Monday, May 29, 2006

Memorial Day? Try This One: May 29, 1453

Today, our Memorial Day for 2006, marks the 553rd anniversary of the fall of Constantinople. Paul Belien gives a moving account of the story at Brussels Journal. His recalling of the appeasement that led up to the seizure of the city is especially notable in our time: appeasement is a fool’s vain wish to avoid the predator:

Fall of Constantinople
In 1374, when the Ottomans were only a nascent power, Prince Manuel, governor of Salonica and a son of the Byzantine Emperor, had tried to rally the inhabitants of his city against the Turks. But the Salonicans did not want to bear the high costs of defending their city and promptly threw him out. Out of fear of the Turks his father, Emperor John V, refused Manuel shelter within the walls of Constantinople and so did all the other Byzantine cities. Consequently the prince was forced to seek refuge with... the Ottomans, whom he served until 1394, when he became Emperor himself.

When the Sultan demanded a Byzantine princess from the Emperor, the latter gave away his daughter Theodora to spend the rest of her life in the Sultan’s harem. He also gave the Turks a church in Constantinople to convert into a mosque. All the appeasement was in vain, however, because in 1453 the Turks demanded that the Byzantines surrender Constantinople. This time the Byzantines refused. In their final hour they saved their honour. “They fought for the city as they had never fought for the empire,” writes Jason Goodwin in his history of the Ottoman Empire. After a siege of two months the city fell. Emperor Constantine XI, Manuel’s son, died with his sword in his hand.

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That is Mr. Belien’s version. Oriana Fallaci, in The Force of Reason, has another more detailed version of Constantinople’s conversion into Istanbul. It is written in her inimitable style, which deserves not to be paraphrased, but quoted in full (pp 42-44):

…Crashing aside the Christians at Varna in 1444 they secured possession of Walachia, Moldavia, Transylvania, the territory now called Bulgaria and Romania, then in 1453 they put again under siege Constantinople which on May 29 fell into the hands of Mehmet II and by the way: do you know who was Mehmet II? A guy who, by virtue of the Islamic Fratricide Law which authorized a sultan to murder members of his immediate family, had ascended the throne by strangling his three year-old brother. Do you know the chronicle that about the fall of Constantinople the scribe Phrantzes has left us to refresh the memory of the oblivious or rather of the hypocrites?

Perhaps not. Especially in Europe, a Europe that weeps only for the Muslims, never for the Christians or the Jews or the Buddhists or the Hindus, it would not be Politically Correct to know the details of the fall of Constantinople. Its inhabitants who at daybreak, while Mehmet II is shelling Theodosius’ walls, take refuge in the cathedral of St. Sophia and here start to sing psalms. To invoke divine mercy. The patriarch who by candlelight celebrates his last Mass and in order to lessen the panic thunders: “Fear not, my brothers and sisters! Tomorrow you’ll be in the Kingdom of Heaven and your names will survive till the end of time!”. The children who cry in terror, their mothers who give them heart repeating: “Hush, baby, hush! We die for our faith in Jesus Christ! We die for our Emperor Constantine XI, for our homeland!”. The Ottoman troops who beating their drums step over the breaches in the fallen walls, overwhelm the Genovese and Venetian and Spanish defenders, hack them on to death with scimitars, then burst into the cathedral and behead even newborn babies. They amuse themselves by snuffing out the candles with their little severed heads... It lasted from the dawn to the afternoon that massacre. It abated only when the Grand Vizier mounted the pulpit of St. Sophia and said to the slaughterers: “Rest. Now this temple belongs to Allah” Meanwhile the city burns, the soldiery crucify and hang and impale, the Janissaries rape and butcher the nuns (four thousand in a few hours) or put the survivors in chains to sell them at the market of Ankara. And the servants prepare the Victory Feast. The feast during which (in defiance of the Prophet) Mehmet II got drunk on the wines of Cyprus and, having a soft spot for young boys, sent for the firstborn of the Greek Orthodox Grand Duke Notaras. A fourteen year-old adolescent known for his beauty. In front of everyone he raped him, and after the rape he sent for his family. His parents, his grandparents, his uncles, his aunts and cousins. In front of him he beheaded them. One by one. He also had all the altars destroyed, all the bells melted down, all the churches turned into mosques or bazaars. Oh, yes. That’s how Constantinople became Istanbul. But Doudou of the UN and the teachers in our schools don’t want to hear about it.

No, we don’t teach history that way anymore. But Oriana Fallaci is dying, and death gives her freedom to tell the truth, the whole bloody truth, and nothing but the horrendous truth.

This has been a report on the Religion of Peace. They will tell you we made it up.

For a poetic version, see the Baron’s post from January on Yeats’ “Sailing to Byzantium”.


Hat tip: commenter Fluffy.

8 comments:

Yaakov Kirschen said...

Our attempts to forget history or to at least clean up the untidy parts has brought us to the sorry state we are all in today.

thank you for the posting,
Dry Bones
Israel's Political Comic Strip Since 1973

Baron Bodissey said...

Adaneshju,

When I studied for my Byzantium post, I read three accounts of the fall of Constantinople, and all mentioned the rape story, in one variation or another. According to all the sources, when the city fell, Mehmet opened up the city to three days of unrestricted burning, looting, pillage, rape, murder, and mayhem by his troops. After that he said, "That's it, boys. Now we institute the rule of law -- shari'ah law, that is."

Not all churches became mosques, but the biggest and wealthiest ones did, after being thoroughly despoiled. The idea was to demonstrate very effectively to the conquered that they had been crushed and humiliated, and that Islam was in charge now.

You are right that the city was half-empty when it was overthrown. Many people had fled to Venice or other Christian havens in anticipation of the outcome.

You are also right that the Franks had sacked Byzantium during one of the Crusades (I forget which). But the point is -- ?

