[HN Gopher] The last day of Constantinople
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The last day of Constantinople
Author : benbreen
Score : 68 points
Date : 2023-06-26 04:58 UTC (18 hours ago)
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| dangerwill wrote:
| Constantinople was conquered by the Turks but not only the people
| but the name of the city (albeit transliterated into Arabic)
| remained for centuries. Istanbul wasn't the officially recognized
| name of the city until the 1930s
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_Istanbul
| sedatk wrote:
| Not only had the city's name remained Constantinople, Ottoman
| Empire had seen itself as the successor of Roman Empire too.
| One of the official titles of Mehmet the Conqueror was
| "Kaiser-i Rum" (Caesar of Roman). Ottoman Empire even adopted
| the Roman Empire's "hands-off" governance model at the
| beginning: mostly dealt with taxes, and refrained from
| interfering with people's daily lives.
|
| The name "Istanbul" is believed to be a contraction of "Eis tin
| polin" ("To the inner city") in Greek which was a commonly used
| term in daily chatter, and possibly adopted literally by Turks.
| glonq wrote:
| In my experience, a good way to piss off a Turk is to suggest
| that their country borrowed or stole anything from Greek
| language, food, art, or culture!
| handwarmers wrote:
| Ah yes, the hands-off, non-interfering with people's daily
| lives history of the Ottoman empire. Just like everyone on
| the Balkans and in Armenia remembers it.
| sedatk wrote:
| Which part of "at the beginning" did you miss?
| resolutebat wrote:
| > _Ottoman Empire even adopted the Roman Empire 's "hands-
| off" governance model at the beginning: mostly dealt with
| taxes, and refrained from interfering with people's daily
| lives._
|
| Yup: in fact many Jews, Christian schismatics etc fled from
| the terrors of the Inquisition in Europe to the Ottoman
| empire.
| selimthegrim wrote:
| Yes but the name derives from a much older Greek colloquial
| expression, see al-Masudi for example.
| DrPhish wrote:
| As nice as that is for a quick overview, the whole story was told
| rather well by Gibbon in his "History of the decline and fall of
| the Roman Empire".
|
| If that has whet your appetite and you'd like a more in-depth
| telling of just this episode then you can skip right to :
| https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/895/pg895-images.html#l...
| and enjoy.
|
| If you have an inclination, I'd heartily recommend the entire set
| of books. As an anecdote, it took me 2 years of reading 10-20
| minutes per night most nights. I found it extremely enlightening
| and entertaining (Gibbon has a wicked wit).
|
| As much as Gibbon is not in fashion these days, the research I
| did showed that the essential parts of our understanding of the
| nuts and bolts of the history haven't changed since it was
| written, and I don't think anyone else has contextualized and
| editorialized the whole story with as much intelligence and
| careful thought since.
|
| I also found pretty well all the complaints about Gibbon's
| interpretation to have actually been though about and answered
| _by_ Gibbon in the text (in eloquent detail!), which I found
| surprising given the frequency with which he seems to be
| dismissed with simplistic arguments.
| countrymile wrote:
| John Julius Norwich's trilogy on Byzantium is also well worth a
| read for coverage of this period
| vkou wrote:
| It's not so much that Gibbon is out of fashion, it's that he is
| more often wrong than right. Good storyteller, if you want to
| read a story, but on his own, not a sufficient foundation if
| you want to learn something.
|
| Learning about roman history from him is like learning from
| Aristotle or Freud. It's not all wrong, but there are better
| sources, and if that's all you read, you'll be way more
| confused than enlightened.
| DrPhish wrote:
| >it's that he is more often wrong than right.
|
| I hear this a lot, but I really haven't been able to find
| much...is there an "errata" of where he is wrong on specific
| things that are material events in history?
| derriz wrote:
| I second this recommendation. I found it surprising easy to
| read - the sardonic humor kept me going even when I struggled
| to keep track of all the details/people/names/places. Although
| I didn't attempt the full set - just the thousand or so page
| "abridged" version.
| colechristensen wrote:
| I don't remember what they were, but Mary Beard had some
| seemingly credible criticisms or just updates to Gibbon.
|
| I got through a significant portion of the decline and fall but
| got bored somewhere after Justinian as the decline and fall of
| my interest in the Roman empire begins somewhere around the
| state conversion to Christianity.
| DrPhish wrote:
| > Mary Beard had some seemingly credible criticisms or just
| updates to Gibbon
|
| I had a look at her back when I was reading, but also just
| now revisited some articles comparing them, and I couldn't
| find anything substantial that didn't boil down to a dislike
| of his style, or disagreement over approach.
|
| I really would like to update any incorrect facts that I
| might have picked up when reading Gibbon, so something
| concrete would be much appreciated!
|
| I'm not too worried about having picked up his conclusions,
| since I've come to my own based on the description of events
| and supplementing with a fair amount of other treatments
| (mostly "The Learning Company" stuff, for better or for
| worse)
| worstestes wrote:
| If anyone is interested in an expansive podcast detailing the
| history of the Byzantine Empire, check out The History of
| Byzantium podcast!
|
| https://thehistoryofbyzantium.com/
|
| It's truly in depth and picks up around where Mike Duncan stopped
| (roughly) after the History of Rome podcast ended.
| wsgeorge wrote:
| I just started this after finishing The History of Rome. :)
| BenoitEssiambre wrote:
| In Laplace's 1795 essay introducing what is now known as Bayesian
| probabilities, one of the first example given was of a kind of
| simple language model, potentially making the first word used in
| such models, "Constantinople".
