Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies-2007-Lawton-469-91

Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies

1453 and the Stream of Time
David Lawton
Washington University in St. Louis
St. Louis, Missouri
We are not coeval

With a locality
But we imagine others are . . .
George Oppen
The stream of Time, irresistible, ever moving, carries o and
bears away all things that come to birth and plunges them into
utter darkness, both deeds of no accounts and deeds which are
mighty and worthy of commemoration; as the playwright says,
it brings to light that which was unseen and shrouds from us
that which was manifest. Nevertheless, the science of History is
a great bulwark against this stream of Time; in a way it checks
this irresistible flood, it holds in a tight grasp whatever it can seize
floating on the surface and will not allow it to slip away into the
depths of Oblivion.
For Anna Comnena here in the Alexiad (ca. ), time is a stream, a river, a
metaphor become clich that, to take it seriously for one moment, is Aristotelian to the extent that it links motion and time, and Augustinian in satisfying Augustines concern that the slippery present is the only time available
to us but occupies no space of its own. History may defy its nature, by sheer
force of writing or divine aid damming the flow or holding objects unaffected. And metaphor is already mixed here, when the commemorative or
religious aspect is suggested by the way in which imagery of water is overlaid
by that of fire, light in the darkness. It is as if the Petrarchan Renaissance is
dormant in Comnenas imagery.
Now here is Sir Steven Runciman, writing in about :
Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 37:3, Fall 2007
DOI ./-- 2007 by Duke University Press
Published by Duke University Press
In the days when historians were simple folk, the Fall of Constantinople, , was held to mark the close of the Middle Ages.
Nowadays, we know too well the stream of history flows on
relentlessly and there is never a barrier across it.
There is never a barrier across it: Runciman alludes here to the history of
Constantinople. For the Byzantines stretched a great chain across the Golden
Horn to prevent naval invasion (it was breached by the Turks). I see that chain
as a potent symbol of itself, a date promoted into historys premier league
by Gibbon and developed into a definitive marker by nineteenth-century
historians, so that in some versions the Middle Ages closed and the Renaissance begins, as it were, on one bright day; but Gibbons attention, as his title
suggests, was on the Roman Empire and the belated demise of a political,
rather than Petrarchs prior reinvention of a spiritual, Romanitas. The Byzantine chain is inorganic, a showy artifact, yet almost immaterial, having no
eect on the water below; and is such a marker, dividing the surface of
history, without disturbing its flow, into inconsistent temporalities. For if the
Renaissance begins there, the Ottomans must be instruments of progress.
But also serves to divide Christian Europe from Islam, which is cast
as backward, not at all progressive. The rhetoric works to the present day,
relegating both Islam and modern Turkey: in the s the then European
Community issued a report calculating that it would take Turkey over one
hundred years to catch up with the rest of the EC, provided that Europe
forbore from developing in the meantime. Turkey, argue todays opponents,
cannot join the EU because it is behind Europe, and therefore irreparably
other, not only in religion but in temporality. Yet this is not how Islam was
imagined in what becomes the West before ; it becomes backward
by virtue of itself, and the acquisition of Constantinople. This is an
example of a recursive (or tidal), not a linear, model of time.
Unlike the linear, the recursive, according to Johannes Fabian in
, always involves the diachronic relegation of whatever we see as the
immediately preceding period. We have to be in conversation with that
period in order to recognize our own, but in order to mark the periodic
syncopation we withdraw from that contact in order to claim kinship, or a
spiritual synchronicity (Petrarch in the Roman forum), with a more distant
imagined past. Syncopation tends to express itself as the succession of light
and dark; the history we most know, that contingent to our own, is thereby
consigned to the dark. Oblivion, then, is the signature of modernity. The
Middle Ages is the invention of a recursive system, and as we progress in
470 Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies / 37.3 / 2007
time the medieval period should move forward with us, albeit at a respectful
distance: one logarithmic model of periodization, that most accessible on the
Web, has the Middle Ages lasting from to . Stories, especially
good stories, of such shady middle periods are prone to be recycled. The one
Gibbon tells of the Byzantine Empire of cruelty, libidinal excess, and religious fervor leading to emasculation is told again about the five-hundredyear duration of the Ottoman Empire. As one writer puts it, the indulgences of Constantinople sapped the fighting will of the Empire. Turkey
becomes Byzantium, complete with the apparatus and artifice of eternity
Yeats imagines for it. By definition it cannot be modern, albeit that it has
replaced the Byzantine chain with the more hopeful, if unrequited, symbol
of the Bosphorus bridge. For it is Byzantium, not Islam, that is the real other
of the Western Middle Ages.
