#antemuraleppcuproject

[antemuraleppcuproject]

Conclusion for Italy

My research served to present the importance of the defence of Europe by Mary. Pope Pius V. the Saint called the whole Europe to pray the rosary for the victory of the Christianity against the Muslims. He even visited the Holy House in Loreto and  after that, the Holy League won the Battle of Lepanto in 1571.

After the Battle of Lepanto, the importance of the Holy House and the feast of Our Lady of Rosary was very important. Not just because of the defence of Europe, but it was also a profound act against the reformation at that time.

The adoration of Holy Mary and the saints renewed by the Counterreformation and the Holy House of Loretto with the Black Madonna spread into every corner of Catholic Europe as a symbol against the Turks. 

[antemuraleppcuproject]

Was the battle of Lepanto the last battle of the crusades?

At the battle of Lepanto, the Holy Christian League defeated the Muslim Ottoman Empire on the Mediterranean Sea, and it was a totally incredible victory. The members of the Holy League were the Republic of Venice, the Papal States, the Republic of Genova, the Duchy of Savoy, Spanish Empire and as part of the Spanish possessions the Kingdom of Naples, the Kingdom of Sicily and the Kingdom of Sardinia. The Holy League was a great alliance of the Christian states of Europe to stop the Ottoman Empire’s expansion. The battle happened on 7 October 1571. The Spanish admiral, Don John of Austria was the commander of the League, who was the half-brother of Philip II, the King of Spain. In this time people supposed that the Ottoman army is invincible, and when the European powers got news of the victory of the Holy League, the Christian states celebrated it, and constructed lots of memories of the battle.

[antemuraleppcuproject]

Fest of Our Lady of Rosary

Pope Pius V. the Saint called all of Europe to pray the Rosary for the victory of Christianity. The pope even went to Loreto, and made worship at the Holy House of Mary.

The tradition of the veneration of the Holy House goes back to the Apostolic times. Mary’s house have been the place of prayer and pilgrimage for the Christians. In the era of the Crusades, when the Muslims invaded the Holy Land in 1090, and after when they destroyed many Christian sacred shrines and places, on May 10 1291, the Holy House was transported by angels from Nazareth to Trsat, wich was at that time the part of the Hungarian Kingdom. Now Trsat (in Italian: Tersatto) is a small part of the city of Rijeka (Fiume) in Croatia.

In 1294, when the Muslims menanced the Balkan area, the Holy House disappeared from Trsat; the angels transported it across the Adriatic Sea and the House appeared nearby Recanti in Italy. The House became very fast a place of pilgrimage and miracles. The House was moved for a third time, because nearby the Holy House, bandits menanced the pilgrims, and it was not safe any more. The House finally arrived to it’s present place in 1295 to Loretto, Italy.

- Mother Mary of Tersatto

- The Black Madonna of Loretto

[antemuraleppcuproject]

Summary (Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth)

During this semester, I was about to write a summary on the Polish antemurale myth and I also tried to look beneath it; to describe the roughness and the inaccuracy of this topos. On the other side, as the admin of the page sometimes I was carried away to the Hungarian and Croatian topics. As I searched for other antemurales and bulwarks in history along the semester, I focused on citing. This way I was able to find many interesting comments and developments on the topos.

The Polish and Hungarian Kingdoms were the first ones to bear this title, as antemurale christianitatis. Although the term originated from the military architecture, it was used to describe countries. It appeared in various forms: scutum (shield), clipeus (round shield), propugnaculum (fortification or mound), arx (citadel), fortalitium (castle), praesidium (defence), murus (wall), munimen[tum] (shelter),[1] but antemurale became the most widely used. It was translated to Hungarian as védőbástya, although it means a bastion. In Polish, the translation is correct: przedmurze; but forpoczta (bastion), płot (fence) and straż (sentinel) was also used.[2] The term now became a synonym of a buffer state or borderzone (e.g. in the Cold War, Turkey was a strong ally of the US and a bulwark against the USSR, or the historical antemurale Croatia was called Rampart of Liberty in the Balkan region by Margaret Thatcher in 1998.)

