“The notion of historical turning points has proved irresistible: especially, of late, the watershed between expansionist Islam and” defensive Europe, as historian Colin Thubron writes. The decisive turning point could have been the Battle of Tours, or the fighting around Vienna. Both battles featured outnumbered European defenders offering brave, and ultimately successful, resistance to invading Muslim troops:
This crucial event has been assigned inter alia to the Battle of Tours in 732, where the Frankish leader Charles Martel turned back the Moorish army flooding across France, and variously to the siege and the Battle of Vienna (in 1529 and 1683), which checked the Ottoman advance into Eastern Europe.
So which is it? Tours or Vienna? When was that moment at which it was clear or inevitable that Europe would survive, and that Islam would fail to destroy Europe?
The Battle of Tours was certainly significant: Charles Martel turned back the Muslim army which had been flooding across France.
The fighting around Vienna was also significant: the defending Europeans stopped the Islamic advance into eastern Europe.
Colin Thubron offers a third option. The big turning point might have happened in the Mediterranean, at Malta and at Lepanto. To understand the military actions at those two places, a bit of background is necessary. The setting takes place between
1565 and 1571, when the Ottoman Turks pushed westward across the Mediterranean. Their empire was then at its height. They had absorbed Egypt and almost the whole North African littoral; to the east they were battering on Persia, to the north threatening Vienna. Over the Mediterranean itself — ancient Rome’s “center of the world” — the imperial Turkish navies and their corsair auxiliaries were spreading terror down the coasts of Italy and even Spain. But lying strategically across their path, in a pendant below Sicily, was the tiny island of Malta.
From Malta “the Knights of St. John, soldier-monks” offered resistance to the Muslim navies.
In those years, Islam had expanded westward across the Mediterranean; the Muslim navies attacked the coasts of Italy and Spain.
Malta was one small point of resistance, a place which refused to allow Islamic armies to invade and occupy.
The great turning-point in the Mediterranean may have happened at two points of resistance: Lepanto and Malta.
Malta’s survival of the great Ottoman siege in 1565 was to become one of the redemptive epics of Christendom. And a greater one was to follow. In 1571 the western Mediterranean powers — Spain, Venice, the Papacy — united at last in fear, put an end to Turkish maritime expansion at the horrifying Battle of Lepanto.
The Muslim siege on Malta in 1565 and the Muslim attack at Lepanto in 1571 were two major military offensives. Again the Europeans were outnumbered and on the defensive. Their survival showed that Europe refused to collapse in the face of attacking Muslim troops.
