The Fall of Constantinople:
Overview Fall Constantinople 1453: "A lot of people didn't think that in the West that Constantinople could actually fall. So there's a lot of political maneuvering... the heroism of the defenders, who were heavily outnumbered, you will not believe how few troops were actually defending the great city of Constantinople. Most of the city spent their time praying for divine intervention, instead of being at the walls helping to defend it… We reach a point that by the time we get to the last day of the fighting, if the Sultan does not win, he's not going to survive the day. He will probably be killed and be replaced with someone else. In the case of Constantine, you know, he has a chance to win. This is just some terrible luck that happens on the last day that allows the Muslims to get into the city… of course, they call it Istanbul. But where we were staying in the Old City, they still call it Constantinople. And we were amazed that probably you can see 80% of the fortifications on the European side"
Sultan Murad II: "[In 1421 he] began another Siege of Constantinople. But the Byzantines along with some independent Turkish states sent Murat the Second his younger brother Mustapha. He was 13 years old, they convinced him to rebel. Now one of the interesting things about the Byzantines is historically, they have had a spectacular Secret Service. It's generally referred to as the Barbarian Bureau and they have an incredibly spy network. And they knew almost all of their opponents and they knew almost all their weaknesses and they were given the job that if, if you got to poison somebody, you got to kill somebody, you got to start a war with somebody. If you keep the pressure off Byzantium, you're doing a good deal. So here's a case where they found the pliant 13 year old who is willing to listen to other people and he wants to become Sultan too. So they convince him to rebel. Here their real goal is just simply to get the siege over with and it worked. The new Mustapha attacked Bursa, which forced Murad II to drop his Siege of Constantinople. Unfortunately for the young prince, it wasn't long before he was defeated and executed"
Mehmet II The Conqueror: "Now the return of Murad the Second. There’s a couple of versions of this... in version two, Mehmet the Second defeated the crusade against the Ottoman Empire led by Janos Hunyadi after the Hungarians broke the conditions of the truce from the peace of Szeged. What happened was the Pope's legate to Hungary, Cardinal Julian Cecerini convinced the King of Hungary that breaking the truce with the Muslims wasn't a betrayal because a Christian’s word was only binding to another Christian. It’s the same thing they did to John Huss during the Reformation. Well, now Mehmet the Second asked his father to reclaim the throne. Well his father was happily retired in a life of study in southwest Anatolia and initially Murad the Second refused but Mehmet tried again. This time, he wrote him a letter and that letter survives and the crux of it goes, “If you are the Sultan come and lead your armies. If I am the Sultan, I hereby order you to come back and lead your armies”. After receiving the letter Murad the Second came back and lead the Ottoman army to victory at the Battle of Varna in 1444."
Mehmet and the Orthodox Christians Part 2: "So many churches were left to them to puzzle Turkish lawyers for a later date, who could not understand why in a city that had been stormed and vanquished that they should have retained any of their religious shrines. The arrangement suited the conquering Sultan for he had decided that there were quarters in which these Greek subjects in Constantinople should dwell, and they would have to have buildings in which they would carry on their worship. But as time went on, his settlement was forgotten. One by one, the old Christian churches were taken from them and converted into mosques until by the 18th century, only three Byzantine churches remained in Christian hands. The church known as St. Mary of the Mongols, preserved by a special decree of the Conqueror, granted to his favorite architect Christa Duelis [sp?] the Greek and two chapels so tiny as to be overlooked. St. Demetrios Kanabos and St. George of the Cypresses. Elsewhere, the Christians worshipped the newer buildings of unobtrusive design so as not to offend the eyes of the victorious Muslims"
Aftermath of the Victory at Vienna 1: "Talking about the diet. In Poland, the diet, which is of course, their parliament has a really unusual structure. It requires that anything that needs to pass has to be passed unanimously by the diet. So if one member of this group disagrees, it's over. There's actually a term. It's referred to as exploding the diet, you have the people come to meet for some reason. And one man walks in and says, I don't care what you do, I am voting against it. They'll have the vote, he'll vote against it, everything, everybody will go home and everything will remain the same. The belief was that if you had a strong king, it would take away the power of the nobles, and therefore they control the diet, which of course ends up destroying Poland because no one can unify the country successfully. And so it's torn apart piece by piece by piece until it completely disappears."
