Was the Turks conquering Constantinople as bad as people on 4chan make it out to be?
By the time it had fallen, the Byzantine Empire was a pretty shit place to live, most of it's land had been taken by the Turks and Arabs, and it was poor. The Ottoman Empire made the city a financial powerhouse once more. Also, /pol/ will have you believe that le Mudslimes killed every Orthodox Christian in sight, rather than allow freedom of religion. Mehmed II certainly treated them better than the Catholic crusaders ever did.
And no, my name isn't Ercan or Sezer. I'm just countering /pol/ propaganda that Constantinople was New York tier before the Turks arrived, rather than the impoverished, dwindling shithole that it became.
Calm down Mehmet.
I'm much more buttflustered about Persia falling to the Muslim hordes tbqh. It's basically cuckolding on a cultural level. The forced impregnation of your culture with some dirty abrahamic bullshit. REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE
>>716592
It's a symbolic butthurt for a lot of people, not a practical one.
>>716626
Persia was already being cucked by Nestorian Christianity. It's only natural they succumb to their desires for superior Abrahamic circumcised cock while Zoroaster holds their hand lovingly.
>>716626
Wasn't Arab culture heavily influenced by the persian one, after the conquest? I mean, that's what that cuck meme probably means, more than anything.
Still now, Iranians do hate arabs 2bh.
>>716646
The fact that Persians are overrepresented in islamic cultural, scientific and other advances makes turks and arabs super anally pained, even on this board.
>>716635
Classical civilization mostly ended with Justinian's plague, with its last vestiges adopted into Roman Christianity and early Zoroastrian-influenced Islam which was finally wiped out in the 11th century rise of Northern Frankish Christianity and Seljuk Sunni revivalism.
>>716654
Also the fact that Iranians are Shiite, which they somehow managed to intertwine with Iranian nationalism and identity since the Safavid times,
>>716646
The problem is people see Islam as Arab cultural imposition on Persians when it was really a Mesopotamian and Iranian fusion culture that just happened to elevate a random Semite from a backwater as a divine figure in history, just like the Romans with Christianity and Jesus.
Yeah
>Gabriel II (Greek: Γαβριήλ Β΄) was Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople for one week in 1657.
>After his deposition, besides his diocese of Ganos, he was given the position of administrator (proedros) of the vacant Metropolitan See of Prousa (Bursa). Here he was accused by the Jewish community to have baptized a Muslim,[4] even if actually the baptized was a Jew and not a Muslim.[3] He was also charged with maintaining good relations with the Russians, at the time at war with the Ottoman Empire.[3]
>Sultan Mehmed IV was in those days in Bursa, and his Grand Vizier Mehmed Koprulu imprisoned Gabriel, and promised him freedom and honor in change to conversion to Islam. Gabriel refused and was tortured and finally hanged on 3 December 1659.[4]
and then there's
>Gregory V (Γρηγόριος Ε΄, born Georgios Angelopoulos) was Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople from 1797 to 1798, from 1806 to 1808 and from 1818 to 1821
>He was taken out of the Patriarchal Cathedral on 22 April 1821 (10 April Old Style), Easter Sunday, directly after celebrating the solemn Easter Liturgy, and hanged (in full Patriarchal vestments) for two days from the main gate of the Patriarchate compound by order of the Sultan;[1] this was followed by a massacre of the Greek population of Constantinople.
>According to several accounts, after Gregory's death his body, along with those of other executed prelates, was turned over to the city's Jews, who dragged it through the streets and threw it into the sea.[1][2]
>>716592
Non-Meme answer: Nope. Constantinople had heavily decayed when the Turks managed to conquer it. The Ottoman conquest revitalized the city, and made it important once again.
Early Ottomans were also pretty based, and in turn got heavily influenced by Byzantine Greek and Persian culture themselves.
>>716685
>Here he was accused by the Jewish community to have baptized a Muslim
Reminds me of an anecdote from Mamluk Egypt where a Jewish man was visited by a Christian looking to collect on a loan, and he got out of it by shouting for help which drew a crowd of Muslims.
>>716592
Somewhat agree OP, I hate how Byzantium is lauded for being a punching bag that insulated Europe from Muslim aggression. All that is saying is that the Byzantines sucked at fighting but that they took a long time to be conquered and some unrelated chucklefucks a thousand miles away benefited from it.