This is a classic example of Fabians allochrony the refusal to
engage in a conversation with the object of ones study. Having brilliantly
critiqued the allochrony of what he called anthropological Time (what I
see here as recursive), Fabian promptly proceeds to a breathtaking aporia: in a
flagrantly allochronous manner, he contrasts his modern model of time with
what he calls sacred time that he attributes, in the best Petrarchan mode, to
the medieval period the boundary of which for Fabian falls suspiciously
close to . Instead of a model that generates a sequence, however recursive,
Fabians diagram of sacred time is a perfect circle, or rather concentric circles, playing out the issues of Christian empire. And it reinstates the Byzantine chain, the power of . So Fabian directs attention to the stream, but
then reerects the chain, reinforcing the significance of a constructed marker
date even as he notes the larger temporal flows that pass unimpeded by such
markers while being, often in unforeseen ways, causative of them.
Fabian recognizes, however, that temporalities are also spatial: the
idea of Physical Time is part of the system of ideas which includes space,
bodies and motion. There is a material force behind the stream of time;
the movement of bodies in space makes possible the recognition or misrecognition of recurrence as a tide. In the Mediterranean, the movement
of peoples is identical to the progression of periods, but not necessarily in
a simple series; in the heyday of Byzantine or Ottoman control, Constantinople remains the seat of Orthodoxy, the imperial capital, and the hub of
the tricontinental trading zone best known as the Levant; the Turks are well
equipped by the process of superstratification to take over a world of interactions between nomads and settled populations, of religious and cultural
synchronisms, a world out of which new peoples emerged.
Lawton / The Stream of Time 471
All such movements articulate the stream of time. In Edmondo

De Amicis sees Constantinople as the site and sum of its periods:
It seems that Constantinople is what it has always been, the capital of three continents, and the Queen of twenty kingdoms. But
even this description cant give an adequate description of the
spectacle, which resembles vast overlapping tides of emigration,
produced by some enormous cataclysm which has overturned the
old continent.
The stream of time has become the tides of emigration, confirming Constantinoples medieval history and foreshadowing the particular violence
which will identify most of the twentieth century: an empire of conflicted
signs, the late-fading Rome of the East.
There is no call to declare for stream or for chain. Neither is ultimately an adequate metaphor for multiple and simultaneous temporalities,
and both are fraught with discontinuous and incompatible subjective experiences of time. Yet their concurrence suggests inconsistencies we seek to preserve in our understanding of time: the flow that is long-term, spatial, and full
of bodies, against markers that are abstract, symbolic, and seek to distinguish
future from past like the Tree of Knowledge or the Berlin Wall that,
once breached, become historic points of no return. Working with both types
of metaphor may help us do what we need, to both critique periodization and
revise it. In the remainder of this essay, I seek to describe multiple and intersecting temporalities that exist in , and a sequence of foreshadowings and
aftershocks, ranging from the Fourth Crusade in to the occupation of
Constantinople after World War I and its aftermath, the tides of emigration. We need to read a cluster of conflicting and overlapping temporalities,
the various temporal frameworks of historical subjects and objects, with their
dierent extensions in past and future: time as flood, as barrier, and as fault.
1204
A medieval knight is separated from the royal hunting party and wanders
lost in the forest of Ardennes. Eventually, he finds a harbor and boards a
ship manned by invisible hands, aboard which he crosses to a rich and exotic
country whose inhabitants he cannot see. Leaving the port, he climbs up to
a palace in which he is served dinner, again by unseen agents, and retires
to bed in an opulent chamber. As he lies there in the dark, worrying about
magic and necromancy, he is aware that he is not alone: he feels a living body
in the bed beside him, which turns out, on closer investigation, to be that of
a beautiful and noble young woman.
