There are signs prominently displayed at the city limits of Aviano that say
Terra di Padre Marco or "Land of Padre Marco," and one that reads
Borgo Natale del Beato Padre Marco or "Birthplace of the Blessed Padre Marco." I had never heard of
Padre Marco d'Aviano until I came to Italy. His story deserves more recognition than it gets. He became a center of controversy in 2003 when Pope John Paul II beatified him (the final step before sainthood). The controversy serves as an object lesson on how history can be sacrificed on the alter of political correctness.
Padre Marco d'Aviano (1631-1699) was born Carlo Domenico Cristofori to a noble family in Aviano, the small town at the foot of Monte Cavallo in Italy that is host to Aviano Airbase where I am stationed. During his
Jesuit education, Cristofori became facinated with the lives of the Saints. He ran away from home at age 16 to join the
Venetians at Crete, who were at war with the Ottoman Turks who were threatening their lucrative trade routes. Cristofori hoped to convert the Muslim Turks, and perhaps become a martyr himself. After traveling for several days, young Cristofori was cold and hungry. He went to a
Capuchin monastary where he was taken in, fed, sheltered and counseled to go home. He did return home, but the kindness and spirituality of the Capuchin monks affected him deeply.
Cristofori became a Capuchin novice in 1648. He took his vows and the name Marco the following year, and was ordained in 1655. Padre Marco lived a
cloistered life for many years, but was called to
missionary work and became known as a fiery preacher. Recognized for his keen diplomatic and administrative skills, he was chosen as superior for various Capuchin monastaries. His reputation was further enhanced when several miracles were attributed to him. Pope
Innocent XI appointed Padre Marco as
Papal legate to
Leopold I, Holy Roman Emperor of Austria in 1683. Vienna was in grave peril, as a Muslim army from the Ottoman Empire was marching on the city.
You have to go back almost 1,000 years prior to the life of Marco d'Aviano, to the early Islamic conquests and the Crusades, to gain a better understanding of how a simple Capuchin monk became the center of a pissing contest over political correctness in 2003. Through most of western history, western historians regarded the Crusades as a noble, romantic and heroic defense of Christianity. This is particularly true of the Third Crusade, involving Richard I "The Lionheart" of England and Salidin, the Sultan of Egypt. More recently, the Crusades have been reinterpreted by the politically correct historians who now dominate academia as the worst exemplars of western imperialism and colonialism.
These reinterpretations of history tend to ignore certain inconvenient facts. For example, Muslim armies of the Umayyad Empire first invaded Europe in 711 AD, and by 718 AD had conquered almost the entire Iberian peninsula, establishing the Islamic kingdom of Al-Andalus. The islamic invasion of Europe occured almost 400 years before the First Crusade was launched by Pope Urban II in 1095 to regain control of Christian holy sites in Jerusalem. The Muslim armies continued their conquest of Europe by crossing the Pyrenees and subduing Septimania, a narrow strip on the southwestern Mediterranean coast of modern France in 719 AD.
The above map shows the maximum extent of the Umayyad Caliphate (click it for a bigger image). After their relatively easy conquests of the Iberian peninsula and southwest France, the Muslim armies, lead by their Wali (governor general) Al-Samh ibn Malik al-Khawlani, met their first significant military loss at the Battle of Toulouse. Duke Odo of Aquitaine crushed the Muslim army as it laid siege to Odo's capital of Toulouse in 721 AD. Al-Samh ibn Malik al-Khawlani escaped the destruction of his army, but died shortly after the battle and was replaced by his second-in-command Abdul Rahman.
Abdul Rahman raised another army and set out in force to conquer the rest of Europe a decade later in 732 AD. The Muslim army met again with Duke Odo of Aquitaine as it approached Bordeaux. In what is known as the Battle of the River Garonne, Odo was decisively defeated, fled the battlefield and was forced to seek the protection of his arch-rival Charles Martel. European accounts state that tens of thousands of soldiers from Odo's defeated army were systematically slaughtered after the battle to remove them as a threat to the Muslim army's rear. Even Muslim accounts speak of the "faithful...[smiting] all with the sword." Left undefended, the Muslim army pillaged the town of Bordeaux.
