The Fall of Constantinople, 1453 - Live Podcast Part 2

Hello, welcome to Real Crusades History. My name is J. Stephen Roberts, and we are back for yet another live stream about the fall of Constantinople in 1453. So last time we kind of got up to the actual taking of the city itself. So we did a lot of background and we talked about the actual siege. So we're gonna get into something very interesting tonight, which is gonna be Constantinople's actual sacking by the Ottoman Turks. And then we're gonna talk a little bit about the wider historical impact of the fall of Constantinople, sort of how it's remembered and what impact it had on both the Islamic world and the Christian world and just, you know, history in general. So hanging out with us this evening is Real Crusades History's own Scott Amos. Scott, welcome, thanks for being here. Well, thank you, Stephen, and hello, Joseph. Hi, how are you? We've not talked before. Glad to meet you. Yeah, Scott and I are welcoming our special guest for the evening, Joe Visenanzo. Joe was with us last time and provided us with a very good overview of the siege of Constantinople. So thanks for being here, Joe. Great to be back. It's good to have you, Joe. Joe is highly well-versed in all things Byzantine. So he's really the perfect person for us to have on for this discussion of the fall of Constantinople. So we're definitely in for a treat having Joe here to talk about this with us. Let's go ahead and get started. And I'm gonna pretty quickly here just turn the floor over to you, Joe. So I know last time, Joe, we talked a lot about the actual taking of the city, some of the tactics the Ottomans used, the large cannons, the valiant defense of Constantine XI on the walls of Constantinople and the defense of the city by the Christian population of Constantinople. So do you wanna talk a little bit about what happened once the Ottomans actually get in? Like what happens when the city is sacked? Sure, because it was kind of a bit of a different story for different people. I think last time got cut off right as I was talking about the death of Constantine XI. But so there's a couple of things I'd like to mention about that before moving on. For one thing, Constantine XI, he clearly knew that he was getting into this thing too, and it was a last ditch effort. He deliberately removed his imperial insignia so that he would not be captured. He would just be treated as just another Greek defending the walls. He saw it as hopeless and just went out fighting. His body was never found because he removed that imperial insignia. So while there were some Turks who later came forward and said, oh, look, I found his body, or I was the one who killed him. We found this guy who has eagles stitched into them. That's probably him. It looks like anyone who actually knew him said that his body was never recovered, was never located. I'm sure it was just tossed into a mass grave of some sort. But the Greeks in later years developed this legend of the marble king, this idea that he had been just kind of subsumed into the earth and was waiting under the gate that he died defending and would reappear, reemerge to lead the Greeks to victory and independence from the Ottomans later on. So in the 19th century, during the wars between the emergent Greek state and Turkey, this was actually a very major thing. Of course, now Turkey still holds on to Constantinople, but the legend of Constantine XI, he almost became a bit of a King Arthur figure for the Greeks as their nationalism emerged in later years. So I think that is just fascinating and probably not something that Constantine XI really intended to happen, but I'm sure he wouldn't be happy to hear it, that he was remembered so well. So as the city was falling, as Constantine was killed, as Giovanni Justiniani, the Genoese war leader, was being taken away with a sucking chest wound and everything looked like it was falling apart, Turks started streaming through the walls. The first Turk actually to plant the flag on top of, the crescent on top of the walls of Constantinople, for which he had been promised an immense prize was a 25 year old guy called Hassan. He was from Anatolia. He was the equivalent of a knight, a sepahi, essentially the Turkish equivalent of a knight, and he was just a massive guy, apparently. He was the leader of this company of sepahis and was hit with 27 arrows and died shortly after planting this flag, but not before the Turks actually got through the wall. So for the Turks, he is considered kind of the hero of that fight right there. But once that flag was planted on the walls over the gate leading into Constantinople, all up and down the walls that was visible, it was visible from miles away, and panic started to set in. The Greeks were criticized later on by Italians who had been there for saying that they broke and ran first. And while that seems to be the case, I think that it's a little bit unfair to tar them with too much of a bad brush there because frankly, it's inside the walls, and there are miles and miles between the walls and where their families lived in many cases. This is, beyond the walls is I think about eight miles long. So you got as much as a couple hours before any Turks will be reaching your family, and you got to get there first. So certainly there are a lot of Greeks as soon as they saw this, like as soon as this flag was planted over the gate, the emperor was dead, Justinian was carried away wounded, things fell apart completely. And so we have Greeks rushing back into the city, you have Turks coming in and opening all the gates. The sultan had been ramping up his men for days because he knew that this was gonna be an incredibly bloody affair, and it was. In fact, the Turks didn't even record, didn't even write down the number of dead that the number of casualties that their side incurred because it was considered a blight on their successful capture of Constantinople. So they didn't even write that down, it was so bad. But so the Turks are coming in and the Turks, this is a legendary city for them. This is something that they had, they've kind of like, their empire at that point, the Ottoman Empire was more in Europe than it was in Turkey or more in Europe than it was in Asia. So they had been surrounding this one little last bastion of the Roman Empire for quite a long time. And to take this, and of course, for people in the East, Constantinople, the city of Christianity was considered in somewhat the same way that Rome was considered for Westerners. And the Turks were very aware of that. So they had, there were just legends of how much wealth was in Constantinople and how much there was to plunder. And the Sultan, remember, is also just a 21-year-old guy, Mehmet II, was just 21 at this point, had been ramping up his troops saying, like, you know, whoever gets in there is gonna be wealthy beyond their wildest dreams. So they start rushing in and just, it's absolute pandemonium. In fact, the Turkish sailors who are off, you know, surrounding this city, some in the harbor, on ships in the harbor, some, you know, outside the other walls of the city, the Turkish sailors were so, as soon as they saw that flag go up and it was clear that the Turks were entering the city, they actually abandoned their ships and rushed for the city themselves. You know, they're no longer trying to guard their posts because they're on the ground to get to the plunder first. Now, the Turks were made up of, the Turkish army, the Ottoman army was made up of a bunch of different people, but a large number of them were these guys that I mentioned last time called Bashi Bazooks. And Bashi Bazooks means literally damaged head. You know, they were just the crazies. They were just kind of like guys who were pulled together, mercenaries mostly, pulled together from all corners of the empire and beyond. And their sole motivation was plunder. These were not the ones who were particularly, these Bashi Bazooks, they weren't particularly motivated by religion or the restrictions of Islam. What they cared about and the way they got paid was, you know, a successful sack means that, you know, they might be able to get wealthy or at least, you know, get some stuff. And of course, the first one to the prize is the one who gets it. They had actually a system. They'd put a flag outside a house that had been thoroughly plundered, in some cases with the symbol of the person who had plundered it, just to make sure, like, this is mine, I got this, I was here first. So the plunder, as soon as they get through the walls, as soon as the Christian defense collapses, you know, the Italians are running for the boats, the Greeks are running for their houses, and the Turks are, you know, all racing, literally racing to get to the best, biggest houses first. So in Islam, and, you know, Mehmet II was trying to do this according to, you know, the rules of Islam. He wanted to kind of be considered well by his fellow Muslims. In Islam, taking a Christian city, or theoretically a Jewish city, any of the people in the book, taking a city, you know, the people of the book, legally, they could plunder for three days. And after that point, they would have to stop. So again, you'd have to plunder fast, otherwise, you know, if you run out of time, then, you know, then the laws of Islam say that you have to stop. So they're rushing there, and just fan out, you know, rushing across miles of what was, at that time, mostly farmland and suburb. There weren't a whole lot of people left in Constantinople at this point. So the Turks are rushing in. Some places, because Constantinople had become so depopulated by that point, some places were actually like little towns inside the greater city, and they had their own walls. And these, and a few of these places actually opened their gates and surrendered, knowing that according to Muslim law, if they did that, they would be subject to much less plundering, and their, you know, their churches wouldn't be destroyed. Legally speaking, the Muslims couldn't destroy their churches if they let them through the walls of their little village enclaves within the greater Constantinople. So some places opened up and let the Turks in, at which point they were treated better. Other places did not do that, and they were, you know, treated pretty harshly. In particular, there were companies of soldiers from other areas of the world, not Greeks themselves. A group of Catalans, they resisted to the last man. They were entirely destroyed, but, and the Turks actually respected them for that. In another case, a group of Ottomans, actual dissident Ottomans. Mehmet II had a cousin, a distant cousin, who was actually a dissident contender for the throne if Mehmet, if something happened to Mehmet. So he and his men, about 600 Turks, were, you know, absolutely desperate, and, you know, they, of course, essentially fought to the last man as well. The captured ones from that bunch, because they were, you know, a particular threat to Mehmet, they were all impaled, and I think we know what impalement means, but if not, you know, it means to be essentially just sat atop a sharpened stake and then