![]() ![]() It all started with a question from a dear friend: He wanted to know about a musical piece that I recommended to him many years ago. Many churches were pillaged and then destroyed, others were converted to mosques. The gallant West-here I jest-argued amongst themselves to zero hour and after a six week siege stormed the city and four thousand fell of the remaining 50k. Mehmed II was a renaissance badass who spoke a half dozen languages, loved science and poetry but was still sufficiently despotic to impale all his enemies when so peeved. Runciman is an excellent auditor, one who never bends to sentiment or stereotype. The Ottomans conversely were progressing, utilizing technology and a mighty military to make enroads across the map. ![]() ![]() Constantinople was in a steady decline since Christian crusaders sacked it 250 years before. ![]() There is evidence of a longer war between Mediterranean neighbors, religion just makes it sexier. Revisionists may wrong their hands and point to the long war between Islam and the West. Publicly though this collapse was regarded with outrage but not action. Many at the time, may have thought good riddance. This is an often harrowing account of the bitter end of the Byzantine empire, that eastward extension of the Roman Imperium. ![]()
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