St. John of Capistrano
Feast: Oct. 23
After conquering Constantinople on May 29, 1453, the Ottoman
Turks turned their eyes toward Europe. Three years later a
Turkish army of approximately 60,000 men marched into
Hungary. Arrayed against the invaders was a force of
experienced fighting men led by Janos Hunyady, a Hungarian
general who had been battling the Turks for at least 20
years, and a Franciscan priest, St. John of Capistrano, who
led a rag-tag army of peasants armed mostly with knives,
slings and farm implements. Between Hunyady and St. John, the
Christians numbered about 50,000.
The Christians had hunkered down behind the walls of Belgrade
while the Turks were encamped all around. Fighting had been
intermittent for three weeks when, on July 22, as several
small detachments of Christians skirmished with Turkish
cavalry outside the city, the main body of Turks massed for a
major attack. From the battlements Father John saw that the
Ottomans were on the move and rode out to order his men to
take cover behind the walls. But when 2,000 knights rallied
around him the Franciscan changed his tactics and led a wild
charge against the Turks. Hunyady, seeing what Father John
was doing, led a second charge out of the city to disable the
Turkish cannons. Taken entirely by surprise by these
maneuvers, the Turks panicked and fled. For his heroism in
the face of the enemy St. John of Capistrano is revered as
the patron of military chaplains.
John of Capistrano was a man who saw himself, as well as the
world in general, as either black or white. The day he joined
the Franciscans he wrote down a list of his worst sins,
believing that if he was going to begin a new life in pursuit
of holiness he must first acknowledge his personal
wickedness. Once he was ordained a priest he held himself -
and all other members of the clergy - to a high standard.
This was the 15th century when too many priests were lax, to
put it mildly, so John published a book entitled A Mirror for
the Clergy in which he held up to his brother priests all the
evil they did, how much damage it inflicted upon the Church
and the souls of the laity, and what they must do to be
worthy of their sacred office. Such a blatant attack made
John unpopular with many priests and bishops, but Pope
Nicholas V thought such a holy, upright friar was just the
man to convert the Hussites of Bohemia and Hungary. That is
how St. John came to be in Hungary at the time of the Turkish
invasion.
As the Ottoman conquest spread across Eastern Europe, John's
fortitude, his absolute unwillingness to give up, were
exactly the qualities needed to rally the region's
Christians. In his preaching he laid out the options as
starkly as he could: European Christians could remain at home
and wait for the Turks to kill and enslave them, or they
could take up arms in defense of their families, their
country and their faith and drive out the invaders. Inspired
by John's rhetoric, Christian forces drove back the Turks and
saved Eastern Europe from being swallowed up by the Ottoman
Empire.
Craughwell is the author of numerous books about the saints,
including Saints Behaving Badly (Doubleday, 2006).