The hand of Christ in blessing, and a book of the Gospels, depicted on the walls of the Church of Holy Wisdom, ‘Hagia Sophia’, in Constantinople. Opened in 537, it was a mosque from the fall of the city until 1935, when it became a museum. Consequently, the sound of Christian liturgy has been heard in the Emperor Justinian’s great church just once since that fateful day in 1453: when a Cretan priest named Lefteris Noufrakis (1872-1941) snatched the opportunity on January 19th in 1919, knowing that the Allies still controlled the City. See OrthoChristian for the remarkable tale.
Part 1 of 2
FROM 1399 to 1403, the Roman Emperor Manuel II toured Europe, drumming up support for the defence of Constantinople from the growing threat of the Turks. He even visited London, where Henry IV treated him to a Christmas joust.
Ironically, it was those same European powers whose Crusaders had brought Constantinople to this pass, plundering it and murdering its people in 1204, and leaving its defences in ruins.* All the same, the Greeks grudgingly signed an agreement in 1439 accepting the Pope’s supreme authority, in expectation of his military support;* yet when Sultan Mehmed II besieged the city in 1453, no great ships came out of the west, just a few brave Italian merchants.
Mehmed entered the city on Tuesday 29th May. His men broke into the magnificent Church of the Holy Wisdom* and massacred a cowering huddle of civilians; Mehmed followed, and raised prayers of thanksgiving to his god. The sixth-century basilica has never been officially used for Christian worship since.*
Now the Pope summoned a Crusade; but Europe’s kings looked the other way.
The Latin Occupation of Constantinople lasted from 1204 to 1261, during which time the Emperor and his Greek Orthodox clergy were exiled to Nicaea. See also The Holy Table of St Sophia.
One Greek bishop, St Mark of Ephesus, refused to sign. The senior clergy of the See of Kiev, exiled in Moscow following the sack of their city by the Golden Horde in 1240, went further: when Constantinople sent them a new Bishop to bring them into line, for the first time they elected their own instead, as their successors in Moscow do to this day. The agreement with Rome was later repudiated by all the Orthodox Churches, including Constantinople. See Filioque.
The full name of the church is ‘the Temple of the Holy Wisdom of God.’ In Christian teaching, God’s wisdom is not an abstract idea but actually a living, divine Person, the same person as Jesus Christ. The church is often known by its Greek name, ‘Hagía Sophía’; in some places, such as Velikiy Novgorod, the name St Sophia is used for churches dedicated to Holy Wisdom. Its patronal feast is 25th December.
It was used once unofficially, when a Cretan priest named Fr Lefteris Noufrakis stole into the cathedral on January 19th, 1919, in the confusion afforded by the end of the Great War. See ‘The Last Divine Liturgy in Hagia Sophia’ at OrthoChristian.
Précis
Constantinople, the capital of the Roman Empire after 330, fell to the Ottoman Turks on May 29th, 1453. Weak ever since the Crusaders sacked it in 1204, a desperate round of diplomacy in Rome and other European capitals failed to raise any support. The city was looted, its people were massacred, and its cathedral was turned into a mosque. (56 / 60 words)
Part Two
A fresco depicting the Fall of the City in 1453, on the walls of the Moldovita Monastery in Romania. After capturing the City, the Turks built a vast empire stretching from the Middle East to the Austrian border which lasted almost five hundred years. Beginning with Greece in 1821, one by one the Christian peoples of Europe (including Romania and Serbia) broke free; and a disastrous alliance with the German Empire in the Great War of 1914-1918 led to the Turkish Ottoman Empire’s downfall. It was broken up by the Allies, and what remained was declared the Republic of Turkey in 1923.
THE western powers were not the only ones to let Constantinople down. Prince Orhan, a rival to Mehmed who had been enjoying the city’s protection, had slipped out quietly in February. A Hungarian named Urban engaged to build cannon for the Emperor defected to the Turks for higher pay. But Venetians, Sicilians and even some Turks put them to shame, as did the seven hundred loyal companions of Giovanni Giustiniani Longo, a Genoese militiaman who later became a monk and wrote an account of the siege.
For three days Mehmed’s victorious troops looted the city, and murdered its citizens; thirty thousand were enslaved or deported. Others fled in Venetian ships, laden with precious knowledge and artworks which the barbarous Turks did not value, but which ignited the Renaissance. To this day, the Greeks sing heart-rending songs, torn between loss and hope, of the ships that left the City carrying their gospels, their saints and their altars into an exile that has not ended yet.
Précis
The Fall of the City was hastened not only by lack of western support but also by defections; however, there were many brave defenders too, especially from the independent states of Italy. Those few citizens who escaped death or slavery fled to the west, saving the high culture of the east from a new dark ages, and kick-starting the Renaissance. (60 / 60 words)