The Byzantines had their own plot of land that they had to protect and they fucking sucked at it. They let sand rats from the desert take their territory and build an empire out of it. When said Muslim empire collapsed, the Byzantines had 200 years to take advantage of the situation. Literally all they did in that time was conquer half of Armenia and half of the emirate of Aleppo
Then they lose 2/3rds of their empire to Turks in the span of 10 years. They only retake about half of that over the course of a century with the help fuckhuge armies of crusaders that periodically marched through enemy territory raping and killing Muslims so a Byzantine army could trail them and take over vacant cities.
It's a shit empire with a shit history and I laugh at anybody who tries framing things as "they were protected western Europe with their suffering!" or "give them a break, they were really tired after losing that one war, you can't blame them for losing the next one!"
***This is copypasta***
>>716627
>It's a symbolic butthurt for a lot of people, not a practical one.
This.
The last stand of the city was a weak thing, a shadow of what Rome was, but the whole "final remnant of Rome being the capital, one of the most glorious cities in Europe, in a race against the clock, with greeks and italians holding the line waiting for reinforcements from Old Rome that would never come, while an emperor(named after the OG founder of New Rome) and his troops go out in a blaze of glory buying time for the civilians, knowing that everything was lost" really hits it, and serves as a really tragic and symmetrical ending to the whole thing.
>>716592
The city the Turks took was a desolate place that never recovered from the Fourth Crusade. It was essentially euthanasia of a hopeless state, but people love it, and fully had hopes that it could have recovered.
That said, the actual attack was funding awful yeah. When they broke in the Turks began the traditional three days of pillage, but Mehmet stopped after one day because he was horrified at the destruction they were causing.
>>716626
Sadly the persians got cocky.
>>716743
It's like cuck porn, it satisfies a neurosis for a lot of people that justifies their conflicts of identity. It's why you almost never hear about the contingent of Turks who also defended the walls, or the Muslims who lived in the city and bit it hard in the sack, too.
>>716764
>It's why you almost never hear about the contingent of Turks who also defended the walls
?
I gotta hear this.
Sidenote: Vlad the Impaler was in the city helping the greeks, as well. Escaped by pretending to be a turk.
>>716795
Late Byzantine Army employed a lot of mercenaries, among them there were also Turks, it's nothing really revolutionary.
>>716795
After the plagues and crusades that pillaged and killed byzantine civilians there was barely any citizenry to rebuild the professional byzantine armies that were so lauded for being the best in Europe in their time, so they had to employ lots of mercenary armies.
>>716795
Orhan Celebi was an Ottoman prince and pretender to the throne who was raised in Constantinople and led a force of Turkish retainers. They defended one of the sea walls on the southern part of the city next to some Orthodox monks.
>>716592
M-M-Muh Constantinople... M-M-Muh Latin Empire. the truth is that Constantinploe was a symbol and a symbol only. If it was of any importance for the Europeans it would have been defended properly. Like Vienna had been.
>>716819
>At the announcement of the collapse of the Byzantine defense, Turkish troops spread through the city while Hamza Bey who directed operations along the southern walls of Constantinople landed his troops. There was no resistance except in the area of Orkhan trying with some men to stand up to the Turkish troops before being overwhelmed . Although Orkhan managed to escape death in the fighting, he ends up being captured: denounced by a prisoner while trying to flee disguised as a Greek monk, he is apprehended and beheaded on the spot.
That's just sad.
>>716883
>Like Vienna had been.
Lots of cities were important and great defences were made everywhere.
Vienna was just more defended since by the then, the ottomans had spread to the middle of the continent and nearly overwhelmed Austria-Hungary.
>>716923
>Austria-Hungary
>>716940
Ok, the compromise happened later.
The point still stands.
>>716626
They had it coming. Had they not spent 30 years trying to conquer the Romans (AGAIN), failed (AGAIN) and been launched into civil wars and dynastic struggles s a result, they'd likely have been able to fend them off.
Had they NOT, the Romans, not having been socially, economically, and militarily exhausted, would have invaded, crushed the Muslims, and either
>lost control of the region, ending in persia reasserting itself
>granted the region limited independence to act as a useful buffer and natural border to the empire, but with a loss of territory
>ruled it, but naturally gonr through a cultural synthesis over the centuries
The rise of islam is persias fucking fault.
its not about the byzantines its about the city itself being a center of trade and a door to europe
any hope to grab the balkans from turksmell hands became a fantasy
>>719018
Did any Relevant European Power actually care about the Balkans?
