By the late 1560's the crescent moon of Islam was nearing an ascendency it hadn't enjoyed since the first heady days of Moslem expansion in the century that followed the death of the Prophet.The agent of this great advance of Moslem power was an empire founded almost three centuries before in Anatolia. It is known to history as the Ottoman Empire. 

In the 13th century as part of the outer ripple caused by the explosion of Mongol power under the great khan Genghis, a Turkic people turned their horses westward and finally found themselves in Anatolia, in the lands of present day Turkey. There they took service with the Seljuk Turks and in time the best and the brightest of them carved out semi-autonomous statelets and went their own way as the power of the Seljuks decayed around them. One of them, perhaps the fiercest, perhaps the most astute, perhaps simply the luckiest, took power when the reign of the Seljuks was ended by Mongol attacks in 1293, and became the ruler of the local Turks in their wars against the Byzantine Empire. His name was Osman I, his people the Osmanli and the polity he created the Ottoman Empire. It grew into the first superpower the world had ever seen and in a great outward wave it moved into lands north, south and west until Asia Minor, Arabia, the North African littoral, the Crimea and the Balkans all fell under the sway of the Sublime Porte, the palace of Osman's successors. The high water marks of the empire saw the the crescent banners of Islam beating at the very gates of Vienna and beseiging the Knights of St. John in Malta and for long it seemed that Christendom was in perpetual and imminent danger from this, the greatest ever scourge of the followers of Christianity's God. 

From their early roots in Anatolia, the Ottomans strode warlike and powerful onto a world stage greatly enlivened by the petty squabbles and lack of unity of those who stood in the their way. To the Europeans of the day, especially those whose lands lay on the border marches between Christendom and Islam, the progress of the Turks must have seemed both inexorable and irresistible. 

Osman's successor Ohkran subdued most of western Asia Minor and by 1354 the Turks had a base at Gallipoli. Murad I continued the attacks on the Byzantines and in 1361 took Adrianople, reducing the Byzantine Empire to only the city of Constantinople. In the last year of Murad's reign Christian resistance in the Balkans was broken on the Field of Blackbirds (Battle of Kossovo, 1389) and Ottoman power extended up to the Danube. Although slowed for a time by the incursions of Tamerlane, the Ottomans were able to maintain their power in their European possessions and in the early 15th century their expansion continued again. A crusader army was destroyed at the Battle of Varna in 1444 and nine years later the great Christian bastion of Constantinople itself fell. Not long after Venice lost it's possessions in the Morea to the Turks. The main instrument of this wave of conquest was the Ottoman army. Up to a hundred thousand strong it was centred on two main arms. The first were the spahis the cavalry arm of the Ottomans and composed mainly of converts to Islam. The second, with an even more frightening reputation, were the janissaries, an elite corps of infantry that was made up of captured Christian children who were brought up to be fanatical Moslems. In the 16th century three sultans raised the Ottoman empire to it's greatest heights: Bayezid II, Selim I and Suleyman the Magnificent. Bayezid turned the Ottoman fleet into a major presence in the Mediterranean, pushed further into Europe and established footholds on the northern coast of the Black Sea. Selim moved south-eastwards into Syria, Iraq, Egypt and Arabia. With Mecca under their control the Ottoman sultans took the title of caliph as their own and thus became the spiritual leaders of all the adherents of Islam. Suleyman built on the successes of his two predecessors and in 1521 took the great fortress of Belgrade. The following year he drove the Knights of St.John from their stronghold of Rhodes. In 1526, at the Battle of Mohacs, the Hungarians were crushed and henceforth the landward defence of Europe would depend on the Austrian Hapsburgs. Suleyman harried them in their capital at Vienna in 1529 and only over-extended supply lines forced him to withdraw. At sea his navy forced the submission of Algiers with it's corsair ships, and later Tripoli. 

In 1565, the first cracks started to appear in this seemingly invincible power. In the late spring of that year an Ottoman fleet of 181 ships and 30,000 soldiers attemped to take Malta, the new home of the knights of St.John. All summer the seige lasted and in bitter fighting a force of about 600 knights and 8,000 men were able to heroically hold out and finally force a Turkish withdrawal. Though the Knights of St.John had shown Christendom that the Turks were not invincible, they were still immensely powerful and a continuing threat, especially to Christian lands in the Mediterranean. It was then that the See of Rome, and thus all Catholicism, was placed in the care of Pope Pius V. A man of humble origins who spurned the luxurious, opulent life previous pontiffs had preferred and maintained the ascetic practices of the Dominican monk he was, he was a skillful and patient diplomat. His concerns were twofold. He worried at the precarious condition of Venice, long a Christian bulwark in the Eastern Mediterranean, but who had seen possession after possession fall to the Turks. Secondly, the victory of the Knights of Malta notwithstanding, he wished to prevent the Turks coming any closer to the Papal States. After tireless efforts he managed, in 1571, to create an anti-Ottoman alliance known as the Holy League. It consisted of the Papal States, Spain, Venice and Genoa. 

It was principally a seaborne alliance and the man chosen to lead its armada was Don John of Austria. A bastard son of the Emperor Charles V, he was a talented soldier who had proved himself in the wars against the Moors in Grenada. He was also Spain's leading admiral and only 24 years old. Fair-haired, charming and eager for the fame his birth the wrong side of the blanket had robbed him of, Don John assumed command of a quarrelsome, irritable fleet held together only by the will of Pius V and a shared fear of the Turks. The Spaniards were commanded by Santa Cruz, the Genoese by Andrea Doria, the Venetians by Augustino Barbagio and Sebastian Veniero. The two city states were long time rivals and had fought each other more than once in the past. Keeping the fleet focussed on the common enemy was not the least of Don John's problems. On one of the Genoese ships was a Spanish volunteer by the name of Miguel de Cervantes. He would suffer a disabling wound to his hand at Lepanto that would forever preclude his pursuance of a military career. He took up writing instead and in one of those priceless ironies of history, the suffering of a soldier at war led directly to one of the greatest novels of all time - Don Quixote.