Lessons From The Year 1453

n the annals of Western civilization, the final collapse of the Byzantine Empire seems to be merely a footnote. It is not. The story of Constantinople’s final days is one with which we should all be familiar; it is a story of the consequences of Western pettiness, discord, and shortsightedness.

The fall of Constantine’s city reads like an epic. Constantinople had stood as the center of an empire that traced its lineage back to the Caesars. The army which broke into its gates was drawn from a dozen nations and was over a hundred thousand men strong. A rag-tag assortment of Venetians, Genoese, and Greeks, numbering barely seven thousand, defended the city against this horde, fighting bravely to thwart an outcome they knew to be inevitable. The last Christian Emperor died fighting, casting himself headlong into the oncoming enemy, a death that allowed the Byzantine empire to pass with an honor not usually associated with the end of a civilization. Reading accounts of the terrific battle waged on the triple wall of Theodosius, one cannot help but think that they must have influenced Tolkein and his siege of Gondor.

But the heroism of the Greeks is not the interesting or pertinent aspect of the story. What are important are the lessons that the Byzantine Empire’s decline and collapse can teach us. While the current situation we face today is by no means identical to that which faced Europe over five hundred years ago, there are enough similarities to warrant comparison.

Constantinople’s fall teaches us that treading the middle ground in a conflict between civilizations, as much of Europe now seems to be doing, is not a tenable position. Several of the Byzantine Emperors in the early years of the 15th century followed the long and shameful road of appeasement. They made cordial visits to Popes and Sultans alike, and made a conscious effort to avoid angering either. This strategy did not work, for the enemies the Byzantines faced, much like those we face today, were not the kind that could be easily bought off or dissuaded; their goal in life was not to be left alone but to aggressively expand and conquer. The Turks who laid waste to Byzantium were not concerned merely with gaining money, trade privileges, leverage, or power; they were ghazis whose goal was to establish Islam as the preeminent faith over the entire world. Had the Byzantines cast their lot squarely with the West, things would have turned out differently.

The second lesson follows directly from the first, and is one that we should heed especially well. The lesson is that even if we define ourselves along national lines and forsake a greater sense of Western kinship, our enemies do not make such distinctions. This phenomenon is seen in Iraq today, where the French government’s attempts at appeasement have had little effect on the treatment of its captives.The citizens of Pera, a Genoese colony just across the Golden Horn from Constantinople, viewed themselves as separate from their Byzantine neighbors. They saw no reason to become involved in their plight and engaged in shameful neutrality. They expected to reap rewards for this behavior, and they thought that the Ottoman Sultan would be gracious because of their inaction. They were wrong. The treatment they received was the same as any other Christian town that submitted voluntarily to the Sultan’s rule; they had to pay special taxes, their walls were torn down, they were forbidden to carry weapons and they were forbidden to build any new churches. The Genoese, like the French, thought that they would be treated differently because they were a different kind of Westerner, but the Sultan did not heed such distinctions—to him they were all the same.

The final lesson we can glean from the fall of Constantinople is that Western failure to react decisively to emerging threats can have consequences far more serious than any would have predicted. This is a particularly salient lesson for our time, as the threats we face are not yet massive enough to draw our undivided attention. While the Turks were still raiding the Anatolian steppe, few, if any, Europeans would ever have guessed that not only would they eventually conquer the “Second Rome,” a city which legend said would never be conquered, but that they would come within a hairs breadth of conquering Europe itself. Few realize how close the Turks came to breaking into the very heart of Europe. If it was not for the arrival of Jan Sobieski and his Polish cavalry history would have taken a very different turn. The Turkish menace, which ultimately was defeated before the walls of Vienna at a cost of thousands of lives, could have been crushed at far less cost had the West acted earlier.

I can only hope that Western civilization has learned from its past failures and will confront the growing menace of Islamic radicalism with greater cohesion and foresight than it has shown in the past. However the current grumbling from Europe and our other allies sounds eerily similar to that which came from Venice and Genoa all those centuries ago.

Mark A. Adomanis ’07, a Crimson editor, is a government concentrator living in Eliot House.