You ever hear of the Crusade of 1204 which attacked and ransacked Byzantium? The Franks fatally compromised the shield that had been protecting Europe. Byzantium never recovered and the Turks later swarmed all the way to Vienna. The Russians are painfully aware of Western duplicity.
Thanks,
Most folks don’t realize that the fall of Constantinople started with the sack of Constantinople by Vienna. Then the West just watched with eager anticipation as it teetered into destruction by the Turks.
I’ll see the Sack of Constantinople, and raise you the sale to Mehmet’s army of the canons that breached the walls in 1453 by a Hungarian (Latin) Christian armorer.
The ‘decadence’ charge is part an parcel of the ‘Englightenment’ attempt to disposess Christianity of its Roman heritage, to claim ‘the glories of Rome’ for the re-paganizing impulse of modern rationalism. It goes back to Gibbon.
Yes, that was a factor, although I do not agree with those who theorize that it was the main factor. There was also the earlier war with Persia, which weakened both Byzantium and the Persians and helped open the way to the Turks. And there was the admittedly two-sided cultural war that had gone on for many hundreds of years between the Orthodox and Catholic Churches.
The popes tried desperately for many years to persuade Venice, France, Naples, Genoa, Spain, and the other powers of the time to come to the rescue of Christendom against the Turkish threat. In vain, because they were all too busy fighting each other, especially the French and the Holy Roman Emperor.
That Crusade which you mention went astray, but the other crusades did not, and would have helped the Byzantines, if they had only been willing to cooperate better with the Christian west.
There is plenty of blame to go around, certainly. If Europe had stood together, the Muslim threat never would have gotten as far as it did.