of the ancient triremes. There was a row of long oars on either
side, but sail power had so far developed that there were also one, two,
even three tall masts, each crossed by a long yard that carried a
triangular lateen sail. The base of the triangle lay along the yard, and
the apex was the lower corner of the triangular sail, which could be hauled
over to either side of the ship, one end of the yard being hauled down on
the other side. The sail thus lay at an angle with the line of the keel,
with one point of the yard high above the masthead, and by carrying the
sheet tackle of the point of the sail across the ship, and reversing the
position of the yard, the galley was put on one tack or the other. Forward,
pointing ahead, was a battery of two or more guns, and there was sometimes
a second but lighter battery astern, to be used when the galley was
escaping from a ship of superior force. Turks, in the Eastern
Mediterranean, Moors in the West, recruited their crews of rowers by
capturing Christian ships and raiding Christian villages, to carry off
captives who could be trained to the oar. This piracy, plundering, and
slave-hunting went on in the Mediterranean up to the first years of the
nineteenth century, when, after the Turks themselves had long abandoned it,
the sea rovers of the Barbary States in the western waters of the inland
sea still kept it up, and European nations paid blackmail to the Beys of
Tripoli, Tunis, and Algiers to secure immunity for their ships and sailors.

In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries no part of the Mediterranean was
free from the raids of the Moslem pirates