The knight is Partonopeu, scion of the royal family of Franks, the
eponymous hero of one of the most popular European knightly romances
of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Partonopeu de Blois. The poem was
translated into several languages and is found in several distinct narrative versions. Im not concerned here with trying to trace the versions, but I do want
to note the choice that they oer for the development of the scene I have just
interrupted. Mostly, the couple talk; universally, and without any doubt or
euphemism, they then have sex. In one of the two English versions, he forces
himself upon her and rafte her maydenhed; she weeps, and complains, having already asked him to leave. In the second, their sex is consensual, and in
the Icelandic, characteristically, the woman takes the initiative. In all versions, it turns out that she has deliberately brought him to her fathers kingdom by using her power of magic. She is to retain this power only for as long
as their congress takes place in darkness and Partonopeu continues to exist in
his strange parallel world, unseen by and not seeing the people of her fathers
court and kingdom. In a second visit, however, he brings a torch to shed
light on her beautiful features. This is, of course, a strangely transgendered
version of the Cupid and Psyche story: as in their story, separation is the consequence, but with the dierence that the Cupid figure, the woman, immediately loses her magic powers as a result of Partonopeus transgression. The
woman is the daughter and heir of the emperor of Byzantium; the strange
city in which Partonopeu and the indigenous population are both present,
but not to each other, is Constantinople, though the writers account of it
borrows much from imaginings of that new late-twelfth-century travelers
destination, purgatory. When at the end of the romance Partonopeu and his
lady are reunited, the Frankish knight becomes emperor by right of marriage:
this is another poem that could have been entitled Sailing to Byzantium.
It is tempting to read the narrative of Partonopeu, and the structures
of desire and alterity it reveals, alongside the history of the Fourth Crusade, culminating in the occupation of Constantinople and the seizure of
the Byzantine imperial crown by the Franks and their allies the Venetians in
. For modern historians of Byzantium, this rather than is seen as
the truly cataclysmic event. For Runciman, there was never a greater crime
against humanity than the Fourth Crusade. Michael Angolds recent
judgment is that the crusader conquest of Constantinople was no ordinary
conquest. It entailed the shattering of a civilization. Yet recent revisionist
history, less inclined to blame the crusaders for a conspiracy of bad faith, has
gone far to show how the disaster followed from a whole series of miscalculations, the thousands of mistakes to borrow a phrase from Condoleezza
Rice made by crusading armies when they have set out with much fervor
and few plans. The first of these was to assemble an army without the
resources either to pay it or to fund its campaign. This led to the second,
reliance on the Venetians and their ancient and formidable blind Doge Dandolo. The Venetians had essential trading interests in Constantinople and
as many resentments as anities toward the Byzantine Empire. They knew
better than the Franks that the courtly culture of the twelfth century had
its material foundations in the textiles, spices, precious metals, and other
commodities that entered Europe by way of the Golden Horn. Having first
sidetracked the crusade to the successful siege of the neighboring city of
Zara, crucial to Venetian interests if inconveniently full of fellow Christians,
Dandolo then proposed that the armies sail to Constantinople.
The mistake here was that of a faction of the forever feuding Byzantine court, which had sent a claimant to the imperial throne, Alexios Angelus,
to seek help among the Italians. Dandolo was able to argue that once secure
on the throne, Alexios would dip into the Byzantium treasury to pay the
army, which would then fund a crusade against the Mamelukes in Egypt and
so, eventually, to Jerusalem. The crusaders therefore found themselves besieging Constantinople, astonished that they were not being made welcome as
the friends of Alexios, whom the Byzantines reluctantly agreed in to
accept as their emperor, and who was then utterly incapable of financing the
large sums needed to pay the army so that in he was assassinated by
another court faction. Only then did the crusader armies rise up, somewhat
out of the control of their commanders, and seize Constantinople. There is
considerable dispute among historians about the scale of the atrocities the
armies then carried out, but there is no doubt even in their own eyewitness
accounts, when things go wrong afterwards, that this has been Gods judgment on their conduct. Their narrative after is one of progressive diculty, as early as when the new Frankish emperor Baldwin was captured
by the Bulgars and beheaded. Most of the senior crusaders never made it back
to their European homelands; the survivors lived on as beleaguered colonists,
and Villehardouins text conveys a palpable puzzlement at everything going
so completely wrong. The Byzantines for their part sought refuge in the East
among the Seljuk and then the Ottoman Turks, returning to a much diminished form of their empire in Constantinople in .
