1453...

That was the year that Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Muslims after nearly 1,200 years of success and prosperity, and nearly 800 years of fighting the advance of Islam into Eastern Europe. Its also the title of a really good book about the fall of the Byzantines to the Ottomans, and if you can get your hands on it... do so.

This book really gives you a taste of what I find so fascinating about history... it never really goes away. It is always there, lurking in the background, waiting to rear its head again and again, for good or bad.

Mistakes and bad choices made more than 1,300 years ago still effect us today when we speak of the relationship between Islam and Christianity in general. Even the feelings and opinions of common people are tainted with collective memories of such actions as the Crusades, the sacking of Jerusalem by the Muslims, the sacking of Constantinople by the Crusaders, the massacres and blood-baths initiated on both sides.

It also shows that much of what was understood and accepted to be "true" in 1453 by both Muslims and Christians is only held to be "true" today by Muslims. Both faiths, and the people that practiced them, were male-dominated societies where slavery was common-place, brutality and utter poverty a fact of life, and death far less tragic and far more understood as a risk of everyday living. Failure to adhere to either faith was punishable by death or slavery, and only through adherence to the faith of the ruling party could one hope to prosper... or even survive.

This is not true of what we now know as "Western society". Women have an almost universally equal footing in society to men, slavery is unheard of, wars are distant things that rarely effect our daily lives unless we choose to fight in them, and our voices are raised in praise or protest of what we agree with and don't agree with whenever we choose, and in almost any manner we choose. We, as children of this "Western" mind-set, look back on the actions of people like Richard Cour de Leon, Enrico Dandalo, Saladin, Mahmet II, and all the other players in the centuries of conflict between Islam and Christianity and see the barbarity and inhumanity of their actions and ideals. Far too many Muslims still see either martyrs or devils... and nothing more.

Reading this book (again) brings the fact that much of what motivated the men behind the conquest and sacking of Constantinople in 1453 is still the motivation in expanding Islamic influence today... nothing has changed except the means by which the expansion happens. Constantine XI faced the same threat from Islam that much of Europe and America face today... submit to Islamic laws and traditions or face violence, terror and the destruction of all you hold dear and true.

If anything, this book shows how much more intolerant the radical Muslim extremists have become. Mahmet II had entire corps of men under his command that were practicing Christians, and he himself wasn't even a Turk (ethnically speaking, he was a Serb). He allowed his subject peoples to practice their faith according to their hearts, not his... but this wasn't due to his good nature. Islamic law forbids taxes of a certain rate on fellow Muslims, so he didn't want the newly subject peoples to convert... he wanted to tax them at a higher rate than his Muslim subjects. Still, it is much more "tolerant" than what we see today in Saudi Arabia, Iran or Pakistan, isn't it?