It seemed to me that they cared more about Spices/Conquering the Americas and Siberia/Protestant Catholic Wars/ India and Indonesia than the Balkans being Ruled by the Turks
Even Russia only cared about them with the rise of Pan Slavism in 19th Century and before that they mostly cared about Tsargrad
>>719030
>Did any Relevant European Power actually care about the Balkans?
That's pretty much why the Crimean War happened, the bongs and froga didn't want Russia to have access to the Balkans and to the Mediterranean
>>719030
yes
poland hungary venice
all relevant at their times
but if you wana keep your western focus
>battle of nicopolis 1396
It was the worst event in European history
Millions were tortured to death and babies were used as cannon balls
>>716635
how can they fuck up this bad
>>719142
>millions
Try billions
>>719152
It was 8 trillion, you filthy kike
>>719142
indeed it is said that the turks cut and ate the babies of the defender, mamma mia li turhci!
>>716685
It was just banter.
>>719148
You can pinpoint the exact moment the Greeks went into PAY DEBNTS mode.
>>716764
>be Despot of the Serbs
>spend YUUUUUGE dosh paying to repair The Wall
>half decade later
>be compelled to give your best cavalry to your overlord as part of operations to BEEAK THE WALLS DOWN
Suffering.
>>716685
>1657
Blame the jews
>1821
Greeks din du nuffin! Oh yeah they started massacring Turks in Greece after gaining independence.
If that's all you can find you're proving OP's point.
>>719508
>Oh yeah they started massacring Turks in Greece after gaining independence.
Oh yes, it's not like the Greeks were occupied by the Turks, were treated as second class citizens, thrir women were raped and even had their babies stolen to be raised as brainless killing machines.
>>719982
>were treated as second class citizens
This meme again. Greeks ruled entire provinces.
>>720060
>my unsourced claim about few nobles make your claim about treatment of ordinary people void
>>720085
>my unsourced claim about treatment of ordinary people make your claim of greek rulers void
ok
>>720317
Phanariotes=/=entire Greek population
>>719148
can anyone give me a tl;dr of this battle?
did they got bottlenecked or some shit
Its not that it was necessarily a bad thing (though it definitely was for the Greeks sold off into slavery at the time). Its the nostalgia of the event that gets people. Constantinople was the last enclave of a 2000 year old state/ empire, which basically shaped the entirety of Europe. To see it go had to have been saddening for everyone in some shape or form.
Let's say your dog is dying of a horrible disease and its days are numbered. Then some stranger comes out of nowhere and beats your dog to death with a shovel right in front of you. For some magical reason he resurrects the dog in perfect health and then takes it away from you forever. Do you thank this man?
>>721887
read the article famalam, basically the byzzies were too overcautius despite having the advantage and were outmanouvered by a bunch of arab light cavalries which also managed block their their escape route
>>721932
Well better than it dying for good I guess
>>716682
Safavids was a Turkic dynasty. Ismail spoke Turkish.
>>721991
>Ismail was born to Martha and Shaykh Haydar on July 17, 1487 in Ardabil. His father, Haydar, was the sheikh of the Safaviyya Sufi order and a direct descendant of its Kurdish[12][13][14] founder, Safi-ad-din Ardabili (1252–1334). Ismail was the last in line of hereditary Grand Masters of the Safaviyah Sufi order, prior to his ascent to a ruling dynasty. Ismail was a great-great grandson of Emperor Alexios IV of Trebizond and King Alexander I of Georgia. His mother Martha, better known as Halima Begum, was the daughter of Uzun Hasan by his Pontic Greek wife Theodora Megale Komnene, better known as Despina Khatun.[15] Despina Khatun was the daughter of Emperor John IV of Trebizond. (She had married Uzun Hassan in a deal to protect the Greek Empire of Trebizond from the Ottomans.[16]) Ismail grew up bilingual, speaking Persian and Azerbaijani.[17][18] Not only did Ismail have Kurdish ancestors, but he also had ancestors from various other ethnic groups;[19][20][21][22] the majority of scholars agree that his empire was an Iranian one.[4][5][6][7][23]
>>718995
>>716747
this, they were too arrogant for their own good
>During one meeting, Yazdgerd III, intent on humiliating the Muslims, ordered his menials to place a basket full of earth on the head of Asim ibn Amr, a member of the emissary. The optimistic Muslim ambassador interpreted this gesture with the following words: "Congratulations! The enemy has voluntarily surrendered its territory to us" (referring to the earth in the basket).[15] Rustam, the Persian general, held a view similar to Asim ibn Amir. He allegedly rebuked Yazdgerd III for the basket of earth because it signifies that the Persian voluntarily surrendered their land to the Muslims. Yazdgerd III, upon hearing this, called a small band of soldiers to pursue the Muslim emissaries; however, it was too late as the Muslims emissaries had already reached their base camp at that point
and then this happened
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_al-Q%C4%81disiyyah
>>722083
That's pretty good.