|
| "This principle gives the reason why we attribute regular events
| to a particular cause. Some philosophers have thought that these
| events are less possible than others and that at the play of
| heads and tails, for example, the combination in which heads
| occurs twenty successive times is less easy in its nature than
| those where heads and tails are mixed in an irregular manner. But
| this opinion supposes that past events have an influence on the
| possibility of future events, which is not at all admissible. The
| regular combinations occur more rarely only because they are less
| numerous. If we seek a cause wherever we perceive symmetry, it is
| not that we regard a symmetrical event as less possible than the
| others, but, since this event ought to be the effect of a regular
| cause or that of chance, the first of these suppositions is more
| probable than the second. On a table we see letters arranged in
| this order, C o n s t a n t i n o p l e, and we judge that this
| arrangement is not the result of chance, not because it is less
| possible than the others, for if this word were not employed in
| any language we should not suspect it came from any particular
| cause, but this word being in use among us, it is incomparably
| more probable that some person has thus arranged the aforesaid
| letters than that this arrangement is due to chance."
| jonhohle wrote:
| My kids love Istanbul by TMBG, but I never knew the history.
| Something I can share with them the next time it comes on. I hope
| for the sake of the subject of the song they didn't have a date
| in Constantinople. I'm sure it would have been relatively
| chaotic, and romance might not have been a priority ;-)
| [deleted]
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| Small nit to pick: TMBG didn't write the song-- they covered it
| (quite well, too).
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Istanbul_(Not_Constantinople...
|
| The song's appearance on MTV's Liquid Television was my
| introduction to TMBG.
| jonhohle wrote:
| I mean, they do love the TMBG cover, regardless of whether or
| not they wrote it.
| Electricniko wrote:
| I didn't even know it was a song by a real band when I was
| a kid. I only knew it from a cartoon. Depending on how old
| your kids are, they might like this:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IqJXxHi6RwQ
| xraystyle wrote:
| It's not a TMBG song, they just covered it. It was originally
| released by a Canadian vocal quartet called The Four Lads in
| 1953.
| [deleted]
| tcbawo wrote:
| I haven't see this mentioned here, but I found Lars Brownworth's
| "12 Byzantine Rulers: The History of the Byzantine Empire"
| (https://12byzantinerulers.com) particularly entertaining and
| informative back in the day.
| igammarays wrote:
| Here's a crazy tidbit: There are some Muslim eschatologists and
| preachers who believe that Constantinople is coming back! Based
| on their interpretation of the Prophet Muhammad's well-known
| prophecy regarding the conquest of Constantinople, they also
| believe that the Hagia Sophia will become an Orthodox church once
| again.
|
| See Imam Nazar Hosein's book titled "Constantinople in the
| Quran": http://imranhosein.org/n/wp-
| content/uploads/2018/12/Constant...
| pixel3234 wrote:
| So far quite opposite is happening. Until about 15 years ago,
| Istanbul was very cosmopolitan city. You could meet people from
| all corners of Africa, Asia and Europe there. Even locals
| looked very white because of all slaves Ottomans brought into
| Istanbul. To some extend Istanbul was culturally not part of
| Turkey (something like London and UK).
|
| Hovewer over last decade or so, Istanbul is being assimilated
| into Turkey. Many orthodox muslim turkish immigrants from east
| part of Turkey. More radicals... Foreigners are not so welcomed
| anymore...
| proser wrote:
| This has more in common with Austin, Texas. Everyone is
| grumpy about all the people moving there, but the vast, vast
| majority are moving there from other parts of Texas rather
| than out of state.
| derefr wrote:
| Is it that foreigners are less welcome, or is it that anyone
| with other options for places to live is leaving the country
| to avoid the tanking ecomomy?
| pixel3234 wrote:
| For an western expat it is more difficult to move to
| Turkey. Administrative and government stuff. Economy as
| well.
| DSingularity wrote:
| Yeah, culturally identical to Europe like how there are all
| those mosques everywhere.
| pixel3234 wrote:
| Visited France or UK recently? :)
| ReptileMan wrote:
| But a lot less headscarves than today.
| Aerbil313 wrote:
| That's not mainstream nor the correct interpretation. Other
| hadiths of our prophet confirm that the second Constantinople
| is Rome. Thus both are capitals of the (Eastern and Western)
| Roman Empires. The Sultan who conquered Constantinople, Fatih
| Sultan Mehmet, sent the navy to Otranto/Italy and conquered
| there for this reason: to conquer the two Constantinoples and
| thus fulfill the prophecy. He died without doing it in
| accordance with the prophecies, the one to conquer 2nd
| Constantinople will be the Mahdi, expected leader of Muslims in
| the end times and his name will be the same as our prophet's:
| Muhammad ibni Abdullah (means son of Abdullah).
| countrymile wrote:
| It probably would have if the Russian empire had won ww1
| ng12 wrote:
| It actually did for a few short years as an independent city-
| state. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greco-
| Turkish_War_(1919%E2%80%...
| Mobius01 wrote:
| Somewhat tangential, but I started to read Baudolino by Umberto
| Eco last night, and the first chapter at least takes place during
| the (it seems) the last siege of Constantinople. So far it has
| been a wonderful read.
| pawelkobojek wrote:
| There's wonderful podcast on Spotify - Fall of Civilizations
| which has an episode on that subject:
| https://open.spotify.com/episode/4iiSrljKh9sVHBgMPd9EPd
| YeGoblynQueenne wrote:
| Did they really stamp "Museum Britannicum" with red ink on that
| Byzantine-era manuscript? Are they completely mad?
| petesergeant wrote:
| https://www.netflix.com/title/80990771 was surprisingly watchable
| tacker2000 wrote:
| Came here looking for a mention of this! "Rise of Empires:
| Ottoman - The conquest of Constantinople"
|
| I enjoyed this. Really well made and some great actors in
| there.
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(page generated 2023-06-26 23:01 UTC)