Edwin Pears

“ I admit that when Charles the Great, in 800, became Roman Emperor in the West the imperial territory of which the capital was Constantinople may correctly be spoken of as the Eastern Roman Empire. But I avoid condemnation for not adopting this name and for not calling the empire Roman by pleading that I am reverting to the practice of our fathers in the West during many centuries, and by defending their practice. The Empire has sometimes been described as Byzantine and sometimes as the Lower Empire. ”

“ Just as Shakespeare and the English Bible are a bond of union among English-speaking people, so the possession of Greek, a bond of union. the Greek classics, of the New Testament, and the Liturgies of the Church knit together the various Greek-speaking peoples under the empire. The common people learned to love the old Greek stories, to treasure the beautiful half religious, half mythical tales, the exploits recorded by Homer, no less than the simple mixture of inspiriting and patriotic historical narrative with the garrulous and ever pleasant stories of Herodotus. ”

“ Constantinople, which had been the heart of the empire and for centuries the great 417bulwark of European civilisation, became the stronghold of the professors of a hostile creed. After aiding Europe by resisting the long encroachments of the Turks, it had first become an isolated outpost of Christianity surrounded by hostile hordes, and then, after a century of struggle, not altogether inglorious, had been overwhelmed by them. By its capture Europe lost all that its citizens might have contributed to civilisation. ”

“ Paganism itself, among scholars and statesmen, was in competition with Christianity, and the great movement which was destined to give birth to modern Europe and which was greatly assisted, as we shall see, by the Greek scholars from Constantinople, was antagonistic to the crusading spirit. A common Christianity was no longer a bond of union to those who were dreaming of a classic revival and of a return to pagan ideals. Except to men who were outside the influence of the new movement, the pope and churchmen appealed in vain. ”

“ Like other great military rulers, Caesar yesterday, Napoleon to-day, Mahomet regarded men as so many counters, to be kept so long as they were useful in his game, to be cast aside when no longer wanted. Belonging to a family accustomed to absolute rule of the Eastern type, to a race which has never valued life as against military success, and having been reared amid dangers where his struggle for power and even for life was almost daily, he swept away every man who opposed him. ”

“ But to the eternal glory of the Venetians within the city, whose names are duly recorded by Barbaro ‘for a perpetual memorial,’ and of the Genoese who aided them, the conduct of the combatants from both republics was worthy of the compatriots of Marco Polo and of Columbus.
On the one side was an army of one hundred and fifty thousand men, containing at least twelve thousand of the best trained troops in the world; on the other, a miserable number of eight thousand fighting men to defend a length of between twelve and thirteen miles of walls. ”

“ The philosophy, art, theology, and jurisprudence which had emanated from its schools had, happily, leavened Western lands—happily, because after the conquest the city ceased to exercise any influence on European thought. Under the rule of its new masters it was destined to become the most degraded capital in Europe, and became incapable of contributing anything whatever of value to the progress of the human race. No art, no literature, no handicraft even, nothing that the world would gladly keep, has come since 1453 from the Queen City. ”

“ I have already pointed out, in the Fall of Constantinople, that the system of ex-territoriality, under which, in virtue of capitulations, foreigners resident in Turkey are always under the protection of their own laws, is the survival of the system once general in the Roman empire. Of course it is ridiculous to speak of the capitulations as having been wrongfully wrung from the Turks by Western nations, and equally absurd to claim that their grant shows the far-reaching policy of the Turks in their desire to attract foreign trade. ”

“ There were in the country a mass of ignorant peasants tilling the ground and caring little for anything else, peasants who were in a condition of serfdom, thinking of the emperor as a demi-god and rendering unquestioning obedience to his representatives; thinking of the Church as a divine institution entrusted with miraculous powers to confer a life after death, but far too ignorant to trouble themselves about heresies or dogmas. ”

“ It is when we pass from the influence of the Church on the conduct of the individual, to ask what was the value of its ethical teaching in regard to national life, whether it ever set before the nation a lofty national ideal, or whether it ever caused a wave of religious enthusiasm which influenced the nation as a whole, that we find the Orthodox Church during the later centuries of its history greatly lacking. Religion was to guide the conduct of the individual and to save him from eternal punishment. There was little or no conception of it as an aid to national righteousness. ”