***
Pyrrhus of Epirus:
Pyrrhus takes the throne: "In the Hellenistic age, the various phalanx units have signals that when they realize that they're going to lose, they give the signal and then just march and switch sides so they don't get slaughtered"
Winter Negotiations 380-379 BC: "The Romans, never tolerant of defeat, decided to punish the survivors of Heraclea. The cavalry were demoted to infantry and the infantry to less prestigious role of skirmishers. They were also forced to winter outside the main camp and refused supplies, forcing them to forage for food...
Naturally enough, Fabricius scoffed at Cineas’ belief, saying, ‘Oh Hercules, may Pyrrhus and the Samnites cherish these doctrines as long as they are at war with us’. The endless moralizing of Fabricius’s reply to Pyrrhus must be seen in the context of the sources. All wrote under the later Republic, or during the Empire, when the supposed virtues of the early Republic: courage and incorruptibility, were idealized and compared unfavourably with the supposed greed and decadence of the Roman nobility of their own times. So Pyrrhus is cast into the role of a greedy tyrant and compared unfavorably to the upright senator. The longest version of Fabricius’s replies comes from Dionysius of Halicarnassus. This author wrote during the reign of Augustus. His primary motive was to reconcile the Greeks to the rule of Rome and he claimed that the Greeks should not rail at Fortune for having wantonly bestowed upon an undeserving city, a supremacy so great and already of so long a continence, particularly when they shall have learned from my history that Rome from the very beginning, immediately after its founding, produced infinite examples of virtue in men whose superiors, whether for piety or for justice or for lifelong self control, or for warlike valor, no city, either Greek or barbarian has ever produced, end of quote. Fabricius therefore, one of Dionysius’s examples of Roman virtue. As discussed earlier, such anecdotes should not be taken literally. The ancient historians used them to make predetermined moral points. This is particularly true of speeches and conversations. Even Thucydides, one of the most reliable of the ancient historians, admits to concocting such speeches so that my habit has been to make the speaker say what was in my opinion demanded of them by various occasions"
Pyrrhus Abandons Sicily: "A Triumph, as I'd mentioned before, was a solemn procession in which the victorious general and his chariot, his troops, captives and spoils of war were paraded through Rome. At its finale, the white bull was sacrificed in the temple of Jupiter. Such awards were not lightly given and had to be voted by the Senate. A number of prerequisites had to be met. These included at least 5000 of the enemy should have been slain in a single battle and that Roman losses should have been small compared with that of their adversaries, and that the war should have been brought to a victorious conclusion, with the enemy reduced to a state of peace that would allow the troops to withdraw in order to march in the Triumph. During the later Republic, ambitious politicians would deliberately provoke wars, usually against weak enemies in order to gain a triumph and enhance their own glory. They hoped that their friends in the Senate would vote them a triumph and just simply overlook the prerequisites. Such an example was Cicero, who tried to claim a triumph after defeating some bandits in his province of Sicilia. He was quite rightly but generously granted a lesser award, a suplicacio [sp?]."
***
Napoleons
Napoleon enters Paris: "One thing about being interested in the Napoleonic era... this is the last time men looked good killing each other. The most beautiful uniforms to fight wars... there are a few pictures of some of the original guards, that they lived long enough and could keep their uniforms fit. That there're photographs of them. And actually some of them have been colourised, and they are quite stunning"
The New Napoleon Part 1: "Now liberals are in favor of granting more rights to voting. The liberal group would say we want more people to vote, the conservatives would say we like the kings. We're gonna leave them alone. But the liberals are concerned about one group, the uneducated working class. They're afraid they're too stupid, and they'll vote for the wrong kind of people. So the liberal movement, the bourgeoisie liberal movement doesn't want that. They’re willing to give more people the right to vote, but they still want to keep it restricted. So they wanted to reduce the tax, there's actually a tax in France to vote, it was approximately 200 francs a year to be eligible to vote. They were going to try and reduce that to allow more people to vote but not make it free... The February Revolution begins on February the 21st 1848… a group of zealot republicans decided to demonstrate in front of Guizot’s house. Now there are a lot of demonstrators and there are not a lot of troops guarding it. So there was a concern. And there's some push and there’s some pull and the officer in charge on horseback got up to speak to the crowd warning them, this, that or the other and the next thing you know, a shot goes off and hay and his horse and and the commander fall to the ground. They had not been hit. His horse had just gotten spooked by the gunshot but his troops thought he'd been shot at and then fired on the crowd, killing 20 people. Now this then institutes a huge riot, and ultimately leads to Louis Phillipe, on February the 24th, the King of France, fleeing the country along with Guizot"
