Tuesday, October 7, 2025

It is the 7^th of October 2025. Welcome to the Christian History Almanac brought to you by 1517 at 1517.org. I'm your guest host, Sam Leanza Ortiz.

 

When we think of Christian feast days, we think of saints like Bruno, whom we talked about yesterday, or events from the life of Jesus, like Epiphany, or even commemorations of the archangels like Gabriel or Michael. As far as I’ve been able to tell in my research (and I’m open to being corrected!) there’s only one feast on the Roman calendar connected to a historical battle, Our Lady of the Rosary, which commemorates the victory of the Battle of Lepanto that was fought on this day in 1571.

The Battle of Lepanto was one of many battles fought between the Christian states of the West and the Turks of the Ottoman Empire, but it marked a significant shift in the power balance of Christians and Muslims in the Mediterranean.

The Ottoman Turks had been on the scene since 1300, and they had essentially been a continual thorn in the side of Christians in the east as they expanded through modern-day Turkey. Famously, their imperial forces captured Constantinople in 1453, turning one of Christianity’s most important cities into the capital of Islamic political power.

And they did not stop there. At the door of continental Europe, the Ottoman forces pushed into the lands of the Habsburgs, taking Hungary in 1529 and nearly taking the Habsburg capital of Vienna with it, were it not for a break in the supply lines for their forces.

The close proximity of the Ottomans gave Christian Europe a scare, such that apocalyptic rhetoric abounded. Large portions of the Holy Roman Empire were subject to attack by the infamous Suleiman the Magnificent.

Things got so tense that the recently split Protestant and Catholic powers called a temporary truce in 1532, though, as we all know, that did not last very long.

 As the Ottomans fought the powers of the Holy Roman Empire on land, they fought the Venetians on the sea. Once the masters of the Mediterranean, the Venetians held an empire in their own right – not large in terms of landmass, but powerful in its trading routes and its almost ruthless ability to cut a deal with anyone and everyone. Their fortunes were such that they could choose to work with or ignore the papacy as they pleased.

A few years after the failed Protestant-Catholic truce, the Venetians made a “humiliating peace” with Suleiman at the close of the third Ottoman-Venetian war.

Suleiman’s successor, Selim II, renewed the conflict with Venice in 1570 as he wanted to annex the island of Cyprus, an important stop on Venice’s trade routes.

On the ropes once again, Venice turned to Pope Pius V for aid as he had been trying to form an alliance of Catholic states to deal with the Ottoman threat. The fallout of the Reformation made this difficult, for France was embroiled in its Wars of Religion, and the Holy Roman Empire, the home of many of the Reformers, had too many internal issues to look east at the moment.

Instead, Pius and the Venetians turned to Spain and a few of the Italian states to form what they would call the “Holy League.” This alliance took years to formulate, as each state had different offensive objectives, even as the defensive goal of turning back the Ottomans remained in view.

It was only in May of 1571 that the terms were agreed to, and the fleets assembled three months later in Sicily. By September, they reached Corfu on Greece’s west coast, and they soon learned that the Ottoman fleet was in Lepanto to the south.

Orders went out to the Holy League’s ships to attack on the 7^th of October. The battle lasted for hours as galley ships rammed into one another until the Grand Admiral of the Ottoman navy was killed and his ship captured.

It was a crushing victory for the Holy League, as 8,000 of their own were killed and 8,000 wounded, but they seized 117 galleys and liberated 15,000 enslaved Christians in the process.

The news reached the pope two weeks later. The victory was credited ultimately to the Virgin Mary, whose intercession had been prayed for through the Rosary. Before his death the following year, Pius V instituted a new feast day of “Our Lady of Victory” to remember this momentous occasion. The feast has since been renamed to “Our Lady of the Rosary,” focusing on the celebration of the devotion of the Rosary.

The victory itself, in the context of the Ottoman-Venetian war, was small in comparison to its significance for Christian Europe. The Venetians concluded this fourth Ottoman-Venetian war by surrendering Cyprus, the very land the Ottomans wanted, just two years later. Over the next two hundred years, they would fight three more wars.

In that story, Lepanto is merely a blip, but for Christians fearful of the Ottoman threat, Lepanto was evidence that the Ottomans could be beaten on the seas. As the Ottoman Empire entered its decline, becoming the “sick man of Europe” by the twentieth century, its activity remained restricted to the eastern Mediterranean. While this didn’t exactly mean peace for the Christians of Europe, who would go on to have horrific wars in the subsequent centuries, they were heartened in this Davidic victory over a Goliath to the east that was won on this day in 1571.

 

The last word for today comes from the daily lectionary, from 1 John 5:

Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Christ is born of God, and everyone who loves the father loves his child as well. ² This is how we know that we love the children of God: by loving God and carrying out his commands. ³ In fact, this is love for God: to keep his commands. And his commands are not burdensome, ⁴ for everyone born of God overcomes the world. This is the victory that has overcome the world, even our faith. ⁵ Who is it that overcomes the world? Only the one who believes that Jesus is the Son of God.

 

This has been the Christian History Almanac for the 7^th of October 2025, brought to you by 1517 at 1517.org.

This show has been produced by Christopher Gillespie.

This show is normally hosted by Dan van Voorhis, who has slandered the name of the noble Venetians for their participation in the Fourth Crusade, when we really know it was mostly French Crusaders….and this episode was written and read by Sam Leanza Ortiz, who is married to a man of Venetian descent.

You can catch us here every day- and remember that the rumors of grace, forgiveness, and the redemption of all things are true…. Everything is going to be ok.