Posted on 05/29/2006 9:22:33 PM PDT by neverdem
As the European Union., United Nations and United States contrive to fund the Palestinian Authority despite declarations that they would never aid Hamas; as the Russians rush to aid Iran’s nuclear ambitions; and as America is ever more riven by furious disagreement over the prosecution of the terror war, a historical analogy is useful to put things in perspective.
On Tuesday, May 29, 1453, the armies of the Ottoman Sultan Mehmet II entered Constantinople, breaking through the defenses of a vastly outnumbered and indomitably courageous Byzantine force. Historian Steven Runciman notes what happened next: the Muslim soldiers “slew everyone that they met in the streets, men, women, and children without discrimination. The blood ran in rivers down the steep streets from the heights of Petra toward the Golden Horn. But soon the lust for slaughter was assuaged. The soldiers realized that captives and precious objects would bring them greater profit.” (The Fall of Constantinople 1453, Cambridge University Press, 1965, p. 145.)
It has come to be known as Black Tuesday, the Last Day of the World.
The jihadists also entered the Hagia Sophia, which for nearly a thousand years had been the grandest church in Christendom. The faithful had gathered within its hallowed walls to pray during the city’s last agony. The Muslims, according to Runciman, halted the celebration of Orthros (morning prayer); the priests, according to legend, took the sacred vessels and disappeared into the cathedral’s eastern wall, through which they shall return to complete the divine service one day. Muslim men then killed the elderly and weak and led the rest off into slavery.
Once the Muslims had thoroughly subdued Constantinople, they set out to Islamize it. According to the Muslim chronicler Hoca Sa’deddin, tutor of the 16th-century Sultans Murad III and Mehmed III, “churches which were within the city were emptied of their vile idols and cleansed from the filthy and idolatrous impurities and by the defacement of their images and the erection of Islamic prayer niches and pulpits many monasteries and chapels became the envy of the gardens of Paradise.”
Tuesday has been regarded as unlucky by superstitious Greeks ever since.
Why did this happen?
Meanwhile, the world has forgotten what happened on Black Tuesday, and so many other days like it from India to Spain, and persists in the fantasy that Islam does not contain an imperialist impulse and that Muslims can be admitted without limit into Western countries without any attempt to determine how many would like ultimately to subjugate and Islamize their new countries, the way their forefathers did to Constantinople so long ago.
And today we see the same ill-informed games of realpolitik, pragmatic alliances made with those who would conquer and subjugate us, and the same disunity and finger-pointing at each other instead of unity in the face of this threat to our common survival.
It is fitting that Black Tuesday coincided this year with Memorial Day. For only a strong defense—not just military, but cultural and spiritual, a civilizational defense—will conquer the forces of jihad and keep there from being many more Black Tuesdays, many more Last Days of the World. May we mount that defense, speedily.
And as I recall 9-11-01 was also a Tuesday!
Good post!
Tuesdays are not good, in general.
Ping
bump
Tuesday - named after Tiu, one of the German gods of war.
All the same, Islam is *not* a religion of peace. It's interesting that the left forgets Muslims have done atrocities too.
6-6-06 falls on a Tuesday. Figures.
Hey i am bit on the left and i cant stand those motherF%^&&@,
Also Tuesday 13th are bad luck days for most latin cultures.
"Liberalism" isn't the same thing as "leftist".
I live deep in the conservative south and some people around here are to the left of Karl Marx.
They just happen to go to church and believe in god.
(Denny Crane: "Every one should carry a gun strapped to their waist. We need more - not less guns.")
Our spendthrift government waste, and huge deficits and national debt will have the same effect.
Except it is not Venetians, but Congress doing the looting.
Mohammed II only took Constantinople because he secured the services of an expert Christian gunfounder (Urban of Hungary). Urban had offered his services to Constantinople first, but they refused. IMO the Byzantines lost their city because they didn't invest in technology. In the same way, the equally decisive battle of Lepanto was only won because of investment in Naval technology.
Constantinople was sacked by an army consisting of various mercenaries, Venetians and Byzantines. The largest contingent among the troops that sacked Constantinople were themselves Byzantines sacking their own capital city.
The sack of Constantinople occurred in 1203, 250 years before Constantinople fell to the Turks. Pinning the military weakness of 1453 on an incident from 1203 is preposterous.
Most of the treasures of Constantinople were gone well before the Venetians and their allies took the city. Isaac II had looted the treasury before he left the city 8 years earlier, and his successor melted down both Catholic statuary and Orthodox icons for the gold he needed for bribes to keep his tenuous hold on power.
Very little "treasure" was hauled away from Constantinople since very little was left in a city that had been torn by civil strife and kleptocracy for at least a decade.
So is 06/06/06.....could it be...naw...
They don't forget. They actively ignore bad news. The Hue Massacre, Tet 1968 was ignored. Then they ginned up the worldwide student rebellion in May 1968. After it spilled over into Czechoslavakia with the Prague Spring, you had the The Russian Invasion of Czechoslavakia in August.
6/6/44 was a Tuesday, too.
All too often , Hollyweird present mythical history set in a vacuum. The Crusades have to be viewed in historical context.
What happened in Constaninople was unforgivable and horrible by this Christian.
But it was preceeded by EQUALLY horrific acts against Christians in the Middle East, Spain, Portugal, southern France and Italy, Sicily, other parts of Greece, Anatolia, and north Africa - ALL once Christian lands before being attacked and focibly converted to Islam.
This process is replicating itself in Nigeria, Sudan, the Phillippines and other parts of the world before our very eyes.
Unless Islam can totally purge itself of these elements, restore Hagia Sophia to Christian Orthodox control and behave as a civilized faith, renouncing CENTURIES of aggression and conquest, the only way the west can respond is with fire and sword or total capitulation. There are no other options.
A good deal of the "Treasure" looted from Constantinople was the sons and daughters of the city.
The sack of Constantinople by a supposed Crusader force was a disgrace. It helped weaken the city and set it up for later Muslims conquest.
According to a recent book on that subject, a series of incredible blunders, fed by greed, caused that action. And the Pope actually excommunicated the leaders of the Crusade when he heard what they had done. Capturing Constantinople was not the objective of the Latin Church nor of the rank and file Crusaders but was the creation of the Venetians and the Crusade's inept leaders.
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