Dyspeptic Codger

During the fall of Constantinople, many Christians took refuge in the churches with the idea that the Muslim Turks would recognise that the sacred buildings should afford sanctuary. Most of them ran to the great church of Hagia Sophia. The Greek historian Doukas, one of the most important sources for those events, writes that Christians "had only rendered their capture more easy by seeking all together refuge inside the Church". The great crowd were taken as in a drag-net, says another historian, Critobulus. The Muslims entered Hagia Sophia after breaking the doors. Christian prisoners were tied or chained together and any resistance offered was at once overcome. Some were taken to the Turkish ships, others to the camp, and the loot collected was dealt with in the same manner. Turks were arguing for the possession of the most beautiful women. Hagiographies were torn down and burnt. The greatest misfortune of all, says Phrantzes, another important historian who was an eyewitness, was to see the Temple of the Holy Wisdom (Hagia Sophia), the Earthly Heaven, the Throne of the Glory of God, defiled by these miscreant barbarians. The Muslim Turks didn't stop there. They destroyed and disappeared books from the libraries. Books with knowledge and about history and sciences. For Islam any other books except the Koran (Quran) was anti-Islamic and any book that contradicts its teaching ought to be destroyed. The ignorant fanatical masses of Muslims were destroying and burning or stealing books as they did in the Library of Alexandria. The only value of books was the amount for which they could be sold. Constantinople, Greece and the whole region of Eastern Roman Empire, after the Fall and Ottoman slavery, it went from the most advanced people to the most undeveloped. Sciences and philosophy were forbidden under the Islamic law. Historian Critobulus says that not only the holy and religious books, but also those treating of profane sciences and of philosophy, were either thrown into the fire or trampled irreverently under foot, but that the greater part were sold, not for the sake of the price but in mockery, for two or three pence or even farthings. The ships of the Turkish fleet had among their cargo, says Ducas, an innumerable quantity of books. In the booty collected by the Turks they were so plentiful and cheap, that for a nummus, probably worth sixpence, ten volumes were sold containing the works of Plato and Aristotle, treatises on theology and other sciences. The sack of Constantinople lasted 3 days. Hoca Sadeddin Efendi, in his work The Crown of Histories (Tacü’t-Tevarih), one of the most fundamental, detailed, and renowned Ottoman sources on the Fall of Constantinople, first affirms that the soldiers of Islam "acted in accordance with the precept, ‘Slaughter their aged and capture their youth.’" He then adds, in the characteristic ornate style of Ottoman historians: "For three days and nights there was, with the imperial permission, a general sack, and the victorious troops, through the richness of the spoil, entwined the arm of possession round the neck of their desires, and by binding the lustre of their hearts to the locks of the damsels, beautiful as houris, and by the sight of the sweetly smiling fair ones, they made the eye of their hopes the participator in their good fortune." Leonard states that sixty thousand captives were bound together preparatory to their final distribution. Critobulus, writing some years afterwards, estimates that the number of Greeks and Italians killed during the siege and after the capture was four thousand, that five hundred of the army and upwards of fifty thousand of the rest of the population were reduced to slavery. Mehmed, called for an imam, who by his orders ascended the pulpit and made the declaration of Mohammedanism (Islamic faith). It was that moment, when the most important Church of Christianity, the Hagia Sophia, converted into a mosque. Mehmed slaughtered, raped, burned, and enslaved so many of Constantinople’s Greeks that the city had to be repopulated, including with Greeks brought from elsewhere. He ordered five thousand families sent from the provinces and the walls repaired. Ducas records that these families, drawn under threat of death from Trebizond, Sinope, and Asprocastron, included masons and lime-burners to build the city. Have you ever wondered why Ottoman buildings are similar to Byzantine architecture? 65 years after the Fall of Constantinople, Sultan Selim I Yavuz, grandson of Mehmed "the Conqueror" and father of Suleiman, decided to definitively abolish the Patriarchate of Constantinople during the patriarchate of Theoleptos I, and to slaughter all the subjugated Greek Christians (rayah) of the empire who refused to convert to Mohammedanism and Islam. Ottoman expansion was primarily a result of racial and religious grand plan. The conversion of Hagia Sophia into a mosque and Muslims praying in a building that does not belong to their historical or civilizational heritage, is the clearest proof that Islam is a barbaric religion that does not create, but only conquers and destroys. If you want to support me in the effort I’m making, please consider becoming a subscriber to my X account for only $2. I write about the ancient, medieval, and modern history of Greece and what Christians went through because of Islam. Always with primary sources and historical facts. - Homer Pavlos