“ Looking across the centuries, we may, perhaps, conclude that the empire followed the natural course of evolution under despotic rule: struggle for existence, success, wealth, contentment to the point of stagnation, a general slackness and loss of energy and a reluctance to struggle of any kind. But whether such conclusion be justified or not, it cannot be doubted that weariness of strife and general enervation characterised all classes of society. ”

“ He wished to put the citizens under his yoke, to take them as slaves, to convert the holy churches, where the divine Trinity was adored and the most holy Godhead worshipped, into shrines for his blasphemy, and to put the false prophet in the place of Christ. He urged them as brothers and fellow soldiers to fight bravely in the defence of all that was dear to them, to remember that they were the descendants of the heroes of ancient Greece and Rome, and so to conduct themselves that their memory should be as fragrant in the future as that of their ancestors. ”

“ Our religion prevents us from having any fear of death; but it is different with our women. To them, you know, life is everything: their existence ends here; they cry and weep and implore me to save them.’
As to the custom of repudiating a wife, two learned Moslems, one Turkish and the other Indian, and both enlightened men, assure me that repudiation, though a general custom, is contrary to the teaching of Islam, which only recognises divorce. Both, however, admit that the practice is general, though they consider it irreligious or—what is the same thing in the Sacred Law of Islam—illegal. ”

“ The absence of better indications may be accounted for. The subjects of the empire during the century and a half preceding 1453 lived in the midst of alarms. Its boundaries had been constantly changing and continually narrowing. Disaster followed disaster; usurpations, dynastic struggles, inroads of Genoese and Venetians; struggles with them and between them; ever encroaching Turks, battles, triumphs, defeats, hopes of final success, but territory still decreasing; hope of aid from the West or from Tamerlane; illusions all: finally the last siege and extinction. ”

“ While it is true that Constantinople had for centuries produced few ideas and little of original value in literature, it had rendered great service to humanity by preserving the Greek classics. Its methods of thought, its civilisation as well as its literature, were on the model of classical antiquity, but these were all modified by Christianity. Part of the mission of the empire had been to save during upwards of a thousand years, amid the irruptions of Goths, Huns and Vandals, Persians and Arabs, Slavs and Turks, the traditions and the literary works of Greece. ”

“ Those among them who have seen or have otherwise learned the results of Christian civilisation instinctively and almost unconsciously judge the two religions by their fruits. Such men either become entirely neglectful of the ceremonious duties which their religion imposes, or, if they profess to have become more intent in their religious convictions than before, perform their ceremonies with a sub-consciousness that their religion is not better than that of the unbelievers. In whichever category they fall they lose their belief in the exclusively divine character of their creed. ”

“ In order to attract population to the capital, Mahomet recognised that it was necessary to conciliate the Greeks. It may be, as Critobulus asserts, that he felt a genuine pity for the sufferings of the captives. As a young man, with, for a Turk, quite exceptional knowledge of the literary possessions of the old world, it is easy to believe that he was desirous of satisfying the Christians, while his general intelligence must have convinced him that trade and commerce, from which a revenue was to be derived, would be much more likely to flourish with them than with men of his own race. ”

“ The inhabitants of Constantinople seem at first to have hoped against hope, notwithstanding the construction of the fortress at Roumelia-Hissar, that the sultan would have remained content with his position on the Bosporus thus strengthened. They soon realised that an attempt was about to be made to capture the city far more serious than any that had been made within living memory. They knew their weakness and the strength of their foe. They knew that in a siege they would be under greater disadvantages than ever before ”

“ The dominions of the emperor were large and sparsely populated, and offered an irresistible temptation to neighbouring states. More formidable, however, than all other enemies were the Turks. Though they had been attacked in the rear and were for a while rent by internal dissensions, they were steadily increasing: adding constantly by conquests to the territory over which their emirs ruled, and increasing in numbers by the never-failing stream of immigrants and born warriors coming into Asia Minor from Central Asia. ”

“ The failure of the men of the West was largely due to the fact that they despised the common enemy. They were under the curious delusion that the Turk was not a fighting man; that, though he had been successful in beating Greeks, Serbs, and Bulgarians, he was no warrior, and that he had thus far succeeded because he had never encountered European soldiers. This delusion lasted for at least two centuries after the capture of the city. Almost every Western writer who visited Constantinople spoke of the defeat of the Turks as a task well within the power of a European state. ”