Constantinople entered my life for the first time through a folk epic. It was a mysterious, powerful city, somewhere in the east. Then history textbooks expanded the range of names - Byzantium, Constantinople, Istanbul. It wasn't until I read Stefan Zweig's essay on the fall of Byzantium and the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople as a high school student that I became aware that the idea of owning that city was actually the idea of ruling the world. The city founded on the Mediterranean crack between Europe and Asia meant for the conquerors the final proof that they ruled the Black and White seas, and as the masters of the eastern Mediterranean, they are in a way the rulers of the world. Because the Mediterranean in the cultural-historical, religious and geopolitical sense has really been the sea of seas for a long time, the connecting substance of three continents, countless languages and world-important civilizations.
Re-reading Stefan Zweig, I dwell on the lines in which Sultan Mehmed II solemnly promises his soldiers - Zweig cites a figure of 150000, and historians say that there were half as many - that after the conquest of the city, all the treasures, people, women, children will be their prey. He will have three days for that pleasure. When the Ottoman army entered Constantinople on May 29, 1453, the plundering orgy with the cries of "jagma, jagma" as recorded by Zweig, really lasted for days.
Greek East and Latin West
Few connect this Turkish conquest, which forever changed the character of the city, with the event that took place almost two and a half centuries earlier. But a similar thing happened on April 13, 1204. The Crusaders captured Constantinople. Historian Bertold Rubin wrote: “The looting lasted three days and destroyed irreplaceable treasures. Part of the booty is kept by Venice to this day".
I wondered how it was possible that the crusader ideology, which implied the intention to retake the power over the Christian holy places in Jerusalem, redirected its blade to the conquest of the then most important and most developed city of Christian civilization.
It certainly contributed to it - the schism between the Eastern and Western Church in 1054. Or it was one of the alibi. The so-called filioque - a Roman addition that says that the Holy Spirit proceeds from both the Father and the Son and not only from the Father, is only the theological foundation that prepared the ground for the age-old disputes about the primacy of Rome or Constantinople in church matters to turn into open political hostilities . There is certainly a cultural pattern in the background. The East spoke Greek and preserved the Eastern Roman Empire, while the West maintained the dominance of Latin in church matters and was completely fragmented after the fall of the western part of the empire.
"The contemptuous silence of Western chroniclers"
Byzantologist Bertold Rubin therefore left a record of the misunderstanding of the Eastern Roman civilization, which in the West of Europe only grew over the centuries: "Understanding the Byzantine state and culture was not easy even for the modern West." From the competing medieval 'rulers of the world' in the East and West, and certainly from the churches, which for dogmatic but folk-psychological, understandable reasons first became estranged and finally separated from all those proud traditional powers, one could only expect mutual hatred. This is finally reflected in the contemptuous silence of Western chroniclers about Byzantium. It is the result of the unconscious 'language code' of the Christian West, which was in stark contrast to the rich cultural ties between the West and the East".
The irony of history saw to Rubin's academic downfall. The man who was one of Germany's leading Byzantologists and noted the intolerant ignoring of Eastern Roman civilization in the West, became intolerant himself. Since the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961, he has been less and less concerned with Justinian, and more and more with political activism in the extreme right spectrum. He died in 1990. Nevertheless, his works on Byzantium were included in Propylene's "History of the World" as capital.
Crusading Greed
In addition to the reasons indicated by Rubin, it is worth recalling the era of the Crusades. After the defeat by the Seljuks in 1071, Byzantium lost Anatolia and Antioch. She turned to Western Christians, asking for help and hinting at the possibility of uniting the Eastern and Western churches. At the Pope's call, it mobilized armed pilgrims and knightly cavalry detachments to embark on the First Crusade. In April 1097, crusaders from all over Europe passed through Constantinople. They saw a city that they did not know in the countries they came from. Amazement, admiration, envy. Aqueducts, baths, sewers, hospitals with departments for various diseases, a large university, even police and firemen. The city's markets were bustling with merchants from all over the world. The Byzantine emperor Alexius I Comnenus understood well the views of the horde of warriors and hastened to transfer them to the Asian coast. In the same year, those 50000 soldiers captured the capital of the Rum Sultanate, Nicaea - it had been conquered by the Seljuk Turks twenty years earlier. The Crusaders then set out for Jerusalem.
