ST. PIUS V
1 Samuel, Chapter
20, Verse 21
I will then send
my attendant to recover the arrows. If in fact I say to him, ‘Look, the arrow
is this side of you; pick it up,’ come, for you are safe. As the LORD lives,
there will be nothing to fear.
"The sages characterized the
relationship between Jonathan and David in the following Mishnah: “Whenever
love depends on some selfish end, when the end passes away, the love passes
away; but if it does not depend on some selfish end, it will never pass away.
Which love depended on a selfish end? This was the love of Amnon and Tamar. And
which did not depend on a selfish end? This was the love of David and Jonathan.
(Avot 5:15)" Rabbi Shimon ben Tzemach Duran (Spain, North Africa 14th-15th
century) delineated the significance of this mishnah: “Anyone who establishes a
friendship for access to power, money, or sexual relations; when these ends are
not attainable, the friendship ceases…love that is not dependent on selfish
ends is true love of the other person since there is no intended end.” (Magen
Avot – abridged and adapted translation)[1]
The
clash of civilizations is as old as history, and equally as old is the
blindness of those who wish such clashes away; but they are the hinges, the
turning points of history. In the latter half of the 16th century, Muslim war
drums sounded and the mufti of the Ottoman sultan proclaimed jihad, but only
the pope fully appreciated the threat. As Brandon Rogers notes in the Ignatius
Press edition of G. K. Chesterton's poem "Lepanto": Pope Pius V
"understood the tremendous importance of resisting the aggressive
expansion of the Turks better than any of his contemporaries appear to have. He
understood that the real battle being fought was spiritual; a clash of creeds
was at hand, and the stakes were the very existence of the Christian
West." But then, as now, the unity of Christendom was shattered; and in
the aftermath of the Protestant revolt, Islam saw its opportunity. The Ottoman
Empire, the seat of Islamic power, looked to control the Mediterranean.
Corsairs raided from North Africa; the Sultan's massive fleet anchored the
eastern Mediterranean; and Islamic armies ranged along the coasts of Africa,
the Middle and Near East, and pressed against the Adriatic; Muslim armies
threatened the Habsburg Empire through the Balkans. The Ottoman Turks yearned
to bring all Europe within the dar al-Islam, the "House of
Submission" — submissive to the sharia law. Europe, as the land of the
infidels, was the dar al-Harb, the "House of War." But the House of
War was a house divided against itself. The Habsburg Empire was Europe's
bulwark against Islamic jihad, but its timbers were being eaten away by the
Protestants who diverted Catholic armies and even cheered on the Mussulmen,
whom they saw as fellow enemies of the pope in Rome. In 1568, the emperor
Maximilian, of the Austrian half of the Habsburg Empire, had agreed to a peace
treaty with the Turk; and the Danube was reasonably, temporarily, quiet. In
Spain, the other great pillar of the Habsburg Empire was Philip II. And for
him, things were not quiet at all. We think of Philip II as dark and brooding,
and so he was — to the degree that it is surprising to remember that he was blue-eyed
and fair-haired. But the lasting image, especially to those of English (even
Catholic English) blood, is Chesterton's sketch; as King Philip is in his
"closet with the Fleece about his neck":
The walls are hung
with velvet that is black and soft as sin, And little dwarfs creep out of it
and little dwarfs creep in . . . And his face is as a fungus of a leprous white
and grey Like plants in the high houses that are shuttered from the day . . .
As
a ruler, Philip was harsh, saturnine, and austere. He embodied a scrupulousness
that went beyond a personal failing to become a public vice, where there was no
room for charity and far too much room for plottings and calculations, which,
though they always had the protection of the Faith as their goal, were too
admixed with lesser, baser metals than the gold of the monstrance. Philip's
knights had ranged into the New World and were carving out a vast empire, its
extent virtually beyond imagining, whence came gold and other treasures. That,
Philip knew, was the future. But to his immediate north was the menace.
Europe Divided
Philip
was no friend of the Mohammedan, and the Mussulmen remained a persistent threat
to Spain's possession of Naples and Sicily. Spanish vessels clashed throughout
the Mediterranean with Barbary corsairs. At that very moment, Spanish infantry
were suppressing the Morisco revolt of apparently unconverted Moors. But Philip
trusted that Spain was well equipped to defeat the Mussulmen. That was old hat.
