A battle that weakened Islam

Today marks the anniversary of the crucial naval battle of Lepanto, October 7, 1571. Mary Jo Anderson tells about it at WorldNetDaily.

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Vincent Chiarello writes:

In the liturgical calendar of Traditional Catholic churches throughout the world, the month of October is devoted to saying the Rosary, a series of prayer used by believers to honor God and the Virgin, as well as to achieve particular objectives. What was not included in the Anderson piece at WND about the Battle of Lepanto was that the then pontiff, Pius V, had urged both non-combatants and naval personnel to recite the Rosary before their clash with the Moslem navy, which sought supremacy in the Mediterranean, and whose objective, amongst others, as the Sultan had proudly announced, was “to stable his horses in St. Peters.”

Although Anderson does describe the importance of the battle to the future of Europe, she does, I believe, underestimate how important the naval victory was in stopping the Muslim maritime threat to Western Europe. Nearly a century later at the gates to Vienna, the future Muslim menace would be land based. To this day, there are buildings in the Austrian capital that bear the visible signs of the artillery bombardment used in the siege of the city. The naval might of Islam, however, which had centuries before Lepanto made much of the Mediterranean “a Moslem lake,” never recovered.

Although clearly not part of Anderson’s assignment, there is little mention of Pius V’s mastery of the successful negotiations in unifying the disparate Spanish and Venetian governments, for the Spanish King, Phillip II, was, at first, hesitant to join “the Holy League.” As a result of the naval victory, in which a 25 year old Spanish sailor, Miguel de Cervantes, would suffer the loss of use of one of his arms, Pius V announced that October would be set aside to pray the Rosary. It is claimed, albeit apocryphal, that he was saying the Rosary when he received the news of Don Juan of Austria’s victory.

Finally, it should be noted that Pius V would not live one year after Lepanto. Whether through exhaustion or illness, he would die after achieving his successful goal of stopping what appeared to be Western Europe’s most serious threat. Like so much in life, and history, one wonders at the “what if?” question: what if this pontiff had died before Lepanto?

Posted by Lawrence Auster at October 07, 2007 10:51 PM | Send