The 323rd anniversary of Europe’s deliverance

After September 11 comes September 12—September 12, 1683, that is, the day on which the European powers under the leadership of the Polish king Jan Sobieski defeated the Turks at the battle of Vienna and ended the Moslems’ attempt to capture the city. The great Ottoman power then proceeded to ebb, bringing to a close a thousand years of ceaseless Moslem attacks on Europe and making the modern world possible. … until, of course, in the late 20th century, a Europe that no longer remembered or cared what Moslems were, or what Europe itself was, welcomed back its old enemy in the form of millions of Moslem immigrants, as though that millennium of constant threat and struggle had never been.

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James S. writes:

I read “323rd anniversary” and didn’t think it seemed that long ago. I’m obviously getting old. Although, there were Englishmen in Virginia by then.

LA replies:

Well, get this. A friend was just reading an interview with the historian Jacques Barzun, who is about 100 years old. Barzun was telling about his grandmother in France when he was a child. My friend asked me to guess when the grandmother was born. I guessed 1842. It was 1830. That means that when someone speaks to Jacques Barzun today he is speaking to someone who has a personal memory of someone who was born in 1830, someone who was a year old when Toqueville came to America. 1830 is more than half of the way back to 1683.

So—not that long ago.

James S. replies:

I think that would be an interesting way to study history, by blocking it up into people’s lifetimes. Find someone hugely important who lived a long time and died recently. Then find someone hugely important who also lived a long time but who died very soon after the first was born. And continue that back to 1066 or so. Then get biographies of all these people and read them in sequential order. You could easily repeat with a different set of people. It would be better if they were all from the same country so there would continuity.

Edward D. writes:

The entry you wrote perfectly sums up why the defeat of the Turks at Vienna was so important—it showed the Moslems what a united Christian and Western front can do, and that rout continued for two hundred more years. The West needs that kind of determination again. Look how deep into Europe Vienna actually is. Bohemia, Bavaria, and the rest of Austria would be next. It’s quite terrifying to contemplate in modern terms a Moslem army reaching halfway into Europe.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at September 12, 2006 01:01 AM | Send