The Muslim victory at Bordeaux set the stage for one of the most important battles in European history, the Battle of Tours. The Muslim army continued to pillage its way across Gaul, possibly aiming to plunder the riches at the Abby of Saint Martin in Tours. The Muslim army met Charles Martel's Frankish army near Tours. The exact location of the battle is lost to history. The two armies stared each other down for six days before Abdul Rahman blinked and sent his armored heavy cavalry against Charles' unarmored infantry drawn into a defensive square phalanx. The Muslim heavy cavalry was able to break into the phalanx and inflict considerable damage, but the well-trained and disciplined Frankish infantry was highly motivated (they knew what had happened to Odo's army after they lost at Bordeaux).
Charles ordered a group of his scouts to raid the Muslim camp and supply train at the height of the attack. When a group of the Muslim cavalry broke away from the attack to defend their camp and supply train, other elements of the cavalry apparently thought that is was a general retreat and it turned into a rout. Abdul Rahman, attempting to reverse his troops and resume the attack was surrounded by Frankish soldiers and killed. Charles expected the attack to resume in the morning and kept his troops in their defensive phalanx. The next morning, they found that the enemy camp had been abandoned and the Muslim army had retreated with what booty they could carry. Muslim accounts of the battle say that Abdul Rahman's generals squabbled amongst themselves and could not agree on a leader after Rahman was killed.
Charles Martel's army was the only Christian military force on the European continent that was capable of stopping Abdul Rahman's Muslim army. There is no reason to believe that the Muslim army would not have gone on to conquer all of Christian Europe if it had not been stopped at the Battle of Tours, only a few days march from the gates of Paris. It's hard to imagine how different European history would have been if Charles had been defeated at the Battle of Tours. Charles' brilliant tactical move in attacking the Muslim army's camp and supply train from the rear and lucky break in killing Abdul Rahman saved Christian Europe from being a footnote in the history of Muslim Europe. It took until 759 AD for the Franks to finally drive the Muslims back across the Pyrenees under the leadership of the son of Charles Martel, the comically named Pippin the Short. Pippin the Short fathered a son named Charles who later became known as Charlemagne, the first Holy Roman Emperor.
West of the Pyrenees, in Muslim-controlled Al-Andalus, things were not going well either. In 722, the year after the Muslim defeat by Odo of Aquitaine at the Battle Toulouse, Pelayo of Asturias, from one of the small unconquered enclaves on the Iberian peninsula, defeated the Muslim army of the Emir of Al-Andalus at the Battle of Covadonga. This victory is regarded as the beginning of the Reconquista, the Christian reconquest of the Iberian peninsula. The Reconquista took almost 800 years, and was not completed until 1492 by King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain (yes, that Ferdinand and Isabella).
Al-Andalus became a backwater in the Islamic world during the long centuries of the Reconquista. The Umayyad Caliphate fell to internecine fighting in 750 AD and was replaced by the Abbasid Caliphate. The first three centuries of the Abbasid Caliphate ushered in what is considered to be the Golden Age of Islam, particularly under Caliph Harun al-Rashid and his successors who recruited scholars and encouraged the study of mathematics and natural science. The Caliphate weakened over the centuries as tribal leaders carved out fiefdoms that were only nominally ruled by the Caliphate. The Abbasid Caliphate effectively ended in 1258 AD at the Battle of Bagdad, when its capital was sacked by Hulagu Khan, a grandson of Genghis Khan. The Caliphate continued in a weakened, ceremonial form after the Battle of Bagdad when a surviving member of the Abbasids was installed in Cairo by the Mamluk Sultanate of Egypt.
Anatolia is the part of Modern Turkey that is east of the Bosphorus Straight , between the Mediterranean Sea and the Black Sea. After the destruction of Bagdad and the Abbasid Caliphate in 1258, Anatolia, along with dying remnants of the Christian Byzantine Empire, became a vassal state of the Mongol Empire. The Mogols divided Anatolia into a number of Emirates called the Anatolian Beyliks. This set the stage for the rise of the Ottoman Empire, when Osman I, the leader of a small beylik in western Anatolia, declared the independence of his Ottoman Principality and began conquering his neighbors in 1299.
