Posted on 05/29/2007 8:18:42 AM PDT by omega4412
In memory of Emperor Constantine XI Palaeologus and the other martyrs of that day, Greek and Latin.
Constantine's father was Manuel II, whose statement on the nature of Islam Pope Benedict quoted:
Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.
Constantine's mother was Helena Dragas, the daughter of a Serbian prince.
The Emperor's death in battle brings to mind Churchill's words almost 500 years later (his first broadcast as Prime Minister, May 19, 1940)
Centuries ago words were written to be a call and a spur to the faithful servants of Truth and Justice: "Arm yourselves, and be ye men of valour, and be in readiness for the conflict; for it is better for us to perish in battle than to look upon the outrage of our nation and our altar. As the Will of God is in Heaven, even so let it be."
Also on this day in History:
1660 - Charles II was restored to the English throne after the Puritan Commonwealth.
1721 - South Carolina was formally incorporated as a royal colony.
1765 - Patrick Henry denounced the Stamp Act before Virginia’s House of Burgesses.
1790 - Rhode Island became the last of the original thirteen colonies to ratify the U.S. Constitution.
1827 - The first nautical school opened in Nantucket, MA, under the name Admiral Sir Isaac Coffin’s Lancasterian School.
1848 - Wisconsin became the 30th state to join the United States.
1849 - A patent for lifting vessels was granted to Abraham Lincoln.
1910 - An airplane raced a train from Albany, NY, to New York City. The airplane pilot Glenn Curtiss won the $10,000 prize.
1911 - The first running of the Indianapolis 500 took place.
1912 - Fifteen women were dismissed from their jobs at the Curtis Publishing Company in Philadelphia, PA, for dancing the Turkey Trot while on the job.
1916 - The official flag of the president of the United States was adopted.
1916 - U.S. forces invaded Dominican Republic and remained until 1924.
1922 - Ecuador became independent.
1922 - The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that organized baseball was a sport, not subject to antitrust laws.
1932 - World War I veterans began arriving in Washington, DC. to demand cash bonuses they were not scheduled to receive for another 13 years.
1951 - C.F. Blair became the first man to fly over the North Pole in single engine plane.
1953 - Edmund Hillary and Sherpa Tenzing Norgay became first men to reach the top of Mount Everest.
1962 - Buck (John) O’Neil became the first black coach in major league baseball when he accepted the job with the Chicago Cubs.
1965 - Ralph Boston set a world record in the broad jump at 27-feet, 4-3/4 inches, at a meet held in Modesto, CA.
1973 - Tom Bradley was elected the first black mayor of Los Angeles.
1974 - U.S. President Nixon agreed to turn over 1,200 pages of edited Watergate transcripts.
1978 - In the U.S., postage stamps were raised from 13 cents to 15 cents.
1985 - 39 people were killed and 400 were injured in a riot at a European Cup soccer match in Brussels, Belgium.
1988 - U.S. President Reagan began his first visit to the Soviet Union in Moscow.
1988 - NBC aired “To Heal A Nation,” the story of Jan Scruggs’ effort to build the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.
1990 - Boris Yeltsin was elected president of the Russian republic by the Russian parliament.
1995 - The last 3 bodies were recovered from the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City.
1997 - The ruling party in Indonesia, Golkar, won the Parliament election by a record margin. There was a boycott movement and rioting that killed 200 people.
1999 - Space shuttle Discovery completed the first docking with the International Space Station.
2000 - Fiji’s military took control of the nation and declared martial law following a coup attempt by indigenous Fijians in mid-May.
2001 - In New York, four followers of Osama bin Laden were convicted of a global conspiracy to murder Americans. The crimes included the 1998 bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa that killed 224 people.
2001 - The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that disabled golfer Casey Martin could use a cart to ride in tournaments.
You can’t go back to Constantinople ...
Why did Constantinople get the works?
Black Day remembered today.
Istanbul was Constantinople
Now it’s Istanbul, not Constantinople
Been a long time gone, Constantinople
Now it’s Turkish delight on a moonlit night
Every gal in Constantinople
Lives in Istanbul, not Constantinople
So if you’ve a date in Constantinople
She’ll be waiting in Istanbul
Even old New York was once New Amsterdam
Why they changed it I can’t say
People just liked it better that way
So take me back to Constantinople
No, you can’t go back to Constantinople
Been a long time gone, Constantinople
Why did Constantinople get the works?
That’s nobody’s business but the Turks
Istanbul (Istanbul)
Istanbul (Istanbul)
Even old New York was once New Amsterdam
Why they changed it I can’t say
People just liked it better that way
Istanbul was Constantinople
Now it’s Istanbul, not Constantinople
Been a long time gone, Constantinople
Why did Constantinople get the works?
That’s nobody’s business but the Turks
So take me back to Constantinople
No, you can’t go back to Constantinople
Been a long time gone, Constantinople
Why did Constantinople get the works?
That’s nobody’s business but the Turks
Istanbul
~They Might Be Giants
According to Historian Frantzis the invaders broke the heads of those women who resisted, on the floor of the churches and they raped them dead. The famous icon of Apostole Loukas was totally destroyed. The sultan asked for the young sons of Duke Loukas Notaras. Their father refused and Mehmed was ready to take their heads. Notaras asked him to kill him after his sons so that he was sure that they were dead and not disgraced from the pervert sultan. And this is what happened.
By the evening of the first day of looting there was left nothing else to steal. The Sultan, with his top commanders and his guard of Janissaries, came into the city in the afternoon of the first day of occupation. Constantinople was finally his and he intended to make it the capital of his mighty Empire. He toured the ruined city. He visited Saint Sophia which he ordered to be turned into a mosque.
Not much has changed in 1700 years...
Why did Constantinople get the works?
That’s nobody’s business but the Turks..
Not satisfied with turning the Doma Sophia into a mosque, the follwoers of the reilgion of peace attacked into southern europe afterwards until their will was finally broken at Vienna by a combined force that included Poles, Germans, and Hungarians.
Song is actually much older than that ...LOL.
Good history lessons.
That's nobody's business but the Turks.
To be perfectly fair, the description given applies equally well to the Sack of Rome in 1527 by a “Catholic” army, and to just about every other capture of a major city in history following an extended siege, at least before the last couple hundred years.
Badajoz, for instance, captured by the British in 1812.
“The Islamic conquest of India is probably the bloodiest story in history. It is a discouraging tale, for its evident moral is that civilization is a precious good, whose delicate complex order and freedom can at any moment be overthrown by barbarians invading from without and multiplying from within.”
—Will Durant, The Story of Civilization
Even old New York was once New Amsterdam
Why they changed it I can’t say, people just liked it better that way
1903 - Bob Hope was born.
Personally, I like to believe that it was Mallory and Irvine.
Called by Will Durant "the penultimate work of prose in the 18th century," Gibbon's masterpiece should be read, savored and devoured in its entirety. Among other things, it provides a startling chronology of how a great nation fell into ruin by taking the same wrong turns we are choosing today. It explains the formation of the Catholic church, and the rise of Islam. It presents the story of the birth of nations such as Germany and France; of the ruin of North Africa and the Middle East (once the crown jewels of the empire compared to Northern Europe). It demonstrates how entire nations choose ideologies which in some cases lift them to unimagined heights, and in come cases sink them to unfathomable depths.
Persons who have not read this classic are missing a treasure.
The same war, a different theater.
1917, JFK was born. Same day and year as my Grandfather.
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