Ottoman–Habsburg wars: The Battle of Lepanto was fought near the Gulf of Corinth, a significant setback for the Ottoman Empire and the last major naval battle fought entirely with galleys.

The Ottoman–Habsburg wars were fought from the 16th to the 18th centuries between the Ottoman Empire and the Habsburg monarchy, which was at times supported by the Kingdom of Hungary, Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, The Holy Roman Empire, and Habsburg Spain. The wars were dominated by land campaigns in Hungary, including Transylvania and Vojvodina, Croatia, and central Serbia.

The Battle of Lepanto was a naval engagement that took place on 7 October 1571 when a fleet of the Holy League, a coalition of Catholic states arranged by Pope Pius V, inflicted a major defeat on the fleet of the Ottoman Empire in the Gulf of Patras. The Ottoman forces were sailing westward from their naval station in Lepanto when they met the fleet of the Holy League which was sailing east from Messina, Sicily.

The Gulf of Corinth or the Corinthian Gulf is an inlet of the Ionian Sea, separating the Peloponnese from western mainland Greece. It is bounded in the east by the Isthmus of Corinth which includes the shipping-designed Corinth Canal and in the west by the Rion Strait which widens into the shorter Gulf of Patras and whose narrowest point has been crossed since 2004 by the Rio–Antirrio bridge. The gulf is bordered by the large administrative divisions : Aetolia-Acarnania and Phocis in the north, Boeotia in the northeast, Attica in the east, Corinthia in the southeast and south and Achaea in the southwest. The tectonic movement across the gulf is comparable to parts of Iceland and Turkey, growing by 10 mm (0.39 in) per year.

The Ottoman Empire, also called the Turkish Empire, was an imperial realm that controlled much of Southeast Europe, West Asia, and North Africa from the 14th to early 20th centuries; it also controlled parts of southeastern Central Europe, between the early 16th and early 18th centuries.