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.
I don't think you are right. The old treasury Building and the Church of St. Marks in Venice is loaded with stuff from Constantinople, as is the Vatican.
St. Mark's is a good-sized church, but if it truly represented the despoiling of the entire city of Constantinople then Constantinople had next to nothing in it.
I've also been to the Vatican museum and there is a decent-sized collection of Byzantine art and "treasure" - again nowhere near enough to represent the despoiling of an entire city.
Additionally, the Vatican received absolutely nothing at all from the sack of Constantinople because the Pope excommunicated both the Western generals responsible for the sack.
The Western sackers were privateers acting on their own initiatives for their own private enrichment - the Vatican specifically instructed them not to make war on the Byzantines.
I was born on a Tuesday...
Just asking. Saw John Rhomer's series on Byzantium on British Television.
There are many churches of Venice and some have facades that incorporate actual Byzantine work, some that are imitated from the Byzantine and some that are not Byzantine at all.
Additionally, just because a church's facade may incorporate Byzantine work does not mean that the work was plundered nor does it mean that work came from Constantinople instead of being native to Venice itself.
From about the time that Aistulf the Lombard killed the Byzantine Exarch in Ravenna, Byzantines in Italy and other supporters of the Byzantine Emperor in Italy began to settle in the Venetian islands to avoid the Lombards.
The original doges of Venice took their title and claimed their offices as duces of the Byzantine Empire.
Venice was essentially a Byzantine city in its origin. During the period 800-1100 the Byzantine Emperor grew ever weaker and weaker in Northern Italy and Venice became an independent state in that power vacuum - an inbetween place that was neither truly Byzantine nor truly Italian.
So the fact that Venice has so much of the Byzantine about its churches and architecture and culture is mostly due to that heritage and affinity.
Venice engaged in trade from the beginning, with Constantinople as its main trading partner for seven hundred years.
bookmarked
Interesting history lesson Bttt.
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