PART ONE
>>716627
>>716685
>>716718
>>716743
>>716764
>>721906
These all take the money for my book, and are just about sufficient of /thread. But let’s take a crack at killing these 1453 feels once and for all.
It IS a fascinating story, but to who? (/his/, sometimes you are only coming through in memes)
Who are the majority of people fascinated with the fall? And the “period of transition,” not the Fetih, but just that guns blazing, bittersweet image of Constantine XI charging through. Of this interest, there are three main categories of people who still talk about this.
- Greeks, though not all I'm sure
- Some Historians
- Armchair historians both neet and adament
Of the Greeks, that is waaay too long of a response to tackle fully. I simply don't know what it feels like to be a Greek and hear these stories (on top of some of the aforementioned other stories of atrocities, and again, not that they have clean hands) and what that does to manually stimulate some tender areas of your ego/sense of identity. Greek and Turkish identity and history are (despite those bloody “population exchanges”) much to their mutual distaste/indifference hopelessly intertwined. There may be Greeks whose asses remained virgin to the "Kebab" (and Romans) since the time of the Polis, just as there may be out in the hills, shepards who except for their nike shirt, don't look a day past their central Asian origin point, but fact is, it’s not as distinct a difference as their language or borders (and even those) on a map would have one believe. And that brings us to our next groups.
Of Historians, I won’t say much. If they’re worth a grain of salt, they would have abandoned any yearning pain or feeling for the story the moment they began to earnestly engage with the history.
PART TWO
Which leaves us with our armchair historians. Ignoring any abdullahs or georgios dealing with personal history identity issues on the armchair, lets get to the more whitebread outsiders who are “fascinated”/obsessed with the story.
Of the Neet Armchair Historian? These you encounter daily. Their fascination with history begins at the battlestation, playing eu4, totalwar, crusaderkings, Civ games, anything medieval that lends them the opportunity to play as and be the byzantines (“they were Romans!”). Thus, their entire outlook and how they are introduced to the story of the fall, hell, of the Byzantine Empire itself are thus irrevocably shaped by the mechanics of this itself. They log on, hoping to play as England or Germany or whatever wank hole they think they come from (sorry Brits), and they see a smear of purple on the map, hover over it, and in the most dramatic language possible, its usually the same paragraph about how “all is lost, it would take a true emperor to turn this shit around and bring us back to the glory of Rome!” That is their introduction, and it wrecks them maybe forever. Hell, even ignoring the hipster-like appeal and pleasure of figuring out that “Rome didn’t fall in 476!!!” that most of the neet armchair historians inevitably feel, the act of playing one of these games through (and quite a few play them over and over) as the Byzantines, and succesfully? They turn history around in their heads before the true story even sinks in, before maybe they even hit up a fucking wiki. Then the cold reality hits, they stop playing their /his/ games and start listening to Dan Carlin obessively, reading some wikipedia articles (takes a while for them to get to a book, any of which, usually is enough to dispense with this sequence), and they still have that feeling. They may even have something like personal investment in this.
PART THREE
If you want to get bullshitty psychoanalytical, look at the date when most of these original games came out. 2004-2009, or, a full decade ago. So maybe, its just a painfully embarrasing rosebud meme and these kids now creaking into their twenties [or if younger, mostly encountering these 20somethings] have the perfect story that encapsulates the conflicted feelings that come when thinking about real 4 in the morning fears like “I am wasting my life,” or “I wish I could go back and not spend so many hours playing those games.”
