bastion of Christianity

Antemurale Christianitatis ("bastion of Christianity") was the denomination used for the countries that defended the frontiers of Christian civilization before the advance of the Ottoman Empire.

Pope Leo X called Croatia Antemurale Christianitatis in 1519, as the Croatian armies had made significant contributions to the struggle against Turkish expansionism in Europe. The advance of the Ottoman Empire was stopped in Croatian soil that could be, in this sense, considered like a historical door of the European civilization. However, the Ottoman civilization conquered part of Croatia from the fifteenth century to the nineteenth century and some Croats converted to Islam.

For its secular position against the advances of Muslims, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth would also gain the name of Antemurale Christianitatis. Poles and Lithuanians fought the Crimean Tatars in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and against the Turks in 1620-1622, 1672-1683 and 1683-1699. Poles also fought Protestant Sweden and Orthodox Russia. In 1683, the battle of Vienna marked the turning point in a two hundred and fifty year struggle between the forces of Christian Europe and those of the Ottoman Empire and the Crimean kingship, for it marked the end of Islamic land expansion European and the beginning of a gradual setback that would end with the disappearance of the Ottoman Empire after the First World War, finally sanctioned in the Treaty of Sèvres (1920).

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