The 800 Martyrs of Otranto

Elizabeth Lev has written an informative piece about the capture of the Italian city of Otranto by the Ottoman's in 1480. This can be found here, at the ZENIT website. In some ways the story is "of its time" - a time when religious leadership and political leadership were much closer together than they are in developed countries today - so a defence against military invasion was also a defence against a religious persecution in a way that we do not find easy to recognise today.

But the martyrdom of the 800 men who had been captured by the victorious Turks is a pure offering of their lives out of faithfulness to their Christian religion; it is an act of pure religion. It is interesting to reflect on the significance of their martyrdom for the 21st century.

For those familiar with the writing of Hans Urs von Balthasar, the story has something of an echo of the legend of Cordula that he uses as the motif for his book about the significance of martyrdom, published with the English title The Moment of Christian Witness.