Martyrdom of Saint Oswald in Battle

Oswald died in 642 at a place Bede calls Maserfelth, fighting the army of Penda, the pagan king of Mercia. More than eight centuries later, a painter in Styria showed the king taken alive, his hands being tied with a cord, while swords, a halberd and a curved blade rise around his head. Several of his captors wear turbans. In those years Ottoman horsemen crossed into Styria almost every year. Bede writes that Oswald died praying for the souls of his soldiers, and at the top of the panel an angel carries small souls up to heaven in a white cloth. On the ground, the dead lie trampled beneath the fighters' feet, one of them stretched out full length in a red robe.