The Miracle At Lepanto...

Most of what is now Christendom was also conquered militarily. That's true of all civilizations - ancient and modern. A sad human reality.

La Mancha means "the sleeve" does it not?

what is needed is another El Cid.

If you mean the former Roman empire, the conquests were all done while it was pagan.

Some food for thought...

"4. Reform under Grand Vezir Mehmed Sokullu (1565-1579). Sokullu's devsirme party allied with Harem party led by Roxelana (Hurrem Sultan) and party of Jewish bankers led by Dona Gracia Mendes and Don Joseph Nasi. Manages to get Suleyman Kanuni to execute capable son Mustafa and bring to throne incompetent degenerate son Selim II 'the sot'-Sari Selim (Selim the Yellow), Sarhos Selim (Selim the Drunkard). Don Joseph gets Selim II and Sokullu to conquer Cyprus to provide home for Jews fleeing from persecution in Europe. Settlement of East Anatolian Turkomans instead. Leads to formation of new Holy League fleet led by Don Juan of Austria, defeats Ottoman, fleet at Battle of Lepanto (1571). Sokullu rebuilds fleet during winter, regains control of Mediterranean in 1572. Makes major administrative reforms, restores tax system, eliminates corrupt officials. Ottomans complete conquest of Yemen, Gulf fleet restores International trade routes from Far East through Middle East. Ottomans complete conquests of Caucasus, Georgia and Armenia. Successes lead to fall of Sokullu, resumption of decay."

HISTORY OF THE TURKS

"Occupied by the Turks in 1498, Lepanto is chiefly celebrated for the victory which the combined papal, Spanish, Venetian, and Genoese fleets, under Don John of Austria, gained over the Turkish fleet on 7 Oct., 1571. The latter had 208 galleys and 66 small ships; the Christian fleet about the same number. The crusaders lost 17 ships and 7500 men; 15 Turkish ships were sunk and 177 taken, from 20,000 to 30,000 men disabled, and from 12,000 to 15,000 Christian rowers, slaves on the Turkish galleys, were delivered. Though this victory did not accomplish all that was hoped for, since the Turks appeared the very next year with a fleet of 250 ships before Modon and Cape Matapan, and in vain offered battle to the Christians, it was of great importance as being the first great defeat of the infidels on the sea."

Lepanto

Actually, that is not correct. Anything that the Pope declared to be a crusade is obviously a crusade, and the Pope authorized crusades which did not involve attempts to conquer or hold on to Jerusalem and the Holy Lands.

For instance, there was a crusade against the Cathars, or Albigensians, which took place in what is now Southern France. It was a crusade which the Pope declared against a heretical sect which was growing in that particular region.

Also, I am not sure if we can limit the word "crusade" just to those authorized by the Pope; the word has a more generalized usage for any holy war engaged by Christians for religious reasons against non-Christians.

I do believe the Pope declared crusades against the Muslims in Spain; but whether authorized by the Pope or not, the reconquest of Spain was considered by Christians at the time to be just as much a crusade as the attempts to take back the Holy Land from the Muslims.

Lepanto

G.K.Chesterton

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.)

For an excellent history of the Battle of Lepanto, and also an excellent example of the art of narrative prose, read "The Galleys at Lepanto" by Jack Beeching. I believe it is out of print, but you can find used copies for sale at amazon.com and other places. It's a riveting read.

If a crusade is a religious war against non-Christians, then what might the religious war against the Cathers have been?

They were certainly as Christian as anybody else around in their time.

It's about time for everyone to just quit trying to justify the war against the Cathers.

I was replying to the Harpseal post;

"What most people forget is that the Islamic war machine conquered most of what is now Islam militarily. One either converted to Islam or faced death"

I think you can substitute Christian and Christianity and the paragraph will the just as valid.

Surely, you don't believe all the pagans and heretics immediately and voluntarily became good Catholics following the conversion of Constantine? Nor is your statement true. The Byzantines were both Christian and Roman and used rather brutal methods to impose their beliefs on those they conquered or reconquered.

Nor were the modern Europeans much better. The Spanish treatment of the American Indians is legendary for its cruelty - but actually they were only continuing to do what they had been doing for centuries during the Reconquista. The other Europeans were pretty much the same.

