This is how Philip Mansel described the conversion of the Haghia Sophia by Mehmed II, the conqueror of Constantinople.
Above all, the western Christian powers were determined to avoid any reversal of the Muslim conquest of Istanbul: "The Russians shall not have Constantinople" chorused an English music-hall song.How did the various players in this strange religious game explain themselves to their own pious subjects?
The crown Christ wore when he was crucified was said to have been carried from Jerusalem to Constantinople.
In 1525, in an attempt to weaken his imperial adversary, the king made his first moves towards forming an alliance with the Ottoman sultan, Suleiman, a ruler who wanted to conquer Europe for Islam.The vast and romantic 16th-century chateau was built for the very rich Duc de Montmorency, a courtier who carried out many diplomatic missions to Constantinople.
It was for good reason that they called Moscow a third Rome, not a second Constantinople.
When an angry mob starts throwing stones at the bearded sage, you might well find yourself silently egging them on.As the story gets under way, in the early years of the 13th century, the knights of the fourth crusade are having a high time sacking Constantinople.
He used these qualities to influence Empress Catherine the Great not just during the few years when he was her lover, but as her confidant when her affections shifted.With the monarch's approval, Potemkin colonised Crimea, did battle with the Ottoman empire and dreamed up an ambitious plan for reinstating a Christian emperor in Constantinople.
That would be impossible in the Christian world, he suggested, but very possible among the Muslim Ottomans.Let us suppose two churches, the one of Arminians, the other of Calvinists, residing in the city of Constantinople.
It was a Russian-born Oxbridge don, Dimitri Obolensky, who in 1971 coined the term "Byzantine Commonwealth" to describe territories that formed a common cultural and spiritual space with Constantinople but were not subject to it politically; indeed these territories were often at war with the city on the Bosphorus.Obolensky was influenced by the British empire's transformation into a commonwealth.
The objective was to gain control of the Dardanelles Strait, and then to press on and take Constantinople.
Because they still do not believe a Muslim can achieve this … They do not believe that their ancestors carried the ships over land to the Golden Horn," he said, referring to Ottoman Sultan Mehmet II's conquest of Constantinople (now Istanbul) in 1453.
