Lepanto . . .

Paul Cella's group blog What's Wrong with the World features some great writers, like Francis Beckwith, Lydia McGrew, and Edward Feser, but Mr. Cella can hang with that talented crowd.  Note his inspiring reflection on the Battle of Lepanto which took place in 1571.

Here's a sample:

The Turks, in Chesterton’s rousing verse, had by the late 16th century, “dared the white republics up the capes of Italy,” and “dashed the Adriatic round the Lion of the Sea”: the Ottoman Empire was master of the eastern Mediterranean, and nowhere upon that “inmost sea of all the earth” was the might of the Turk, his great navy, and his dread shock troops the Janissaries, not felt. The great Christian city upon the Golden Horn, which for a thousand years had resisted the protean armies of the Crescent — the Greek city that called itself the Second Rome — had fallen a century before in a great shock to the Christian world. Venetian power (the Lion of the Sea) on the Albanian coast had suffered grievous blows. Malta, under the Knights of St. John, had by great valor and some good fortune narrowly escaped defeat and ruin; Cyprus, a Venetian possession, had not been so lucky. Massacre and enslavement was her fate. (But resistance endured to the end: on a ship full of young slaves, destined for the harems of leading Turks, a young woman of fierce pride would endure no such dishonor: she set fire to the vessel’s powder magazine.) In July of 1571, the fortress town of Famagusta on Cyprus had fallen after a year-long siege, and its Venetian ruler, his terms of surrender wantonly betrayed, was subjected to an unspeakable torture and humiliation. The Agony of Famagusta rang like a tocsin throughout Christendom; and on a cool October day in the Gulf of Corinth, the menace of the Turk on the Mediterranean was delivered a blow from which it would never fully recover.

As you read through his lengthy post (and worth every word of it), you may be amazed at the knowledge that Mr. Cella is NOT a Catholic!

Comments

[Maggie]

what maddens me is that no one every TAUGHT me about these battles growing up! The fall of Constantinople, the rescue of Vienna, Lepanto, etc. - all given a sentence (or less) in my elementary school history book. The closest I got was a G.A. Henty (bless him) volume on the Knights of St. John defending Malta, but I didn't have enough historical knowlege to really put the story in context.

Oh, all the inspiring stories I missed! I'll have to make up for it now. Anyone know any good books on Europe vs. The Ottoman Empire ???

[David Gray.]

Runciman has a one volume book on the fall of Constantinope and Osprey published a very good book on it recently.

[Daniel]

Mr. Cella's may not be Catholic, but his writing leaves me wondering if he may be Orthodox.

[Kristor]

Allow me to recommend Rodney Stark's "God's Battalions: The Case for the Crusades," just out. I finished it last week. It is a most un-PC book. The first few chapters put the Crusades in historical perspective. When they were launched, the Byzantines and Europeans (Normans, mostly) had just finished expelling the Muslims from Italy and Sicily, where they had been marauding or ruling for 200 years, and of course the reconquest of Iberia would not be finished for another 400 years.

Anyway, once you have the Crusades in perspective, and read about the subsequent history of the Templars and the Hospitallers, you are able to see the thread that connects the Muslim conquest of Arabia, with its mottle of pagan, Christian and Jewish communities, to the destruction of the World Trade Center.

[Tony]

I highly recommend Henryk Sienkiewicz's trilogy on the wars between the Poles and the Turks in the late seventeenth century: By Fire and Sword, The Deluge, and Pan Michael.

[MGH]

All about the siege of Famagusta you can find in the URL behind my initials

[supra kids shoes]

He is a good friend that speaks well of us behind our backs.