If the point is that Christian conquerors have been just as bad as their Islamic counterparts, I beg to disagree. Robert Specncer, Serge Trifkovic, and Andrew Bostom provide copious and well-sourced evidence to the contrary.

And I especially beg to disagree when you compare Islam and Christianity contemporaneously. No European Christian army was engaging in any barbarities comparable to those of the Turks in the late fifteenth century. No Christian army came close to the wholesale cruelty and destruction wrought by the Muslim jihad in India through the sixteenth and seventeenth century.

And, most importantly, at this moment in history, in the early twenty-first century, no organized groups of Christians are slaughtering, raping, burning, and blowing things up in the name of their faith. Nor are Jews and Hindus, for that matter. The only ones who compete with Muslims in the wanton destruction department are the devout atheists like Stalin.

I refuse to get on the "moral equivalence" bandwagon with regard to Islam and Christianity. It has never been true, and it is especially not true now.

When all the critics can come up with are the likes of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, you know that the argument is specious.

Just A Decurion said...

Adaneshju:

The population of the Mother of Cities at the time of the fall to the Turk was approximately 50,000 souls, the majority of whom were butchered. Too keep the city functioning after the slaughter, Mehmet had to import peasants from his other domains.

Only by the standards of the First Among Cities was that "depopulation". The only Muslim metropolis that had ever been able to be mentioned in the same category as The City was Baghdad before the Mongols. And frankly, having seen Baghdad after it has had about 950 years to recover from the Mongols, I'm not impressed.

Baron Bodissey said...

Adaneshju,

I recognize and respect your desire to defend your faith. The facts you cite are true, so far as I know, so I have no quibble there. But anecdotal argument will not suffice.

Statistically I do not believe that, on a contemporaneous (i.e. not comparing events from different centuries) basis, any other religion comes close to Islam when it comes to:

1. Murder of helpless captives.

2. Taking of slaves. This one, in particular, is significant. The Islamic slave trade, in Africa and elsewhere, dwarfed the Atlantic slave trade and continued long past the end of the Middle Passage. In fact, Muslims still take and trade slaves in Africa. No other religious group has a comparable record; the pagan Vikings were the closest competitor (unless, of course, you count Orthodox Atheists; the communists probably gave the Arabs a run for their money in the slavery category).

3. Violent assaults on foreign peoples for purely religious reasons. Once again, this is not to say that Christians didn’t do the same things; I am arguing about the scale of these events. Demonstrate to me with statistics that Christians have a comparable record of invading, subduing, slaughtering, and enslaving for religious reasons. The Crusades are a weak argument in any case, because they were a response to the conquest of Christian polities in Asia Minor by Islam. Remember, the Christian cultures in Asia Minor had converted to Christianity peacefully, but gave it up to Islam under the threat of the sword.

4. The oppression of women. Demonstrate to me — again, via statistics — that there was a period in history when women were treated better under Islam than they were under Christianity or Judaism.

As for the relative treatment of Jews under Islam, Andrew Bostom, in The Legacy of Jihad, demonstrates that this is largely a myth, using on contemporaneous Jewish sources. I recommend his book; its endnotes are quite thorough.

Finally, my main point is always about conditions right now, in 2006, in our degraded post-modern world. Once again, the statistics are overwhelming. Aside from the atheist totalitarianisms, no religion comes close to Islam in the perpetration of violence — against both infidels and other Muslims — in the name of religious faith.

I challenge you to demonstrate, with statistics, that I am incorrect.

Just A Decurion said...

The cities of China would not be "Muslim" in any era I am familiar with.

And the issue is not merely size. Baghdad is huge in population, but when it comes to culture, art, architecture, or any other standard of measurement, it is less significant a city than Boston. Never mind the SWEAT assesment. (Sewage, Water, etc--acronym used to report on basic infrastructre for population centers)

Just A Decurion said...

Adaneshju,

You know what I find really funny?

You decry the actions of Christians engaged defending themselves and liberating conquered territory, but excuse the behavior of Muslims engaged in wars of conquest aimed at enslaving and looting people who never harmed them.

The Reconquista, for all that it has been a politically correct bogey-man, was a fundamentally defensive war by the surviving Christian kings of Spain against an enemy that attacked them and did their best, consistently over a period of centuries, to wipe them out.

And to understand Russia in Central Asia, you have to understand what came out of Central Asia on a regular basis. Russia was conquered by the Mongols, who converted to Islam and terminated their early policies of religious toleration. This provoked massive resistance from the Russians which eventually threw off the yoke of political subjugation. But until Central Asia was pacified, the 'Tartars' continued to engage in slave-taking raids in Russia, killing anyone they couldn't make a profit on. A few centuries of this, and I'd be ready to engage in some fairly rough tactics to shut this system down myself.

Randy McDonald said...

I took a look at the demographics in France two years ago.

http://rfmcdpei.livejournal.com/408410.html

France isn't likely to be Islamized. The differences in birth rates are relatively small and shrinking, while language shift to French and declining rates of religious practice are whittling away at Muslim solidarity.

The major problems facing France relate to economic factors, to the exclusion of French of recent immigrant stock (Maghrebin, North African, Portuguese) from the high-income and high-employment sectors of the French economy, this exclusion effecting particularly men.

Randy McDonald said...

One more note.

[U]ntil Central Asia was pacified, the 'Tartars' continued to engage in slave-taking raids in Russia, killing anyone they couldn't make a profit on. A few centuries of this, and I'd be ready to engage in some fairly rough tactics to shut this system down myself.

This may explain why, in central Asia, first Tsarist then Soviet authorities committed multiple genocides and mass murders against the different Muslim populations in the region. I fail to see how indiscriminate attacks made against people on the grounds of their ethnicity could ever be defended.