If you doubt this look at how Christians treated each other during the century or two of wars following Martin Luther's declaration of independence from the Catholic Church.

In 1571, the Spainiards were the glorious defenders of the West. In 1588 they had become the cruel embodiment of the "Black Legend" as they sailed their Imperial Fleet against Albion, last bastion of freedom. What an irony.

The Spanish treatment of the American Indians is legendary for its cruelty -

A ridiculous lie. The Spanish were forbidden (by the Pope and by their King) to enslave the Indians, and basically treated them rather well. Perhaps a modern cultural relativist wouldn't like the Spanish approach, but I do: they taught the Indians Christianity, baptized them - and then intermarried.

The English, by contrast, had an initial period in which they accepted Indians as possibly equal in humanity, and then shifted to a point of view that regarded Christianity as the property of Englishmen, and the Indians as forever outside of that. And they did not intermarry, in contrast to the Spanish.

BTW, when Spain ruled Florida, black slaves used to flee from the (British) Carolinas to St. Augustine, because they were freed when they entered Spanish territory and accepted baptism. This was something for which the Carolinians never forgave the Spanish, and after they failed in their attack on St. Augustine in 1702, the Carolinians returned to attack the poorly defended western lands of Spanish Florida and Georgia. One of the things they were notable for was herding the Christian Indians and the Spanish friars and soliders into the tiny mission churches and then setting fire to the churches.

Please review your history before making bigoted and idiotic statements.

Please review your history before making bigoted and idiotic statements

Your rude rant is not central to my argument but I'll reply anyway.

History books over several centuries have spoken of exceptionally cruel treatment of the Indians by the Spanish. Lately there've been some attempts to revise that. Your interpretation of the Spanish vs. the English treatment of the Indians is open to several interpretations - the Spanish came to rob and steal, not to settle. Hence they didn't bring their women. The English had different priorities. Your view of the relationship between the Spanish and the Indians reminds me of the old South's view of black-white relations. By the way, you are aware that Indians occupy the bottom rungs in most - or all - Latin American societies, mestizos the middle, and pure-blood Spanish (and other Europeans) the top.

The religious war against the Cathars was indeed considered a crusade. It was called the "Albigensian Crusade." William of Tudela's epic on this crusade is entitled "Chanson de la Croisade contre les Albigeois".

It's not a rude rant, it happens to be the truth.

The Spanish did indeed come to South America to settle, after their initial period of exploration. In fact, one of the main objectives in their explorations was the extension of the Catholic faith - which they did do, and quite effectively. They attempted several settlements in North America, but failed first because of the climate, and then because of the attacks launched upon their Southern mission chain (which extended from Florida fairly far up to northern and western parts of the South) by the English and Indians who were incited by the English. This coincided with diminished resources of the Spanish crown, because of its European wars, and the mission chain (with its villages of Christian Indians) collapsed.

The reason mestizos are at the bottom in Latin America is that they formed the great majority of the population in economic cultures that were controlled by a small number of rich families at the top, something that was typical of Spanish economic life in Spain, as well. This is not a good thing, but it was simply a fact of economic life.

One of the reasons that "mestizos" are not at the bottom in English speaking cultures is that few existed in the first place, because the English did not consider the Indians sufficiently human to merit baptism, and certainly not intermarriage. (The exception was during a brief period in New England when attempts were made by the very earliest English settlers to convert the Indians.)

You are clearly a subscriber to the leyenda negra, and you should most certainly reexamine things before making the usual bigoted statements about the Spanish.

The English and French propaganda regarding the cruelty inflicted by Spaniards on the American Indians was truly frightful stuff.

Most of it was not true.

Some of the Spanish came to settle - for example recently converted Moslems had no difficulty finding reasons to move to the New World. The same was true of the Jews who'd become Morenos. For most of a century these people settled the Caribbean islands and only later moved on to the continental mainlands.

Spanish Protestants also found it highly expedient to relocate to the Americas as fast as possible since their discovery in Spain all too frequently resulted in a quick death. Although there's little history written about these people, it's worth noting that one of the last of Pizzarro's Conquistidores, a Senor Carvajal (Carvalho) actually rejected the ministrations of a Catholic priest just before his execution. As a direct consequence of this clear profession of his Protestant beliefs he was drawn, quartered and his parts tossed into the fields to be devoured by dogs and wild animals.

