The Last Day of the World

The following is taken from the writings of Robert Spenser. It is a very timely reminder of the intentions of imperialist Islam. The fate of Constantinople should remind us all to be vigilant.



May 29 marks the anniversary of the real Nakba, or perhaps more precisely the καταστροφή -- the Catastrophe: on this day in 1453, the armies of the Ottoman Sultan Mehmet II entered Constantinople, marking the end of the Eastern Roman Empire, more commonly known as the Byzantine Empire.
If anything deserves to be called an occupation, and a nakba, it is this, although it has, like so many other bloody conquests in human history, been legitimized by time. Still, if the descendants of the Christian inhabitants of Constantinople and Anatolia were to demand, and receive, a right of return, rapidly-Islamizing Turkey would look vastly different from how it looks now.
On this day in 1453, the conquerers were extraordinarily brutal. Historian Steven Runciman notes that the Muslim soldiers "slew everyone that they met in the streets, men, women, and children without discrimination. The blood ran in rivers down the steep streets from the heights of Petra toward the Golden Horn. But soon the lust for slaughter was assuaged. The soldiers realized that captives and precious objects would bring them greater profit." (The Fall of Constantinople 1453, Cambridge University Press, 1965, p. 145.)
Some jihadists "made for the small but splendid churches by the walls, Saint George by the Charisian Gate, Saint John in Petra, and the lovely church of the monastery of the Holy Saviour in Chora, to strip them of their stores of plate and their vestments and everything else that could be torn from them. In the Chora they left the mosaics and frescoes, but they destroyed the icon of the Mother of God, the Hodigitria, the holiest picture in all Byzantium, painted, so men said, by Saint Luke himself. It had been taken there from its own church beside the Palace at the beginning of the siege, that its beneficient presence might be at hand to inspire the defenders on the walls. It was taken from its setting and hacked into four pieces." (P. 146.)
The jihadists also entered the Hagia Sophia, which for nearly a thousand years had been the grandest church in Christendom. The faithful had gathered within its hallowed walls to pray during the city’s last agony. The Muslims, according to Runciman, halted the celebration of Orthros (morning prayer); the priests, according to legend, took the sacred vessels and disappeared into the cathedral’s eastern wall, through which they shall return to complete the divine service one day. Muslim men then killed the elderly and weak and led the rest off into slavery.
Once the Muslims had thoroughly subdued Constantinople, they set out to Islamize it. According to the Muslim chronicler Hoca Sa’deddin, tutor of the sixteenth-century Sultans Murad III and Mehmed III, "churches which were within the city were emptied of their vile idols and cleansed from the filthy and idolatrous impurities and by the defacement of their images and the erection of Islamic prayer niches and pulpits many monasteries and chapels became the envy of the gardens of Paradise."
It has come to be known as Black Tuesday, the Last Day of the World.