slowly die over the course of days in some cases. So, yeah, so resistance was not treated very well. Mehmet entered the city, and he actually entered the city twice. He entered the city three days later after all the sacking was done in a formal triumph modeled after the Roman triumphs, the sort of thing that Pompey or, you know, Julius Caesar or Constantine would have celebrated, you know, coming through the triumphal gate with an arch and doing all that, but he entered it a couple of days earlier on the day of the sacking, the first day of the sacking, May 29th, and the first thing he did, because he was, I think, a guy who saw himself in kind of grand historical terms, again, he was a younger man, kind of romantic, I think, in some ways, in some areas of his thinking, and certainly had a high opinion of himself. So he, the first thing he did was to make his way down to the Hagia Sophia, you know, the greatest church of Christendom for a thousand years, you know, this massive thing that had been built by the Emperor Justinian back in the 500s, and as he was doing that, there was still a service that was being conducted. I'm not sure if it was a mass or if it was some other service, I think it might be actually matins, so an evening service. For reference, the sack began in the morning, so he made his way down there, must have been about six hours later before he actually got to that service, and as the Turks busted in, the people there were still celebrating, I think it was matins, and the monks who were conducting this, according to legends, they gathered up, you know, all the instruments for the mass or the service, the matins, and of course, you know, the legend that grew up after that was that they moved to the south wall of the sanctuary, and were kind of subsumed into the wall. It's kind of like that same story about Constantine XI being kind of subsumed into the earth underneath the gate that he died fighting at. They were just kind of subsumed into the wall, and you can sort of see their outline still hanging on, still barely visible there, you know, these monks, and that when Hagia Sophia becomes a Christian church again, they'll be, you know, transported back out of this wall, released, and then they'll pick up and continue the service that they were performing, you know, where they left off. So certainly there's a lot of legends that have grown up around these pretty fateful three days here. So, you know, Turks are rampaging through the city, and everything's going crazy. The Italians immediately, if they, not immediately, certainly not all, but any that could, fled to the boats, and because the navy, the Turkish navy, was so distracted by trying to get a piece of the action themselves, they actually let a bunch of those Italian ships out rather than trying to fight them. I mean, I guess it's like why fight a, you know, a corner badger when you can go, you know, grab what he's been guarding this whole time. And so a lot of Italians actually were witnesses to this, and were able to escape and tell the story, and spread the story very quickly to the rest of Europe. So the Byzantine nobility that did not die on the walls, especially immediately around the gate where Constantine XI died, most of them were captured and immediately enslaved. Mehmed wanted to, as best as he could, kind of take these people who had been in charge of running the empire, running Constantinople, and transform them into, you know, his own officials, you know, take them, bring them on his side. And so he was, you know, he was attempted in many cases to treat them quite respectfully, but there was certainly a limit to that. For example, Lucas Notaris, who was the megaduke, the megadux, the grand duke, essentially the prime minister of Constantinople, he was captured, and he was brought to Mehmed, and Mehmed treated him with honor, and invited him to, you know, the celebratory banquet at the end of the three days of sacking and looting. But unfortunately for all parties involved, Mehmed was also a bit of a, he had what you might call divided proclivities, sexually speaking. So he certainly had plenty of kids, so there's that, but then he was also clearly, he liked teenage boys. And Lucas Notaris, you know, had a 14-year-old son, and Lucas Notaris, his two older sons had died on the walls fighting, and so he had this one remaining son, and he gets invited to this banquet, Lucas and his son, and Mehmed says, well, I want your son for my harem. And of course, Lucas Notaris, he's just lost his two older sons, that's the last thing that he wants to have happen, so he says, no, absolutely not. And well, then Mehmed has him killed, has his son killed, and also has his nephew killed, who's another kid that Mehmed wanted to add to his harem. And so yeah, there was a bit of confusion when that happened. Sorry, I don't know if you want to add anything at this point. I'm on a bit of a run, so if there's anything that you want some clarification for. Yeah, you're definitely doing really cool show, very interesting show. So yeah, that's, I was actually gonna ask you that if that story was true about Mehmed and the teenage sons of that Byzantine official, so yeah, I guess what you're saying is that that did in fact happen. Well, I mean, I suppose I can't say for a certainty that it's true. There is a, that one is pretty well-confirmed. I think Ducas and Georges Francis, who were both there, both recorded it as having occurred. You know, yeah, they could be trying to just make Mehmed look worse, but we also know that he was, that that wasn't just something