Lepanto: The Rosary defeated the half moon

Gulf of Patras, Greece · October 7, 1571

The Ottoman threat to Europe

In the summer of 1571, the Ottoman Empire was the largest naval power in the Mediterranean. Its fleet of more than 275 galleys - with about 120,000 soldiers on board - was moving towards the heart of the Mediterranean with the aim of taking Cyprus and opening the door of Western Europe. The Serene Republic of Venice had already lost much of Cyprus, and the panic was cundy in the coastal cities of Italy, Spain and Greece.

Pope Pius V - Dominican, fervent devotee of the Rosary - called the Catholic powers in an alliance called the Holy League. Under the military command of Don Juan de Austria, the natural son of Charles I of Spain, a fleet of 214 galleys was gathered with 80,000 men from Spain, Venice, the Pontifical States, Genoa, Malta and Savoy.

The Battle and the Rosary of Rome

On October 7, 1571, both fleets were found in the Gulf of Patras, opposite the Greek city of Naucompacto - known in the West as Lepanto. As the cannons thunder in the eastern Mediterranean, in Rome Pope Pius V called on all the faithful to pray the Rosary in procession through the streets of the city. The co-fradies of the Rosary of all Europe, following the papal exhortation, joined the collective prayer.

The battle was incarnated. The Turks outnumbered the allies, but the wind, favourable to the Ottomans at dawn, changed direction at the critical moment. The Christian fleet crushed the Ottoman: it captured 130 enemy galleys and released 12,000 Christian remers serving in the Turkish galleys as slaves. Some 9,000 Allied soldiers and some 30,000 Turks were killed. It was the greatest naval defeat of the Ottoman Empire and the end of its hegemony in the Western Mediterranean.

The Feast of the Holy Rosary

Pius V immediately set up the feast of "Our Lady of Victory" on October 7, which his successor Gregory XIII renamed "Our Lady of the Rosary." Thus was born one of the most universal Marian festivals of Catholicism. Lepanto's victory is also the origin of the motto that crowns the shields of many of the Rosary's cofradies: Auxilium Christianorum - "Help the Christians."

Cervantes fought in Lepanto and lost the movement of the left hand; he always called that day "the highest occasion they saw in the past centuries, the present, and they do not expect to see the future." The painting of the battle of Lepanto de Paolo Veronese is preserved in the Palazzo Ducale of Venice.

"Virgin of the Rosary, you who guided the fleet of believers,
lead us also through the storms of life. "