Both states (Poland, Hungary and inside Hungary, Croatia) have received this title from the Pope, as the Eastern fines of the West and Catholic Christianity. The bulwark stood against the Mongols and Muslims and against the Orthodoxs as well. Wiktor Weintraub sees it as a major ambiguity,[3] but I don’t see it was a problem. The border between Latin and Greek, Catholic and Orthodox became one of the most basic borders of Europe. Otherwise, Muscovy wasn’t part of Europe in the Polish sense. But Weintraub has a point: the Polish antemurale-myth was on it’s height in the nineteenth century, but not due to an imminent Turkish threat. Poland wasn’t an independent country at that time, but the continous uprisings against the Russians had a national and state-like historical and theoretical background (see Mickiewicz: Reduta Ordona). Albeit, this thinking, that Poland is placed on the border of what is European (civilized, Christian, and most of all, Catholic) and what is non-European (Asiatic, barbarian, pagan and Orthodox), has marked Polish culture since, at least, the mid-fifteenth century. Jolanta T. Pekacz also cites, that despite many countries held the antemurale name, it was only in Poland that the concept of the antemurale deeply influenced national consciousness and often became a guidepost of political thought.[4]

Which I think is more controversial in the question of the Catholic bulwark, that how it is possible that the Polish Kingdom became an azyl heretyków, a shelter for heretics? It is known, that for example, Judaism arrived to Poland before Christianity; in the early modern times, there lived many Calvinists, Lutherans and other reformed sects (like Arians, Anabaptists and Husites) in the Rzeczpospolita and even at the time of the third partition of Poland, the Roman Catholics made up only the half of the population.[5] By Davies, we can find many occasions, when Catholics suffered injustice by the law, but martyrdom, such as in Oxford or in Kassa, never happened. Nevertheless, we are able to see a slow expansion of the Church. The veneration of Mary became one of the strongest in the world, and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth created the Union of Brest (Unia Brzeska), in 1596. It meant the union of the Orthodox Kiev Metropolia with the Catholic Church, so at least two-thirds of the Orthodox population became Catholic in Poland-Lithuania. By switching to Catholicism, the Orthodox clergy accepted the filioque and the primacy of the Pope and the clergy became an internal part of the szlachta and proper education was granted to becoming priests and deacons.

If I would like to list every bloodshed between religious groups, I could also mention Thorn (Toruń), the Jesuit blood-bath of the German Protestants or the mentioned German prayer from Danzig (Gdańsk), which was asking God to flood Vienna with Catholic blood, as he poured rain down on them. In the early modern times before the 1660’s and even after that, the szlachta, the Polish nobility was based on and upheld by concors discordia, which means agreement on disagreement. Agreement on preserving the strong political role of the nobles against the ruler. We can say, that agreement on disagreement, the forming of the Uniate Church and the golden liberty of nobility were a great factor holding together this commonwealth, but these were also the reasons of the partitions of Poland. The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was a medieval era state, not a modern monarchy, with great absolutistic power and with a stable ruling dynasty. It’s tolerance was medieval, pre-Reformation; it’s success in Counterreformation and Catholic renewal was only due to it’s lagging situation on it’s Eastern borders.

So, ending with the statement, antemurale is a perfect description of Poland in the early modern period. It became a myth, an identity of victimhood, but first, it was a political slogan, to defend from, or even push the enemies of Christianity and to ask for money to wage this wars.

[1] Srodecki, Paul: Antemurale Christianitatis. In: Religiöse Erinnerungsorte in Ostmitteleuropa. Konstitution und Konkurrenz im nationen- und epochenübergreifenden Zugriff. Berlin, 2013. 804.

[2] Davies, Norman: Lengyelország története. Osiris, Budapest, 2006. 139.

[3]  Weintraub, Wiktor: Renaissance Poland and “Antemurale Christianitatis”. Harvard Ukrainian Studies, Vol. ¾, Part 2. Eucharisterion: Essays presented to Omeljan Pritsak on his Sixtieth Birthday by his Colleagues and Students (1979-1980). 920.

[4] Pekacz, Jolanta T.: ‘Antemurale’ of Europe; from the history of national megalomania in Poland. History of European Ideas, Vol. 20., 1-3, 1995. 419.

[5] Davies, Norman: Lengyelország története. Osiris, Budapest, 2006. 145.

