“I see that it is only in my own hand that my sword is invincible!” exploded the sultan, and by May of the following year he was leading an army of 300,000 men across the plains of Hungary, bound for Vienna. Three-quarters of the Turkish army were killed over the four-month siege, before the Ottoman survivors turned and straggled back to Constantinople. ![]() While Europe stood idly by, expecting the fortress to fall, the knights held their island against an Ottoman army of 40,000, including 6500 of the sultan’s elite Janissaries. Many of Valette’s 700 knights and their men-at-arms did just that. Happy will be those who first consummate this sacrifice.” Are the Gospels to be superseded by the Koran? God on this occasion demands of us our lives, already vowed to His service. Today it is a question of the defense of our Faith. “These persons, my brothers, are the enemies of Jesus Christ. “A formidable army composed of audacious barbarians is descending on this island,” he told them. That night, Jean de la Valette, the seventy-one-year-old Grand Master of the Knights of Saint John, led his warriors into their chapel where they confessed and then assisted at the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. The Turks sailed for Malta in the spring of 1565, and on May 18, their fleet was spotted offshore. Peter’s, then under construction, into a mosque, just as they had Constantinople’s Hagia Sophia more than a century before.Īlthough the sultan had led his army on twelve major campaigns, this time his age would keep him home. There the Turks could transform Michelangelo’s St. Soleiman’s greatest dream, however, the dream of all Turks, the dream his soldiers toasted before setting off on every campaign, was the conquest of Rome. With the greater control of the sea that it would afford him, he would be able to bring Venice to heel. Soleiman had bigger goals than pleasing these matrons, and he knew that, in Turkish possession, the harbors of Malta would afford him a base from which to continue his raids on the coast of Italy. The ladies of Soleiman’s harem, who accumulated great wealth speculating in glass and other Venetian luxuries, nagged the sultan to take Malta. They could also board and seize Turkish merchantmen carrying goods from France or Venice to be hawked in the markets of Constantinople. Yet this little island guarded the Mediterranean passage from the Islamic East to the Christian West.įrom its excellent natural harbors, the galleys of the Knights of Saint John could sail forth and disrupt any Turkish assault on Italy. The island could sustain only the smallest population. ![]() Malta was an infertile, dusty rock with so few natural springs that the Maltese had to collect rainwater in large clay urns. His one defeat was at the gates of Vienna in 1529. His war galleys terrorized not only the Mediterranean Sea, but the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf as well. ![]() Soleiman had conquered Aden, Algiers, Baghdad, Belgrade, Budapest, Rhodes, and Temesvar. During the five-decade reign of Soleiman the Magnificent, the Ottoman Empire grew to its fullest glory, encompassing the Caucuses, the Balkans, Anatolia, the Middle East, and North Africa. “Many more difficult victories have fallen to your scimitar than the capture of a handful of men on a tiny little island that is not well fortified,” they told him. That this military triumph is also a Marian feast underscores our image of the Blessed Virgin prefigured in the Canticle of Canticles: “Who is she that cometh forth as the morning rising, fair as the moon, bright as the sun, terrible as an army set in array?” In October of 1564, the Viziers of the Divan of the Ottoman Empire assembled to urge their sultan to prepare for war with Malta. October 7, the Feast of Our Lady of the Rosary, celebrates the victory at Lepanto, the battle that saved the Christian West from defeat at the hands of the Ottoman Turks. It was a tragedy for the Catholic kingdom of Spain and a triumph for the Protestant British Empire, and the defeat determined the kind of history that would one day be taught in American schools: Protestant British history.Īs a result, 1571, the year of the battle of Lepanto, the most important naval contest in human history, is not well known to Americans. Americans know that in 1492 Christopher Columbus “sailed the ocean blue,” but how many know that in the same year the heroic Catholic monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella conquered the Moors in Grenada? Americans would also probably recognize 1588 as the year of the defeat of the Spanish Armada by Francis Drake and the rest of Queen Elizabeth’s pirates.
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