The Battle That Saved Christendom

Sinclair Jenkins, American Renaissance, February 21, 2020

The Holy League assembled a fleet of 316 Spanish, Venetian, and Genoese ships, with 50,000 sailors and 30,000 soldiers. Miguel de Cervantes, the future author of Don Quixote, served on board. The league was united in a common cause and a common faith, but national factions almost came to blows even before the first engagement with the Turks. Fortunately, the overall commander, Don Juan of Austria, managed to rally all the Christians. The Holy League fleet found the Ottoman fleet of 245 galleys in the Gulf of Patras on October 7, 1571; historian Crowley calls the Battle of Lepanto “killing on an industrial scale.” After four hours of close combat, “40,000 men were dead, nearly 100 ships destroyed, 137 Muslim ships captured by the Holy League” [10]. Of the 40,000 dead, 25,000 were Ottoman, with a further 3,500 Muslims taken as slaves. 12,000 Christian galley slaves were freed from Ottoman ships [11].

The Battle of Lepanto, Paolo Veronese, c.1572

The Battle of Lepanto became known as the battle that saved Christendom. King Philip of Spain almost bankrupted his country sending silver and gold from Spanish colonies in South America and the Philippines to support the Holy League. The Venetians deployed their state-of-the-art vessels known as galleasses to great effect. Historian Paul Davis writes that “Lepanto was a victory that spelled the end of Moslem naval power and ambitions” [12].

Lepanto was also a moral victory for the Europeans. It ended the prolonged sense of fear and inferiority brought on by years of slave raids. In Venice, the citizens celebrated for days. All across Europe, paintings and plays were dedicated to the victory, and one play, Cinthio’s A Moorish Captain, inspired William Shakespeare to write Othello.

Lepanto and the long war against the Turks had repercussions in the New World. John Smith of Jamestown had been a soldier for the Hapsburgs and fought the Ottomans in Transylvania before becoming a slave of the Turks in Crimea. It was also the American Navy that ended the white slave trade in North Africa when, in 1815, Commodore Stephen Decatur defeated the Ottoman corsairs of North Africa.

Most Americans do not know this history. The historic American nation is tied to the history of Europe’s long war against the Ottoman Empire. Americans once saw themselves as transplanted Europeans, whose civilization was an extension of Christendom. Turks threaten Europe today. Turkish President Recep Erdogan claims that Europe’s future “belongs to them.” He believes in a kind of Neo-Ottomanism, and his troops in Syria and Libya are helping Arab jihadists. Pres. Erdogan acknowledges Muslim “refugees” as a Turkish foreign policy instrument in Europe.

The victories at Malta and Lepanto saved Europe. We now face a different kind of Islamic imperialism, and we must defeat it again.

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[1]: Dario Fernandez-Morera, The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise: Muslims, Christians, and Jews under Islamic Rule in Medieval Spain (New York: Open Road Media, 2016): Kindle edition.

[2]: The Earth and Its Peoples: A Global History, Volume 1, Ed. Richard Bulliet, Pamela Crossley, Daniel Headrick, Steven Hirsch, and Lyman Johnson (Boston: Cengage Learning, 2010): 238.

[3]: Paul K. Davis, 100 Decisive Battles: From Ancient Times to the Present (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999): 120.

[4]: Roger Crowley, Empires of the Sea: The Siege of Malta, The Battle of Lepanto, and the Contest For the Center of the World (New York: Random House, 2008): xvi.

[5]: Ibid.

[6]: Crowley, Empires of the Sea, 68.

[7]: Crowley, Empires of the Sea, 241.

[8]: Crowley, Empires of the Sea, 138-139.

[9]: Crowley, Empires of the Sea, 66.

[10]: Crowley, Empires of the Sea, 276.

[11]: Ibid.

[12]: Davis, 100 Decisive Battles, 198.Topics: Christianity, Europe, Featured, Islam in Europe/Asia, Racial Conflict