damental principles of Ottoman policy in Europe" (117). The aim of Turkish diplomacy was to keep Christian Europe disunited, the keystone of which was the Franco-Turkish alliance first formalized in 1536.
During the late 15th and early 16th centuries, the Ottomans became a naval power in the Eastern Mediterranean, mostly at the expense of the Republic of Venice whose island outposts in the Ionian and Aegean Seas fell to the Turks, including in 1499 the small port of Lepanto in western Greece. They also conquered the Levant and Egypt. In the 1520s the Ottomans achieved naval supremacy in the eastern Mediterranean, capped off by their routing of a Christian fleet led by the much renowned Genoese Admiral Andrea Doria in 1538 off Prevesa in the Ionian Sea. Lord Kinross said after he was repulsed at Vienna, Suleiman "no longer contemplated landward expansion into central Europe" and shifted much of his attention to the Mediterranean (217).
According to Padfield, Suleiman's goals there as well as elsewhere were mixed. He said the Ottoman Empire "had a built-in need to acquire territory for revenue and for manpower" (96). Kinross said "the Sultan's campaigns more than paid for their initial outlay" (210). Beeching said the Mediterranean west of the Greek isles "represented both a mass of tempting plunder and a religious duty" (76). In the mid-16th century, "the focal point of the world economy [was] . . . a narrow urban quadrilateral, Venice, Milan, Genoa, Florence. It was to this trading and financial heart that new nation states, Spain, France and Ottoman Turkey were drawn" (Padfield 75). The Ottomans' principal naval foes were the Spanish Habsburgs under Charles V (r. 1519-1556) and Philip II (r. 1556-1598), part of the greater Habsburg Empire which had blunted the Ottoman thrust into central Europe.
As they built up their naval strength, the Ottomans before the 1560s largely confined their activities in the central and western...