Introduction
In April of 1453, the Ottoman Turks started the most ambitious attack on Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine Empire. The Turks hurled 1300-pound cannonballs at the Constantinople city walls. The shouting and crying, accompanied by the thunder of cannons could be heard miles away.
After the fall of Constantinople in May of 1453, the Ottoman Turks expanded territories into the Balkans and conquered many lands of the Middle East. To escape the Turks’ oppression, many Greek Intellectuals fled to Italy and the West, which fueled the Renaissance that was already under way. The loss of the trading gateway to the east forced the West to explore sea routes, which resulted in the discovery of the New World. The Fall brought triumph to both the West and the Ottoman Turks. But the Fall also marked the beginning of the Greeks’ tragedy through centuries of enslavement, religious oppression, and economical, cultural and educational decline, which delayed the Greek modernity.
The Byzantine Greeks Prior to 1453
In 395, Roman Empire was divided into the Western Eastern Empires. In 476, as the Western Roman Empire crumbled, the Eastern Empire, also known as the Byzantine Empire, thrived for 1000 years, spawning a rich tradition of art, literature and learning. The term “Byzantine” derives from Byzantium, an ancient Greek colony. Its citizens identified themselves as Romans and Christians, although many of them spoke Greek and followed Greek Orthodoxy.
The Ottoman Turks, A Turkic tribe that originated from the western Anatolia, gradually became powerful. In 1451, Mehmed II became the new Sultan of the Empire, and he started to plan for the conquest of Constantinople, the door to the East and the access to the West. The city of Constantinople has been a target of Islamic conquest for centuries, and as the Byzantine Empire started its decay after the Fourth Crusade, the fall of the city was just a matter of time.
The Fall of Constantinople
In order to regulate all ships that attempt to go through the strait, in 1452, Sultan Mehmed II ordered a new fortress to be built on the European side of the narrowest point of the Bosphorus Strait. Those who attempts to pass without the permission of the Ottomans will be destroyed by the cannons placed in the fort. Same year, Mehmed II also recruited the Hungarian engineer Orban to produce cannons for him. He demanded Orban to make the largest cannon that has ever been seen in the history of warfare, and Orban succeeded.
April 18, 1453, the Ottomans launched their first attack against Constantinople, but were repelled. Later that month, Mehmed ordered half of his 140 ship-fleet to move into the Golden Horn. The defenders tried to repel this Ottoman fleet, but they failed. On May 6, Mehmed II ordered a full-out attack. When they failed, they attempted the assault by digging tunnels as well as crafting huge siege towers, again none worked. On May 29, Mehmed orders another full-out attack, and this time the Ottomans wounded the Venetian Commander Giustiniani, which weakened the defense. Eventually, the Ottomans were able to take gate St.Romulus. The Byzantine Emperor Constantine XI attempted a counter attack, but was probably killed in battle. The City fell to the Ottomans. The Greek nation began their tragic decline for three centuries.
The Greek Enslavement
After the fall, the Greeks sank, effortlessly, into the most Abject form of slavery. As soon as the Turks entered Constantinople, they began to seize and enslave every person who came their way; all those who tried to offer resistance were put to the sword. “…countless rows of slaves consisting of noble ladies, virgins, and nuns, who were being dragged by the Turks by their headgear, hair, and braids out of the shelter of churches… There was the crying of children, the looting of sacred and holy buildings…” George Sphrantzes, a servant of emperor Constantine, wrote after his escape: “I was taken prisoner and suffered the evils of wretched slavery… My wife and children had passed into the possession of some elderly Turks… Then they were sold to the sultan’s Mir Ahor, who amassed a great fortune by selling many other beautiful noble ladies.” As in Constantinople, the inhabitants of many other cities suffered from the same tragic fate after attempting to resist Turkish administration. As a way to gain control, the Turks enslaved the noblemen and the intellectuals, which fueled the big wave of exile and drained Greece of their generations of intellectual capital. (Citation)
A major source of slaves was war prisoners, and many of whom were Greeks of newly conquered land. After the Turkish army conquers a foreign city, often times the inhabitants were sold into slavery. In the Barbarossa attack of Corfu 1537, the Turks “carried off many thousands of the inhabitants as slaves”. After the attack against Eyina, the Turks “carried off thirty thousand Greeks into slavery”. With the Sack of Constantinople of 1453, “As soon as the Turks were inside the City, they began to seize and enslave every person who came their way; all those who tried to offer resistance were put to the sward”. (Citation?) For hundreds of years, the Ottoman Empire had two classes: the ruling class and the subject class.
