October Festivals: Lepanto and Columbus

Every year, the Feast of Our Lady of the Rosary, October 7, falls within the same week as Columbus Day, celebrated on the second Monday in October. Together, these feasts make up one big festival because of the intimate relation between the events that they celebrate.

The Feast of Our Lady of the Rosary is also known as the Feast of Our Lady of Victory because it celebrates the Blessed Mother’s aid in the Battle of Lepanto on October 7, 1571. This battle was a great Christian naval victory over the Muslim Turkish forces in the Mediterranean. Although an increasing number of young Catholics are aware of this major historical event, it is not widely known among the general American public and is rarely covered in public elementary or high school history curricula. 

The Battle of Lepanto was a decisive encounter between an allied Christian navy made up of Genoese, Venetian, Vatican, and Spanish ships cobbled together for the defense of Italy against a larger Turkish navy gathered in Greece for attack across the Adriatic. It was the largest naval battle to ever take place in the Mediterranean, the grand finale of a century of crusading struggle over the watery “Middle Earth.” 

Two signal features of the Battle of Lepanto place it at the intersection of the Age of Columbus (1492) and the Age of the Reformation (1517). 

On the one hand, the Genoese Christian flagship during the battle had an image of Our Lady of Guadalupe, which had been sent back to Europe—so, in some sense, the newly evangelized native peoples of the Americas had their representative at the battle.

On the other hand, Protestants were significantly absent from the allied Christian ranks during the battle. Pope St. Pius V had sent out an “all call” for everyone to pray their Rosary in the time of crisis for Christendom and he had requested military help from all the old Crusader kingdoms—the France of King St. Louis, the England of Richard the Lionhearted, the Holy Roman Emperor, and the kings of Spain. But the French king, Charles IX, was too occupied with religious tensions with Protestant Huguenots to send ships; and Elizabeth I, the Protestant Queen of England, had been recently excommunicated and was too busy funding piracy against the Spanish to support the defense of Christendom. Even the famed Spanish Armada of Philip II was, in some sense, otherwise occupied with exploring and conquering the distant East Indies–that far-flung portion of the Christian world that would be named for him–The Philippines.

G. K. Chesterton’s famous 1911 poem “Lepanto” draws attention to this double historical context with two wonderful lines: “From evening isles fantastical rings faint the Spanish drum,” and “The cold Queen of England is looking in the glass.” The absence of Philip II’s Spanish fleet in the far western island archipelago, and the absence of English naval support from Queen Elizabeth certainly contributed to the sense of desperation leading up to the battle. The pope was forced to cobble together a motley band of brothers under a youthful, untried commander, Don John of Austria.

Many Catholics do not realize that October 31 is celebrated as Reformation Day, the anniversary of Luther’s legendary nailing of his protest against indulgences to the door of the Wittenberg Cathedral on All Hallows’ Eve. Columbus’ voyage and Luther’s protest were both, in different ways, responses to the ongoing crisis in the Mediterranean. 

The urgent preaching of indulgences, the call for Peter’s Pence, the desperate need for alms which sparked rebellion among the local German princes escalated into the Protestant Reformation in the context of the Turkish threat to Christian Europe. Crusaders, the wounded and maimed, their widows and children; hospitals, orphanages, roads, bridges, ships; ransom for captives and galley slaves; building a new St. Peter’s since Constantinople’s great church had fallen into the hands of the Muslims—all this took money. All these “good works”—besides prayer, fasting, sacraments, pilgrimages—were central to the public corporate Christian life in the 1500s.

Columbus Day celebrates the famous voyage and the famous landfall on October 12, 1492, that also took place in the context of the massive three-century-long struggle between Christendom and the Ottoman Turk Empire which came to a head later in the Battle of Lepanto. There would have been no reason, no need, no cause for Columbus’ harebrained scheme of sailing west to Japan and China if the age-old route across the Mediterranean to the Silk Road to China and the Spice Road to India was still open and available to Christian merchants and missionaries. But that route, which the Venetian Marco Polo had pioneered back in the 1200s, during the great age of the rise of trade, towns, and mendicant friars—the age of Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274)—was closed off by the rise of the Ottoman Turk Empire.

