Free Republic

Lepanto 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,...

On September 11th 1683, Vienna was besieged by Islamic Ottoman Turks. Christians throughout Europe prayed the Rosary in the midst of a desperate situation. At Vienna, vastly outnumbered European Christian forces miraculously and wonderfully delivered a crippling blow to Muslim expansion into Europe, preventing a grim invasion of the continent by Muslim forces. 41,000 Christian forces (including 30,000 troops of Polish King Jan III Sobieski that Pope Innocent XI had called upon) defeated a 140,000 man strong Turkish army the night of September 11th over three centuries before the 9/11 attacks on the United States that were also caused by...

Lepanto, 1571: The Battle That Saved Europe 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... 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...