On 2 June 1676, during the Franco-Dutch War, a French fleet commanded by the Duke of Vivonne, with Abraham Duquesne and the future admiral Tourville under him, attacked the Spanish and Dutch fleets lying at anchor in the bay of Palermo in Sicily. Using the smoke of their own broadsides as cover, the French sent in fireships that burned the Spanish flagship and several Dutch ships. The Spanish commander Diego de Ibarra and the Dutch commander Jan den Haen were both killed, and France was left the stronger power at sea around Sicily.
A sideshow in Sicily
Messina rose against Spanish rule in July 1674, and Louis XIV took the city under his protection as a way of striking at Spain. Unable to defend the island alone, Spain asked the Dutch Republic for a fleet, and Michiel de Ruyter came to the Mediterranean with a small squadron. Duquesne, sent to support the Sicilian rebels, beat the allies in two engagements in 1676, off Augusta in April and off Palermo in June. At Augusta on 22 April de Ruyter was mortally wounded, and he died a week later at Syracuse.1 › Battle of Stromboli, 1676
The battered allied fleet withdrew to Palermo to refit. On 23 May the Duke of Vivonne, Louis XIV's commander in Sicily, sailed from Messina with, according to the French naval historian Charles de La Roncière, twenty-nine ships of the line, nine fireships and twenty-five galleys.2
A half-moon across the bay
Warned on 30 May that the French fleet had been sighted from the hills, the acting Dutch commander, Vice Admiral Jan den Haen, decided not to seek battle at sea. Both the Dutch historian J. C. de Jonge and La Roncière describe how he brought his ships out from behind the mole and anchored them in a half-moon across the mouth of the bay, where the batteries on the mole, the Castellammare fort and the city walls could cover them. De Jonge records that the Spanish commanders thought this unnecessary at first and moved their remaining ships into line only on 1 June, with the galleys placed between the big ships to fend off fireships.3
La Roncière writes that Tourville and Rear Admiral Gabaret inspected the allied line from a small felucca and that Tourville persuaded Vivonne to attack the end of the line away from the mole and its guns.4
Fire in the harbor
On 2 June the Marquis de Preuilly's division anchored a cable's length from the allied van, made up mostly of Spanish ships, and opened fire. Both historians say the shore batteries did little and that the Spanish vice admiral Juan Roco soon cut his cable and let his ship drift away, which opened the line. Under cover of the smoke, the French fireships went in.5
The first fireships sent against the Spanish flagship, Nuestra Señora del Pilar, were sunk, but the next two grappled her. Her commander, Diego de Ibarra, his leg already broken, drowned trying to escape the flames, and the former Spanish commander Francisco de La Cerda died with the officers around him before the ship blew up. On the Dutch side, the burning Steenbergen of Rear Admiral Pieter van Middelandt set fire to the Vrijheid and the Leiden, and all three exploded; van Middelandt drowned. Den Haen was killed by a cannonball as he stood near his flagship's mainmast. The surviving Dutch ships, among them the Eendracht with de Ruyter's body aboard, fought on.6
De Jonge argues that more fireships might have finished the Dutch fleet, but the French had used them all. According to La Roncière, Vivonne refused proposals to improvise more, calling it rash to attempt anything further.7
Counting the cost
The losses are not agreed. La Roncière, drawing on a Spanish report from Palermo, gives the allies nine warships, a frigate and three thousand men lost, and notes that the Marquis de Villette put the figure at four thousand men out of action and Duquesne at two thousand five hundred killed; he gives French losses as two hundred men out of action. De Jonge, from Dutch letters and a Spanish report, counts about 250 Dutch killed and 1,700 to 1,800 Spanish killed or wounded.8
Britannica calls the victory decisive, but for Louis XIV, as the American naval historian Alfred Thayer Mahan wrote, the Sicilian enterprise was never more than a diversion from the war on land. When England allied with the Dutch Republic in January 1678, Louis ordered Sicily evacuated. De Jonge adds a sour footnote: because den Haen died commanding in a defeat, the States General denied him the state funeral and monument usually given to fallen commanders. The other great sea fights of the age are gathered in our list of the greatest naval battles.9
