The Ottoman capture of Cyprus in 1570 prompted Pope Pius V to assemble the Holy League from Spain, Venice, Genoa, Savoy and Malta. The two fleets met on 7 October 1571 at the mouth of the Gulf of Corinth: roughly 200 galleys each and close to 150,000 men in all. The battle lasted four or five hours and was fought largely as a land action at sea — ships grappled together, with the real fighting on the decks. The Ottoman fleet was almost entirely lost, tens of thousands died, and many enslaved Christian oarsmen were freed.

The strategic consequence was far narrower than the symbolic one. The Ottoman state rebuilt its navy over a single winter; in 1573 Venice signed a peace recognising the loss of Cyprus, and Tunis fell in 1574. The remark attributed to the grand vizier Sokollu Mehmed Pasha — that the League had shaved the Ottoman beard while the Ottomans had severed Venice's arm — captures the asymmetry. In Europe, however, the news was read as the first concrete proof that centuries of Ottoman advance could be halted, and it generated a wide cultural output from Cervantes (who lost the use of his left hand in the battle) to Titian.

In military terms Lepanto marks the end of an age. The oared galley had dominated the narrow, often windless waters of the Mediterranean for a thousand years; the sailing warship, carrying its firepower along the broadside, proved superior on open oceans. After Lepanto the Mediterranean ceased to be the centre of world maritime trade — because the weight of it had already shifted to the Atlantic and Indian Ocean routes opened in the same century.