108 In the mid-sixteenth century, the Ottoman Empire and its allies had carried Islamic power to the doors of Rome, Venice, and Vienna. The latter, besieged by more than a hundred thousand troops, had only just been saved. But Bulgaria, Serbia, Bosnia, Croatia, a large part of Greece, Hungary, Moldavia, Romania, and Albania had already been conquered. Italy was like a ripe fruit ready for the picking by Selim II, the successor to Suleiman the Magnificent. He mustered a formidable fleet off Lepanto, in the Gulf of Patras (Corinth), to deliver the coup de grâce. In panic, the Dominican Pope Pius V founded the Holy League, a coalition of Christian fleets, principally from Venice and Spain, under the sole command of Don John of Austria, who at the time was just twenty-four years of age. This young man, the half-brother of the emperor, Philip II, was to prove himself an admiral of genius. The Greatest Naval Battle of All Time Conscious of the desperate nature of this undertaking, the pope beseeched all Christians to pray for this Armada by a daily recitation of the rosary. The decisive battle took place on October 7, 1571. More than one hundred and fifty thousand men and at least five hundred ships gathered for the fight. It was the greatest naval battle of all time. The outcome long hung in the balance, until the confrontation finally ended in the destruction of the Muslim fleet. Pope Pius V experienced a miraculous revelation of the victory at the same moment it was taking place. This saintly pope always maintained that the victory of Lepanto was due to the special intercession of the Virgin Mary, obtained by the praying of the rosary. In commemoration of the victory, he had the invocation Auxilium Christianorum, “Help of Christians,” added to the Litanies of Loreto, and he established October 7 as the Feast of Our Lady of Victory. His successor, Gregory XIII, moved the feast to the first Sunday in October, celebrated henceforth as the Solemnity of the Most Holy Rosary of Our Blessed Lady. Ever since then, this feast has been especially honored whenever Christianity has come under threat. Thus it was extended to the entire Latin rite Church in 1716 by Clement XII to commemorate and encourage the liberation of Eastern Europe from the Islamic yoke. In a desire to re-establish the dominical liturgy solely as the day of the Resurrection, in 1913 Saint Pius X moved the feast Our Lady of the Rosary
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