Thanks harpygoddess.
Posted on 05/30/2018 5:18:56 AM PDT by harpygoddess
They found the Turks coming right up under the walls and seeking battle, particularly the Janissaries ... and when one or two of them were killed, at once more Turks came and took away the dead ones ... without caring how near they came to the city walls. Our men shot at them with guns and crossbows, aiming at the Turk who was carrying away his dead countryman, and both of them would fall to the ground dead, and then there came other Turks and took them away, none fearing death, but being willing to let ten of themselves be killed rather than suffer the shame of leaving a single Turkish corpse by the walls.
Nothing will ever equal the horror of this harrowing and terrible spectacle. People frightened by the shouting ran out of their houses and were cut down by the sword before they knew what was happening. And some were massacred in their houses where they tried to hide, and some in churches where they sought refuge... they were intent on pillage and roamed through the town stealing, disrobing, pillaging, killing, raping, taking captive men, women, children, old men, young men, monks, priests, people of all sorts and conditions . . .
There were virgins who awoke from troubled sleep to find those brigands standing over them with bloody hands and faces full of abject fury. This medley of all nations, these frantic brutes stormed into their houses, dragged them, tore them, forced them, dishonored them, raped them at the cross-roads and made them submit to the most terrible outrages.
~ excerpts from various eye-witness accounts of the fall of Constantinople, 29 May 1453
(Excerpt) Read more at vaviper.blogspot.com ...
Time to take back Constantinople from the Mohammadan hordes.
Interesting to think that 2,200 years after its founding, the last vestige of Ancient Rome fell. It survived thru the Middle Ages into the beginning of the Renaissance.
Until she was unable to defend her borders
Thanks harpygoddess.
In my freshman year at Columbia I bet my roommates that I could somehow bring up the fall of Constantinople in every class until graduation. It became a sort of in-joke that drew laughs that bewildered professors didn’t understand.
The Byzantine Christians blocked the advance of Islam in the East for nearly 800 years
Their successful defense of Constantinople from Arab besiegers in AD 683 and 716-717 arguably prevented Islam from spreading into Europe at a time when the continent would have been easy pickings.
Irony was that it was really the 4rth Crusade and its sacking of the city in the 13th century which was the direct cause of the eventual end of Constantinople and the Byzantine Empire as this piece notes as well.
That’s no one’s business but the Turks.
Suleiman the Magnificient restored the boundaries of the Roman Empire by adding Egypt and Africa and the Balkans to the list of Ottoman conquests.
He did what Justinian couldn’t do with far more limited resources in the sixth century. In the fifteenth century, the the two most powerful empires in the world were Islamic: the Ottomans in the West and the Safavids in Persia.
The fourth Crusade attacked Constantinople instead of going to Jerusalem. That was the beginning of the long decline. Damned Venetians.
I think that cultures that dwell excessively on certain past events aren’t healthy. Not to say it’s never appropriate to be deeply
Moved by such events. I’m a Catholic and the sack of Constantinople in 1204 was one of blackest marks on our history. Likewise, the fall of Constantinople is one of the darkest days in the history of the world. Most likely too far gone to save by 1453, but the failure of the west to try is an enduring shame. Every once in a while I reflect
On these events, and do so with great sadness.
With
I have read that many of the city’s residents refused to join in defense of the city. If a people will not defend themselves, one cannot expect anyone else to defend them.
Well put. But for the fifteenth century one shouldn’t forget the Ming Dynasty in China or the Aztecs and Incas in this hemisphere. Point being Islam itself may have been a unifying foundation for the Ottoman and Safavid Empires, but other large empires existed at the same time without it.
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