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Introduction IN THE SPRINGOF 1453 MEHMED II, the clever and ambitious young sultan of the Ottoman Empire, was laying siege to Constantinople, the stillformidable capital of the waning Byzantine Empire. Despite some help from Western European fighters primarily from Venice and Genoa, the Greeks were heavily outnumbered: approximately seven thousand fighting men within the city faced an army of eighty thousand camped without and armed with powerful cannons. Despite the city's redoubtable three sets of land walls and seaward walls, the courageous leadership of its emperor, and the military expertise of its soldiers and sailors, Constantinople could not resist Mehmed's overwhelming assault power. Mter an intense, yet brief siege the city fell to the Ottomans on 29 May and was brutally sacked.' In keeping with Islamic tradition, a three-day pillage was granted to the soldiers. Hundreds of citizens and soldiers managed to escape by ship, but most of the population were enslaved and their houses and churches looted." Approximately four thousand inhabitants were killed in the siege; countless women and boys were raped. The last Byzantine emperor , Constantine XI Palaeologus Dragases, died while attempting to defend the walls of his city, dramatically hurling himself into the fray rather than fleeing, according to several accounts. (Mehmed reportedly had his head stuffed and sent around to Muslim courts to regale them with his victory.) A few hours after the city was taken, Mehmed entered in triumph. In only seven weeks the twenty-one-year-old sultan had accomplished a feat that had eluded numerous commanders before him. Given its strategic and symbolic import, the city became the new capital of the Ottoman Empire. Western powers slowly mustering relief forces, secure in the belief that the city could withstand a siege of several months, were stunned by the news. The broader populace, particularly in Italy, was equally horrified; Roman citizens were so shocked that they refused to believe the news at first." Accounts circulating in the West fed popular anxiety by depicting the sack as one of the bloodiest and most inhumane acts of history. The 2 Introduction Venetian Senate, for example, exaggerated tales of casualties by reporting that all inhabitants over the age of six had been slaughtered. Numerous laments were penned in Latin and the vernacular alike, and rumors abounded that Mehmed would not be content with the prize of the "new Rome" and would soon attempt to conquer the old Rome." Humanists as a group responded to news of the sack with great emotion . Calling the Turks "the most inhuman barbarians [immanes barbariJ and the most savage enemies of the faith," Cardinal Bessarion exclaimed, "Men have been butchered like cattle, women abducted, virgins ravished, and children snatched from the arms of their parents. If any survived so great a slaughter, they have been enslaved in chains so that they might be ransomed for a price, or subjected to every kind of torture, or reduced to the most humiliating servitude.?" In addition to the loss of life, humanists lamented the desecration of churches and the irreparable damage to famous buildings and libraries. Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini (later Pope Pius II) labeled the fall of Constantinople a "second death for Homer and a second destruction of Plato."> Hence, in the midst of a golden age of learning and the arts, Renaissance Europeans battled fears that a hostile, Islamic enemy to the East could at any moment destroy their world and hurl them back to the "dark ages." The events and rhetoric surrounding II September 2001 serve as a grim reminder of just how powerful the perceived opposition between East and West continues to be-both for the Muslim extremists who planned the attacks and for the American and European politicians who responded with broad insinuations about the savagery of the Muslim East. Before this date, intellectuals had an open forum to argue leisurely about whether stark divisions of any kind mirror cultural realities, man-made and simplistic as they are? Recent events, however, have revealed how easily such reductive rhetoric is resurrected, be it the West as the Great Satan or evil crusader, the East as the intolerant and cunning foe, or the "clash of civilizations.t " The broad appeal of such biting sophistry is part and parcel of deeply rooted cultural constructs. The myth of East and West as polar opposites was introduced over two thousand years ago by the Greeks and adapted by the Romans." From about the eleventh century on, Europeans used the terms "Christian" and "Infidel...

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