Many consider October 7, 1571 as the day Europe was saved from Islamic rule. History is repeating itself. This time, will Europe prevail? It's time to learn the rest of the story. Please teach your children well.
The Holy League, or the League of Venice, of 1571, was organized by Pope Pius V and included all the major Catholic maritime states in the Mediterranean, except France. It was intended to break the the Islamic Ottoman Turks' control of the eastern Mediterranean Sea and end the Muslim's unrelenting military conquest over Christendom, unabated since 622 AD.
In 622 AD, Mohammed set out from Medina to conquer the whole Christian world for Allah by force of arms. Within a hundred years, his successors had occupied and pillaged every Christian capital of the Middle East, from Antioch through North Africa (home of Saint Augustine) and Spain. All that remained outside Allah's reign was the northern arc from Southern France to Constantinople, which would fall in 1453.
BTW, all other religions preceded Islam by 600-2,600 years. Muhammad stole stories from other religions to make his own, then instructed his followers to go forth and convert or kill all Arab pagans, Christians, Jews and non-Muslims and take their land.
In fact, the first Jewish Temple was built on the Temple Mount in 1000 BC, 1,600 years before Muhammad was even born! Muhammad invented the monotheist political cult of Islam to terrorize the world, invade nations and steal land. The biggest con ever perpetrated on mankind. It continues today. Muhammad didn't even invent Islam and start spreading Islam through his bloody military conquest until 622 AD, some 1,600 years after the Jewish Temple to God was first built.
The Temple Mount is the holiest site for the Jewish people and was the location for numerous pivotal moments in the Bible. It is believed to be the location where God created Adam from the dust, where Abraham brought Isaac in order to sacrifice him and where kings Solomon and Hezekiah built the first and second Temples, respectively.
For more than a thousand years after 622, southern Europe had to give active military resistance to the "Saracens" (as the Islamists came to be known in the West.) For 600 of those thousand years, a huge sea war ensued for control of the Mediterranean.
The Turks who took over the Arab world expanded their empire in all four directions on the map. For more than a century they made attempt after attempt to take down the largest and richest of the Christian capitals, Constantinople, whose walls they finally breached in 1453. There followed great plunder, huge fires of destruction, the desecration of Christian basilicas and churches, murder, and torture. Thousands of Christian men, women, and children were marched off toward slavery in the East.
A long line of great warrior sultans sponsored Turkish advances in shipbuilding, gunnery, military organization, and training. By the mid 1550s they had slowly conceived of a long-term offensive, a pincers movement first by sea and then by land, to conquer the whole northern shore of the Mediterranean. Their ultimate aim was to take all of Italy; then all of Europe.
First, in 1565, they launched a massive sea attack on the crossroads of the Mediterranean, the strategically placed island of Malta. They were repelled after an epic siege. A later northern pincers movement by land was aimed at an attack up through the Balkans, for the conquest of Budapest, and then in a northeast arc into Slovakia and Poland. In this way, the Muslim forces would essentially encircle Italy from the north. The capture of Vienna — and thus the cutting off of Italy, for easy conquest — was the prize most sought.
By 1540 the Reformation had begun separating the Christian nations of the north from Rome. The Islamic sultans soon recognized that the Christian world would no longer fight as one. The next hundred years or so would be the most fruitful time since 632 to fulfill the destiny of Islam in Europe.
For more than three years, Pope Pius V had labored mightily to sound alarms about the deadly Muslim buildup in the shipyards of Istanbul. The savagery of Muslim attacks on the Christian coastal villages of Italy, Sicily, Dalmatia, and Greece was horrific. Three or four Muslim galleys would offload hundreds of warriors, who would sweep through a village, tie all its healthy men together for shipment out to become galley slaves, march away many of its women and young boys and girls for shipment to Eastern harems, and then gather all the elderly into the village church, where the helpless victims would be beheaded, and sometimes cut up into little pieces, to strike terror into other villages.
The Muslims believed that future victims would lose heart and swiftly surrender when Muslim raiders arrived. Over three centuries, the number of European captives kidnapped from villages and beaches by these pirates climbed into the hundreds of thousands. The Muslim army was built with hundreds of thousands of Christian slaves.
Each new caliph of the Islamic empire was expected to expand the existing Muslim territories, in order to fulfill Islam's mission and gain for the leader the necessary popularity and legitimacy. So it was that in the pleasant springtime of 1571, an entire Muslim fleet under Ali Pasha was ordered by the sultan to seek out and destroy Christian dominance of the Mediterranean Sea, all the way up to Venice.
On October 7, 1571, the naval forces of the Holy League, led by John of Austria, met the Islamic Ottoman Turks in battle in the Gulf of Corinth (Greece) and – after prayer by the entire Holy League and many churches around Europe – the Ottomans were defeated, for the first time, by Christian forces in a naval battle, now referred to as the Battle of Lepanto.
The Muslim ships had some 37,000 oarsman, virtually all of them Christian slaves, who had been captured by the Ottomans in previous conquests and engagements.
The Christian ships were manned by 40,000 sailors and oarsmen. In addition, they carried approximately 20,000 fighting troops: 7,000 Spanish regular infantry of excellent quality, 7,000 Germans, 6,000 Italian mercenaries in Spanish pay, and 5,000 professional Venetian soldiers. Also, Venetian oarsmen were mainly free citizens and able to bear arms, adding to the fighting power of their ship.
In four hours the battle was over. It was the largest naval battle in Western history since classical antiquity, involving more than 400 warships. More than 40,000 men had died, and thousands more were wounded, more than in any other battle in history.
Never again did the Muslim fleet pose a grave danger to Europe from the south, although of course Muslim fleets kept busy expanding their bases on the African coast, harassing Western ships and territories across the Mediterranean.
The victory of the Holy League is of great importance in the history of Europe and of the Ottoman Empire, marking the turning-point of Ottoman military expansion into the Mediterranean, although the Ottoman wars in Europe would continue for another century.
The question is: Will the Muslim world be successful this time and overthrow Europe? Right now, it looks likely. Will America learn from Europe's failure and save herself? I hope so
