In 1565, a Turkish army laid siege to Malta, then an outpost of Christianity in the Mediterranean. Muslims and Christians had been battling all over the Mediterranean for hundreds of years. The Christians were on the defensive at the time.
Malta was defended by the Order of Malta, a group of knights whose Christianity extended to piracy. Their grandmaster was Jean Parisot de Valette, who wore the cross of Christ on his chest.
According to historians, the Muslim Turks, skilled in the dark arts of terrorism and unfettered by the qualms of Christianity, nailed their Christian prisoners to crosses and then threw the crucified bodies into water, knowing the current would carry these grisly warnings under the walls held by de Vallette and his men.
In response, de Valette brought their Turkish prisoners up on the walls of the citadel, beheaded them in sight of the Turkish army and then stuffed the heads into his cannons and fired them at the Turkish camp.
It remains a stunningly perfect moment in history. It is not an ironic moment because irony does not live in the midst of battle, despite hundreds of movies telling us otherwise. As for religion, it is by nature opposed to irony.
The Turks “started it,” of course, which makes de Valette’s response understandable and even praiseworthy to a bunch of people currently hanging around American culture.
But behind arguments about the nature of Islam and Christianity, behind talk of the Crusades and right and wrong, there were, and are, those bloody-handed men who crucified the Christian prisoners, and their opposites on the Christian side, the sweaty gunners who stuffed the staring heads of Turkish prisoners into the big, black bores of their guns.
They probably weren’t much different from all soldiers of their time, men used to handling reluctant slaves, to killing prisoners, to being reassured at the required times by the leaders of their faiths that they were doing no wrong.
They weren’t much different than us, either, just more certain of heaven and of hell, of right and of wrong. Certainty is a terribly sharp sword.
They’re lost to us. There are no records of post-Malta suicides among veterans of either side. The military culture of the time had no handy acronym for post-traumatic stress disorder. After the war, if you went back to your little farm in France or Anatolia and you walked out to the barn one bright morning and hanged yourself, perhaps people in your village murmured that you “hadn’t been the same” since you came home.
In America, some of us lust after their certainty, or possess it already, and we make noise about torture, about what we would do if we had those man-burning Islamist scum in our hands. There are dark mutterings of everything from burning alive to castration.
But remember, if people decided to fire heads from cannons, or drop them from planes, you would not like those who would volunteer for the job and, if you liked them when you found them, you would not like them after they’d done the job for a while.
Marc Munroe Dion is a nationally syndicated columnist. His book of Pulitzer Prize-nominated column “Between Wealth and Welfare: A Liberal Curmudgeon in America,” is available for $9.95 for Nook and Kindle.