The Church celebrates the Memorial of Our Lady of the Rosary on Oct. 7, a celebration originally known as Our Lady of Victory. The victory in question was the defeat of a Muslim naval invasion force at the Battle of Lepanto on Oct. 7, 1571. Lepanto is in Greece: if you look at a map of that country, its two main parts are connected by a narrow strip of land near Athens. Lepanto is on the southern, Peloponnesian peninsula.

Islamic forces had regularly threatened jihad to conquer Christian Europe. The first took place in Spain around A.D. 710, resulting in the Iberian Peninsula coming under Muslim domination. The eighth-century invasion of Iberia did not sate Islamic religious expansionism. It moved across the Pyrenees into France until it was finally repelled back into Spain by the Frankish forces of Charles Martel in A.D. 732 at the Battle of Tours. Catholic forces slowly recovered Spain through a multi-century Reconquista, which led to final liberation by the Catholic monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella in 1492. 

Having established itself in the Holy Land and the Middle East, the center of Muslim power shifted by the 15th century to what is now Turkey, leading to the Muslim conquest of Constantinople, renamed Istanbul. From there, Muslim forces probed Christian defenses, particularly across southeast Europe, today’s Balkan Peninsula. By 1571, Christian and Muslim forces were locked in naval conflict off Greece.

The Christian forces, allied as the “Holy League,” were primarily from Spain and what we today would call Italy, particularly independent Venice. Pope Pius V had commissioned them to defend Christian Europe. One of the commanders of the Christian forces, John of Austria, was but 24.

Pius V called for prayers to Our Lady for victory over the invaders and, despite many odds, that is what happened. In gratitude, the Pope declared Oct. 7 as the feast of Our Lady of Victories, which he attributed to the Rosary. 

Lepanto was the last great Islamic naval incursion into Europe. There would be later land invasions, the last major one repelled by the Polish King Jan III Sobieski just outside of Vienna in 1683 (for which Austria repaid Poland a century later by carving it up with Prussia and Russia). Sobieski also attributed his victory to Our Lady and to God’s Providence: revising Julius Caesar’s famous message from the Gallic Wars — veni, vidi, vici (“I came, I saw, I conquered”) — the Polish king notified the Pope, veni, vidi, Deus vincit (“I came, I saw, God conquered”). Muslim control of continental Europe was subsequently limited to the Balkans.

The Battle of Lepanto and Our Lady of Victory is captured in a contemporaneous painting by Paolo Veronese. Allegoria della battaglia di Lepanto (The Allegory of the Battle of Lepanto) presents a Christian view of history, which refuses to confine the “event” to the purely temporal/historical. Rather, Veronese’s painting presents both temporal and celestial dimensions to the conflict. 

In the upper portion of the painting, we see the back of a white figure being presented to the Blessed Virgin Mary. The white figure is “La Serenissima,” (The Most Serene One), a title applied to the personification of Venice (similar to how “Uncle Sam” is applied to the United States). Venice is represented as in need of defense: Cyprus, which had belonged to Venice, had been seized by Muslim forces, at great loss of Christian lives. Behind La Serenissima, the bearded figure in the gold cape, is St. Mark, the patron saint of Venice (with his iconographic lion). One commentary identifies the other saint as St. Justina of Padua, an early virgin martyr from Diocletian persecution (c. A.D. 304), a secondary patroness of Venice. Our Lady is assisted by St. Peter behind her, with his keys dangling in front and, according to commentary, St. Roch, a major saint of medieval Europe whose cult in northern Italy spread with the repelling of the plague. 

Heaven’s view of the conflict is demonstrated by the light that falls on the Christian forces and the darkness shadowing the Turkish Ottoman forces, which are also assaulted by the angel on the right in pink, hurling thunderbolts against them.

The depiction of the conflict illustrates the magnitude of the battle, which was estimated to have resulted in about 40,000 casualties, a huge number for the time. The density of the ships and the close combat indicate just how intense the fight was.

The large painting (almost 6 feet by 5 feet) is in Venice.