On this day, 29 May, 1453 Constantinople fell to the Ottomans thus ending two millennia of Roman civilisation.
Constantinople, already weakened by centuries of betrayal by Western Christianity, the many invasions by Crusaders and others and by the indifference of fractured Western powers was in a weakened state. Many of her citizens had already moved away and parts of the city lay abandoned and empty. However, some of her great monuments still survived despite the earlier looting by Crusaders, Venetians and others which robbed the city of its incomparable treasures. As an example, the bronze horses which today are in St Mark's Basilica in Venice were looted by Doge Enrico Dandolo in 1204 from their original site at the great Hippodrome in Constantinople.
On those fateful days of May, 1453, as the city was besieged, the great dome of the Hagia Sophia built by the emperor, Justinian in 537 loomed over the doomed city and stood as a mighty monument to Western Civilisation and ingenuity. And the city's mighty defensive walls endured also. There is some debate whether or not the Ottoman siege of Constantinople was failing and only succeeded because of their use of cannons.
But the city did fall on the 29 May making it one of the greatest tragedies to befall Western Civilisation.
Three days of looting by the Ottomans followed and saw many atrocities committed by them. As clergy and lay people sought sanctuary in their holiest of places and the home of Greek Orthodoxy, the Hagia Sofia, they were murdered without pity. Greek homes were looted, Greek women raped and even the conqueror of Constantinople raped the sons of aristocratic Greek families after beheading their fathers and older brothers.
And thirty thousand hapless Greek residents were marched away into Muslim slavery.
Constantinople's fall rightly shocked the Western powers as they now faced frequent Ottoman incursions into their own territories and were forced to defend themselves during centuries of warfare. Perhaps the survival of Western Civilisation owes much to the Spanish Reconquista of 1492 and the expulsion of Muslims from Europe.
Origin of picture unknown. Sourced from the internet.
You are absolutely right, Chris, in recalling the fall of Constantinople into Muslim Turkish hands on this 29th day of May and in celebrating it as one of the greatest tragedies to befall Western Civilisation.
ReplyDeleteThe fall of the City shocked for several decades all the Western Christian world also because, besides the atrocities, the loss of innumerable human lives and also of countless treasures of Art and of Learning, some of the extremely precious and ancient, dating back even to the times of Imperial Rome, the fall of Constantinople was also the fall of the very last vestige of the Roman Empire.
Your reconstruction of that tragic day is very accurate and fascinating.
Let me only expand a bit - in this blog particularly dedicated to discussions on slavery- on some further details, that you mention, about the wretched fate of the multitude of Greek Christians who had the misfortune of falling alive into the hands of the Turkish conquerors and were destined to slavery.
After the numberless barbaric atrocities that occurred during the three days of wild looting, the more than thirty thousand Greek captives that were destined to be sold into slavery, were first of all thoroughly selected ad separated into three categories: the prime “choice of choice” (in all senses, see below) chosen as the best “spoils of war” for the Sultan Mehmed II himself ……. a few other thousands “first-class” Christian prisoners picked out for being presented as “gift-slaves” and “war-booty” to the noblest Turkish aristocrats and courtiers and to the highest officers of the Sultan’s army ……. and the rest of the Greek captives, destined to be publicly auctioned into slavery, flooding the many Slave Markets of the Middle East.
Moreover, these groups of slaves were further divided into “categories” according to their “use”, i.e. for example “hard labour” for the strongest male prisoners of war, or “sexual use” for the youngest and most beautiful ones, both males and females etc.
The Christian prisoners destined to be publicly sold in Slave Markets were further “categorized” according to what knocking-down price they might bring once displayed on the auction-blocks of a Muslim Market.
The highest-valued and most “expensive” Greek slaves were partly sold in the main Markets of the Ottoman Empire, but were mainly “exported” to the very rich Arab Slave Markets of Damascus and Baghdad, of Alexandria in Egypt, and of Jeddah and Muscat, in the Arabic Peninsula.
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ReplyDeleteIn another post of some months ago, I have already recalled, about the awful fate of Greek captives in the fall of Constantinople, the very significant and very particular testimony of the Byzantine historian Georgios Sphrantzes in his “CHRONICLES”.
The very noble Sphrantzes was not only a historian but one of the most important men in the Greek Empire: a cousin to the last Byzantine Emperor Constantine XI and one of his dearest courtiers and friends, Sphrantzes was also a General and had bravely fought during the Turkish siege.
Captured by Turks and made a slave of the Sultan, like all the noblest members of the Greek Court, Sphrantzes, in spite of being a fighting soldier, had his life spared by the Sultan Mehmed II, who personally knew him as a diplomat, most likely because the Turkish sovereign perhaps was thinking of using him again as a diplomat in future missions to the Western Powers. Some time later Mehmed even allowed Sphrantzes to ransom himself.
However Georgios Sphrantzes had to suffer the most atrocious grief in seeing all the rest of his family, and especially his children, brutally enslaved and horribly abused.
In particular in his Chronicles he mourns the atrocious and shameful fate of his teenage son Yoannis.
The adolescent Yoannis was not only captured in the sack of the City and enslaved but even worse …… because of his “exceptional beauty” (mourns his broken-hearted father) …… the youth was chosen to be a page-slave of the Sultan Mehmed II and destined (together with 600 other uncommonly beautiful Greek boys, lads and youths) to become a “male concubine” of the Emperor in his male-harem (the so called “Third Harem” as Turks called it). At the same time, also 600 very beautiful Christian girls were selected for the two female Harems of the Turkish Emperor.
As Georgios Sphrantzes narrates with the greatest grief in his Chronicles, the teenage Yoannis was even more selected, with other nine Greek boys chosen among the cutest young sons of the noblest Greek families, for being repeatedly raped during an outrageous “homosexual orgy” that is said to have lasted almost ten days and during which the young Turkish Sultan …… at that time Mehmet II was just 21 years old …… “celebrated” his victory on the Byzantine Empire in particular by brutally and disgracefully anally and orally raping first of all those ten helpless teenage sons of the noblest Greek families.
After that barbaric and shocking homosexual “celebration-orgy”, the miserable Yoannis Sphrantzes unluckily became one of the many male-concubines in the huge male-harem of the young and ferocious Turkish Emperor.
Karel