Of the “adamant” armchair historian, its inevitably the same thing. They learn about Rome which has an appeal, the appeal of unity. This feeling that long ago, all was bedrock and united and wonderful (yeah, lets ignore China and Persia, ya westerner), and that somehow, Byzantium was the last of that (that is some sweet mirroring with Constantine’s name, almost as sweet as the last Western emperor being named Romulus-Augustulus, or that the last Byzantine claimant to the throne died a penniless pauper on the streets of Rome herself, in debt to the pope). In any casse, the arc is the same, the effect which is that gross little feeling of that person’s own pains and regrets of the past in his own life [not for history, lets remember, if you read history, that isn’t you abstractly encountering something, that is something that you did with your life now] are perfectly encapsulated in this story of a rundown city being taken by a hugeass army. And maybe it is porn, because so often in my experience on these boards, most who spout about this endlessly have no use for any additional facts or commentary, but instead just harp and moan and simper about some feeling they get when they read the intro on the article of the Wikipedia page. That the same sentences are repeated and throbbed over in their heads rather than actual discourse (and how triggered they get when they first encounter 1204 [and of this, the latin massacre]).
PART FOUR
It’s porn because it captures their own life pains and abstracts them from themselves so fully and perfectly, that they never need actually deal with their own issues, but instead can always just go back to childishly cursing “kebab” or starting up the server for one more play thru of eu4, or listening to one more podcast. In either case, its gross guys. Rome never fell, there I said it. Now go and be Romans (which I’m sure is the opposite of crying over one little city you’ll never visit).
>>716646
>Wasn't Arab culture heavily influenced by the persian one, after the conquest?
Persians are fairly good at being conquered.
Which is why persianized is a term.
>>722602
havent read his post at all actually
>>722602
I've read it all and honestly all you wrote were just /pol/ tier shit, especially part 3
>>722167
Well you just got me. You described me completly. Now I will slowly retire and continue admiring another "greek". Alexander
>>723036
this is a pretty good board actually
أما في المدينة فقد عمل الجنود العُثمانيّون على استباحتها طيلة ثلاثة أيَّام كما كانت العادة الرائجة في ذلك الزمان،[131] أي يُسمح للجنود بالحصول على ما تيسّر من غنائم بوصفها غنائم حرب، فساد السلب والنهب في المدينة واعتصم بعض السكان بالكنائس فرارًا من بطش
TL;dr
rape rape rape stilling and rape for 3 day by the soldier
>>721887
It was the will of Allah, that's really all you need to know
>>721932
A better analogy would be that your dog is sick and will die soon, but some stranger comes in and aggressively pays for your dogs medicine and treatment before asking of you're cool with it. Now it's his dog and he has renamed it because he saved it.
>>716592
No. In fact, it was the best thing that happened to the city since 1204.
It was a ruined crap, with a small population, virtually dominated by Genoese, and a mere shadow of the Empire.
It grew to staggering levels after its conquest. It became, again, a vivid metropolis. Although the nominal heart of the Orthodox faith, turned also, from 1517, the capital of the Islamic world.
>>724452
The city wasn't renamed until after WWI
>>716654
>turks
I'd think Turks being overrepresented along with Persians in the Arab-started Islamic culture would leave the Arabs pained, if anything.
The Turkish probably saw the Perso-Arabs the same way the Germanics saw the Greco-Romans. It's like pottery.
>>716592
The only tragedy is that they stopped at Qustantiniyye.
>>716683
Exactly. The real reason people lament it it's that Persian culture was actually a thing before adopting Islam, and Islam isn't particularly popular in the west, so its seen as a loss.
The same would happen if an outsider saw Christian Europe and lamented the loss of Greek culture in the Middle Ages. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if that actually happened within Muslim scholar circles.
>>726080
>The real reason people lament it it's that Persian culture was actually a thing before adopting Islam
As it was after adopting Islam.
>>726211
Of course. I meant that Persians actually had a culture to speak of before Islam, unlike Germanic and Slavic tribes before they adopted western and eastern Roman culture. I'm not saying Persian culture ended with Islam.
>>725814
This is bullshit. In 1876 constitution of Ottoman Empire it was referred as İstanbul. I keep hearing this bullshit on this board.
>>716592
>did 4chan exaggerate X
yes