But Protestantism was something relatively new. It was treason and heresy. And,
though Philip would not have been so eloquent, it was worse:
The North is full
of tangled things and texts and aching eyes, And dead is all the innocence of
anger and surprise, And Christian killeth Christian in a narrow dusty room, And
Christian dreadeth Christ that hath a newer face of doom, And Christian hateth
Mary that God kissed in Galilee . . .
Where
the Austrian Habsburgs hoped against hope for conciliation with their own
violent, Teutonic Protestants, Philip II trusted to his renowned Spanish
infantry. They had the answer that Protestantism deserved. The pope had no
sympathy for Protestants either, but for him, as for previous popes, Islam
remained the real threat. The pope felt he had many urgent tasks to attend to,
but the vital one was confronting the Islamic challenge. Pope Pius V, like
Philip, was no exemplar of rubicund, jovial Christianity such as the Italians
preferred. He thought the Church had seen too much of that, with the
concomitant slackness in Renaissance morals and an excessive generosity to
Protestant error. He had never known the high life. He was a former shepherd,
an ascetic, a Dominican, and an inquisitor. Though much of a mind with Philip,
he had a finer balanced spiritual core that kept him from Philip's failings. As
a pope, he was a reformer, and brought a monastic purity to the organization
and administration of the Church, to a review of the religious orders, to
educating the faithful, to evangelizing, and to caring for the poor (which he
did personally). If Christendom was split asunder — with even Philip disputing
papal control of the Church in Spain — the pope nevertheless had the spiritual
and temporal authority, the presence of a future saint, to assemble a Holy
League, a fighting force that included Catholic knights not only from the papal
states and the Knights of Malta, but from Italy, Germany, and Spain; and even
from England, Scotland, and Scandinavia, Catholics and freebooters, gentleman
adventurers and convicts condemned to row the galleys. France, la belle
France, would be present in the Knights, but not as a party itself. The
great period of the fleur de lis had passed away with the end of the
Crusader kingdoms. Now the king of France could support no venture in league
with the Habsburgs, whose dominions surrounded him. Worse, he was quite willing
to cut deals with the Mohammedans in order to turn Muslim corsairs against
Genoese and Spaniards and away from Frenchmen (unless they were Knights of
Malta, where Frenchmen of the old school continued to thrive). So the French
king, from the line of Valois, Charles IX, pleaded exhaustion from having to
fight the Huguenots. Even less willing to cooperate with the pope was
Protestant England, whose Virgin Queen was establishing a cult around herself
and a church subordinate to her will.
The sad result of
French realpolitik and English apostasy was that the sons of Richard
Coeur-de-Lion sat this one out: And the Pope has cast his arms abroad for agony
and loss, And called the kings of
Christendom for swords about the Cross. The cold queen of England is looking in
the glass; The shadow of the Valois is yawning at the Mass . . .
A Rude Awakening for Venice
Others,
who might also occasionally yawn at Mass, nevertheless were enthusiasts for a
crusade against the Turk — this was most especially true of the merchant
Republic of Venice. It is one of the many commonly accepted myths of history
that Protestants invented capitalism, but Venice is proof that Catholic states
were exercising their capitalist muscles centuries before Luther burped into
his tankard or Calvin had his first glint of his predestined salvation and
others' predestined damnation. The Venetians were prime exponents of the
capitalist art. They were, in fact, something like the entrepreneurs of modern
Hong Kong, to the extent that their city was built in a lagoon, the buildings
actually resting on logs; and the Venetians enjoyed great economic success
despite having no natural resources to speak of, save the sea. No one knows exactly
when Venice was founded, but it was during the Roman Empire, perhaps in the
fifth century. By the early Middle Ages it was an established city-state and
had carved out a commercial and territorial empire — the territory necessary to
protect and extend Venetian commerce. As with all men of commerce, the
Venetians' preferred mode of interaction was trade: They wanted to make money,
not war. But they realized that, as the similarly minded Thomas Jefferson
realized half a millennium later, "Our commerce on the ocean . . . must be paid for by frequent war."