The power and prestige of the Ottomans continued to grow under the successors of Osman I. The fall of Constantinople to Ottoman Sultan Mehmet II in 1453 marked the end of the Byzantine Empire and the recognition by the European powers that the Ottomans were now an Empire. The last Abbasid Caliph was forced to surrender the Caliphate to the Ottoman Empire in 1517 after the Ottomans defeated the Mamluk Sultinate and won effective control of most Arab lands. Decades before the fall of Constantinople, the Ottomans invaded southeastern Europe where they were opposed by Serbian Christians. The Serbs were crushed by the Ottomans in the 1389 Battle of Kosovo. The battle of Kosovo is so central to the cultural identity of the Serbs, that they were willing to go to war with the NATO and the United States in the 1990s to keep Kosovo under Serbian control. Serbia became an Ottoman tributary principality and was annexed by the Ottoman Empire in 1459.
The Ottoman Empire reached its Golden Age under the reign of Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent. Suleiman captured Belgrade, the last Christian enclave in Serbia, in 1521. Belgrade remained under Ottoman rule for the next 300 years. The Kingdom of Hungary, in concert with various other Christian kingdoms, had long opposed further expansion of the Ottomans into Europe. The Hungarians and their allies suffered a devastating defeat at the hands of Suleiman at the Battle of Mohács in 1526 that destroyed Hungary as an independent kingdom. With the Kingdom of Hungary no longer a viable force to resist it, southwestern Hungary, Transylvania, Wallachia and Moldavia all became Ottoman tributary principalities.
The Ottomans were then left to face the biggest threat to their further expansion into Europe--the Austrian Hapsburg Empire. Suleiman's Muslim army laid siege to the Hapsburg imperial capital in 1529, but was not able to capture it and was forced to withdraw. The Ottoman advance into Europe stopped at the gates of Vienna. For the next 135 years the Hapsburgs and the Ottomans stabbed at each other intil 1664 when the Hapsburgs handed a crushing defeat to the Ottomans at the Battle of Saint Gotthard in western Hungary. The Ottoman loss was so complete that the Ottomans were forced to agree to the treaty known as the Peace of Vasvár. The Peace of Vasvár held for 20 years until the Ottoman Empire again laid siege to Vienna in 1683.
The Ottomans used the 20 years of peace under the Peace of Vasvár to make vast logistical preparations to realize their long-term aspiration to capture Vienna because of its strategic position at two important crossroads of Europe. The Ottomans declared war on the Hapsburg Empire on August 6, 1682. Even though the Ottoman army had been mobilized on January 21, 1682, it didn't actually set out for Austria until April 1, 1683. This was a fatal mistake, because it allowed the Austrians 15 months to prepare for the expected attack.
This brings us back to a humble Capuchin Monk. Pope Innocent XI watched the Ottoman army's war preparations with increasing alarm. The Pope made vast contributions from the Papal treasury for war preparations, appealed to the Christian kings of Europe to form a Holy League to ally with Austria, and appointed to Emperor Leopold I of Austria a Papal legate--Padre Marco d'Aviano. Padre Marco carried the Papal appeals to the Christian kings. He worked tirelessly to secure help from the kings of Saxony, Bavaria, Baden, Franconia, Swabia, Lorraine and Poland. He used all his diplomatic and administrative skills to hold the fragile alliance together. Joining troops from Venice and the Papal lands, they became the Holy League and Polish King Jan III Sobieski was appointed overall leader by Padre Marco.
The image below is of King Jan III Sobieski being asked to join the Holy League. Click the painting for a bigger image. The central, red-robed figure is not Pope Innocent XI, because it is unlikely that he would have ventured out of the Vatican at such a critical time. The figure is wearing a cardinal's hat and is more than likely a Polish cardinal beseeching Sobieski's help on behalf of the Pope. Note, however, the bearded man above his head wearing what appears to be a Capuchin monk's robes.
In a eerily familiar turn of events, Louis XIV of France not only refused to join the Holy League to fight the Muslims, he took advantage of the situation to pursue French parochial interests by militarily enforcing French territorial claims against Alsace and Lorraine while their armies were away defending Christian Europe. Who would have guessed that the French, when confronted with an Islamic threat to western civilization, would act in such a perfidious and self-serving manner?