What a mensch!

It's worth noting, too, that Pizzarro worked initially for DeSoto, and he'd begun his search for a homeland in FLorida, also known as what is now the Midwest, in 1541 - this is the same year French and Breton Protestants sailed West to begin a similar search in the New World. Given the close relationship of both parties to the de la Garde and Carvajal multi-national families of Protestant adventurers, I think a fair case could be made for assigning the "steal" and "pillage" attitudes to the Protestants, with an assignment of the "settlement" attitudes to all parties.

Europe was, after all, a cesspool in that time and one of the major driving forces behind European conquest of the world was to get out of Europe.

Since we are somewhat off-topic here a review is in order.

The initial article was a comment on the "miraculous" victory of the Christians at Lepanto.

Harpseal used this to make two observations about Islam;
the Islamic war machine conquered most of what is now Islam militarily
One either converted to Islam or faced death

I commented that the same two observations applied equally to Christendom. Nothing either of you has said contradicts the first point...and the exceptions to the second point apply equally to Islam.

That said, I'm not really interested in the fine points of the treatment of the Indians - Catholics vs. Protestants, English vs. Spanish. To what extent la leyenda negra is true will be disputed long after we're gone. It is enough to observe that, human nature being what it is, there are plenty of non-Spanish mestizos in the North. I meet them all the time (or maybe they're lying about their Indian ancestry because it's chic to do so).

A current serious historical research subject is just how much of Islam was spread to Christian areas by conquest and how much was spread through willing conversion.

Everyone tends to forget that the advance into Syria, Mesopotamia and North Africa (including Egypt) took place within the Dark Ages where even in the most civilized parts of the world record keeping had more or less fallen apart.

We do know that Islam spread to Indonesia rather peacefully - via the ministrations of trader/missionaries. It's being spread rather non-violently in the Americas these days.

Moslem conquest in the Indus was, according to Hindu sources, violent. According to Moslem sources, less violent. Moslems also have some interesting things to say about the Hindus in that regard, and when you notice that low ranking jots and castes were the first to join Islam, there's every indication that most of the reports were exceedingly biased in light of pre-existing social problems in the Sub-Continent.

Getting back to the Eastern Mediterranean experience, Christianity was not as firmly fixed as we might presume. The Persians had never been Christian, and their most popular religion, Mithrism, was widespread throughout the Roman Empire although it was on it's deathbed as was the third competitor we now call Druidism (ever since the 4th Century). The Arien Heresy was popular, and in some areas the only Christians around were actually hermits in the wilderness - they wrote letters which is why we know about them, but that doesn't mean there were a lot of them. Judaism was a popular belief system as well. Even today tribes in Yemen and down the East coast of Africa recall that their religion before Islam was, in fact, Judaism. Various Saudi Arabian groups have a similar tradition as do many, many groups in Afghanistan and Iraq. Their transformation from Jews to Moslems is not, from the Christian theological point of view, a serious item.

Islam has had it's period of greatest growth in recent decades, and for the most part the expansion has been peaceful. Christianity has also been spread peacefully for the last 200 years. The last really violent Christian outburst was fomented by the King of France who used the powers of state to spread Catholicism among Protestants within his Domain. Most of our Bill of Rights consists of items directed against his theory and practice of tyranny (the activities of French kings being much on the minds of our Founding Fathers).

The "spread by the sword" story was certainly excellent propaganda. A good bit of that sort of thing was done by the Mongols, but they would have done it if they'd been Buddhist. In fact, Islam may well have tempered the Mongol approach to conquest - earlier in history they'd been really bad!

One of the major Mongol invaders was, in fact, a Christian - his mother had been a Christian, and those old boys seemed to leave it to their women-folk to inculcate belief. Folks in the areas under his rule became Christian whether they wanted to be or not.

The Spanish situation is exceptional. The Reconquista was very organized and folks took whatever religion the local ruler thought they should have. This went on for centuries and ended only in 1492. Everyone who did not like the final outcome was free to leave, which they did. Loose ends, if we can call them that, were disposed of by the Inquisition (which has a remarkably small death-toll for the times). In the end Spanish social problems were resolved by emigration to the new empire in the West. Troublemakers saw fit to discover America on their own.