Still, given the choice, just as Churchill thought "to jaw-jaw is always
better than to war-war," the Venetians thought ka-ching—ka-ching was
better than war-war. As such, crusades called by the pope merely for the sake
of repelling the Mussulmen had no appeal to them. The Mohammedan was a
customer, after all — and the customer is always (at least up to the point of
heresy) publicly right, even if the merchant secretly despises him. The
Venetians, however, had been forced to come to some sober conclusions about
Islamic aggression in the eastern Mediterranean. In 1565, the Ottomans had laid
siege to the island of Malta, which was defended by the Knights Hospitallers
(also known as the Knights of St. John; or, given their new home, the Knights
of Malta). For four months the gallant Knights threw back the besieging Turks,
inflicting massive losses on the enemy, who finally called it quits after the
Knights were reinforced by Spain. The Ottomans hated the Knights, but reckoned
that Venetian-held Cyprus was easier pickings, and five years later it was
Cyprus that was besieged. Now Venice, which had ignored previous papal calls to
defend the Mediterranean against Mohammedan raiders, was itself in the firing
line. As was good business practice, the Venetians were not caught unprepared.
Their insurance policy was the Venetian Arsenal, which built and held the
merchant republic's mighty naval forces. The arsenal, however, had caught fire
in late 1569; and in February 1570 the Ottoman mufti Ebn Said, on behalf of
Sultan Selim II, declared a jihad against the Christians on Cyprus. Selim was
known as "the Sot" for his rather un-Islamic drinking habits. He also
had the distinction of having blond hair. Despite his heavy drinking, he, like
Philip II, was not a blond who had more fun. With his harem, free-flowing
alcohol, and access to all the pleasures that the devout expected only to find
in paradise, he tramped his palace in depression and rage against the infidel
and Western decadence. While no soldier or sailor himself, he lent his full
support to every corsair who would attack Western shipping, to every expansion
of the Ottoman navy, and to the siege of Cyprus.
The Muslim Onslaught
The
Turks came on with 70,000 men, including their shock troops, the praetorian
guard of the sultan, the Janissaries — Christian youths taken as taxation from
their families, trained up in the art of war, converted to Islam, and given the
power of the sword and the possibility of advancement. The Catholic defenders
of Cyprus were frightfully outnumbered — by about 7 to 1 — but then again, the
Knights of Malta had faced even stiffer odds. The two key points in Cyprus were
Nicosia and Famagusta. The city of Nicosia held out for nearly seven weeks.
Finally, reduced to 500 soldiers, it surrendered, expecting the civilians to be
spared, even as the Christian troops were enslaved. Instead, the Muslim
attackers butchered every Christian they could find — 20,000 victims, murdered
regardless of rank, sex, or age, save perhaps for 1,000 women and children who
would be sold as slaves. The Mussulmen knew something about commerce, too, and
those with an eye for harem-flesh tried to spare the most valuable Europeans.
That left the former Crusader fortress of Famagusta as the only defensible
point on the island. Inspired by the Turks' display of severed Venetian heads
from Nicosia, the Christian soldiers put up a stiff defense and were at one
point resupplied by gallant Venetian sailors. But the man most devoted to the
relief of Famagusta was Pope Pius V. It was his incessant diplomacy that
finally brought together the forces of the papal states, the Knights of Malta,
Venice, its smaller rival Genoa, the Savoyards, and, most important, Spain and
its possessions Naples and Sicily to form the Holy
League.
The pope did not punish Venice for its failure to support previous papal calls
to combat. He was above such pettiness. He only wanted to restore Christendom.
He knew, however, that there were national and personal rivalries and hatreds
aplenty within his League, and it would take enormous tact to hold the League
together and lead it to victory against the Turk and to the relief of Cyprus.
For the brave defenders of Famagusta, it was too late. In August 1571, after
ten months of resistance, the Venetian commander Marco Antonio Bragadino gave
in to civilian pressure and opened negotiations with the Turks. Terms were
agreed: The garrison would be exiled, the people spared. The troops were
disarmed and boarded transports — and then they and their commanders were
slaughtered. But for Marco Antonio, the Mohammedans reserved a special torture.