Tribute-children was another form of enslavement that degraded the Greek population. Tribute children were Children taken from Christian families, and sent to the Sultan to study Islam and Turkish traditions against the will of the families. They formed the best army of the Ottoman Empire, the Janissaries. A fifth of their male children from age 10 to 20 were marched away from the Sultan’s subjects, as a part of that tribute which the Koran declared was the lawful price of toleration to those who refused to embrace Islam. At the accession of Mehmed III in 1598, upwards of one hundred thousand janissaries of the corps had consisted of tribute-children. The original members were required to be slaves, trained as an offering to the Prophet. And their education taught them to regard their dedication to the Mohammedan religion as their highest privilege, while their strict discipline rendered them to be the best soldiers for two centuries. The tribute-children, therefore, permanently supplied the ottoman sultans with recruits of army, which powered the ottoman expansion into the rest of Greek lands and other kingdoms. There is nothing more tragic in the long history of the debasement of the Greek nation, which is submitted to this inhuman imposition. Almost without a struggle, the Greeks surrendered their children to Sultans’ cause. This human tax was considered by historians as the loss of national honor.
Religious Oppression
Not only were the Greek people enslaved by their Turkish overlords, they were also oppressed religiously. After taking the city, Mehmed II appointed George Scholarios as the new Patriarch of the Greek Church (Melissenos 134-135), as an instrument to regulate and monitor Greek’s religious life. The Patriarchs for generations became merely puppets of the sultans. While in appearance the Patriarchs are were the head of the Church, the sultans always possessed the ultimate power to decide on the church policy and dispose the patriarchs and the bishops when necessary. Ironically, it is the Islamic sultan who controls the Orthodox Churches. It’s tragic that the head of the Christian church became the political agent for the Islamic Sultan.
It was devastating to the Greeks when the Turks destroyed Christian churches and converted them to Islamic Mosques. Upon the sack of Constantinople, the attackers burned down the Church of Blachernae and Mehmed II converted the Church of Saint Sofia into his own personal mosque. The landmark Church of Pammakaristos was converted into a mosque in 1580 by Murat III. More Ominously, the “crisis of the monasteries” between 1567 and 1571 threatened to destroy the entire institution of Christian monasticism, that is, the very backbone of Christian existence in the Ottoman Empire. Only when some brave Greeks stepped forward, reminding the Sultan that Constantinople had surrendered, was this catastrophe narrowly averted. As, according to the Ottoman codes, surrendered territories shall not be harmed. Nevertheless, the destruction of churches continued sporadically for generations under the Ottoman rule.
Religious oppressions were also evident by ordering infidel subjects of the sultan to pay higher taxes. This tax was levied on the entirety of non-Muslim population, causing many Christians to convert to Islam simply to avoid paying the extra tax. Nektarios Terpos once said: “Because of some small financial need you separate yourselves from the sacred and pure faith of Christ and go to eternal Hell”. The conversion also meant abandoning the Greeks’ badge of difference from their Muslim overlords. This source of revenue, at the expense of the Greek’s misery, filled the coffer of the sultan’s treasury and supported the glorious Ottoman military expansion.
Economic, Cultural, and Educational Decline
The Ottoman Empire restrained the Greek Economy. The Ottoman Empire imposed the guild system to strictly control the economic activities of its subject and impose tax accordingly, and as a result, the economic stagnation happened in Greece, and the guild system was a strong contributor to it. This was mainly due to the fact that Greece at that time did not have ships suitable for oversea trading neither did they have a sustainable marketing and banking system. When Greece was independent, the only sizable buildings Ottoman built was numerous mosques. No other infrastructure was built. Greece’s economic system was behind hundreds of years.
