Divine Wind. Literary and historical echoes in the work of Antonius Rosaneus

Since Greek, Etruscan and Roman times, peoples have believed that supernatural entities were in control of meteorological phenomena. Whether the gods were on one's side or not was crucial in determining the outcome of battles, invasions and sieges. This paper focuses on a particular episode in the War of Cyprus, the conflict between the Ottoman Empire and the Republic of Venice that started in 1570. On the 15th of August of the following year, during the surrender of Famagusta, which took place a few weeks before the great battle of Lepanto, a fleet commanded by the Pasha and Beylerbey of Algiers, the renegade corsair Uluj Ali, sailed up the Adriatic Sea and attacked the island of Korčula. Unarmed and unprepared for defense, the islanders were in complete despair. But the attackers miraculously retreated shortly after landing, since a sudden storm at sea threatened to damage their anchored fleet. While the chronicler of this battle, archdeacon Antonius Rosaneus, believed God to be responsible for this turn of events, in his description he used the same vocabulary as classical Latin authors. Without citing his source, Rosaneus recalls a famous passage in Claudian, in which the latter commemorated Theodosius's victory over the usurper Eugenius (394 AD) and described how a similar sudden miraculous wind reversed the outcome of the battle.