[antemuraleppcuproject]

Turcicae tres

“Two prominent sixteenth-century publicists propagated the idea of a war against Turkey through an alliance with Vienna: by the middle of the century Stanisław Orzechowski, and by the end of it Krzysztof Warszewicki. [...] Warszewicki was a Habsburg political agent and, because of that, he was twice forced to flee to Austrian lands. It is significant that the first version of his anti-Turkish tract, Turcicae tres, was published in 1589 while he was an émigré in Prague. The expanded version, Turcicae quatuor decim, appeared in 1595 in Cracow, after he had been allowed to return to his native country. There, in the twelfth oration, he speaks of Poland as "quasi totius Europae propugnaculum." […] Despite the fact that these anti-Turkish voices must have found favor with some segments of the reading public, one can prove that the idea of Poland as antemurale or propugnaculum of Christianity was not popular with sixteenth-century Poles.”

-  Weintraub, Wiktor: Renaissance Poland and “Antemurale Christianitatis”. Harvard Ukrainian Studies, Vol. ¾, Part 2. Eucharisterion: Essays presented to Omeljan Pritsak on his Sixtieth Birthday by his Colleagues and Students (1979-1980). 927-928.

Weintraub tries to prove it: antemurale was a foreign political slogan, to pull Poland into war. 

The pamphlet is readable online: mek.oszk.hu/04500/04522/04522.pdf

[antemuraleppcuproject]

...Artyleryi ruskiej ciągną się szeregi, Prosto, długo, daleko, jako morza brzegi; I widziałem ich wodza: przybiegł, mieczem skinął I jak ptak jedno skrzydło wojska swego zwinął; Wylewa się spod skrzydła ściśniona piechota Długą czarną kolumną, jako lawa błota, Nasypana iskrami bagnetów. Jak sępy Czarne chorągwie na śmierć prowadzą zastępy. Przeciw nim sterczy biała, wąska, zaostrzona, Jak głaz bodzący morze, reduta Ordona.

detail from Adam Mickiewicz’s Reduta Ordona 

English translation: 

“...Rus artillery ranks goes. straight, long, far like a sea shores; I saw their leader: he ran, waved his sword and like a bird one wing of his army swinged; Out from under the wing the squeezed infantry pours in a long black column as lava of mud, Showered with sparkles of bayonets. As vultures, black banners leads their regiments to death. Against them points white, narrow, sharpened like a rock that gores the sea, Ordon's redoubt.” 

This citation shows, how antemurale formed Polish culture, how it formed a strong image of Poland’s place in history. If Europe is a cultural island, then Poland is on the shore guarding it, and the Russians are the sea.

On the other side, Reduta became the name of Poland’s first theatre laboratory. It was founded in 1919 in Warsaw by Juliusz Osterwa and Mieczysław Limanowski, who together created Reduta’s ideology and led its work. source: grotowski.net/en/encyclopedia/reduta

Watch this video for contemporary apprehension of this poem: youtube.com/watch?v=0fNJiuEp3h8

[antemuraleppcuproject]

The Final Conclusion Of The Term ’Antemurale Christianitatis’ In Croatia, During The Early Modern Period

During the semester, I wanted to represent the political situation of Croatia during the early modern period in the aspect of one country of the bulwark of the Christendom. At that time politically, Croatia was the integral part of the Hungarian Kingdom. The Croats belonged to the European culture, almost all of them preserved their Catholic faith, despite the success of the facilely spreading Protestantism in the Carpathian Basin.

The technical methods which I used were: historical, chronological, political, literary and religious approaches. At the beginning I introduced the Ottoman invasion in the Balkans, how they occupied the border areas of the Hungarian Kingdom in North-West Bosnia, and in Slavonia. After this effect, the Croats started to escape to the northern territories. They went up to Moravia, (North)-West Hungary. They played important role in the Catholic Renewal in West Hungary thanks to the numerous Croatian Catholic priests. Nevertheless the Croatian population suffered from the big population decline, which had endless political consequences. This was the period when started the mixing of the population in Bosnia and in Croatia. Vlachs, Serbs, and another orthodox groups settled into the pre-Croats fields, because they were supported by the Ottoman authorities.

How could feel the Croats that they are the bulwark of the Christendom. In the 1510s and 1520s Croatian humanists, aware of the catastrophe towards which Croatia was heading, addressed a number of West European potentates, including the Pope, in speeches and letters. In 1517 Pope Leo X called Croatia, ‘the bulwark of Christendom’ (Antemurale Christianitatis), in 1519 years later the humanist Tomo Crnić (Niger) described the country’s desperate plight to the Pope and pleaded for help. If none came, said Crnić, Croatia would surrender to the Ottomans and thus open their way to the West. The idea of reaching an agreement with the Ottomans reappeared peripherally in later periods. Marulić’s poem from that time, Molitva suprotiv Turkom, (Prayer against the Turks) was the first in a series of lamentations by Croatian poets over the fate of their homeland, a tradition which continued through the centuries.

