STEPHEN COUGHLIN: Mary was given the title Queen of Victory following the spectacular, dare I say, miraculous naval victory at the Battle of Lepanto in 1571, in which a superior Ottoman naval force was decisively and permanently defeated, making the Mediterranean Sea safe for travel.

Mary was given the title Queen of Victory following the spectacular, dare I say, miraculous naval victory at the Battle of Lepanto in 1571, in which a superior Ottoman naval force was decisively and permanently defeated, making the Mediterranean Sea safe for travel.

All those… https://t.co/BaWgXrQOUP

— Stephen Coughlin (@S_Coughlin_DC) September 9, 2026

Battle of Lepanto, October 7, 1571,

The Battle of Lepanto was a naval engagement that took place on 7 October 1571 when a fleet of the Holy League, a coalition of Catholic states arranged by Pope Pius V and led by the navies of the Spanish Empire and the Republic of Venice, inflicted a major defeat on the fleet of the Ottoman Empire in the Gulf of Patras. The Ottoman forces were sailing westward from their naval station in Lepanto (the Venetian name of ancient Naupactus – Greek Ναύπακτος, Turkish İnebahtı) when they met the fleet of the Holy League which was sailing east from Messina, Sicily.

Lepanto marks the last major engagement in the Western world to be fought almost entirely between rowing vessels, namely the galleys and galleasses, which were the direct descendants of ancient trireme warships. The battle was in essence an "infantry battle on floating platforms". It was the largest naval battle in Western history since classical antiquity, involving more than 450 warships. Over the following decades, the increasing importance of the galleon would displace the galley as the major warship of its era, marking the beginning of the "Age of Sail".

The victory of the Holy League is of great importance in the history of Europe and of the Ottoman Empire, with the Ottoman fleet almost completely destroyed. The Ottomans rapidly rebuilt their fleet, but the loss of qualified crews during the battle led to a sharp decrease of their naval initiative after 1580.

The victory of this battle, The Battle of Lepanto, the medieval Italian name for Nafpaktos, a town in western Greece, was commemorated to the Virgin Mary.  Wikipedia gets you started,

The Holy League credited the victory to the Virgin Mary, whose intercession with God they had implored for victory through the use of the Rosary. Andrea Doria had kept a copy of the miraculous image of Our Lady of Guadalupe given to him by King Philip II of Spain in his ship's state room. Pope Pius V instituted a new Catholic feast day of Our Lady of Victory to commemorate the battle, which is now celebrated by the Catholic Church as the feast of Our Lady of the Rosary, [October 7]. Dominican friar Juan Lopez in his 1584 book on the rosary states that the feast of the rosary was offered "in memory and in perpetual gratitude of the miraculous victory that the Lord gave to his Christian people that day against the Turkish armada".  A piece of commemorative music composed after the victory is the motet Canticum Moysis (Song of Moses Exodus 15) Pro victoria navali contra Turcas by the Spanish composer based in Rome Fernando de las Infantas.  The other piece of music is Jacobus de Kerle's "Cantio octo vocum de sacro foedere contra Turcas" 1572

(Song in Eight Voices on the Holy League Against the Turks), in the opinion of Pettitt (2006) an "exuberantly militaristic" piece celebrating the victory.  There were celebrations and festivities with triumphs and pageants at Rome and Venice with Turkish slaves in chains.