Empire of God, page 37
The end was at hand.
The Last Day of the World
The final Turkish assault on Constantinople began on Tuesday, May 29, 1453. The Turkish cannons reduced the walls to rubble in several places; the defenders, however, tenaciously used the rubble itself to shore up the weak points and create a barrier that the jihadis could not initially breach. But then Giovanni Giustiniani, a Genoese commander whom Constantine had placed in charge of the land defenses, was gravely wounded and left the city hurriedly in a Genoese ship. Seeing him leaving and not knowing how seriously he had been wounded, the emperor called out to Giustiniani: “My brother, fight bravely. Do not forsake us in our distress. The salvation of the City depends on you. Return to your post. Where are you going?”762 Giustiniani replied that “God was leading the Turks.”763 This was the old iconoclast argument, that military success equaled divine favor. His soldiers apparently agreed and followed him out, and the remaining defenders began to lose heart. Constantine, however, was unwilling to accept what increasingly appeared inevitable. Turning to his men, he shouted, “Men, let us attack these barbarians!”764
There was nothing with which to attack. The Turks began to breach the walls and found a small gate into the city—the kerkoporta—unlocked. Constantine cast off his imperial regalia and joined the common soldiers in hand-to-hand combat against the invaders. According to Chalkokondyles, he was wounded in the shoulder and died shortly thereafter. A janissary brought his severed head to the sultan and was showered with gifts for doing so.765 Another historian of the fifteenth century, Michael Kritoboulos, wrote:
The Emperor Constantine…died fighting. He was a wise and moderate man in his private life and diligent to the highest degree in prudence and virtue, sagacious as the most disciplined of men. In political affairs and in matters of government he yielded to no one of the Emperors before him in preeminence. Quick to perceive his duty, and quicker still to do it, he was eloquent in speech, clever in thought, and very accomplished in public speaking. He was exact in his judgements of the present, as someone said of Pericles, and usually correct in regard to the future—a splendid worker, who chose to do and to suffer everything for his fatherland and for his subjects.766
The Turks poured into the city, determined to make good on Mehmed’s threat to “slaughter all the survivors and allow my troops to plunder at will.” The slaughter was indiscriminate and the plunder universal. The jihadis entered Hagia Sophia, where there was still a large number of Christians praying for the city’s deliverance. According to legend, as the jihadis halted the divine service, the clerics gathered up the sacred vessels and walked into the eastern wall of the Great Church, where they are waiting to appear once again and complete the prayers when the magnificent structure is once again a church. The Ottomans laid waste even inside the church, killing many and enslaving the rest. The marble floors were slippery with blood. Amidst this carnage, Mehmed sent an Islamic scholar to the pulpit to proclaim from there that there was no god but Allah, Muhammad was his prophet, and the nine-hundred-year-old cathedral was now a mosque.
In July 1453, Bessarion—a native of Trebizond who had been staunchly in favor of the union of the churches and had become, like Isidore of Kiev, a cardinal of the Latin Church—recounted that the Queen of Cities had been “sacked by the most inhuman barbarians and the most savage enemies of the Christian faith, by the fiercest of wild beasts. The public treasure has been consumed, private wealth has been destroyed, the temples have been stripped of gold, silver, jewels, the relics of the saints, and other most precious ornaments. Men have been butchered like cattle, women abducted, virgins ravished, and children snatched from the arms of their parents.”767
According to Chalkokondyles, the janissaries, the sultan’s crack troops who were themselves Christians who had been seized from their families as young boys and forcibly converted to Islam, “filled the sultan’s camp with the women and children of the most illustrious Greeks, seized much wealth, and became very prosperous. One could see the camp everywhere full of men and women crying out to each other and children who were dumbstruck at this catastrophe.”768 Isidore of Kiev was captured and sold as a slave but was not recognized and thus was not heavily guarded; he managed to escape to the Morea. The leader of the Venetians in Constantinople was also captured and was executed; while the Turks were busy with killing and plundering, however, most of the other Venetians in the city managed to escape on Venetian ships.
The sultan decided that it was time to enjoy the fruits of his conquest. He discovered that Lukas Notaras—chief minister of the Roman Empire during the reigns of both John VIII and Constantine XI—had a twelve-year-old son and sent one of his servants to demand that Notaras, who had been captured and released, hand over the boy for his pleasure. Notaras refused. When the servant returned to Mehmed and told him this, according to Chalkokondyles, the sultan “ordered him to arrest and butcher Notaras, his children, and all who were present with him. When those charged with this task came to Notaras, he asked that they kill his children first, right there in front of him, and only then to execute him,” so that the children wouldn’t submit to Mehmed after their father had been killed.769 He exhorted his sons to “meet their deaths bravely.”770
Mehmed had the heads of Notaras and his children placed as trophies on his banquet table, but he was still enraged at this insolence and ordered the other Romans who had been freed from captivity to be rearrested and killed.771 They died, says Chalkokondyles, “for no good reason,” at the instigation of a Roman “with whose daughter the sultan was sleeping” and who apparently thought this advice would secure Mehmed’s favor.772
Chalkokondyles says of the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople: “This calamity seems to be the greatest that ever took place throughout the world in its excess of suffering.”773 It had been 2,206 years since the founding of Rome and 1,480 years since the Senate of Rome had given Octavian Caesar the title augustus. The Roman Empire was no more.
