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July 5, 2022

On May 29, 2022 in Istanbul and other cities in Turkey, elaborate celebrations were held to commemorate the 569th anniversary of the Islamic conquest of Constantinople in 1453.  During these neo-Ottoman celebrations, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan declared that “As our ancestors buried Byzantium, let us hope that today, by building our vision for 2053, we also manage to put in the time warp of history the current Byzantines who are plotting against us.”

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In order to understand the troubling significance of this otherwise cryptic remark — most Westerners are today totally unaware of the history between Muslim Turkey and Christian Byzantium — some background is necessary.

Towards the end of the first millennium, the Turks, whose origins lay in the steppes of Asia, had become Muslim and began to raid and conquer portions of Asia Minor, which was then and had been for a millennium Greek and Christian.  By the end of the 14th century they had conquered it entirely and began eying Constantinople, just across the Bosporus.  Although generations of Turks repeatedly besieged it, it would fall to Muhammad II (or “Mehmet”), Erdogan’s hero.

But why did Muhammad and his predecessors attack Constantinople in the first place?  What made it an enemy to the Turks?  The same thing that made every non-Muslim nation an enemy: it was “infidel” — in this case, Christian — and therefore in need of subjugating.  That was the sole justification and pretext — the sole “grievance” — that propelled the Turks to besiege it (as their Arab counterparts did in the seventh and eighth centuries). 

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From the start, deceit was part of Muhammad’s arsenal.  When he first became sultan and was too busy consolidating his authority, Muhammad “swore by the god of their false prophet, by the prophet whose name he bore,” a bitter Christian contemporary retrospectively wrote, that “he was their [the Christians’] friend, and would remain for the whole of his life a friend and ally of Constantinople.” Although they believed him, Muhammad was taking advantage of “the basest arts of dissimulation and deceit,” wrote Edward Gibbon. “Peace was on his lips while war was in his heart.”

Muhammad also exhorted his Muslim army with jihadist ideology once the siege commenced, including by unleashing throngs of preachers who cried throughout the Muslim camp,

Children of Muhammad, be of good heart, for tomorrow we shall have so many Christians in our hands that we will sell them, two slaves for a ducat, and will have such riches that we will all be of gold, and from the beards of the Greeks we will make leads for our dogs, and their families will be our slaves. So be of good heart and be ready to die cheerfully for the love of our [past and present] Muhammad.

“Recall the promises of our Prophet concerning fallen warriors in the Koran,” Muhammad himself exhorted: “the man who dies in combat shall be transported bodily to paradise and shall dine with [prophet] Muhammad in the presence of women, handsome boys, and virgins.”

The mention of “handsome boys” was not just an accurate reference to the Koran’s promise (e.g., 52:24, 56:17, and 76:19); Muhammad was a notorious pedophile.  His enslavement and rape of Jacob Notaras — a handsome 14-year-old nobleman’s son in Constantinople, whom Muhammad forced into becoming his personal catamite until he escaped — was only one of the most infamous. The sultan stabbed to death another Christian boy who “preferred death to infamy.”

Or consider the behavior of Muhammad’s army once they had penetrated inside Constantinople: