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In the winter of 2002 I took advantage of the then depressed cost of air and overseas travel (post 9/11/01) to visit Spain, specifically the capital, Madrid and its environs.
It was January and I discovered first-hand that both Madrid’s elevation and latitude give it a winter climate similar to New York. It was bitter cold; though brightly sunny that gave Madrid’s sky a shade of bright blue that the locals boast of as unique.
One day I went out by bus to the nearby “Royal Monastery of Saint Lawrence” better known simply as El Escorial. Founded in the 16th century by King Philip II as a combination shrine, residence, and burial place for the Royal House; its church holds the earthly remains of all Spain’s royalty from the Emperor Charles V (Carlos I of Spain) right down to the present King’s parents.
I went down alone (few tourists in the mountains in January!) to visit the royal tombs.
I left the vaulted “Pantheon of the Kings” and began to wander down a corridor into other vaulted rooms. Spying an interesting looking medieval style tomb in an alcove by itself I entered and stood at the tomb of a knight depicted, as was the style, recumbent in armor, clutching a sword.
Thanking God that I was born when I was, and received the clerical education I did at the time I did, I was able to read and understand the Latin inscription on the tomb. After a minute I stopped and stared. I was standing at the tomb of Don John of Austria.
Now for those of you who might be a bit rusty in your history, let me explain who he was.
He was the illegitimate but acknowledged and beloved son of the great Emperor Charles V whose tomb I had just seen in the royal Pantheon, the half brother of King Philip II who had built the Escorial which I was visiting. His appellation “of Austria” did not refer to the country; but was and is the usual way that the Spanish refer to the dynasty we call the Spanish Habsburgs who ruled “the Spains and the Indies” for two hundred years.
And, 438 years ago today he won an astounding victory at the head of a multi-national Christian fleet off Cape Lepanto in the Aegean Sea against a vast Ottoman Turkish fleet. It was a desperate fight; and the issue decided whether or not Rome would suffer the fate of “New Rome”: Constantinople or Istanbul as the Turks call it. A once great Christian city, desolate, with the world’s largest domed church ( Hagia Sophia or “Holy Wisdom” )was turned into a mosque in 1453; and the Sultan had vowed to do the same to the new Saint Peter’s then abuilding in Rome. All that stood in his path was Don John and his motley galleys and sailing ships.
Five years before the great Suleiman had vowed to crush the Christian Knights of Saint John in their island fortress of Malta and had failed. Then the Grand Master of the Knights, Jean de La Valette , had declared to his brethren and the Maltese people ( then, as now, nearly 100% Catholic and among the finest peoples of Europe) that the coming struggle would determine whether “the Koran or the Gospel” would rule the “Middle Sea”, and indeed, all Europe. Then the Great Siege had been broken and a harrowing victory for the Cross won finally on September 8th, 1565, the feast of Our Lady’s Nativity. (A later siege of Malta would also be lifted on another feast of Our Lady: Assumption Day, 1943.)
Now Suleiman’s son was aiming higher. Sicily, Rome, and all Italy was in his sights.
Don John had been given the command of a collection of ships willingly or grudgingly provided by various Catholic powers: Spain, Venice, Genoa, and the Holy See. He was a dashing and romantic figure and I recommend G. K Chesterton’s poem Lepanto as a great pounding hymn of praise to the man whom the poet described as “the last knight of Christendom” who meets the Sultan’s threat:
White founts falling in the courts of the sun,
And the Sultan 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.
The appeal for ships fell upon a Europe divided now by the Reformation:
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 bath 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.
Well…and so it goes.
On October 6th, 1571 as it became obvious battle was imminent Don John was rowed among his ships in a long-boat in his shirt, holding a large Crucifix and calling upon his officers and men to prepare themselves. Confessions were heard, Masses said, quarrels ended, and galley slaves given their liberty if they would fight the next day.
In Rome, Pope (now Saint) Pius V, a Dominican, prayed the Rosary the next day with all Rome and felt a sudden sense of assurance of victory. Hundreds of miles to the east, Don John and his ships decisively defeated the vast Turkish fleet.
Never again would militant Islam come so far West…..until…..
In the next century the day of this victory became known as the Feast of Our Lady of the Rosary after may other epic battles of the Cross and the Crescent.
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!
But that was along time ago we might think. So did I till September 2001.
That day I stood there, January 2002, in the presence of all that is mortal of Don John of Austria … and a silly comic phrase came to mind, unworthy of the scene…”Don John of Austria, call your office….they’re back!”
But that’s just me….
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