He was not killed immediately. Instead, his nose and ears were severed, and, as
T. C. F. Hopkins has it in Confrontation at Lepanto:
He
was pilloried in Famagusta and dragged around the Ottoman camp in nothing but a
loincloth and a donkey's saddle and made to kiss the ground in front of Lala
Mustapha's tent. The Ottoman soldiers were encouraged to throw garbage and
excrement on him, and to mock his misery, and to pull hairs from his beard . .
. Lala Mustapha himself came out to spit on the Venetian and to empty his
chamber pot over the old man's head . . . And even that was not the end of it.
Marco Antonio — still, for the moment, alive — was flayed, skinned like a
trophy, and then his corpse was stuffed and sent to the sultan, who had the
prize stored in a warehouse of other human trophies — a slave prison.
Don Juan Takes to the Sea
But
for this outrage, the pope had an answer, and he had found the man to deliver
it. Among all the courageous, experienced, jostling commanders in his unruly
Holy League, he chose a handsome 24-year-old. The young man, raised on tales of
chivalry, was a student of war and an experienced commander, with a track
record of victory against the Moriscos. He was also the bastard son of the
late, great Charles V, which gave him good bloodlines as bastards go. He was
Don Juan of Austria. Don Juan was also the half-brother of Philip II, who
treated him with the cold, brooding calculation one might expect, and an
apparent jealousy that one might not. Philip was pleased that Don Juan's
elevation affirmed Spain's leading role in the Holy League. But he did
everything he could to tie Don Juan's authority to his other Spanish commanders
and thus to himself. When the decks were readied for action, however, such
constraints had of necessity fallen away, and Don Juan the swashbuckler took
full command.
Where, risen from
a doubtful seat and half-attainted stall, The last knight of Europe takes
weapons from the wall, The last and lingering troubadour to whom the bird has
sung, That once went singing southward when all the world was young, In that
enormous silence, tiny and unafraid, Comes up along a winding road the noise of
the Crusade.
His
first victory was keeping the Venetians, the Genoese, and the Spaniards from
killing each other. His second was more important: Against urgings of caution
from some of his commanders — most especially the Genoese Admiral Giovanni
Andrea Doria — Don Juan of Austria pressed his fleet forward to the attack.
Andrea Doria had reason to fear. If defeating the Turkish fleet required the
united naval force of Christendom, what chance had this cobbled-together coalition
of fractious rivals commanded by a 24-year-old who, though he had fought
corsairs, had sought instruction in commanding so huge a fleet from Don Garcia
de Toledo? Don Garcia had once been renowned as a tough old naval warrior, but
having run afoul of Philip II, he had been forced into retirement, his
reputation blackened. Don Juan, however, trusted him, and believed his advice
would be unsullied by Spanish politicking. And Don Juan, fortunately, was
right, for in the words of Jack Beeching in The Galleys at Lepanto, he
"had the fate of the civilized world placed in his hands."
The Battle Begins
The
Turks had an estimated 328 ships, of which 208 were galleys, the rest being
smaller supporting craft. Aboard them were nearly 77,000 men, including 10,000
Janissaries, but also 50,000 oarsmen, many of them Christian slaves. At Don
Juan's command were 206 galleys, along with 40,000 oarsmen and sailors, and
more than 28,000 soldiers, knights, and gentleman adventurers. He also had the
blessings of the pope and the papal banner; the ministrations of Jesuits,
Dominicans, Franciscans, and Capuchins who accompanied the fleet, the prayers
of the faithful; and the rosaries that were pressed into the hands of every
Christian oarsman. The Catholic armada had been spotted by Muslim spy ships
(painted entirely black so that they cruised through the night unnoticed). They
reported that the Christians would be no match for the Ottoman fleet. On
October 7, 1571, Don Juan's lookouts raised the alarm as the Christian ships
entered the Gulf of Patras. The Ottomans, from their naval base at Lepanto in
the adjacent Gulf of Corinth, had formed a battle line, its front arrayed in
three "battles," as were the Christians (though the battle had
started before Andrea Doria, commanding the Catholic right flank, could bring
his ships fully in line). Ahead of Don Juan's three battles was a wedge of
galleasses — slower, less maneuverable gunships that made up for their lack of