Various Muslim forces had controlled the Holy Land since Muhammad’s time, and they had had differing policies with regard to Christian pilgrims and traders over the centuries. But the rise of the Turkish power, subduing other Muslim ethnic groups—the Arabs, the Egyptians, Tunisians, Kurds—had consolidated Muslim control of the Eastern Mediterranean. By 1453, the Turks had captured the ancient Christian capital of Constantinople and turned the enormous Christian basilica of Hagia Sophia into the great mosque of Istanbul. 

Conquest of the Dardanelles strait enabled them to make further inroads into Christian Europe, conquering Greece, the Balkans, moving into Hungary, and threatening Vienna with a siege in 1529. They also threatened Christian islands like Cyprus and Malta in the Mediterranean and carried out attacks along the eastern coast of Italy—raiding, massacring, and taking slaves from Brindisi, Otranto, Bari, and even the ancient naval capital, Venice. The Turkish leader, Suleiman the Magnificent, vowed that he would make the Mediterranean “a sea on which no Christian ship could set sail.”

This growing encirclement, the red crescent of Turkish control of the eastern Mediterranean, first drove the Portuguese to attempt the route around Africa to the Indies to replace Marco Polo’s old trade route and then the Spanish to give a hearing to the mariner who believed that Japan and China were only 2,500 nautical miles and one month sailing west of the Canary Islands. Columbus’ idea was considered absurd (it was absurd; it is absurd!) by the learned in the universities of Spain because they knew full well that the circumference of the earth was far and away larger than Columbus calculated (they did not think that the earth was flat!). But the financial needs of the Reconquest of Spain from the Moors and the ongoing need for gold to pay soldiers and spices to preserve meat for the troops in the defense of Christendom, made the Spanish monarchs willing to entertain Columbus’ visionary plan.

The two great victories—the providential rescue of Columbus from his own madness on October 12, 1492, and the providential rescue of Rome October 7, 1571, took place in the context of the crisis of Christendom surrounded. Christians celebrated both great events in the same fashion: Rome celebrated Columbus’ voyage by gilding the ceiling of the great Basilica of St. Mary Major; Rome celebrated the victory at Lepanto by gilding the ceiling of the church of Santa Maria in Ara Coeli (St. Mary in the Heavens) on the top of the Capitoline Hill.

The struggle with the Islamic Turkish forces was not over: the Turks would lay siege to Vienna a second time on September 11, 1683. The struggle to find a route for trade and missionary activity to China is not over still, despite the Suez and Panama Canals and 500 years of efforts by Dominicans, Franciscans, and Jesuits in the Far East. 

But every year, the two great feasts of the Battle of Lepanto and Columbus’ American landfall coincide and lead us to ponder anew the providential plan of God. As Leo XIII wrote on the 400th anniversary of Columbus’ voyage in 1892: 

Columbus threw open America at the time when a great storm was about to break over the Church [the Protestant Reformation]. As far therefore, as it is lawful for man to divine from events the ways of Divine Providence, he seemed to have truly been born, by a singular provision of God, to remedy those losses which were awaiting the Catholic Church on the side of Europe.

After 500 years, the basic parameters established by those events still haunt our own time. The enormous 1.4 billion population of China is neither Muslim nor Christian. India, too, is neither majority Muslim nor majority Christian but remains 80 percent Hindu. The scandal of the division of Christendom—not just in Europe but worldwide—between Catholics and Protestants handicaps Christian missionary efforts. And Europe is threatened internally by a secularism and birth dearth that makes it likely to be overrun by Muslim immigration.

Columbus’ sailors—like all good Christian mariners of that age—sang the “Salve Regina” every evening at nightfall. They turned, as darkness fell, to Our Lady as Stella Maris, Star of the Sea, to guide them to safety. Pope St. Pius V begged Christians to turn to Mary’s protection to rescue Rome from the Turkish threat. Miraculously, on October 7 and on October 12, those prayers to the Queen of Heaven were answered.