The cultural destruction was also tragic for the Greeks. Many Byzantine monuments were either destroyed or slowly decayed as years went by. The antique palaces of Byzantine emperors did not survive. The columns of Theodosius were demolished in about 1500 to make way for the new bath houses. The huge statue of Justinian outside Hagia Sophia was taken down in 1540 so that its metal could be used to cast cannon. The whole Byzantine legacy of the Greeks was destroyed. The English traveler, George Sandys (1578-1644), discovered, “Along with the buildings had perished all memory of the society that had constructed them so that even the local Greeks were completely ignorant of the history of their forebears.” The irony here pinned down the tragic elements for the Greeks.
The Turks also neglected the Greek educational system because of their military expansion priority. The Ottoman put Patriarch in charge of the education, while the state completely ignored the funding of it. Because of that, the church many times only educated the children with minimum religious content. A Greek teacher once said: “Three years have now gone by, and no money has arrived at our school. I want to leave. I am unable to work, borrow, or eat” (Brewer, 111). A huge drop of literacy rate followed the fall of Constantinople, Martin Crusis, a German historian, wrote one century after the Fall: “In Greece studies nowhere flourished… amongst the priests and the monks those who really understand these books are very few indeed”. (Brewer, 111)
Education in Greece was left behind compared to the rest of the world to the extent that even foreign travelers are able to identify this hole in the society. A sixteenth century French traveler to Greece once said: “All the Greece in both (Turkish and Venetian) areas are in such an amazing state of ignorance that there is not a single city in the entire country that has a university and not a trace of pleasure in learning the arts and sciences”. He “can scarcely find in each monetary two or three who knows how to read and write”. It is a tragedy for the Greek nation that generations of inhabitants grow up without studying the philosophy and literature that flourished and originated from their own lands.
For more than three centuries, Greeks, as a nation, ceased to exist in history. Eventually, with the help from the Greeks in exile and from other countries, the Greeks won their independence in February of 1833. Otho of Bavaria became the first King of Greece. Building Greek nation from ground up was a difficult task. Greek Nation by then completely missed Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Enlightenment. The children of Plato had to rewrite their textbooks in their schools. After the independence, Greece started building schools, literature, art, and infrastructure.
The Triumphs for the Ottoman and the West
The Greeks’ tragedy contributed to the Ottoman’s triumph and the West’s discoveries of the New World. As the Greek tributary children became the soldiers for the army and the taxes funded the military expansion, the Ottomans conquered the Balkans and much of the Middle East. The geopolitical maps were redrawn with the increasing Islamic population in Europe. The Western world also benefited from Greek Diaspora which added fuels to the Renaissance. In searching for new trading route, Christopher Columbus set sail in 1492 and sparked the Age of Discovery.
The Fall off Constantinople were written in many history books as a transition point for empires. From either Ottoman Turks’ point of view or the Western world’s point of view, it was a glorious turning point. But the Fall in many books ignored the fallen. The Greeks’ voices were under-represented, which may partially due to the fact that, for more than 100 years after the Fall, not many Greek sources were found to record that had happened. Most sources came from the Turks or the Western travelers.
Conclusion
The Fall of Constantinople was a turning point in history. But for Greeks, it was not a point fixed in time, but rather the beginning of a continuous, slow grind of miseries for hundreds of years. Under Ottoman rule, Greeks were either slaves or had an inferior status. Their children were forced to serve in the army and convert to Islam. A puppet leader was imposed to the Christian church by the Muslim Sultans. Many Greeks was forced to convert to Islam for career advancement or lesser tax burdens. Few could read and write. They had little knowledge of their history and did not feel connected with their ancient ancestors. The lack of economic and educational development and the ignorance caused the Greek Nation miss the series modernization movements in Europe. The Fall is not a just a onetime military defeat to the Greek Nation, but a lingering moral and psychological defeat for generations. The Greek tragedy altered the Greek identity and Greek modernization timeline.