that he did at that point. He was, you know, he was a bit of a pedophile, so. Now, there are Turkish sources that dispute that now, but you know, they have their own agenda. Well, I'm sure you know because today it's kind of politically incorrect for somebody to have those proclivities that that would be the kind of thing that, you know, you wouldn't want a national hero to have that on his resume, if you will. But I imagine back at the time, that wasn't really considered an issue. That was sort of mainstream behavior among the Turkish nobility at the time, wasn't it? I would say so, in much the same way that that sort of behavior of samurai culture, you know, ancient Greece, you know, you can think of situations where that has been a little bit more normalized or at least not thought of as particularly, you know, damning behavior. It's certainly not really allowed by Islam and, you know, ISIS would condemn him for that now. But then again, you know, Mehmet was also an alcoholic, you know, a famous drinker, as was his entire family. So, you know, they weren't following all the rules of Islam. I think they're really, as far as the Ottomans went, they definitely considered, especially the Turks in general, they were less strict about certain things. They were a little bit, you know, held onto a little bit more of that kind of- So that step- Conqueror- Lifestyle. Yeah. That's actually true. I know that even during the, you know, the 12th and 13th centuries, kind of the Crusades and the Holy Land era, some of the various Turkish figures were known to enjoy alcohol, like, for example, after he won the Battle of the Field of Blood. According to, you know, Saracen sources that we have, he got drunk afterwards and he was a fan of drink. So, yeah, I guess that's kind of been a long running thing, perhaps, with the Turkish branch of Islam. Yeah, and certainly there's exceptions made for the people at the top in their personal lives, you know. So while that's not something he probably would have just championed publicly, that's something that everyone who is around and, you know, would have just looked the other way. If, you know, if they even needed to, I couldn't say for sure, but yeah. There is a story, speaking of like, that's a little bit maybe less reliable, that the brother of Vlad Dracul, of course, Vlad the Impaler, Dracula, his brother Radu, who was in Constantinople at the time, was actually introduced into Mehmet's family. You know, harem. And that, you know, went along with Mehmet a lot more and was then later rewarded by Mehmet when he conquered much of what's now Romania. And, you know, fighting his brother and kind of, you know, was placed on the throne by Mehmet as a puppet king. But that may be less reliable. But, yeah, certainly that- That particular story, just to kind of add to that, that was included in a really interesting book I read not too long ago about Vlad the Impaler's life. And the researchers there pretty much treated that like that was just sort of a, just a fact of history. I mean, that Radu was, in fact, Vlad's lover. So, yeah, I don't think, or I'm sorry, did I say, Radu was Mehmet's lover. But, yeah, I think that, you know, the idea of Mehmet II as kind of having boys in his harem is, I mean, it's not that controversial, is it, among- Oh, it's not controversial at all. Yeah, that's acknowledged by everybody. Great. Well, did you have anything else to add about the sacking of the city? You're definitely giving a really good idea of kind of what went on. What else did you have to add to that, Joe? Yeah, I guess, I suppose, a few things. So, Mehmet, he clearly had this brutal streak, but he made a conscious effort to, as soon as he could, kind of bring the Greeks, bring the Byzantines into his system as soon as he could. He didn't want to, I mean, he was not a dumb guy. He knew that in order to rule this city and to run this thing, he needed Greek bureaucrats and nobles. So, he brought in, Constantine's nephew, actually, became a very important figure, a vizier in his regime. Later on, and a number of people were brought in there. The man who became the patriarch of Constantinople, a guy called Gennadius, who was virulently anti-Latin, anti-Western, anti-Pope. That's probably why he was chosen, aside from the fact that he really was a very well-respected scholar. Gennadius and Mehmet were famed for having regular philosophical debates on various subjects, and Mehmet made a point of protecting the Greek Orthodox system as a way to kind of ameliorate his subject population. So, it was not all a pure bloodbath, but the population of about 30,000 people were killed or sold into slavery, and certainly there was an absurd amount of depraved violence and pretty horrific stuff that happened in the aftermath. I think the, yes, well, everyone is just famous for saying just like, rivers of blood in the streets, run down the gutters, these old Roman gutters. So, there's clearly a lot of violence, but Mehmet wasn't stupid, and he knew that he had to also appease the Greeks and prevent any sort of attempted uprising or actually had to work with the people that he had conquered. So, there's, it's not all, it's not orcs. They're still human beings, but. Yeah, I guess what you're saying is after a certain period of some mayhem and some sacking of the city, there would have been some attempt to kind of start to organize the city as a part of the Ottoman domain. Yeah, and that began pretty quickly. In fact, and one thing that is extremely significant is that Mehmet really wanted everyone to think of him as the new, as basically just the successor to the previous emperor, that he was now the emperor of Rome. In fact, his official title after this point was Kaiser Yerûm, so the Caesar of Rome. I am the Caesar of Rome. I'm continuing this long tradition that goes back at that point for 1,400 and some years, and that he is now the heir to this ancient culture, that he's the heir to this ancient lineage, and that he has, by right of conquest, all the rights of the Roman emperor. And what that also meant was that he had, according to his line of reasoning, the legal rights to all of the area that had once been ruled by Rome. Any area that had once been ruled by the Roman Empire, and not just the Eastern, but the Western Roman Empire, was, as he saw it, his, legally his. So Mehmet, in the coming decades, the next 30 years, his, no, his title in Ottoman history is Fatih, the Conqueror, Mehmet the Conqueror. He conquered Constantinople, but he also, he expanded the Ottoman domains like no one had ever done before, and he expanded into areas that had once been Roman territory. And his justification for doing it, in all cases, was that, hey, I am the lawful emperor, and you need to submit to my rule. I am the emperor of Rome. I'm the Caesar of Rome, Kaiser of Rome, and you are rebels, essentially. That's really crazy to think of that title, Roman emperor, would ultimately be taken up by a Turk. It just shows how the depth of power that the idea of the Roman Empire maintained for centuries and centuries and centuries. Let me go ahead and ask you this, Joe. This is a question that kind of popped up in my head. How would you compare, this is probably too broad a question, but you can maybe just give some thoughts on it. How would you compare the sacking in 1204 with the sacking in 1453? Oh, it was certainly worse in 1453, although the population was much smaller in 1453, so proportionally killed or brutalized in 1453, I'm not sure about the absolute numbers. But in 1204, there was a couple hundred thousand people in Constantinople. In 1453, there was under 50,000, so it's a little bit hard to say. The brutality was definitely greater in 1453, though. I think that's pretty indisputable. Did Mehmed claim under, was he making his claims on behalf of Islam or behalf of himself? Both. Certainly, a large justification was that this is something that God demands that we conquer the whole world and put it under submission to him. Therefore, this city, which for the Turks in particular, was a symbol of Christianity, Christian authority, legally speaking, or I should say, secularly speaking, as the capital of their longstanding rivals, the Roman or Byzantine Empire. But also, yes, in the seat of the patriarchy and everything else. And the Ottomans themselves were always on the border. They were always on the border of the Christian and the Muslim world. So they justified their state by being Ghazis, which is kind of the warrior for the faith, a border warrior, someone who's expanding the borders. So to be a person who expands the borders of Islam was something that I think was very motivating for Mehmed personally. But his personal aggrandizement, being the one who did that, what meant a lot. Because at the point, taking Constantinople didn't add a lot to his material wealth or his material power, but it certainly added to his prestige and his sense, he's known as the conqueror. And it's the biggest event in Ottoman history, essentially. I guess I was just, Saladin immediately came to mind that he had the same idea of himself as a jihadist in the sense that Saladin did. It just seems like this guy had a- Oh yeah, definitely. Right, Joe? I mean, the Ottomans kind of adopted this, I mean, this whole idea that Muslim rulers had had throughout the centuries. They were the heirs to the caliphate, really. I mean, wasn't that one of the titles that the Ottomans used, was the idea that they were the caliph? Yeah, that was, they maintained that up until the moment that they ended after World War I, that they were the leaders of the faith. Okay, great. Well, I guess that kind of gives us a good overview of the actual sacking of the city. So the next question we were gonna address tonight, Joe, was this issue of how this event impacted history. And that's obviously a huge issue because I think 1453 is one of those immortal dates that just looms very large in history. In fact, I think there are some historians who would even argue that this is the end of the medieval era, the end of the era of walled cities, if you will. So what do you think, Joe? How would you talk about this as having an impact on history? Well, I would definitely, if you have to pick a date, I would definitely say 1453 was the end of the Middle Ages. Not only was Constantinople taken, but the Gutenberg Bible was printed, the Hundred Years' War ended, which that itself led to a kind of more Western European nationalism arising. There was a whole bunch of significant things that happened in 1453, but one of the most significant, and one of the things that I think that the connection is not made nearly enough in most people's minds or anyone's mind who is not a historian, is that 1453 directly led to 1492. I mean, now that Columbus Day has just passed, there wouldn't be a 1492 Columbus's Exploration without that date, or without this event, this conquering, this shutting off of the trade route to India and China, because that is one of the major things that, the major effects of the conquest of Constantinople. Well, Italian merchants and Spanish merchants and Western European merchants don't have a kind of a Christian bastion, a Christian stopping off point in between where the Silk Road opens out in Northern Anatolia or Southern Russia, the Caucasus. Now there's no safe passage. They have to, absolutely have to go through the Muslim world, and in particular, the Ottoman Empire. And the Ottomans levied very heavy taxes. And this was still a time that was, kind of thinking in mercantilist economics. So people would have trade wars with each other on a much more regular basis. They were not free marketers. So they had very high tolls and tariffs that were levied by the Ottomans after this point. And so you can say 40, 39 years later, after the, certainly the Portuguese had already started trying to find a way, or had already found a way around Africa, but that was pretty lengthy still. The only reason why people had to turn from just going with the old tried and true method of going, sailing for Constantinople or sailing to the Levant and just picking up the goods, the spices and the silks and all that from there and to try to make this risky gamble to sail all the way around the world in 1492 was because it had become just prohibitively expensive. So that's a very significant point that I think doesn't get brought up enough that the Ottoman dominance, the Ottoman monopoly on the trade route between Europe and the Far East was a major motivator for Spain and Italy, the Italians and the Spanish and the, I can't really speak of them as unified countries and the Portuguese to continue their push to find alternate routes. Yeah, that's really quite. Just that financial. Oh yeah, sorry, Joe. But yeah, that's really interesting. I think that in the coming century, the Ottomans were certainly going to be one of the great powers in the region, if not the great power, but by closing off that route, and sort of causing Western Europe, which was a civilization that was certainly on the rise and kind of continuing to rise, but sort of causing Western Europe to turn west. That was kind of the beginning of the end for the Ottomans too, because once Western Europe kind of came of age in this age of exploration, the Ottomans were gonna be very much left behind in that. So, but that's kind of neither here nor there with our specific issue, the fall of Constantinople. One thing I'm kind of interested in, Joe, is what this event ended up meaning symbolically for the various sides involved. I think we've already talked a little bit about what it meant for the Ottomans. This was their great triumph, almost a founding moment in some ways, where the Ottomans went from being this great sultanate to becoming an empire. But what did this mean symbolically for both the Orthodox Christian community, which now kind of had to exist in captivity, and for Western Europe as well, Western Christendom? Yeah, well, it was a major, major impact, at least in, well, it was definitely a major impact on Western Europe. What they did about it was really not that much. It was kind of a tumultuous time, and frankly, the population of Western Europe had declined fairly significantly in the previous century as a result of the Black Death and a few other things. And there just, there was a lot of bolts being sworn that, oh, we're gonna start a new crusade, and we're gonna head back to Constantinople, and we're gonna retake that for Christ, and all that. There's a famous, I think it's the Oath of the Pheasant, or the Court of the Duke of Burgundy, where they swore this huge oath after listening, getting drunk and listening to this long ballad about the fall of Constantinople later that year. But not much came of it. The Eastern European powers, if you can call them that, the Serbians, the Hungarians, Wallachians, Moldavians, all them, those areas, they definitely had a vested interest in that, and fought them viciously for hundreds of years after this point, fought the Ottomans viciously. But in large part, they were overwhelmed in the decade or two following the conquest of Constantinople. And the Western powers never really got it together, because it's kind of far away, they have buffer states in between them, and it wasn't really clear what they could even do, because like, what are you gonna do? Like, try to take Constantinople now? Like, that's, even at that point, with canons and with new technologies, that was a very impregnable city. It took a couple years for the sultan to actually kind of wrap up, finishing up the last little remnants of the Byzantines, of the Greeks, the empire, or the despotate of the Moria, down in the Peloponnesus, around Sparta, that didn't fall for another six or seven years. The last one was the empire of Trebizond, just this tiny little city-state, essentially, up in northwest Turkey, northwest Anatolia. Sorry, northeast, northeast Anatolia. That was kind of the end of the Silk Road. They were taken in 1461, and that was kind of like the last little gasp of Greek or Roman independence. But Sultan Mehmed, he never really let up, and he became this boogeyman, really, for the rest of Western Europe. They could just refer to him as the Turk, just with the definite article, the Turk. He was painted by Renaissance painters. Remember, this is the middle of the Renaissance, when all this is happening. He was famously hook-nosed, so his nickname was the Eagle. And when he finally died, church bells were rung all across Western Europe. Thank God that the Eagle has died, the Eagle is dead. And it did make a difference. What people ended up doing was to basically talk big game about what had happened, talk about how it was so terrible and how they were gonna do something about it, but then never really get around to doing it. And you can't really blame them too much, because there's not much they could have done. At that point, the Ottomans were a power on the rise. They were more powerful than certainly any single European kingdom, and maybe as powerful as most put together. They were the power in the Western world, and the biggest power in the Muslim world as well. They later on, Mehmed, just a couple decades later, went on to conquer Iraq and take Baghdad and all those areas. So he also increased his empire at the expense of other Muslim states as well. So I might have lost track a little bit of the question. Does that answer it? I think that was really good. Yeah, that gives us a good idea of kind of how this loomed in the minds of the Christian world. But yeah, so do we have any? Yeah, go ahead, Joe. Joe? Sorry, what? Did you have something else to add? Yeah, I think there's just a couple other things, like this idea of Rome is something that is interesting in the aftermath. The emperor of Rome, there were Palaeologus, that's the ruling dynasty of Constantinople, there were Palaeologus relatives scattered all throughout Western Europe, scattered all throughout the Turkish dominions, and in Russia, which is pretty significant. And in particular, also in Eastern Europe, but just generally, as soon as Constantinople fell, both the Tsar of Serbia and the King of Hungary advanced their claims to be the new emperor of Rome. This was something, a void that people clearly saw and needed to be filled. You can't just not have an emperor, it's unthinkable. And for Russia, at that point, the Prince of Novgorod, Russia wasn't really fully formed at that point, it was about to be, but the Prince of Novgorod was related by blood in a couple of ways over, but was married to a Byzantine princess and assumed the title of Caesar of Rome as well. And in the Russian pronunciation, Caesar or Kaiser would be Tsar. So that's ultimately where that title came from and their claim to be the Tsar, be the Caesar, be the ruler of Rome came from was, well, Rome has fallen and it's fallen to an infidel, it's fallen to a Turk, a Muslim, that can't be right. They can't have a legitimate claim, so we can't make that claim. So ever since then, and even today, Russia has tried to advance into territory, or Turkish territory, even today, I'll bet you that there is a very large, substantial portion of Russia that would dearly love to see Constantinople or Istanbul in the hands of the Russian people. And that's kind of a, that ideology that exists over there today is called the Third Rome, Third Rome, this concept, and it is kind of put about by Russian nationalists even today, which is almost mind-blowing to think of this Roman legacy lasting that long. Yeah, that's really interesting, and in the future here, Russia is gonna become a major enemy of the Ottomans, and in fact, it's going to beat up on them pretty good. In fact, I guess it's almost debatable that were it not for intervention from the British, the Russians may very well have been the next power to occupy Constantinople. Yeah, I would say so with the Crimean War, and I know there's certainly a lot of diplomacy throughout the 19th century. Well, the Germans weren't fans of the idea either, but yeah, there's, they came pretty close a couple times almost. Yeah, by then, the Ottomans were kind of almost preserved as this sort of giant buffer state against the Russians by the British, kind of this. Oh, but speaking of the conflict, like this imperial, sorry, speaking of this imperial notion, you know, like the later conflict between the Habsburgs, the Holy Roman Emperors, and the Ottoman Turks was not just like, oh, you know, Christians versus Muslims, or, you know, this two powerful states or collections of states in the Habsburgs case. It was consciously on both sides, a war for the title, you know, or a conflict, a struggle over the title, you know, the rightful title of Roman Emperor. You know, who is the actual Roman Emperor? Who is the successor to, you know, to Constantine and to Julius Caesar and Augustus? You know, that like this fight over Vienna, that of course, the siege of Vienna, which is absolutely fascinating as well, you know, two centuries later, that was something that was, you know, I just met the second, like trying to one-up his predecessor and put his name in the Turkish, you know, the Ottoman history books as the man who conquered the next claim to be the true Roman Emperor, you know, the capital of the Habsburgs, the capital of the Holy Roman Empire. So this is something that we are, most people are not very aware of today and probably have a hard time kind of wrapping our minds around because we don't live in that same sort of honor and prestige and privilege and tradition-based culture, but who gets to be the Roman Emperor? Who is legitimately the man who is like representative of what civilization, of the true civilization, which is what Rome represented for these people? Who is that person who is at the top of the heap that has driven as many wars as anything else in the last, you know, 2,000 years? Yeah, it's pretty interesting. So I guess as we're kind of coming to the end here, Joe, let me go ahead and throw out another question that's kind of skipping ahead quite a bit, but something I think people will find interesting. So how long did the Ottomans remain the hegemonic power, would you say? I think you broke up a little there. Oh, sorry about that. How long would you say the Ottomans remained the hegemonic power? How long did the Ottomans maintain their hegemonic power? Right, yeah. Well, yeah, like how long were they the dominant force in the area? Yes, exactly. Okay, yeah, well, it certainly declined after 1683 with the failed Siege of Vienna, and then all of a sudden there's all these reverses where all the Eastern European states and the Balkans start rebelling and there's a lot of problems. I would say that they were definitely the top dog, the thing that Europe feared the most, if you can think of that, you know, exterior power, and where they had the most implements of any power up until essentially year 1700. Maybe it's a little bit, you know, maybe a little bit in the decade and a half since they had suffered their terrible reversal at Vienna, but it's a very close run thing. Like no one realized, now, what ended up happening is that the Ottomans got stuck in a particular mode of warfare, which was very effective, but did not account for new technological development and new, it's mostly technological development, but because they had to maintain this tight control over their dominions, they did not allow it for any competition or much innovation. So by 1700, European powers bringing in, you know, wealth from around the world, having competed with each other and kind of, you know, sharpened each other in these long conflicts, many of them, and certainly collectively were advanced in the Ottomans. But it really, that was not clear at all until, and it really wasn't clear that it was gonna happen that way until the siege of Vienna in 1683. So 1683, now that's 230 years. 230 years, I would say, that the Ottoman Turks could be considered to be the dominant power in Europe. You know, being at that point, you know, a largely European power themselves. Yeah, you can make an argument for an earlier date, but it's close to 200 years, at least, that the Turks were the big dogs on the block. So you consider Vienna more important than Lepanto in the long run? Say again? Of the two, of Lepanto and the Battle of Vienna, Vienna would be the most important in the- Yeah, I think Lepanto was the canary in the coal mine for the Turks. I don't think that Lepanto, the Turks did not think of it as big a deal as the Christians did, as the Western Christians did, because it was a naval defeat where they lost 40,000 men, but they had many, many more men. And the problem was, though, that the defeat at Lepanto suffered because of European innovation in naval technology, naval tactics, not just technology, but tactics. And the Turks were still doing the same thing that had always worked for them. And because they had their overwhelming wealth and superiority in population and materials, and frankly, organization, because they were very unified, whereas Western Europe was incredibly divided, it should have been a sign for the Turks that they needed to change things up, but it wasn't. And so Lepanto is 1571, right? And a little more than 100 years later, they have Vienna. But in between then, Western Europe, in particular, Italy, the Mediterranean, and Germany lived in fear of, well, if the Turks actually get their minds together and get themselves together and really decide to launch a major assault like they did in earlier years, like in the time of Mehmet II or Suleyman the Magnificent, then we're really gonna have a problem. So I'd say that Vienna would be much more significant than Lepanto for the Turks themselves, although they did not really learn any lesson from Lepanto and they should have, because that's when the tide really was turning. Right, my understanding is that after 1571, there wasn't much more expansion on the part of the Ottomans, isn't that correct? No, yeah, it was pretty stagnant, which was another problem that they continued to have. Right, right. Okay, well, yeah, this has been really interesting. I'm glad we got to talk about this, Joe, and I know that you and I have talked a little bit about possibly having you on again to sort of discuss the Turks as a people in general, so that would be definitely an interesting podcast, so. Yeah, I think it's pretty clear that it's been a subject of interest for me for a long time. Yeah, and it's something that a lot of people don't take the time to really learn about, so I'm glad that you've done it. So, yeah, thanks so much for being with us, Joe. Scott and I definitely enjoyed it. Thank you very much, I learned a great deal. Well, it's great to be here, and it's always fun to talk about this stuff. Yeah, absolutely, I always learn a lot when we have you on, so thanks again, Joe, and we will certainly have you on once more. I know somebody actually in the chat mentioned that they would love to have a podcast about maybe the conflicts between the Hungarians and the Ottomans. Is that a subject that you're very interested in, Joe? Yeah, I can't call myself an expert in it yet, but it's something that I've been reading a lot about lately, so yeah, that would be exciting for something in the future. Yeah, that would be great, and also I think it would just be interesting to talk about the Great Turkish War, this kind of turning point we were talking about at the end of the 1600s, which of course includes the Siege of Vienna and also the Battle of Zenta and all of that. That would be something interesting to talk about too. So, okay, great. Well, I guess we can call it a night then. Did you have anything else to add at all, Joe, or are we good? I think we're all set. All right, great, well, that's exactly an hour then, so I think we did okay. Perfect. All right, we will talk to you guys later.