Infidels_ A History of the Conflict Between Christendom and Islam - Andrew Wheatcroft [228]
29. Ransoms were demanded for the most eminent and profitable captives.
30. This was remarkable, because in 1402 the Ottomans were beaten by the Mongol ruler Timur in Anatolia, and Bayezid was taken prisoner. A long period of Ottoman political turmoil ensued, when a Crusade could have retaken the Ottoman possessions in Europe. However, after Nicopolis there was little enthusiasm for a new enterprise.
31. Stavrianos, Balkans, p. 54.
32. His ally the Albanian Skenderbeg arrived just too late to turn the tide of battle in Hunyadi’s favor.
33. Vlad Tepes believed in a puritan moral order, and in addition to many of his political rivals and the wealthy classes of Wallachia, what he deemed “unchaste” women suffered the most terrible deaths under his rule.
34. See Mitchell B. Merbeck, The Thief, the Cross and the Wheel: Pain and the Spectacles of Punishment in Medieval and Renaissance Europe, London: Reaktion Books, 1999, pp. 126–57.
35. Doukas [sic], Decline and Fall of Byzantium to the Ottoman Turks: An Annotated Translation of “Historia Turco-Byzantina,” trans. Harry J. Magoulias, Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1975, pp. 231–5.
36. Letter of Bessarion, July 13, 1453, to Doge Francesco Foscari.
37. See D. C. Munro, Translations and Reprints from the Original Sources of European History, series 1, vol. 3:1, Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1912, pp. 15–16.
38. Doukas, Decline and Fall of Byzantium to the Ottoman Turks: An Annotated Translation of “Historia Turco-Byzantina,” trans. Harry J. Magoulias, Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1975, pp. 231–5.
39. Babinger is dubious about the motives for killing Notaras. He points out that Kritoboulos (a fifteenth-century historian and governor of Imbros) discounted Mehmed’s sodomitical lust and replaced it with a political rationale. See Franz Babinger, Mehmed the Conqueror and His Life, ed. William C. Hickman, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978, pp. 96–7.
40. Some, like ardent enthusiast for the war against the infidel Philippe de Mézières, came to blame the sinful schismatics, the Orthodox, for the triumph of Islam. See Petkov, “The Rotten Apple.”
41. Cited in Robert A. Kann, A Study of Austrian Intellectual History from the Late Baroque to Romanticism, London: Thames and Hudson, 1960, pp. 74–5.
42. On some of its nineteenth-century forms see Elizabeth Siberry, The New Crusaders: Images of the Crusades in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000.
43. Over 170 million copies of Hymns Ancient and Modern were sold over a period of 120 years.
44. These were processions that accompanied the traditional Whit Monday festivals in Yorkshire.
45. Thus Thomas Jefferson’s “crusade against ignorance” of 1786 eventually becomes the presidential “Crusade in the Classroom” in the first year of the third millennium. This was the title of a school test volume in the United States. The description read: “ ‘Crusade in the Classroom’ is a practical nonpartisan guide to the changes and choices you can expect from the Bush administration. In clear, jargon-free language, Dr. Douglas Reeves explains the Bush policies for school reform, predicts how these new programs will change our schools, and helps parents understand their options.” Captest catalogue, 2001, http://www.Captest.com.
46. Midian was, like Ishmael, a son of Abraham, but born to Keturah. However, the Ishmaelites were elided with the Midianites, as in Judges 7:12, where “all the children of the east lay along in the valley as numerous as locusts.” Later “Midianites” became for Christians another term for the desert Arabs, like Agarenes.
47. Thomas Moore’s hymn of 1816—
Come, ask the infidel what boon he brings us,
What charm for aching hearts he can reveal,
Sweet is that heavenly promise Hope sings us—
“Earth has no sorrow that God cannot heal.”
—was given a new concluding verse in 1831:
Here see the bread of life, see waters flowing
Forth from the throne of God, pure from above.
Come to the feast of love; come, ever knowing