But not the Ottoman Empire was the only problem. The Protestantism also spread among the Croats alongside of the Danube and the Mura River. But after the renewal of the Catholic faith in the Hungarian Kingdom, the Croats persecuted the Protestant preachers. After the Counterreformation the most important part of the Croatian identity was the Catholic faith. At that time the idea was created about the life between two pagans. The first, were the brutal Muslim Turks, and the second were the Hungarian Protestant noblemen and counts.

But the Croatian and the Hungarian nobility could co-operate also with each other. I also devoted one lecture to the Wesselényi (Frankopan–Zrinski) conspiracy. This event was a turning point in the Croatian history. After it the Hungarian and the Croatian political groups started separate ways from each other. The reason was the decapitation of the biggest Croatian nobles.  During this period the episcopate of Zagreb started to expand, to took tithes from Hungarian territories. Later, the bishops of Zagreb were the one of the most important supporters of the Croatian independence.

If we compare with the other areas, Hungary, Poland, Venice, we can say that Croatia was the smallest entity, but they were able to keep their Catholic identity against the Ottomans and also the Hungarians and Austrians. They were on the periphery, but the Croatian literature flourished in the 16th century. Matthias Flacius Illyricus was the most important Protestant theologian, and the religious literature also flourished in Dalmatia at that time. After the disappearance of the Frankopan and Zrínyi families, the Croats also kept their political identity, and of course the Zrínyi family had an important remembrance in Croatia, because of their struggles against the Ottomans.

I would like to complete my work with one later event. When the Ustasa regime came into power in 1941, they started to convert the Muslim Bosnians and the Orthodox Serbs to Catholic faith. When the German officers saw this process from Germany, they just wrote a record: the Croats are converting their enemies, the Serbs and the Muslims to the Catholic faith. We are feeling reading this, like we are in the 16–17th century, not in the 20th century. Here we can find one tragic aftermath of the Ottoman period in this area.

[antemuraleppcuproject]

„Do Not Hurt the Hungarian!” The Pamphlet for Freedom

The fight against the Turks was getting less important for the Habsburgs, and the Hungarian nobles didn’t do enough either, so Nicolas Zrínyi tried to convince them to be more active in the defense of the Kingdom. He wrote that in his pamphlet, called Az török áfium ellen való orvosság, in English The Medicine Against the Turkish Disease. That was written in 1661.

In the beginning of the text, the count rebuke the Hungarian nation for their passivity in the fights. He gave antique examples from the Greek history.

Next, he examined the foreign countries and ascertained, that these countries were not able to help Hungary in time, so it was unnecessary to wait for their help. The causes were the geographical distance and that other threats were binding them the other part of their borders. He also mentioned that the King of Hungary is trying to do everything to liberate his people, but other foreign rulers can’t allow that. He also stated that the Germans were not helping the Hungarians, because the Hungarian war was about to protect them against the Turks.

Furthermore the foreign soldiers and generals gave up the Hungarian castles more easily than the Hungarian captains, because they are foreigners and their fight is not the protection of their homeland. So Zrínyi encouraged Hungarians to be more active in the war, because the Hungarian soldiers are defending their home until they die. As he said: „Itt győznötök, vagy halnotok kell!” in English: „Here you can win or die!”

To form a good Hungarian army, the count gave an idea to make it possible.  First of all Hungary’s could have a regular, well trained national army, which is mostly light cavalry. In that time, he said the army’s headcount could be approximately 42 thousand.

According to him, the catering problems were solved by good quantity of military pay, which is also preventing raids. To prevent other breaks in moral, he wanted to institute a military law.

In addition Zrínyi made a suggestion who could be a soldier. First he wanted a well-trained and highly educated nobility, but they weren’t enough, so he decided to select from the peasants, who are in good health and doing strong physical work. He suggested education and training for the soldiers too, because it can raise the convergence of the army.

The only help, what the foreigners can give to Hungarians is the training. Zrínyi wanted that, so he stated, that the trainers of this Hungarian army to be foreigners in the beginning.

The count closed his pamphlet with a provocation: he wrote, we can also run to Brasil, like a coward, or we can fight for our land and our people, like a man.