Jason Goodwin
Batten The Hatches
Victory of the West: The Story of the Battle of Lepanto
By Niccolò Capponi
Macmillan 356pp £20 order from our bookshop
Coming hard on the heels of the Ottoman occupation of Venetian Cyprus, the Battle of Lepanto was the first major victory that the Christians had ever carried against the Turks, and has been duly celebrated ever since as marking the moment that the tide turned against the Ottoman project. Only Voltaire demurred; he thought the battle was inconsequential. Niccolò Capponi dismisses this as the error of a man living in an age when victory meant territory: Lepanto gained its victors very little.
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