Bibliography
Primary Sources
Finlay, George. History of Greece Under Othoman and Venetian Domination A.D. 1453-1821. Athens. 1866. Print
This book is one of the classic history books written by a Scottish historian. Finlay, as an enthusiast for Greek cause, joined Sir Byron in the Greek Independence war. He later bought properties near Athens and lived there. His book on Greece detailed the Greeks’ struggle under the Ottoman Rule.
Kritovoulos. Mehmed the Conqueror. Greenwood Press 1970
This is a first handed book written in praising of the conquest of Constantinople by the Ottoman Sultan, Mehmed II. The siege of Constantinople is only a part of the book, the rest accounts for the life of Mehmed II. Although Greek by birth, Kritovoulos joined the Ottomans thus the book is written very much in Ottoman perspective.
Melissenos, Makarios.The Chronicle of the Siege of Constantinople April 2 to May 29 1453. Translated by Marios Philippides.Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1980. Print.
This book also discussed the Fall of Constantinople and the Byzantine Empire, with a focus also on the aftermath of the battle: the destruction of Greek buildings and the displacement of Greek people.
Sphrantzes, George. The Fall of the Byzantine Empire: A Chronicle by George Sphrantzes. Translated by Marios Philippides.Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1980. Print.
This is a firsthand account regarding the siege of Constantinople. Sphrantzes was a victim of the war. He and his family were taken as slaves after the Turks entered the city. Although he eventually bought him and his wife freedom, his children were killed by the Ottomans.
Secondary Sources
Balfour, Patric. The Ottoman Centuries, Rise and Fall of the Turkish Empire
This book provides a full account of the Ottoman Empire since its start to the very end of the empire. The siege of Constantinople as well as the Greeks are also included in the book.
Brownworth, Lars. Lost to the West, The Forgotten Byzantine Empire that Rescued Western Civilization
This book is about the Byzantine Empire, from the time of Diocletian and Constantine until the siege of Constantinople, when the empire was overthrown by the Ottomans.
Brewer, David. Greece, the Hidden Centuries. New York: I.B.Tauris & Co Ltd. 2013. Print.
This book writes about information regarding the years of Greece under the rule of the Ottoman. From the start of the Fall of Constantinople up until the Greek War of Independence.
Crowley, Roger. 1453. Hachette Books, 2014
This book provides a brilliant account regarding the Siege of Constantinople of 1453, including the Ottoman and Byzantine stories before the siege, as well as some information discussing the impact and the aftermath of the siege.
Feldman, Ruth. The Fall of Constantinople. Minneapolis: Twenty-First Century Books. 2008 Print.
This book provides historical background for the Fall, and captures the pivotal moment of the fall of the Constantinople. It also includes multiple maps, paintings, as well as quotes from those who witnessed the battle. It helped me understand the importance of that turning point in history.
Greene, Molly. The Edinburgh History of the Greeks, 1453 to 1768. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. 2015. Print.
This book explains the life of Greeks under Ottoman domination during the years of 1453 to 1768 through many perspectives, including but not limited to religion, society, economy, and politics.
Harris, Jonathan. Constantinople, Capital of Byzantium.
Harris’ work detailed the power and glory of Byzantium and those who built it. It gave us the clear idea that the inhabitants of the land were the Byzantines, a Greek-speaking Christian people who regarded their empire as a continuation of the old Roman Empire. This book called out the destructions the Ottomans made to the Greek legacy.
Jusdanis, Gregory. Belated Modernity and Aesthetic Culture. Minneapolis:University of Minnesota Press. 1991. Print.
The impact of the lost centuries caused Greece to be left behind by the West and the modernization culturally, economically, and politically. Greece was experiencing the national identity crisis “Greekness of the Greek”. After the independence, Greece started building schools, literature, art, and infrastructure.
Loomis, Louise Ropes. The Greek Renaissance in Italy. The American Historical Review, Vol. 13, No. 2 (Jan., 1908), London: Oxford University Press. pp. 250-251
This Journal article told us how the Greeks in Exile add fire to the Renaissance.