mobility with their unrivaled firepower. The battle was met, the galleasses
drawing first blood, splintering Turkish decks and Turkish men. But the
Ottomans sailed around them, the goal, to grapple with the Catholic ships and
turn the battle into a floating melee of Muslim scimitars, bows, and muskets
against Catholic swords, pikes, and arquebuses. Cannons erupted, arrows rained
on the Christians, and arquebuses spat back balls of lead. When the ships
closed, grappling hooks threw them together; the Christians hurled nets to
repel boarders and followed up with gunfire. Still, the fighting closed to
hand-to-hand aboard decks. Catholics turned swivel guns on the enemy ships, and
the Turkish bowmen fired dark volleys of arrows that claimed the life of
Agostini Barbarigo, commander of the Catholic left wing, whose eye was pierced
when he raised his visor to issue orders. Ottoman ships tried to turn the left
flank of the Christian line, and while they appeared to succeed, the Catholic
ships responded — amid a blinding hail of cannon blasts, arrows, grenades, and
gunfire — in pinning the Muslim ships against Scropha Point. There, against the
shoals, the Muslim vessels were trapped — and, at first, the Mohammedans fought
with the ferocity of trapped animals. But more Catholic ships joined the
battle, and what had been the right of the Ottoman line began to splinter, the
Christian slaves on the Ottoman ships revolted, and Ottoman captains and crews,
sensing disaster, beached their ships, hoping to escape to shore. By early
afternoon, the Catholic left had emerged victorious. At the head of the
Catholic center was Don Juan aboard the flagship Real. For him, and for
the Muslim commander Ali Pasha, the battle was a joust. They fired shots to
announce their presence one to the other, and then drove to the clash, using
their galleys as steeds. The ships crashed together, Don Juan in the lead, and
everywhere the line erupted with explosions of cannons, bombs, gunfire, and the
clash of swords and battle axes, while silent-flying deadly arrows thudded into
timber and men. It appeared that in this violent shipyard scrum, Don Juan's
ship and men were getting the worst of it — despite the handsome hero's pet
monkey hurling Ottoman grenades back at the enemy — until Marco Antonio
Colonna, commander of the papal galleys, rammed his own flagship into Ali
Pasha's. The surging Catholic forces, in what had become an infantry battle
fought across ships' decks, swept the Muslims aside. Ali Pasha himself was
killed and beheaded, and when Don Juan waved away the present of the severed
head, it was tossed overboard. The Holy League's banner was raised aloft the
captured Ottoman flagship, and Ali Pasha's banner — the sultan's own undefeated
standard made of green silk and with the prophet's name threaded through it
28,900 times in gold — was Don Juan's. On the right flank, Andrea Doria was
engaged in a battle of maneuver that was anti-climactic to the battles on the
Catholic left and center, save for the fact that in being drawn away from
guarding the center battle's right flank, he allowed the Turks to pour through
the gap. Some Catholic ships — without orders — pulled out of Andrea Doria's
battle to plug the gap. But they were too few, and were forced to such
desperate heroics as firing their own powder magazines. The Muslim lunge was
then directed at the flagship of the Knights of Malta, who, like so many of
their brave fellows before, fought to the death against overwhelming odds.
(There were, perhaps, six survivors. The sources vary; six is a high guess. The
one certain survivor was the Knights' commander, Pietro Giustiniani, though
five times wounded by arrows and twice by scimitars.) Andrea Doria, having
hardly distinguished himself thus far, wheeled around and chased away the
remaining Ottoman raiders who were commanded by Uluch Ali Pasha, an Italian turned
Barbary corsair. Uluch Ali had his prize — the Knights of Malta's banner — and
he knew how to skedaddle when necessary. A realist, he knew the bigger battle
was lost.
Victory at Lepanto
Not
only was the battle lost for the Turk, but so were 170 of his galleys and
33,000 men killed, wounded, or captured, as well as 12,000 liberated Christian
slaves. Lost was a generation of experienced Ottoman bowmen and seamen; and
though a mighty fleet could, and indeed was, rebuilt, and though the sultan was
committed to renewing the jihad by sea — or if not by sea, then by land — the
threat of the Ottoman Turks dominating the Mediterranean was finished.
Domino Gloria! Don John of Austria Has
set his people free!
