Sack of Constantinople

5 Key excerpts on "Sack of Constantinople"

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  The Unknown Europe

  How Eastern Europe Got That Way

  • James R. Payton(Author)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Cascade Books

    (Publisher)

  chapter 9

  The Fourth Crusade (12 0 4 )

  “The Crusaders’ Sack of Constantinople is one of the most ghastly and tragic incidents in history. . . . The price was the lasting enmity of Greek Christendom. The Fourth Crusade could never be forgiven nor forgotten by the Christians of the East.”131

  On May 4 , 2001 , at a meeting with the Greek Orthodox archbishop of Athens, Pope John Paul II startled his host by asking forgiveness for the Fourth Crusade, which sacked, pillaged, and looted Constantinople, the chief city of Eastern Christianity. Few people in the West even know what happened in the Fourth Crusade: they may know a little about the crusades, but most are unaware of what happened during the fourth one.

  In contrast, virtually all Eastern Europeans know about that crusade all too well. As a Pole, John Paul II was acquainted with it in a way no other pope had been since the event. As head of the church whose crusaders so long ago perpetrated its horrors, this Polish pope knew just how painful a memory the Fourth Crusade has been for centuries to many Eastern Europeans.

  It is striking that the head of the Roman Catholic church asked forgiveness for what the crusaders had done so long ago. After the Fourth Crusade, 760 years elapsed before a pope and an ecumenical patriarch (from Constantinople, the leading hierarch of the Orthodox world) even met face to face, when Pope Paul VI and the Ecumenical Patriarch Athenagoras I did so in 1964 . That gives some sense of the deep rift opened up by the Fourth Crusade. But the 19 64 event went no further than an embrace and a polite kiss on the cheek; in 2001 , the pope asked forgiveness for what had happened in 1204 . For multiplied centuries, the Eastern Orthodox have lived with the pain, remembering the horror of what took place in 1204

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  The Fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans

  Context and Consequences

  • Michael Angold(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER 1 The fall of Constantinople as a turning point

  T he fall of Constantinople is a story that has often been told. It is Sir Steven Runciman who tells the story best in his Fall of Constantinople 1453, which is a consummate example of history as narrative, but even he was beginning to wonder whether the topic merited another book.1 He did not think that over the details of the siege he had much to add to the account given by Sir Edwin Pears in his Destruction of the Greek Empire, which originally appeared in 1903, the year of Runciman’s birth.2 Runciman’s hesitations have not prevented others from undertaking the retelling of the story of the fall of Constantinople. The most recent attempt by M. Philippides and W.K. Hanak is on a massive scale and provides a convincing and detailed reconstruction of the event.3 It is not my intention to provide yet another narrative or to attempt another reconstruction. The focus of my interest will be on the historical significance of the fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans. Was it one of history’s turning points? Such an approach will necessarily highlight its prehistory and its consequences, at the expense of the event itself. But it makes little sense to write about the fall of Constantinople without first providing a brief sketch of those desperate days in April and May 1453.

  I

  The decision taken by the young Sultan Mehmed II (1451–81) to embark on the conquest of Constantinople represented the failure of political arrangements, which for fifty years had allowed Byzantium to survive and to a degree to prosper. He blamed the Byzantine emperor for the political crisis at the heart of the Ottoman ruling institution, which had overshadowed his boyhood. We are never going to know exactly what the forces were which in 1444 persuaded his father Murad II to abdicate in favour of his son, who was not quite thirteen.4 There are, however, pointers, such as rumours that the young Mehmed – or at least the men behind him – were agitating for an attack on Constantinople. There was deep suspicion of the Byzantine emperor, who was blamed for orchestrating a series of Hungarian invasions of the Ottoman Empire, which were only beaten off with great loss of life.5 Some at the Ottoman court were beginning to see an independent Constantinople as a threat to security. They also resented the ascendancy exercised over Murad II by his Grand Vezir Çandarli Halil Pasha, who was an advocate of entente with Byzantium. The conquest of Constantinople will no doubt have appealed to Mehmed II’s youthful bravado nurtured by reading about the exploits of Alexander the Great. Encouraging him was a clique at the Ottoman court, which in the search for preferment had attached itself to the young sultan. From the names that we have they seem to have been predominantly from Christian families, but converts to Islam brought up at the Ottoman court. They were slave administrators and represented a new political force, which emerged as an Ottoman central government began to take clearer shape. They had a vested interest in extending the effective authority of the sultan, but were frustrated by Murad II, who preferred to maintain the status quo, ably seconded by his Grand Vezir. His was always the voice of moderation. When in 1437 Sultan Murad II was contemplating a punitive expedition against Constantinople, there was one dissenting voice, that of Halil Pasha. He argued that any attack on Constantinople would throw the emperor into the arms of the Latins. It was better to let matters take their course, since the Ottomans had little to fear, protected as they were by a series of treaties.6

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  From Christians to Europeans

  Pope Pius II and the Concept of the Modern Western Identity

  • Nancy Bisaha(Author)
  • 2023(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  The History of Mehmed the Conqueror, ed. and tr. Charles T. Riggs (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1954), 76.
• For details on the siege and sack see Marios Philippides and Walter K . Hanak, The Siege and the Fall of Constantinople in 1453 (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011); Kenneth Setton, The Papacy and the Levant (1205–1571), vol. 2 (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1978); the most readable treatment of the siege is Steven Runciman, The Fall of Constantinople: 1453 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965). One of the best eyewitness accounts is that of Leonard of Chios, “History of the Capture of Constantinople by Mehmed II,” in The Siege of Constantinople 1453: Seven Contemporary Accounts, tr. and ed. J. R. Melville Jones (Amsterdam: Adolf M. Hakkert, 1972), 11–41. See also Donald Nicol, Immortal Emperor: The Life and Legend of Constantine Palaiologos, Last Emperor of the Romans (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). For a recent and more critical assessment of Constantine, see Marios Philippides, Constantine XI Dragaš Palaeologus: The Last Emperor of Byzantium (London: Routledge, 2019). On Constantinople as a “God-given city,” see, Jonathan Harris, Constantinople: Capital of Byzantium (London: Hambledon Continuum, 2007).
• The barrel was probably between twenty and twenty-six feet in length and six to eight feet in circumference , with a breach of about two feet in circumference. Contemporary estimates of the weight of the projectiles range from 11,000–18,000 pounds. The cannon required thirty wagons and sixty oxen to transport it. See Philippides and Hanak, Siege and the Fall of Constantinople in 1453, 418–25.
• Contemporary chronicler Doukas recounts conversations with Ottoman soldiers who participated in the sack as saying they would have “sold [the Greeks] like sheep” had they known how few men were actually defending the city; Doukas
  , Decline and Fall of Byzantium, ed. and tr. Harry Magoulias (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1975), 224–25. Eyewitness Leonard of Chios, states that those who surrendered were spared, but also notes widespread seizure of inhabitants, Siege of Constantinople