Lars Brownworth - Lost to the West - The Forgotten Byzantine Empire That Rescued Western Civilization

With the church hopelessly divided and the citizens up in arms, everything now depended on the Crusade. Led by the Hungarian king Ladislas, along with the brilliant Transylvanian general John Hunyadi, the crusaders set off in 1443, sweeping into Bulgaria and conquering it within a few months. Murad II was so alarmed at having his Christian enemies united against him that he offered the crusaders a ten-year truce if they would withdraw. The Serbian contingent of the army accepted and returned home, but the rest, spurred on by the pope, plunged down to the Black Sea coast. At the little city of Varna, they found the enraged sultan waiting with an army nearly three times their size. The Turks broke before the first crusader charge, but disaster struck when, in a wild attempt to capture the fleeing Murad, King Ladislas was killed. The crusader army disintegrated in a panic, and in a few hours’ time, the Christian army had ceased to exist.

The Hungarian regent John Hunyadi managed to regroup his forces and keep the sultan busy for a few years, but by 1448 his army was effectively crushed. Watching sadly from Constantinople, John VIII, who had pinned all his hopes on help from the West, was completely broken. He had incurred the wrath of his people and the abasement of his throne, and divided the church in vain. Heartbroken and defeated, he was near death, but one final humiliation remained. On the sultan’s return, the emperor was forced to present himself before Murad II and congratulate him on the victory that had sealed Constantinople’s fate. Eleven days later, he was dead.

*He also suggested that a good way to deter adultery would be to force the guilty women to live as prostitutes (no word on the punishment for the men involved) while those who committed rape should be burned alive.†As a Muslim, the Mongol warlord didn’t want to shed the blood of the heir of Muhammad, so he had the caliph wrapped in a carpet before trampling him with a horse. The invaders then settled down to a thorough sack of the city. According to legend, so many books from its great library were hurled into the Tigris that the river ran black from the ink for six months. The story is an obvious hyperbole, but Baghdad has never been the same since. *There were the usual complaints of the poor against the rich, as well as the startling claim that allowing the wealthy and destitute to marry (a practice frowned upon) would eliminate poverty and lead to a utopian society of shared resources. *It was by this time a rather pathetic glass crown, since John’s impoverished predecessor had pawned the real thing to Venice.†In Europe, the black death, as it was called, carried off nearly a third of the population, but the Ottomans, far away from densely settled cities, were largely spared. *Roger Crowley, 1453 (New York: Hyperion, 2005). *Fortunately for posterity, the emperor left a lively account of his journey across the lost Byzantine heartland. *Some contemporary accounts say the Mongol khan treated Bayezid with respect—or at least more respect than confining him to a cage—while others go to great lengths to describe the humiliation, relishing every detail. In any case, Timur the Lame had no use for the Ottomans, and abusing their conquered sultan certainly wouldn’t have been out of character. *Understandably for a man whose empire was under almost constant attack from Islam, Manuel II abhorred the concept of conversion by the sword. A prolific writer, he left us a book called 26 Dialogues with a Persian , which is a record of his debates on the subject with his Muslim counterparts. In 2006, Pope Benedict XVI quoted from it, arguing that violence had no place in faith. Ironically, the speech unleashed a firestorm of controversy in the Middle East, resulting in the destruction of some churches and several deaths.

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T HE E TERNAL E MPEROR

We hope in the “blond” people to save us … We put our hope in the

oracles, in the false prophecies. We waste our time in worthless words. —TIMOTHY GREGORY, A History of Byzantium (2006)

Within days of the funeral, Byzantine ambassadors were speeding on their way to the Peloponnese. There, at Mistra, in the vale of ancient Sparta, they found John’s younger brother Constantine XI Dragases and informed him that he was now the emperor of Byzantium. The envoys had no authority to crown him—that had to be done by the patriarch in Constantinople—but a simple ceremony was held. *Boarding a Venetian galley—there were no Byzantine ones available—the last emperor of Constantinople made his way to the capital, making his formal entry on March 12, 1449.

Of all Manuel II’s sons, Constantine was by far the most able. Charismatic and courageous, he was deeply conscious of Byzantium’s long and glorious history, and he was determined to uphold its dignity. A true son of his father, Constantine considered appeasement to be another form of treachery. The armies of Islam had been beating against the capital’s walls for centuries, and to cower before them as his brother and grandfather had done would only add humiliation to the eventual destruction.

The emperor, however, had no illusion about the odds against him. At forty-three, he had spent more than half his life fighting the Turks, and he knew his enemy well. Three years earlier, during the initial excitement of the Hungarian Crusade, Constantine had taken advantage of the Ottoman distraction to seize Athens and much of northern Greece from the Turks. After the collapse of the Crusade, Constantine had been left to face the full brunt of the sultan’s anger alone. Murad II swept into Greece, capturing Athens and forcing the Byzantines to take refuge behind the six-mile-long Hexamilion. Safe behind the wall, Constantine expected to hold out for months, but the Turks brought with them a terrifying new weapon—several large cannons. The opening blast tore into the wall, roaring with terrible certainty that the world had changed. Defensive fortifications, no matter how grand, were now obsolete. The age of the cannon had begun.

The Hexamilion collapsed in a mere five days, and Constantine barely escaped with his life. The Ottomans burst into the Peloponnese, and only a fortuitous early winter snow that blocked the mountain passes spared the capital of Mistra. Fortunately for the empire, Murad II was more interested in conquering the Balkans than finishing off the remnants of Byzantium, so the Ottoman armies lumbered off to conquer Dalmatia, and Constantine XI was left in peace to rebuild southern Greece as best he could. *

By the time the new emperor made his entry into Constantinople, the city was a dim reflection of its former grandeur, shrunken behind its walls like an ebbing tide. The streets of the capital no longer murmured with the babble of a dozen languages, merchant ships no longer crowded the imperial harbors, and wealth no longer adorned its palaces and churches. From an imperial height of nearly half a million in Justinian’s day, the population had fallen to around fifty thousand. Deserted fields choked with weeds now covered vast stretches of the city, and half-ruined buildings still slumped in their sprawling decay. And yet, for all that, there was a strange vibrancy in the air. The newly painted frescoes were not as sumptuous as they had been in the past, silver and gold no longer encrusted the icons, and grand mosaics no longer dazzled the eye, but there was a freshness and new vitality to the art that struck out against the waning imperial fortunes. Artisans and scholars found willing patrons in the swirling atmosphere, and new schools of art flourished in the monasteries scattered throughout the fragmented empire. Byzantium had lived in the shadow of the merciless Turk for centuries, and knew with a terrible certainty that it would be destroyed root and branch, but there was a determination to experience life in full even as the hour of doom approached. Materially, the empire may have been reduced to an insignificant speck, but intellectually and culturally it was blooming.