>>941048613
I just watched a great documentary this morning about 500 Knights Hospitaller (Catholic warrior monks), and a few thousand Maltese civilian volunteers who held back an invading force of 40,000 Muslims on the island of Malta in the year of our Lord, 1565. The Christians held the Muslim dogs back for months until a Christian relief force of about 6,000 soldiers arrived. The Muslims who were still alive by this time fled the island. Once everything was sifted through and counts were made, roughly 30,000 Muslim invaders lay dead on the rocky shores of Malta, while most of the Maltese militiamen and many of the 500 Knights Hospitaller were still alive. The Siege of Malta has gone down in history as one of the most decisive military defeats of all time. It saw a kill/death ratio of possibly about 30,000/2,000, or 15:1.
While Muslim bodies piled up by day, Christian monks chanted prayers and sang hymns by night. And every new morning, the Christian defenders would add more Muslim carcasses to the ever-growing pile. The Christians were under siege, and it was not an easy few months for them. They ran out of food and began cutting leather from their own clothes and horse saddles to boil for soup. Leather is made from the dehydrated skins of animals, but they still contain minute amounts of nutrients like protein and fiber. So in between battles, they drank leather soup, prayed the rosary, and sang hymns to the Lord. Meanwhile, the Muslim horde was suffering its own hardships and degradations. As more and more dead Muslims piled up, disease, vermin, and pests became the bane of their existence. Almost as if it wasn't enough for the Almighty to cause a Muslim defeat - He wanted it to be slow and humiliating, to send a message. And if that was the case, His plan seemed to have worked. The Muslim Ottomans never attempted to take the island of Malta again.
If angels assisted the Crusaders at Antioch in 1098, they must have led the battle at Malta in 1565.
