http://www.ordo-militiae-templi.org/
In hoc signo vinces
IHS+
Ping
Pius V messed up big time. he should have known that Islam was "a religion of peace" and he should have had to "pass a global test" before he went into battle.
In addendum to the story of Lepanto.
The pope subsequently designated October 7 as the feast of Our Lady of Victory, later renamed the Feast of the Most Holy Rosary, to honor the Blessed Mother in her role as intercessor in Lepanto.
Excellent post. I watched a show about this a couple months ago on EWTN.
It is tragic that Europe has abandoned everything that once made it great.
Lepanto ended the dominance of Islam for 400 years. We need another Lepanto NOW. After Iraq on to Iran.
Death to Islam. Conversion to the Muslims.
BTTT !!
Bump.
The obligatory poem:
White founts falling in the Courts of the sun,
And the Soldan of Byzantium is smiling as they run;
There is laughter like the fountains in that face of all men feared,
It stirs the forest darkness, the darkness of his beard;
It curls the blood-red crescent, the crescent of his lips;
For the inmost sea of all the earth is shaken with his ships.
They have dared the white republics up the capes of Italy,
They have dashed the Adriatic round the Lion of the Sea,
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;
From evening isles fantastical rings faint the Spanish gun,
And the Lord upon the Golden Horn is laughing in the sun.
Dim drums throbbing, in the hills half heard,
Where only on a nameless throne a crownless prince has stirred,
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.
Strong gongs groaning as the guns boom far,
Don John of Austria is going to the war,
Stiff flags straining in the night-blasts cold
In the gloom black-purple, in the glint old-gold,
Torchlight crimson on the copper kettle-drums,
Then the tuckets, then the trumpets, then the cannon, and he
comes.
Don John laughing in the brave beard curled,
Spurning of his stirrups like the thrones of all the world,
Holding his head up for a flag of all the free.
Love-light of Spain--hurrah!
Death-light of Africa!
Don John of Austria
Is riding to the sea.
Mahound is in his paradise above the evening star,
(Don John of Austria is going to the war.)
He moves a mighty turban on the timeless houri's knees,
His turban that is woven of the sunsets and the seas.
He shakes the peacock gardens as he rises from his ease,
And he strides among the tree-tops and is taller than the trees;
And his voice through all the garden is a thunder sent to bring
Black Azrael and Ariel and Ammon on the wing.
Giants and the Genii,
Multiplex of wing and eye,
Whose strong obedience broke the sky
When Solomon was king.
They rush in red and purple from the red clouds of the morn,
From the temples where the yellow gods shut up their eyes in
scorn;
They rise in green robes roaring from the green hells of the sea
Where fallen skies and evil hues and eyeless creatures be,
On them the sea-valves cluster and the grey sea-forests curl,
Splashed with a splendid sickness, the sickness of the pearl;
They swell in sapphire smoke out of the blue cracks of the
ground,--
They gather and they wonder and give worship to Mahound.
And he saith, "Break up the mountains where the hermit-folk can
hide,
And sift the red and silver sands lest bone of saint abide,
And chase the Giaours flying night and day, not giving rest,
For that which was our trouble comes again out of the west.
We have set the seal of Solomon on all things under sun,
Of knowledge and of sorrow and endurance of things done.
But a noise is in the mountains, in the mountains, and I know
The voice that shook our palaces--four hundred years ago:
It is he that saith not 'Kismet'; it is he that knows not Fate;
It is Richard, it is Raymond, it is Godfrey at the gate!
It is he whose loss is laughter when he counts the wager worth,
Put down your feet upon him, that our peace be on the earth."
For he heard drums groaning and he heard guns jar,
(Don John of Austria is going to the war.)
Sudden and still--hurrah!
Bolt from Iberia!
Don John of Austria
Is gone by Alcalar.
St. Michaels on his Mountain in the sea-roads of the north
(Don John of Austria is girt and going forth.)
Where the grey seas glitter and the sharp tides shift
And the sea-folk labour and the red sails lift.
He shakes his lance of iron and he claps his wings of stone;
The noise is gone through Normandy; the noise is gone alone;
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,--
But Don John of Austria is riding to the sea.
Don John calling through the blast and the eclipse
Crying with the trumpet, with the trumpet of his lips,
Trumpet that sayeth _ha_!
Domino gloria!
Don John of Austria
Is shouting to the ships.
King Philip's in his closet with the Fleece about his neck
(Don John of Austria is armed upon the deck.)
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.
He holds a crystal phial that has colours like the moon,
He touches, and it tingles, and he trembles very soon,
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,
And death is in the phial and the end of noble work,
But Don John of Austria has fired upon the Turk.
Don John's hunting, and his hounds have bayed--
Booms away past Italy the rumour of his raid.
Gun upon gun, ha! ha!
Gun upon gun, hurrah!
Don John of Austria
Has loosed the cannonade.
The Pope was in his chapel before day or battle broke,
(Don John of Austria is hidden in the smoke.)
The hidden room in man's house where God sits all the year,
The secret window whence the world looks small and very dear.
He sees as in a mirror on the monstrous twilight sea
The crescent of his cruel ships whose name is mystery;
They fling great shadows foe-wards, making Cross and Castle
dark,
They veil the plume graved lions on the galleys of St. Mark;
And above the ships are palaces of brown, black-bearded chiefs,
And below the ships are prisons, where with multitudinous griefs,
Christian captives sick and sunless, all a labouring race repines
Like a race in sunken cities, like a nation in the mines.