Padre Marco urged the citizens of Vienna to seek deliverance from God. Emperor Leopold ordered public pennance and prayer. When the Ottoman army drew near, the Emperor and about 80,000 Viennese civilians fled to Linz. Only 11,000 troops and 5000 civilian volunteers remained behind the city walls to defend Vienna when the Ottoman advance units arrived on July 14, 1683. Following the standard script for siege warfare, all food supplies were cut off to starve out the defenders. The Ottoman cannons were outdated and easily outranged by the superior and better-placed Austrian cannons on the city walls. The Viennese had demolished the houses that skirted the city walls leaving a vast empty plain to expose the attackers to their guns. The Turks were forced to dig long trenches to allow their troops to approach the city walls while reducing their exposure to the deadly Viennese fire.
When their trenches reached the city walls, the Muslims started the next phase of their planned siege. They began tunneling chambers under the city walls which they filled with kegs of gunpowder to blast breaches into the walls. The defenders countered by digging their own tunnels to prevent the Turks from completing their work. Savage, underground, hand-to-hand combat in the dark between the opposing tunnelers ensued and is sometimes referred to as the "War of the Moles." The Viennese defenders were not entirely successful in the subterranean war. In early September, Turkish Sappers managed to blast several breaches in the city walls and Ottoman attackers occupied some city ramparts.
Like the cavalry arriving in the nick of time in the American West, the relief army of the Holy League arrived just when the situation in Vienna seemed hopeless, and defeat a virtual certainty. Sobieski planned to attack the Ottoman army on September 13, 1683, but found the Turkish resistance was rather weak. He attacked at 4:00 AM on September 12, 1683. Before the battle, Padre Marco "celebrated holy Mass, preached a brief, inflamed homily, publicly invoked God's help, and blessed the army." Showing absolutely no fear, Padre Marco galloped his horse in front of the Christian troops exhorting them to attack. When the Muslim troops counterattacked, Padre marco raised his crucifix to them and cried out "Behold the cross of the Lord! Begone, enemy troops." According to legend, a white dove appeared on Marco's head at a critical moment in the battle. Taking this as a sign from God, the Christian soldiers renewed their efforts and won the day. The Muslim army fled the battlefield. For the second time a Muslim invasion of Christian Europe was halted at the gates of Vienna.
Three months after the battle, Kara Mustafa Pasha, the Ottoman Grand Vizier and commander of the Ottoman army, was strangled by the Janissaries and his severed head was ordered mounted on a stone column at the entrance to the Ottoman capital by the obviously disappointed Sultan Mehmed IV. Scapegoating the Grand Vizier for the loss didn't save the Sultan--he was overthrown in a palace coup d'etat two years later. The Ottoman loss at the Battle of Vienna is considered the beginning of the long stagnation and decline of the Empire.
Now scroll forward 320 years from the Holy League's victory over the Muslim Ottoman army at the Battle of Vienna to the year 2003. The beatification of Padre Marco was considered controversial and divisive when it was proposed. Pacifists felt that it was inappropriate for the Church to honor a man who was so strongly associated with war. Protestants objected to the honor because of Padre Marco's association with Emperor Leopold I who zealously pursued the counter-reformation. The politically correct fretted that honoring a man who waged war against Muslims would send the wrong message at a time when the church and Europe were trying to reach out and find common ground with Islam in the post-9/11 world.
Islamists attempted to tar Padre Marco with the crusader brush. The term "crusader" has special resonance in the Islamic world because the atrocities committed by the Christian armies during the Crusades allow the Islamists to play the victim-card in the world press. While there certainly were atrocities commited by the crusaders, the charge cuts both ways. The Muslim armies that conquered and occupied parts of Europe committed atrocities as well. The slaughter of tens of thousands of captured soldiers of Odo of Aquitaine's army after their loss at Bordeaux is one example. Two days after the defeat of the Hungarians at Battle of Mohács in 1526, Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent casually noted in his diary "The Sultan receives the homage of the viziers and the beys, massacre of 2,000 prisoners, the rain falls in torrents." Suleiman gives the deliberate, cold-blooded massacre of 2,000 helpless prisoners who had surrendered after the battle little more weight than the obsequious fawning of his underlings or his weather report.
