Christmas Every Day

1571 Battle of Lepanto

Since the 1370s the Ottoman Turks had been making themselves the dominant power in the Middle East and the Mediterranean, rolling back Christian and other Muslim opponents. In 1453 they took the last remnant of the Roman Empire when they smashed in the walls of Constantinople; in 1517 they seized Egypt and Arabia and claimed the Sunni Caliphate; in 1522 they drove the Knights of St John out of their fortress in Rhodes; 1527 they reached the gates of Vienna. Turkish fleets, including those of their North African pirate underlings, threatened every mile of the Christian Mediterranean coastline. From his Topkapi Palace their Emperor ruled territory from the Atlantic to the Euphrates.

Turkish success owed much to Christian disunity. Ogier Ghiselin de Busbecq, the ambassador of the Holy Roman Empire to Constantinople, surveyed the situation in the 1550s and declared:

 On their side is the vast wealth of their empire, unimpaired resources, experience and practice in arms, a veteran soldiery, an uninterrupted series of victories, readiness to endure hardships, union, order, discipline, thrift and watchfulness. On ours are found an empty exchequer, luxurious habits, exhausted resources, broken spirits, a raw and insubordinate soldiery, and greedy quarrels; there is no regard for discipline, license runs riot, the men indulge in drunkenness and debauchery, and worst of all, the enemy are accustomed to victory, we to defeat. Can we doubt what the result must be?

Though previous attempts at a Christian alliance against the Turks had failed, Pope Pius V laboured to put together a coalition to save Cyprus in 1571. The resulting “Holy League” included ships from Spain, Venice, Genoa, the Knights of St John, the Papal States and Florence. Keeping order in this fragile alliance was the job of Don John of Austria, the bastard brother of the Spanish King, who had to hang a few troublesome captains to assert the necessary unity.

The combined Christian fleet numbered 212 ships, almost all oar-propelled galleys, 40,000 sailors and 28,000 infantry. They faced a Turkish force of 251 ships, 50,000 oarsmen and 31,000 soldiers in the Gulf of Patras off the coast of southwestern Greece. The key to the battle was the deployment, in front of the Holy League’s ships, of four galleasses, large, clumsy, heavily-armed vessels bristling with cannons which blew up 70 Muslim galleys before they could reach the Christian line. The Turkish galleys carried crack Janissary troops, the elite fighting force of the Ottomans, but they were outgunned by their opponents. The day ended in a near-complete Christian victory; they sunk or captured over 150 enemy ships, killing or capturing 20,000 men and liberating 12,000 Christian slaves from the Turkish galleys.

The Turks would soon rebuild their fleet and continue to dominate the eastern Mediterranean but their defeat at Lepanto cost them dearly in experienced sailors and fighters. The Holy League would soon dissolve but Christian fleets would never face a serious naval threat again in the central or western Mediterranean. The boost to morale was incalculable and Lepanto still figures prominently in the civic mythology of Venice and Spain.

Our Lady of the Rosary

Pope Pius V atributed the triumph to the intercession of the Virgin Mary and created a new festival for Our Lady of Victory. Two years later Pope Gregory XIII changed the name to the “Feast of the Holy Rosary” and in 1960 Pope Paul VI renamed it again to the “Feast of Our Lady of the Rosary”

There are numerous churches dedicated to either Our Lady of Victory or Our Lady of the Rosary Maria del Rosario is a common Spanish girl’s name while Rosario is a popular name for boys in the Catholic world.

1793 The French Revolution dechristianizes the calendar

Since its beginning in 1789, forces of the French Revolution had been hostile to Christianity, especially the Roman Catholic Church. The monastic system had been abolished and all church lands seized by the government. The Catholic church was severed from its allegiance to the Pope and its clergy became civil servants, forced to swear loyalty to the state; priests who refused were subject to imprisonment, exile, or death. All church bells were seized and melted down to make artillery; church silver and precious objects were stolen; crosses were torn down, tombs were desecrated, and buildings turned over to secular uses. In place of Christianity, supporters of the Revolution offered the near-atheist Cult of Reason or the deist Cult of the Supreme Being.

On October 5, 1703 the traditional calendar with its Anno Domini dating from the birth of Christ, its seven-day week and names drawn from mythology was abolished and replaced by a revolutionary calendar. All months now had 30 days, divided into 3 ten-day décades, with a 5-day year-end holiday. Saints’ days were abolished and instead of a day of rest every 7 days, there was now one every 10 days — revolutionaries despised the idleness encouraged by the old church calendar and its many holidays. Dating was to take place from the beginning of the French Republic, months were named after climatic conditions and days were named after tools or common objects. Thus, Christmas Day 1793 was officially V nivôse II, le jour de chien — Year II, the fifth day of the snowy month, the day of the dog. (It could have been worse, December 28 was “the day of manure.”) There was even a short-lived attempt to decimalize the clock: a ten-hour day, each hour with 100 minutes. 

Such efforts were made to remove every-day religion from the minds of the common people but ordinary folk did not fail to notice that they now had to work more days in the year. Though governments tried to enforce the reforms, they never truly caught on and Napoleon ended the experiment on XIII frimaire XIII, January 1, 1806.

1187 Saladin Captures Jerusalem

The Catholic knights of the First Crusade had taken much of the eastern coastline of the Mediterranean away from Muslim forces by 1100 and set up a number of Christian enclaves, principally the Kingdom of Jerusalem. The westerners had benefited from Islamic political divisions in the area but as the 12^th century wore on, those divisions were healed and an Arab counter-attack had begun. In 1144 Edessaa fell to the Turks, prompting an unsuccessful Second Crusade that failed to return the city to Christian control.

In the person of An-Nasir Salah ad-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub, known in the West as Saladin, Muslim forces in the Middle East found a powerful leader. In 1169 he conquered Egypt from the Fatimid dynasty and in 1174 he made himself master of Syria. Despite attempts to kill him by the Assassins (a Shi’ite sect) he managed to unite most of the Arab forces in a bid to oust the Crusaders from the Middle East.

On July 4, 1187 Saladin defeated a large Crusader army at the Battle of Hattin (depicted in the dreadful Hollywood film Kingdom of Heaven which you must never, ever watch if you value historical truth) taking the King of Jerusalem, Guy de Lusignan, prisoner, and massacring Templar and Hospitaller prisoners. He then moved against the city of Jerusalem and placed it under siege. Defenders under Balian of Ibelin swore to destroy sacred Islamic sites inside the city if reasonable surrender terms were not granted, so Saladin agreed to let Christians withdraw from the city on payment of a low ransom. On October 2, 1187 the city surrendered, with Saladin keeping about 15,000 Christian residents as slaves.

The fall of Jerusalem prompted the Third Crusade, led by Richard Lionheart of England who was able to defeat Saladin in battle but could not recapture the city. Saladin achieved a glowing reputation among Christians during the Middle Ages as a noble infidel. Dante placed him in Limbo along with other virtuous non-Christians such as Socrates and Plato.