In 1439, fourteen years before it fell, Byzantium formally recognised the Papacy’s supremacy over the Eastern Orthodox churches in the vain hope that it would win it support against the advancing Ottomans. (The square brackets here are Toynbee’s.)
Greek Orthodox Christians who opted in the fourteenth or fifteenth century of the Christian Era for embracing Islam in preference to accepting union with the Western Christian Church on Western terms could justify their choice by pointing to their own and their ancestors’ experience of the comparative humanity of the Muslims by comparison with the Franks. In the East Roman historian Nıkítas Khoniátis’ Khronikì Dhıíyisıs the appalling accounts of the sack of Salonica by the Sicilian Normans in A.D. 1185 (pp. 385-98 of the edition published at Bonn in 1835 by Weber) and of the sack of Constantinople by so-called “Crusaders” in A.D. 1203-4 (ibid., pp. 710-70) stand out in glaring contrast to the description (ibid., pp. 653-7) of the Saljūk prince Kay Khusrū’s chivalrous treatment of the East Roman civilians whom he carried away captive in a raid on the West Anatolian dominions of the East Roman Empire during the reign of the Emperor Alexius III Angelus (imperabat A.D. 1195-1203). Kay Khusrū’s kindness to his prisoners during the campaign, and the favourableness of the conditions on which he subsequently settled them in his own dominions in the neighbourhood of Āq Shehir (the ci-devant Philomelium), “not only prevented the prisoners themselves from feeling any nostalgia for their native land but also attracted to Philomelium many East Roman settlers, who had not been carried away captive by the Turks, on the strength of reports of the good treatment that their kinsmen and fellow countrymen had received at the Turks’ hands. The truth was that in the [East] Roman World, by our day, the springs of Christian virtue had dried up, the truths [of Religion] had ceased to be taken seriously, and arbitrary injustice had run riot until the natural affections of the majority of the population had been chilled to a degree at which entire Hellenic [i.e. “Greek”, not “pagan”] communities voluntarily opted for finding new homes among the barbarians and rejoiced to get away from their native land” (ibid., p. 657). In another passage (ibid., pp 762-3) the same East Roman observer expressly draws the contrast between the conduct of the Western Crusaders when they captured Constantinople in A.D. 1203-4 and that of the Muslims when they had recaptured Jerusalem in A.D. 1187 from its Western Christian conquerors. “The children of Ishmael did not behave like that; indeed, far from it, they showed the most exemplary humanity and clemency to the [Western] kinsmen [of the sackers of Constantinople] after they [i.e. the Muslims] had taken Jerusalem by force of arms. They did not violate the Latins’ womenfolk, they did not choke the Holy Sepulchre with corpses. … All that they did [to the Latins of Jerusalem] was to allow them to go their own way in peace on payment of ransoms which they assessed at a few gold pieces per head – leaving all the rest of the Latins’ property to its owners, even in cases where their wealth was as abundant as the sands of the sea. This was how the adversaries of Christ treated Latins who from their standpoint were infidels. They chivalrously forbore to put them to the sword or subject them to the divers torments of fire, famine, persecution, denudation, tribulation, oppression – or any of the other atrocities which those professedly Christian co-religionists of ours committed against us, as we have recorded in outline, without their having any provocation on our part to bring up against us.”
Nicetas Choniates’ Chronikē Diēgēsis (Chronological Exposition), in twenty-one books, covers the years 1118 to 1206. Choniates blames and criticises the representatives of the Angeloi dynasty for the Byzantine tragedy of 1204. The book is otherwise a defence of the Empire.
Toynbee began his career during the First World War by writing propaganda which denounced the Ottomans in very much the same terms as those in which Choniates denounces the Crusaders and his own compatriots.
A Study of History, Vol VIII, OUP, 1954 (footnote)
June 16 2009 at 2:13 am
[...] Greek against Greek June 15, 2009 After the sack of Constantinople by the Crusaders in A.D. 1204, some of the previously well-to-do Greek refugees from the sacked city were ill-treated by the Greek rural population in the hinterland, who forcibly relieved them of the money that they had been able to bring away with them, and gloated over the spectacle of grandees reduced to an equality with themselves on a common level of destitution. The poorer Greek inhabitants of Constantinople, who did not take flight, enriched themselves by buying from the Latin conquerors, at derisory prices, valuable articles of property that the Latins had plundered from the Greek purchasers’ wealthy fellow-citizens (see the indignant comments on these proceedings in Nıkítas Khoniátis’ Khronikì Dhıíyisıs, Epilogue on the Aftermath of the Catastrophe, chap. 5, on pp. 784-5 of I. Bekker’s edition (Bonn 1835, Weber)). Islamic forbearance [...]
January 19 2012 at 2:42 am
[...] The degree of the enemy pressure [Persian, Arab, Slavic] on fortress-Constantinople in the seventh century can be gauged by the remarkable facts that in 618 or 619 even the heroic Emperor Heraclius was with difficulty deterred from evacuating it, and that in 662 Heraclius’s grandson the Emperor Constans II did transfer the Empire’s capital to Syracuse. However, after Constans’ assassination at Syracuse in 668, the capital immediately reverted to Constantinople; and it reverted again in 1261 from Nicea – the seat of the refugee-capital of the principal surviving fragment of the East Roman Empire after the capture of Constantinople and the seizure of the major part of the Empire’s European dominions by the Venetians and the French in and after 1204. Constans’s twelve-day visit to Rome in 663 was the first by an Emperor since the fall of the Empire in the west. There was, I think, only one after this: a desperate visit by John VIII Palaiologos in 1423, which led to the Union of Florence. [...]