On 7 October 1571, Europe's fleets defeated a larger Ottoman armada at Lepanto.
Pope Pius V credited Our Lady with the victory of the West and dedicated the day to her, a feast the Church still keeps.
Today Ukraine's defenders are the wall against a new empire that threatens the whole West.
An icon of Our Lady of Victories, carried from wartime Ukraine to Britain's soldiers, connects the two fights.
BERLIN—October 7 is the Feast of Our Lady of the Rosary, but its place in the European calendar is inseparable from something much older and more martial.
On that day in 1571, the fleet of the Holy League met the Ottoman navy off western Greece and won the Battle of Lepanto, one of the great galley battles of European history. Spain, Venice, the Papal States, and other Catholic powers had gathered under Don John of Austria after years in which Ottoman expansion had steadily changed the balance of the Mediterranean. Here, the Christian knights of Europe made their stand against the might of a foreign empire.
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The Ottoman Empire recovered from its loss, and the battle did not end the struggle between the two worlds, as the Ottomans rebuilt ships with impressive speed. But the victory ended the sense that their advance was simply the natural direction of history, something to be endured rather than stopped.
It entered European memory for that reason, and the feast celebrated on October 7 still carries the echo of that day.
More than a century later, another such date was written into the continent’s memory. Vienna had been under Ottoman siege for weeks when the relief army of Poles, Habsburg troops, and forces from the German states arrived in September 1683.
Jan III Sobieski took command, crossed the heights around the Kahlenberg, and on September 12 broke the siege, side by side with his German commander Karl von Lothringen. The Austrian government today describes the battle as the beginning of a strategic reversal of European dimensions.
If not for the brave men who defended the Gates of Vienna and those knights and warriors who rode through night and day to relieve the city, battling a gigantic army in the morning dawn, Europe would have been lost. The Enlightenment would never have happened.