But those who returned to Europe did not talk so much about the Holy Land as about the splendor of Constantinople.
Imperial ambitions
Those stories produced dreams of world domination among ambitious Western rulers. Their Western Christian, Catholic perspective is most visible in the son of Friedrich Barbarossa. The Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, the King of Germany and Sicily intended to conquer the entire East. His ideological-religious motivation may sound strange today, but at the time it was part of the dominant religious views. Heinrich VI saw himself, or one of his successors, as the last emperor before the Last Judgment. The last emperor is obliged to unite the earthly part of the East and the West, to convert the Jews from the Holy Land to Christianity, and to first defeat the infidels. When the last emperor lays his scepter and crown on Golgotha in Jerusalem, it will mean the beginning of the Last Judgment.
In real politics, this meant that Henry VI asked Constantinople for money, a fleet and some territories, in order to realize his intention. The open threats of Heinrich led to the concession of Byzantium. But he did not get to mount his crown and scepter on Golgotha. He died in Messina in 1197. Due to the brutal reckoning with his opponents in Sicily, Pope Innocent III called his reign "the rampage of the north". And Voltaire saw in those methods the oppression of the Mediterranean civilization by "northern barbarism". If you look at the bigger picture - and this is what modern historians suggest - it will be established that public executions without mercy were actually more the rule than the exception in the world of that time.
Fourth Crusade
Court intrigues in Constantinople contributed to the weakening of the state. Isaac II Angelo was deposed from the imperial throne by his older brother Alexius III Angelo. He blinded him and threw him and his son into prison. Isaac's son, also named Alexius, escaped from prison. He asked for help from the crusaders he met near Zadar. They were preparing the Fourth Crusade. He promised them 200 silver marks if they helped him.
The Republic of Venice, led by the Doge Enrico Dandola, had its own score with Constantinople because they had previously lost trading privileges in Byzantium that had gone to the Genoese. Thus the Crusader sword, the Venetian interest and the will of Alexios IV Angelo, who lived with his son-in-law Philip of Swabia, came together to overthrow his uncle and ascend the Byzantine throne.
The Crusader army appeared before the walls of Constantinople in June 1203. Alexius III escaped with the state treasury. Although Alexius the Younger was enthroned by the crusaders as Emperor Alexius IV, he did not have the money to pay off the crusaders. He barely collected half of the promised sum.
The crusaders stayed in the city waiting for their money. They discovered a mosque in a neighborhood of Constantinople. The community of Arab traders who lived in the city built it back in 718. Almost five hundred years later, the crusaders burned down the mosque, and the fire engulfed part of the city. Almost a third of the population remains homeless.
The emperor installed by the crusaders imposes new taxes and enforces them with the crusader's sword. This causes additional dissatisfaction among the population. Aristocrat Alexija Duka Murzufl is placed at the head of the rebellion. Alexius IV was overthrown and executed in January 1204. Duka Murzufl proclaimed himself emperor and defended the city against angry crusaders who wanted their money. The city fell and the last Byzantine emperor, who was given only a few months to be on the throne, fled Constantinople before the crusaders broke into the city on April 13. Fate was not kind to him either. His new father-in-law, former emperor Alexius III Angelus, first received him nicely in Mosinopolje, where he escaped. After a feast, he ordered that he be blinded - the purpose of the cruel custom was to disable his rival from ruling. Then, blind and abandoned by everyone, he was captured by the new Latin masters of Constantinople. They executed him in public - by throwing him from the Column of Theodosius - that Egyptian obelisk that every tourist agency advertises as an Istanbul landmark.