Embers
The Romans of the Ottoman Empire became a subject people. The Morea and Trebizond, the last remnants of the empire, fell to the sultan in 1460 and 1461, respectively. Mehmed II called himself, among other titles, “Caesar of the Roman Empire,” and the ecumenical patriarchs of Constantinople and their associates were forced during his lifetime to accept this title.774 In 1466, the Roman scholar George of Trebizond wrote to the sultan: “No one doubts that you are the Emperor of the Romans. Whoever is legally master of the capital of the Empire is the Emperor, and Constantinople is the capital of the Roman Empire.”775 Actually virtually everyone doubted this. What no one really doubted was that the Roman Empire had ceased to exist.
Andreas Palaiologos, the nephew of Constantine XI, fled to Rome, where he lived off the largesse of the pope. Andreas called himself despot of the Morea and despot of the Romans, and in 1483, began claiming the title “Emperor of Constantinople.” He even began trying to arouse interest in a new Crusade to restore the empire, but as was so often the case when the empire still lived, nothing came of it. In September 1494, Andreas sold his rights to the imperial throne to King Charles VIII (“The Affable”) of France, in return not just for a monetary stipend but for Charles the Affable’s promise that he would launch a new Crusade and restore him to the throne of the Morea, if not of Constantinople itself.776 The genial French king, however, died in 1498, without mounting a new Crusade. The empire was not restored.
In some ways, however, the empire never died at all. After the fall of Constantinople, numerous scholars of classical Greek antiquity fled to Western Europe, taking their books with them. The Renaissance that Gemistos Plethon had played a significant role in sparking gained even more impetus from this intellectual infusion, and many classical works previously unknown in the West were published and studied there for the first time. From the ashes of Constantinople came the Greek intellectual tradition that played such an important role in the later development of the West, up to and including the Enlightenment principles about the rights of man and the dignity of the human being that are among the fundamental truths upon which the United States is based.
There would likely be no United States of America at all had Constantinople not fallen, which fact does not diminish the immensity of the tragedy of May 29, 1453. The New World would eventually have been discovered, but the fall of the city and the empire led to the closing of trade routes between Europe and India, and this gave new urgency to the search for a new route. While previously, traveling merchants from Europe could make their way along the Silk Road and Spice Road into Asia, after 1453 this meant making one’s way as a Christian through Ottoman domains. The trip became significantly more dangerous, as a merchant could at any time be captured, forced to convert to Islam, or sold into slavery. Interest began to grow in finding a new route to India; in 1492, the Spanish monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella commissioned Christopher Columbus to sail west to find one. He did.
The legacy of the Roman Empire in its Byzantine period, however, is not at all limited to the paradoxical benefits of its fall. It gave more than most people know not just in death but throughout its long and eventful life.
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751 Ibid., 507.
752 Ibid., 623.
753 Ibid., 678-84.
754 Ibid., 695.
755 Ibid., 714.
756 Ibid., 707.
757 Ibid., 841.
758 Ibid., 848.
759 Ibid., 860.
760 Ibid., 874-89.
761 Ibid., 896.
762 David Nicolle, Constantinople 1453: The End of Byzantium, (Osprey Publishing, November 25,2000), 77.
763 Chalkokondyles, The Histories, op. cit., 193.
764 Ibid.
765 Ibid., 201.
766 Nicol, The Immortal Emperor, op. cit., 914.
767 Andrew Wheatcroft, Infidels: A History of the Conflict Between Christendom and Islam (Random House, May 3, 2005), 195.
768 Chalkokondyles, The Histories, op. cit., 199.
769 Ibid., 205.
770 Ibid., 207.
771 Lord Kinross, The Ottoman Centuries: The Rise and Fall of the Turkish Empire (Morrow Quill Publishers, 1977), 115–16.
772 Chalkokondyles, The Histories, op. cit.
773 Ibid.
774 Nicolle, The End, op. cit., 85.
775 Ibid.
776 Jonathan Harris, “A worthless prince? Andreas Palaeologus in Rome 1464-1502,” n.d., https://repository.royalholloway.ac.uk/file/8d5e5f50-eb89-df4b-2cb9-e031304df8a1/7/A_worthless_prince_Andreas_Palaeologus_in_Rome_by_Jonathan_Harris.pdf
Chapter Twenty-Eight
The Christian Legacy
The Challenge of Islam
Many of the points of pride of the post-Christian Western world—notably the equality of rights of women, the freedom of speech, and the principle of republican rule—developed in Christian Europe, but not in the Islamic world, for very good reasons that were embedded within the texts and teachings of Islam itself.