The Holy League that Padre Marco d'Aviano inspired to victory at the Battle of Vienna was not an invading army. It was fighting for its life against a larger Muslim invading army that routinely massacred its prisoners of war. Furthermore, by the time of the Battle of Vienna, Muslims had conquered and continuously occupied parts of Christian Europe for almost 1,000 years. Playing the crusader victim-card against Padre Marco d'Aviano is an act of breathtaking chutzpah.
It is interesting to note that almost all the opposition was coming from outside the Roman Catholic Church, more than likely from those who were actually opposed to the institution of the Roman Catholic Church. Pope John Paul II evidently decided that the Roman Catholic Church, and not its critics, would decide Church policy, because he ignored the critics and beatified Padre Marco d'Aviano in Saint Peter's Square on April 23, 2003. It probably didn't hurt that Pope John Paul II is Polish, and that Padre Marco d'Aviano was historically associated with King Jan III Sobieski, a Polish hero of near mythologic stature.
There are a couple of curious culinary footnotes to the story of Padre Marco d'Aviano. The cresent-shaped croissant pastry is said to have been designed by Viennese bakers after the crescents on the Turkish flags. This is probably not true. Another legend is that cappuccino, the frothy, milky, sweetened Italian coffee, was named in honor of, or may even have been invented by the little Capuchin from Aviano. Allegedly, thousands of sacks of Turkish coffee beans were abandoned by the Ottoman troops when they hastily fled their camp after the battle. The beans were too bitter for the taste of the victorious soldiers who scavenged the camp, but it was made more palatable by mixing it with milk and honey, thus producing the forerunner of cappuccino. As the espresso machine was not invented until a couple hundred years after the Battle of Vienna, the story is likely apocryphal.
Marco d'Aviano continued as Papal legate to Leopold I of Austria for the rest of his life and accompanied the armies of the Holy League as they continued to drive the Ottomans out of southwetern Europe. He died in 1699 and is interred in a Capuchin crypt in Vienna. The photograph below is a bronze statue of Padre Marco d'Aviano erected in 1999 to commemorate the 300th anniversary of his death. I took this photograph on the grounds of La Chiesa di Padre Marco or "The Church of Padre Marco" which is on the outskirts of Aviano.
Instead, we ate at Enoteca l'Elefante. You can see it in the photgraph below to the left of the fountain in Piazza Diacono. An enoteca (ay-no-TAY-kah) is actually a wine store, but many enoteca also serve food as a way to get you to in the door to try their wines. The word "l'Elefante" means "the Elephant." Cividale del Friuli is noted for two local wines, Verduzzo Friuliano (a sweet dessert wine) and Refosco dal Peduncolo Rosso (a red wine). We had a very fine Refosco with our meal. It had a rich ruby color, thin legs and distinct plum and blackberry notes without being too "jammy." A well-made Refosco tastes similar to the better-known (and more expensive) Brunello di Montalcino, but not as oaky and the finish isn't as soft.
Cividale del Friuli was founded as a municipium in 50 B.C. by Julius Caesar because it is located at the mouth of a strategic mountain pass through the Julian Alps. The municipium served to protect the Via Julia Augusta, an important Roman road. The town was called (in Latin) Forum Julii or "Julius' Forum" in English. Some scholars believe that the name "Friuli" is a corruption of Forum Julii. 
There is a long, steep stairway down to the river from the bridge. We went with our two dogs down the stairs where I took these photographs. The water is quite deep and cold, but there is virtually no current. There appears to be a small dam downstream designed to maintain the level of the water. Our dog, Shadow, gave the the water a four dogbone rating.
It looks like some sort of strange party with beach umbrellas taking place in a farmer's field. These are actually farm workers planting a crop by hand. Here's a closer view of the guy under the pink umbrella: 
Now you can see that he is sitting on a little four-wheeled cart with a red plastic box. He seems to be planting little blue sticks. Here's a bit closer view of what he's planting:
It took a few weeks for me to see what they were actually planting. In the picture below, rain has washed the blue coating off the little sticks and they've sprouted leaves:
Here is a closer view of an individual plant with a label on it:
