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A Turkish official was itching to know the secret behind a Russian slave girl’s personal charm.
In 1453, Constantinople, the capital of the Roman Empire, fell to the Ottomon Turks. The new rulers thereafter grudgingly tolerated the conquered people’s religion, but forbade any Muslim to join them under pain of death. That was still true under Sultan Mehmed IV, who ruled from 1648 to 1687 (a contemporary of King Charles II).
Hassan slipped across to Ithaca because it was in British hands and the Turkish authorities on the Greek mainland must not know what he was going to do.
The British liberation of the Ionian Islands during the Napoleonic Wars presumably displeased the French, and was no doubt disquieting for the Ottoman imperial government that for over two centuries had occupied the Greek mainland. But it was good news for Hassan. He wanted to be baptised a Christian, and for reasons of his own it was imperative that the Turkish authorities know nothing about it.
Back in the eleventh century English refugees founded New York, but it wasn’t in North America.
After the Norman Conquest in 1066, a group of English noblemen sold their estates and set sail for anywhere not ruled by Normans. Their wanderings took them to Constantinople (or Micklegarth), at that time beset by another overbearing Norman, Robert Guiscard, Duke of Apulia, and the Seljuk Turks.
In Constantinople, capital of the Roman Empire, a man from Kent founded a glittering church for English refugees.
Goscelin of Canterbury was a Flemish monk who settled in England during the 1060s. He preserved many records of the English just in time to save them from obliteration by the Normans, who overran the country’s highest offices following the Conquest of 1066. As he tells us, however, not everyone could bear to stay and watch.
Heathen prince Boris I of Bulgaria (r. 852–889) commissioned St Methodius to paint an impressive scene for his palace walls.
St Methodius (815-885) and his younger brother St Cyril (826-869) were Slavs from Thessalonica who brought the Christian gospel to Eastern Europe. In 864, Boris I, King of the Bulgarians (r. 852-889), abandoned his heathen beliefs and was baptised, and according to 11th-century Byzantine chronicler John Skylitzes, Methodius was behind Boris’s change of heart.
Richard Hannay sees for himself how political activists trick decent people into supporting their quest for power.
Early in the Great War, Richard Hannay is in Constantinople, in pursuit of a German secret agent named Hilda von Einem. Hilda has duped a dreamy Muslim mystic into believing Germany shares his vision for society, and as Sandy Arbuthnot explains, that could be very bad both for the Arab world and for England.
The young Roman Emperor Theophilus backed away from marriage to the formidable Cassiani, but he could not forget her.
Cassiani was a nun of noble birth in the Roman Empire’s capital city, Constantinople, during the 9th century. Her gift for poetry and hymn-writing was widely admired, and the Eastern service-books are littered with her works. The most famous is a Hymn for Wednesday in Holy Week, and thereby hangs quite a tale.