They are lost like slaves that sweat, and in the skies of morning
hung
The stair-ways of the tallest gods when tyranny was young.
They are countless, voiceless, hopeless as those fallen or fleeing on
Before the high Kings' horses in the granite of Babylon.
And many a one grows witless in his quiet room in hell
Where a yellow face looks inward through the lattice of his cell,
And he finds his God forgotten, and he seeks no more a sign--
(But Don John of Austria has burst the battle-line!)
Don John pounding from the slaughter-painted poop,
Purpling all the ocean like a bloody pirate's sloop,
Scarlet running over on the silvers and the golds,
Breaking of the hatches up and bursting of the holds,
Thronging of the thousands up that labour under sea
White for bliss and blind for sun and stunned for liberty.
Vivat Hispania!
Domino Gloria!
Don John of Austria
Has set his people free!
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 for ever rides in vain,
And he smiles, but not as Sultans smile, and settles back the
blade....
(But Don John of Austria rides home from the Crusade.)
Lepanto was a military victory-but based on prayer. Without God, our military exploits will be fruitless.
Similarly if we wish to be rid of this modern Islamic scourge which assails us, we will need God's help. It won't be forthcoming while we continue to butcher His unborn children.
If anyone thinks we can stand before God and beg Him to free us from the threat of Islamic violence, while our own hands are dripping with blood, think again.
Excuse my ignorance, but I thought the Moslems had already taken these areas centuries earlier?
”I blinked when I read 'the great historian Hilaire Belloc'. He gets the date of the Battle of Vienna (1683) wrong.”
I'm not sure of what point he's making here, but it's sort of like saying that Murillo's rendition of the "Mater Delorosa" mistakenly had the Virgin Mary's robes blue-on-red when it was supposed to be red-on-blue; it means nada when you know the greatness and bigger picture of the genius. Belloc was/is considered to be the greatest religious and war historian of the 20th century by many. I've read that his memory was phenomenal and his passion for history was unparalleled, (no Google 'geniuses' in those days).
Belloc graduated with First Class Honors from Oxford, and was elected President of their union. Also a great orator, Belloc then went on a lecture tour of the U.S. He had already published two books of verse, 'Verses and Sonnets' and the immensely popular and much reprinted 'The Bad Child's Books of Beasts'.
Then Belloc went back to England where he became literay editor of the 'Morning Post'. Next he was elected to the House of Commons; after one term he returned to journalism and became a writer for four publications, then became editor of 'The Eye Witness', and then collaborated with H.G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw and G.K. Chesterton to write his next book, 'The Party System'. A year later he wrote another successful political book, 'The Servile State', and then proceeded to write three successful Novels and two more history books.
Belloc spent nine months in France's military, where he developed an impressive understanding of military strategy; so much so that he was recruited by the British government to help the war effort, (WWI), and he wrote the successful 'The Two Maps of Europe'. 'The Times of London' recruited Belloc to be their military writer for their new weekly publication 'Land and Water', which became an instant success with over 100,000 publications weekly.
According to Frederick Wilhemsen, in his monograph, 'Hilaire Belloc: No Alienated Man', 1954, Belloc was an extremist for historical detail. Wilhemsen wrote: "Belloc's position absolutely necessitated his emphasis on travel, his minute detection of physical details, his sympathy with verbal tradition...these were all humanistic instruments, rendering him one with the past.- - - Wilhemsen goes on to say how Belloc visited the site of a battle on its anniversary, and if the weather was not right, visited it again and again until it was. Not exactly your average historian, eh?
After the War Belloc continued to proliferate highly successful history books, including 'Europe and Faith' (1920). Belloc also published a series of historical biographies: 'Oliver Cromwell' (1927), 'James II' (1928), 'Richelieu' (1930), 'Wolsey' (1930), 'Cranmer' (1931), 'Napoleon' (1932) and 'Charles II' (1940).
Belloc was also a great orator and enchanting speaker wherever he went to lecture, and he traveled all over Europe and the U.S. lecturing and teaching history.
Hilaire Belloc also (accurately) predicted that Islam would soon rise and threaten the West again. He noted their unbroken adherence to their beliefs while pointing to the gradual loss of faith by the Christian West. The only other historians of his times that I'm aware of who recognized this threat were his great Catholic counterpart, G.K. Chesterton, who wrote a novel with this prediction, and Winston Churchill, who wrote that the only reason why Western man wasn't being attacked by Islam was our superior technology. Few men possessed Belloc's foresight and historical astuteness.
Then as now, Belloc's greatest obstacle to gaining the full notoriety from his peers, which he truly deserved, was that he was a CATHOLIC historian. For him it began when he graduated Oxford with First Class Honors and was never offered a Fellowship by his Protestant University. I suspect this discrimination may be still going on with some folks. So suffice to say that Hilaire Belloc was one of the greatest CATHOLIC historians of all time, that's good enough for me.
thank goodness they won
God bless our Lady of Victories!
May she intervene on behalf of Christianity in our struggle with the scourge of Islam...
Interesting. I heard that Ridley Scott was directing a movie set in the time of the Crusades. Kingdom of Heaven, I think.
BTTT
Lepanto, Bertone e Battesimo, Oh My!
Our Lady of the Rosary of La Naval (A Mini-Lepanto in the Philippines)
Swiss Guards at the Battle of Lepanto, 7 October 1571
LEPANTO, 7 OCTOBER 1571: The Defense of Europe
On This Day In History, The Battle of Lepanto
Call to Prayer 12:00 EST 17 November: This Lepanto Moment [Read only]