The bloody trail of the Crusaders and the Venetians
On their way to Constantinople, the crusaders and their transport company - the Venetian fleet - conquered and plundered Zadar, they conquered Dubrovnik, Durrës, Corfu. Those places don't remember them well. The Pope sent a letter expressly forbidding war against Christians and excommunicated the Venetian initiators of the conquest of Christian cities such as Zadar, which was under Hungarian rule. But the letter never reached the crusaders, because the Venetians intercepted it.
The thirteenth of April 820 years ago was a black day in the millennial chronicle of the city. Residents were abused, raped, killed. While the Frankish crusaders looted everything in turn, the Venetians took the connoisseurs of art and relics, they took only the best. According to the testimony of one of the crusaders, Robert of Clary, the conquerors found an unimaginable treasure in the city: "Even the angels on the door and on the rings were made of silver, and there was not a pillar that was not made of porphyry, jasper or rich precious stones." Rich relics were found in that chapel, namely, two pieces of the true cross of Christ, as high as a man's leg and half a hand wide... and the tip of the spear with which our Lord was pierced from the side, two nails that were driven through his palm and through his foot , the tunic he wore and which was taken from him when they led him to Calvary... the blessed crown with which he was crowned".
St. Mark's Basilica in Venice is full of looted Constantinople treasures. The treasury houses the icon of the Virgin of Nikopeia, which the Byzantine army carried to war. She was one of the most famous icons of Constantinople.
The most visible are the Horses of Saint Mark - four statues were taken from the Hippodrome of Constantinople. Then four figures known as the Tetrars of Constantinople. And two columns from the Church of St. Polieukt in Constantinople.
The head of Saint Panteleimon was brought to Cologne. In Halberstadt, the local bishop organized a kind of triumphal procession, in which the looted relics were displayed. Among them the index finger of Saint Nicholas. Decorative relics from the imperial palace ended up in Western European churches.
In Paris, these are places like Notre Dame, the Louvre. Then the Vatican. Vienna. Many took advantage of the barbaric act.
In Brussels, you can see a memorial statue of Baldwin I of Flanders, the crusader leader who was crowned Latin emperor in the looted Hagia Sophia. His reign ended after the defeat of the Bulgarians at Adrianople. He died in captivity in Velika Trnova. And the empire itself will last only 57 years.
Consequences
The blow that the Eastern Roman Empire received at that time was not final. The restored empire lasted until 1453. But the disaster of 1204 prepared the later one. The weakened Byzantium never reached its old power, Constantinople could not defend the borders of the empire, and in the end not even itself. The Crusaders greatly facilitated the penetration of the Ottoman invaders into Europe, claiming that they had in mind the defense of Christianity. That trauma was deeply etched in the consciousness of Eastern Christians, preventing ecumenical thought. Russia's attitude towards the Western world throughout the centuries cannot be understood without these events.
In the new millennium, there are attempts to move all of that from a standstill.
In 2001, Pope John Paul II, in a letter to the Archbishop of Athens and All Greece, Christodoulos, asked for forgiveness for the evil committed in 1204. In 2004, the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I officially accepted that apology.
In 2004, the same pope returned the relics of St. John Chrysostom and Gregory the Theologian to the Patriarchate of Constantinople. Exactly 800 years before that, their relics were secretly moved from the Church of the Holy Apostles in Constantinople, where the Byzantine emperors were buried, and transferred to the Roman Basilica of St. Peter. Fatih's mosque was built in 1462 on the site of the demolished Constantinople church. John and Gregory did not return from where they started.
Finally, let me say: it is easy to admire Istanbul, it is a unique city. I could watch it for days, from Suleimaniye, from Galata, from a boat on the Bosphorus. But its beauty, especially since the spring, is overshadowed by the memory of the mortal robber of many people who lived here in the wrong time on several occasions, so they had to die ugly.
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