Infidels_ A History of the Conflict Between Christendom and Islam - Andrew Wheatcroft [123]
Alas, the images, which ought to have been adored, were trodden under foot! Alas, the relics of the holy martyrs were thrown into unclean places! Then was seen what one shudders to hear, namely, the divine body and blood of Christ was spilled upon the ground or thrown about.
No one was without a share in the grief. In the alleys, in the streets, in the temples, complaints, weeping, lamentations, grief, the groaning of men, the shrieks of women, wounds, rape, captivity, the separation of those most closely united.37
In Orthodox Christian eyes there was perhaps little to choose between Catholic or Muslim rapine. But there was nonetheless a subtle distinction in the language used to describe the perpetrators of these bestial horrors. The Muslims were implicitly evil: “son of iniquity,” “the fiercest of wild beasts,” “inhuman barbarians,” “the infidel.” Much was also made in Ducas’s account of the sodomitical perversion of the Ottomans. Mehmed, drunk at a banquet after the fall of the city, demanded that Lukas Notaras, one of the surviving Byzantine officials, should send him his handsome younger son. Notaras replied: “It is not our custom to hand over my own child to be despoiled by him. It would be far better for me if the executioner were sent to take my head.” When the executioners came, he bolstered his sons’ courage with an appeal to their Christian and patriotic zeal.38 This was not just the martyrdom of Notaras and his family, but of the great Christian city.39
These themes of destruction and martyrdom and of the rampant bestiality of the Ottomans were built upon earlier perceptions of Islam. For many Western Christians the capture of Constantinople and the slaughter that accompanied it became a catastrophe on a par with the loss of Jerusalem in 1187. Conversely, for Muslims the final capture of the city seemed both an emblem and a guarantee of the ultimate triumph of Islam. Where “Jerusalem” had been a dominating trope of the Middle Ages, the loss of Constantinople, the last outpost of Christendom in the East, with all its holy sites, became both a political and religious motif for the following four centuries, in both western and eastern Europe. With the capture of the “New Jerusalem,” the Ottomans became the cynosure for the Christian world. But any element of admiration was equaled by a sense of terror, and both were firmly rooted in reality. Constantinople under Ottoman rule—or Istanbul, to give it its Turkish name—was infinitely grander in its splendid new buildings, in its vast wealth, in a greatly enlarged population, and above all in military and political power far superior to its decayed Byzantine predecessor. Equally, under the Ottomans it seemed to contain all the qualities of lust, perversion, sinful luxury, and cruelty against which Christian scholars had inveighed for centuries.40 These Turks, in Christian eyes, now epitomized the infidel, logically enough perhaps because it was the Turks whom they had been fighting since the First Crusade.
What is a Turk? a celebrated Austrian preacher asked rhetorically late in the seventeenth century. His answer was: “He is a replica of the Antichrist … he is an insatiable tiger … he is a vengeful beast; he is a thief of crowns without conscience, he is a murderous falcon … he is oriental dragon poison; he is an unchained hellhound; he is an Epicurean piece of excrement; he is a tyrannic monster. He is God’s whip.”41
THE CRUSADING DISCOURSE HAS MUTATED THROUGHOUT ITS LONG history. From the sixteenth to the nineteenth century it took a variety of new forms.42 I have suggested how the Spanish cruzada against the Moors extended during the sixteenth century into a string of conquests in North Africa and in the new territories of the Americas. Now we should cast our net wider. From the eighteenth century, the missionary “crusade” became a Protestant venture, acquiring a new life in the British colonial conquests of India