Livin' In America

Back in 2003, after I'd buried my mother, I took a week's worth of vacation in Rome before going back to work.

By the good offices of my wife, a women with high-level contacts throughout the world, I ended up visiting closely-closeted parts of the Colonna Palace, home of Pope Martin V, in Rome. My God! What a great day! (Thank you V., Thank you GianPierrot. Thank you Julia.)

Why do I mention this? Because today is the anniversary of the Battle of Lepanto. Read on...

In 1571 the Colonna clan threw in with Don Juan of Austria at the Battle of Lepanto. In their palace, the Colonna symbol is shown with time chained to it, a way to indicate that Marcantonio Colonna's reputation would be timeless.

The great poem about the battle is here. (I was required to memorize it when I was in secondary school, many years ago.) Great stuff. And stuff to be remembered today.

Money stanza:

The Pope was in his chapel before day or battle broke,
(Don John of Austria is hidden in the smoke.)
The hidden room in man’s house where God sits all the year,
The secret window whence the world looks small and very dear.
He sees as in a mirror on the monstrous twilight sea
The crescent of his cruel ships whose name is mystery;
They fling great shadows foe-wards, making Cross and Castle dark,
They veil the plumèd lions on the galley’s of St. Mark;
And above the ships are palaces of brown, black-bearded chiefs,
And below the ships are prisons, where with multitudinous griefs,
Christian captives sick and sunless, all a labouring race repines
Like a race in sunken cities, like a nation in the mines.
They are lost like slaves that swat, and in the skies of morning hung
The stair-ways of the tallest gods when tyranny was young.
They are countless, voiceless, hopeless as those fallen or fleeing on
Before the high Kings’ horses in the granite of Babylon.
And many a one grows witless in his quiet room in hell
Where a yellow face looks inward through the lattice of his cell,
And he finds his God forgotten, and he seeks no more a sign —
(But Don John of Austria has burst the battle-line!)
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!

Great lines for Christians to sing in the ongoing culture war.

Say it again:

Vivat Hispania!
Domino Gloria!
Don John of Austria
Has set his people free!

BTW, if you want to know why Europe could be raised against the Religion of Pieces, well, read here:

The Venetians, on the left flank of the battle line, were especially passionate. Not long before, the Turks had so battered an island port maintained by Venetians (and others) that the Venetian commander, Marcantonio Bragadino appealed for a truce. The Turks promised him and his subjects safe passage — and then took him prisoner, beat him, cut off his nose and ears, put a collar on him, and made him crawl like a dog before the conquering army. In a little cage, he was hoisted up on the mast of the galley so that all in the fleet and on land could see him. Then he was brought down flayed mercilessly, his skin carefully stripped from his body as he died (the skin was later stuffed with straw and sent off to Constantinople as a trophy). Thousands of Venetians and others were slaughtered on the spot, or driven off in captivity for service on Turkish galleys or in Turkish harems

Half a millenium later, the Religion of Pieces remains unchanged, and so...

Since Osama bin Laden and others often cite these battles, for which he is still seeking revenge, it is not unwise for the people of the West to bear them in mind. Besides October 7, 1571 — the great victory by Jan Sobieski’s Polish calvary over the Turks outside the gates of Vienna on September 11-12, 1683 — deserves to be remembered. But there were also other great battles — some victories, some defeats — over that thousand-year period that still live in memory, or should.