1453: The Conquest and Tragedy of Constantinople, by Anthony Kaldellis
Constantinople (Istanbul) is marvelously located, a city astride Europe and Asia, lynchpin of the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. It was where the Silk Road met the sea routes. More than a center of trade, it was also a mecca for learning, as emphasized in Anthony Kaldellis’ 1453: The Conquest and Tragedy of Constantinople.
Kaldellis (University of Chicago) has worked assiduously to challenge the ill-reputation of Byzantium (he prefers calling it East Rome), an empire ruled from Constantinople for a thousand years before it fell to the Ottoman Turks in 1453. Byzantium represented a Greek-speaking, Eastern alternative to Western Christianity, a rival to the pope and kings of Europe as well as the Islamic caliphates that peeled away its provinces over centuries of warfare. 1453 traces the unending Eurocentric hostility toward Byzantium. That hatred, manifested in the 1204 Fourth Crusade when European Catholics raped, killed and looted Constantinople, continued in historiography through the near present. To borrow from Edward Said, Byzantium was “Orientalized,” depicted as effeminate, untrustworthy and decadent.
1453 also scrutinizes the more benign claim by Western historians that the fall of Constantinople helped trigger the Renaissance by way of Greek scholars fleeing the city for refuge in Italy. Byzantium had kept alive the learning of ancient Greece, and Kaldellis points out that European scholars traveled to study in Constantinople before it fell. He adds the missing half of the narrative. Byzantium was not a static civilization and added to the store of human thought during its millennium, producing work largely ignored in the West.
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For Western Europeans and the Ottomans, late comers to the land that became Turkey, Byzantium was, in Kaldellis’ words, an “ideological nuisance” before it fell after a legendary siege. Historians have usually deemed that fall inevitable. Kaldellis disagrees. The “late Romans,” as he calls them, “prized their freedom and sovereignty and were proud of their culture … They did not believe what modern historians told them in retrospect, that it was time to give up, accept terms of surrender, and go quietly into the night.”
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