Lost to the West: The Forgotten Byzantine Empire That Rescued Western Civilization

^*Today a double eagle carved into the floor of the cathedral of Agios Dimitrios in Mistra marks the place where the last Byzantine emperor was officially confirmed.^*To ensure the loyalty of Balkan magnates in his absence, Murad II often took their sons as hostages. One particular prisoner was the Transylvanian prince Vlad III, who amused himself in captivity by impaling birds on little sticks. Developing an intense hatred for the Turks in general and the young Sultan Mehmed II in particular, he devoted his life to keeping the Turks out of Transylvania. His cruelty soon earned him the nickname “Vlad the Impaler,” but he always preferred his father’s nickname of “The Dragon,” and it is as Dracula—Son of the Dragon—that posterity remembers him.^*Nicol, Donald M. The Immortal Emperor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992, p. 67).^*A Muslim prayer niche that traditionally faces Mecca, indicating the direction for the faithful to face when they pray.

EPILOGUE: BYZANTINE EMBERS

King, I shall arise from my enmarbled sleep,

And from my mystic tomb I shall come forth

To open wide the bricked-up Golden Gate;

And, victor over the Caliphs and the Tsars,

Hunting them beyond the Red Apple Tree,

I shall seek rest upon my ancient bounds.—DONALD M. NICOL, The Immortal Emperor (1992)

When the sun rose on the shattered capital of Christendom the following morning of Wednesday, May 30, 1453, the Ottoman conquest of the empire was all but complete. Constantine’s squabbling brothers were still holding out in the Peloponnese and the descendants of Alexius Comnenus were still ruling in Trebizond on the Black Sea coast. But these were empty shells, splintered fragments existing at the whim of the sultan, and by the late summer of 1461, the last of them had surrendered. The Turks had at last fulfilled the cherished dream of Islam to claim the city, and its capture took a profound hold on the Ottoman psyche. Constantinople became the Ottoman capital in imitation of the mighty empire that had come before, and Mehmed took the title of Caesar, appointing a patriarch and clothing himself in the trappings of Byzantium.^* The Turks never forgot the magic of that victory, and even today their flag still proudly displays a waning moon to commemorate how the early morning sky appeared on a Tuesday in 1453.^*

The consciousness of the Orthodox world was also seared with the images of that terrible May, and over time memory began to transform into legend. The priests officiating in the Hagia Sophia when the Turks had burst in hadn’t been slaughtered but had stopped in midchant and miraculously melted into the southern wall of the sanctuary. When the city was again in Christian hands, they would reappear and take up the service from where it had been interrupted. As for the last heroic emperor, he hadn’t perished in the fighting but had been rescued by an angel and turned to stone. There, in a cave below the Golden Gate, the marble emperor awaits, like a Byzantine King Arthur, to return in triumph and once more rule his people. In the five centuries of Ottoman domination that followed, Constantine’s doomed stand against impossible odds became the talismanic symbol of the Orthodox Church in exile. His statue still stands in Athens, sword arm defiantly raised, the first proto-martyr and iconic, unofficial saint of modern Greece.†

Byzantium’s long resistance to Islam had finally ended in defeat, but in carrying on the struggle for so long, it had won an important victory. The great walls of Constantine’s city had delayed the Muslim advance into Europe for eight hundred years, allowing the West the time it needed to develop. When the Ottoman tide washed over Byzantium, it was nearing its crest; the armies of Islam would soon falter before the walls of Vienna, and the Ottoman Empire would begin its long retreat from Europe.