Catholic
losses were 7,500 dead — though many of these were knights and noblemen — and
another 22,000 wounded (including Miguel de Cervantes). Pope Pius V, who had
commanded the faithful to pray the rosary for victory, was convinced that it
was prayer that had turned the tide. The Battle of Lepanto became the feast day
of Our Lady of Victory, later of Our Lady of the Rosary. Don Juan, a hero to
the last, gave his portion of the captured booty to the Catholic wounded who
had not been able to pillage for themselves, and redoubled his generosity by
adding to their treasure the 30,000 ducats awarded him by the city of Messina.
He also made gifts of two captured banners: The imperial Ottoman banner went to
the pope; the fabulous green silk banner went to Philip II, along with his
after-action report. He gave credit to everyone else and little to himself,
though he had been wounded in the hand-to-hand fighting. Don Juan was
everything a parfait gentil knight should be — and, alas, as is often
the case of the good and noble, died young, felled by fever; a romantic hero, a
devoted and faithful Catholic and soldier (but one appalled at his
half-brother's brutality in the Netherlands), in love with the charming
Marguerite de Valois, whose blood was royal but whose character was far less
admirable than his own. Still, Don Juan showed that chivalry could indeed live
and breathe, even in the thinner air of a Europe no longer unified by the
Catholic ideals that gave birth to chivalry.
And
so:
Cervantes on his
galley sets the sword back in the sheath…Don
John of Austria rides homeward with a wreath.)And he sees across a weary
land a straggling road in Spain, Up which a lean and foolish knight forever
rides in vain, And he smiles, but not a Sultans smile, and settles back the blade
. . .(But Don John of Austria rides
home from the Crusade.)
Today,
Christendom is even more divided, and certainly more deracinated and less
confident, than it was in Don Juan's time, but there are still fighting men,
the valiant core of that civilization, who even now patrol the dusty villages
of Afghanistan and the dirty streets of Mesopotamia. The enemy smiles as
"suicide bombers" smile, but our fighting men — some holding rosaries
(the very same as I have, made by a Marine Corps mom) — smile with thoughts of
sweethearts, wives, and children; of football and cold beers by warm fires; and
of Christmas. They are the inheritors of the men who saved Europe at Lepanto;
and they are the men who will, with God's grace, save the West again. So in
honor of Don Juan, of Lepanto, of who we are as Catholics, let us pray for
them, for their safety and for their victory. St. George, St. Michael, Our
Lady, pray for them — and for us.
The last day of April was first celebrated as a druidic feast of some importance in honor of spring's return, and bonfires were lighted to frighten away the spirits of darkness which might prevent the arrival of the joyous goddess of the springtide. For Christians it became the feast of Saint Walburga, the daughter of a Saxon king of the eighth century, who went to Germany at the call of her uncle, Saint Boniface, to aid in the work of evangelizing the Germanic tribes and remained to found and rule monasteries and convents. The Abbess of Heidenheim was given great veneration in the Low Countries and Germany during her lifetime and was honored after her death for her learning and the many miracles she wrought. But the observance of her feast, or rather its eve, Walpurgisnacht, came to be held with many of the pagan traditions peculiar to the day, so that it grew to resemble the celebration of Halloween. At its best, it is the night when protection is invoked against murrains of fields and crops and the spirits of evil; at its worst, it is a night when witches ride and dark deeds are done.
The original pagan feast, celebrated as the Eve of Beltane in the British Isles, was accompanied by lighting of new fires and feasting on certain foods retained by later customs in Scotland, Wales, and Ireland. We are told that Beltane Cakes, large and scalloped, were set against hot stones to bake while a caudle (custard) was eaten, and beer and whiskey consumed. Many customs were connected with these cakes, among them that the person drawing a piece blackened by the fire became the "carline" who must be sacrificed to the fire. Later in Wales when cakes were cooked on ordinary stoves, light and dark oatmeal cakes were made, and the one who drew the dark cake was required to jump three times through the flames of the lighted bonfire.
We have been unable to trace any authentic recipes for Beltane Cakes, and everyone knows how to make a custard or caudle. However, on this eve one might well anticipate the day to come by brewing the first Maibowle.
Activity Source: Feast Day Cookbook by Katherine Burton and Helmut Ripperger, David McKay Company, Inc., New York, 1951
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