A long, devastating war laid waste the open country;
victor and vanquished alike were bathed in blood; while the rising
republic of the waters gave a welcome to fugitive industry, and out of
the ruins erected the noble edifice of its own greatness. For forty
years a war lasted, whose happy termination was not to bless the dying
eye of Philip; which destroyed one paradise in Europe, to create a new
one out of its shattered fragments; which destroyed the choicest flower
of military youth; and while it enriched more than a quarter of the
globe, impoverished the possessor of the golden Peru. This monarch, who,
even without oppressing his subjects, could expend nine hundred tons of
gold, but who by tyrannical means extorted far more, heaped on his
depopulated kingdom a debt of one hundred and forty millions of ducats.
An implacable hatred of liberty swallowed up all these treasures and
consumed in fruitless labor his royal life. But the Reformation throve
amid the devastation of his sword, and over the blood of her citizens
the banner of the new republic floated victorious.
LEPANTO: DESTRUCTION OF THE TURKISH NAVAL POWER
A.D. 1571
SIR WILLIAM STIRLING-MAXWELL
By the defeat of the Turks in the naval fight near Lepanto their
power was so seriously shaken that its decline may be reckoned to
have begun with that event.
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