The Qur’an itself mandates that a woman “from whom you fear disobedience” must be beaten (4:34). A hadith puts into Muhammad’s mouth the saying, “You should listen to and obey, your ruler even if he was an Ethiopian (black) slave whose head looks like a raisin.”777 This statement has become notorious because of its casual racism: the most outlandish ruler Muhammad can think of, and the one who appears to be least worthy of obedience, is a black man. Overlooked, however, is the absolutism of Muhammad’s statement: one must obey the ruler even when the ruler appears absurd and unworthy of obedience. Throughout its history, Islam has lent itself to authoritarian rule, with Turkey being the sole example of a secular republic in a majority-Muslim state—and a poor example at best—as modern Turkey was founded upon an explicit rejection of political Islam. And in our own day Turkish secularism is rapidly eroding under pressure from its Islamizing president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Islam’s expansionism and supremacism are embedded within its core texts. Not only did Muhammad affirm that he had been commanded to fight against the non-Muslims of the world until they accepted that he was Allah’s prophet, but numerous Islamic leaders and thinkers have repeated this throughout history. In the twentieth century, the Pakistani theologian and politician Maulana Syed Abul A’la Maududi stated that non-Muslims have “absolutely no right to seize the reins of power in any part of God’s earth nor to direct the collective affairs of human beings according to their own misconceived doctrines. For if they are given such an opportunity, corruption and mischief will ensue. In such a situation the believers would be under an obligation to do their utmost to dislodge them from political power and to make them live in subservience to the Islamic way of life.”778
In a commentary about Qur’an 9:29, the verse that commands Muslims to wage war against Jews and Christians, Maududi explains that “the purpose for which the Muslims are required to fight” is “to put an end to the suzerainty of the unbelievers so that the latter are unable to rule over people. The authority to rule should only be vested in those who follow the True Faith; unbelievers who do not follow this True Faith should live in a state of subordination. Anybody who becomes convinced of the Truth of Islam may accept the faith of his/her own volition. The unbelievers are required to pay jizyah (poll tax) in return for the security provided to them as the dhimmis (“Protected People”) of an Islamic state. Jizyah symbolizes the submission of the unbelievers to the suzerainty of Islam.”779
In 2015, the Council of the International Islamic Fiqh Academy of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation declared that “Offensive Jihad” in Islam “aims to protect freedom of spreading the call for Islam; removing any barriers it may encounter; and defending those who are under oppression and tyranny, subject to specific rules and conditions that Islamic jurists have indicated for the achievement of interest and aversion of harm.”780 This appears reasonable on its surface, but it must be borne in mind that the barriers to spreading Islam can be removed by means of violence, and the “oppression and tyranny” that is meant is any system of government and law that is not based on Sharia, Islamic law
Today, however, most Westerners assume that the overwhelming majority of Muslims do not take these exhortations and commands seriously and that Islam has developed new ways of looking at uncomfortable passages in its scriptures, just as Jews and Christians have done with theirs. Unfortunately, this is not the case, but it has become commonplace in Western Europe and North America to be resigned to occasional jihad attacks and far less concerned about them and about the advancing jihad in general than about “Islamophobia,” that is, vigilante attacks against innocent Muslims, although the word is often used also to disparage and silence any critical word about Islam whatsoever, no matter how accurate or justified by the facts.
The Romans stood against Islam and resisted its expansion for eight hundred years, from the time of Heraclius until the warriors of jihad succeeded in their eight-century effort and finally put an end to the Roman Empire. Some today would no doubt say that this is a strike against the defenders, who should have realized how much Muslims would enrich and diversify their cities and their population. In the twenty-first century West, we are way beyond that “us vs. them” mentality; we are all “us” now, and if the emperors in Constantinople had realized that and welcomed the Arabs and then the Turks, a magnificent multicultural civilization would have grown up on both banks of the Bosporus and spread to both Asia and Europe.
This is a pleasing fantasy, but those same warriors of jihad would never have allowed it to become a reality. They were not coming then, as they are now, as putative refugees in need of a helping hand from the wealthy West. They were coming as warriors and would-be conquerors; coexistence was not in their mind any more than it was in the mind of the Romans. They came to rule, intending to subjugate the Christians (as well as the Jews and any others they encountered) and to establish the hegemony of Islam. If they had succeeded in taking Constantinople in the first siege in 675, or in the second siege in 717, or at any point after that before the time of the Crusades, they would almost certainly have destroyed the empire completely and then had a free hand to advance into Eastern Europe, where during the seventh and eighth centuries there was no force remotely powerful enough to stop their advance.
The same warriors of Islam were, meanwhile, advancing confidently in Western Europe, conquering Visigothic Spain in 711 and advancing into France, where they were stopped at Tours in 732.
History frequently hangs by a thread. If the jihadis had conquered Constantinople in 675 and defeated Charles Martel at Tours in 732, the entirety of Europe could swiftly have been conquered for Islam. Gibbon describes what might have happened if Charles Martel had not prevailed: “A victorious line of march had been prolonged above a thousand miles from the rock of Gibraltar to the banks of the Loire; the repetition of an equal space would have carried the Saracens to the confines of Poland and the Highlands of Scotland; the Rhine is not more impassable than the Nile or Euphrates, and the Arabian fleet might have sailed without a naval combat into the mouth of the Thames. Perhaps the interpretation of the Koran would now be taught in the schools of Oxford, and her pulpits might demonstrate to a circumcised people the sanctity and truth of the revelation of Mahomet.”781
