Causes of catastrophe
WHATEVER befell the Queen of Cities, 553 summers ago, it was evidently a turning-point in world affairs. But to paraphrase Lenin's question, who exactly prevailed over whom?
The bare facts are not in doubt. On May 29th 1453, a 21-year-old Ottoman sultan, later known as Mehmet the Conqueror, took the ancient capital of the Byzantine, or eastern Roman, empire. By blockading the Bosphorus, spiriting ships into the supposedly impregnable Golden Horn and pounding the walls with cannon, Mehmet fulfilled the dream of many previous besiegers, going back to the early Islamic era. Constantine XI, the last Christian emperor, died in the defence.
In Turkish history books, the conquest of Istanbul is presented as a heroic feat by a visionary leader, who cast aside the caution of his elders and opened a brilliant new chapter in history. It is argued that the city was badly depopulated, and the civilisation it had spawned had become moribund: only after a change of master was the great conurbation on the Bosphorus able to rediscover its natural role as the epicentre of a world empire.
For Constantinople's defenders and their Greek or philhellenic heirs, the “fall of the city” was a tragedy whose sharpness has never ceased to be felt: the end of a civilisation whose art, architecture and world view were deeply infused with Christian doctrine and Hellenic thought—with spectacular aesthetic results, whatever you might think of Byzantine politics.
A comparatively dispassionate—yet still gripping—view of the drama of 1453 is offered by Roger Crowley, an ex-teacher with a pedagogue's gift for anticipating queries and injecting life into an old, if perpetually fascinating, story. One of the hardest questions, as he suggests at the outset, is how to describe the warring parties. Were they “Greeks” and “Turks” in the modern sense? Of course not, because the nation-state had not been invented. On the attacking side, the best troops were Slavic; so, it seems, were at least half the genes of Mehmet; his feisty commander, Zaganos Pasha, was of Greek origin. The defenders included Venetians, Catalans and above all Genoese. It is less misleading, Mr Crowley argues, to define the belligerents in religious terms: on one hand, a “Christendom” whose split between a Catholic West and Orthodox East had fateful results; on the other, the realm of Islam, whose passion for holy war had been reinvigorated by the arrival of the Ottomans in Anatolia.
The book mixes intriguing details of military history with rich references to the religious imagery that influenced both parties. It describes how morale on the defending side was fatally affected by apparent portents from heaven—such as the incident when a famous icon of the Virgin Mary, revered as a protectress of the city, fell into the mud during a procession. Odd meteorological phenomena, apparently linked with a volcano thousands of miles away, were seen by both sides as omens.
But for all the power of religious symbols and rhetoric, the conflict between the Christian and Muslim worlds was not as total, or as simple, as the discourse of the time might suggest. Notionally Christian powers were willing to ally with the Ottomans against their fellow Christians. As for Mehmet, he selected a conservative (ie, anti-Roman) theologian as patriarch and reaffirmed the prelate's authority over all the empire's Christian subjects. Before 1453, it seemed that the Orthodox Christians of Constantinople might yield some doctrinal ground to Rome in order to secure military aid from the Catholic West. But the monastics, and above all the people of the city, rejected compromise, even if this refusal sealed their military fate. After 1453, the Ottoman rulers played an important part in making sure that their Christian subjects remained on an eastern Orthodox, rather than Roman Catholic, track.
So whatever it implied, the Ottoman victory in 1453 did not mean an end to the practice of Orthodox Christianity either in the great city itself or the wider region. A more nearly terminal moment came almost exactly five centuries later. In September 1955, at a time of tension over Cyprus, well-orchestrated mobs ran amok through the Greek churches, shops and cemeteries of the city, desecrating, looting, maiming and in a few cases killing. Speros Vryonis, a Greek-American scholar of Ottoman history, has devoted many years to documenting this episode—along with the diplomatic legerdemain that was used to limit its consequences. The most upbeat thing about this sobering book is the fact that two Turkish scholars—albeit American-based ones—have endorsed it.
In diplomatic theory, modern Istanbul should have been spared this kind of horror. The Lausanne treaty of 1923, a founding document for the modern states of Turkey and Greece, had exempted Istanbul from the Greek-Turkish population exchange. During the early 1950s, and for a brief halcyon period in the early 1960s, Greek Orthodox businessmen with deep roots in the city were thriving once more. But in the end, modern statehood proved more harmful to Greek-Turkish and Christian-Muslim co-existence than traditional theocracy (including Ottoman theocracy) had been. That is thought-provoking for anyone who assumes that over time, the world is becoming more secular, and from a secular viewpoint, more “sensible”.
From the print edition: Books and arts