Recent scholarly dating of Partonopeu places the text somewhere
between and , well before the Fourth Crusade. I do not see this as
a disadvantage to my argument, which is precisely that romance can predetermine subsequent history; at the least, we may wonder how much it
may influence the conduct of knightly lives. Both crusaders and Partonopeu
find themselves conveyed to Constantinople, and their eventual gaining of
its throne depends on questions of agency. Was it rape? Or was it consensual, since the emperors heir was the instrument of their coming there? The
crusaders themselves were well aware of the foundational tradition that the
would-be emperor of Constantinople must marry the city; one might almost
say that Partonopeu finds himself in bed with the city itself. Here is the tradition as told by Gunther of Paris:
There one night he lay down on the royal bed, rested, and fell
asleep. It seemed to him that he saw a little old woman, quite
aged and dead, and the blessed Pope Sylvester (who also appeared
to be there in person) said she would be resuscitated by Constantine. When the emperor reawakened her by his prayer, she
had been transformed into a very beautiful maiden, who excited
a chaste love in his eyes. He adorned her with a royal cape and,
when he had placed his diadem on her head, his mother Helena
appeared to say to him: Son, until the end of time you will have
this wife, who will remain this beautiful forever. When he had
related this vision to many people and one interpreted it this way
and another that, the king resolved to fast without break until
Christ provided him with an interpretation of his vision through
His servant Sylvester. When he had fasted for seven days, the
blessed Sylvester appeared to him in a vision on that seventh night
and said to him: That hag whom you saw is this city, which is
presently almost dead from neglect and old age. Through you it
is to be renovated to such a state of beauty that it will be called
queen among all the cities of Greece.
Tales of such marriages when the bride is a city are eschatological, but allow
for a play of dierent eschatologies. Here I would merely like to press one or
two details from Partonopeu. Given that the lady is a figure of Constantinople, how are we to read her loss of power when she is brought into clear view
and, especially, how are we to read the way in which this rupture restores the
people of the city and Partonopeu, who have inhabited the same space but
dierent temporalities, to a common time?
The cultural stream between Byzantine and Frank, or in the imagery

of the text, the darkness which brings them into a space of unequal secrecy,
is religious: given the schism between East and West, each mirrors Christendoms other, and each has its distinctive temporalities. Byzantine apocalypse,
for example, is not grounded in the Book of Revelation, with its explicit rejection of Rome as the great whore; in Byzantine apocalypse, on the contrary,
Romanitas is a defining value, and the Western whore is the Eastern bride.
Yet Byzantine apocalypse is itself a source of loss, for the city must be lost,
irreparably, as in the Apocalypse of Daniel, or in order to be recovered, as
in the Pseudo-Methodius. The most striking dierences are in the calibration of earthly and sacred time, which in the West, especially in scholastic
thought, is posited on rupture: an increasingly fundamentalist insistence on
the presence of the Galilean body of Christ in each and every eucharistic host
becomes the one means for the individual worshipper of conjoining times that
otherwise increasingly divide. The Orthodox sense, by contrast, is hierarchical. Whenever the liturgy is said on earth it is said simultaneously in heaven;
and there is a spiritual stair or ladder between the two. Constantinople is the
city entrusted to its emperor by God for the purpose of replicating the life of
heaven, the real presence of which is displayed in its relics and its holy images
as much as in its sacraments. The drops of Christs blood guarded with relics
of the true cross in the emperors church, the Blachernae, make the Crucifixion eternally present in the city the city nowadays being Paris, since these
were removed to the Sainte-Chapelle; relics of saints mark the saints actual
company; the holiest of holy icons, the Hodegetria, the portrait of Virgin and
Child supposedly painted by St. Luke, does not merely symbolize the continued presence of the Virgin in Constantinople, but enacts and celebrates it.
Thus the removal of images and relics from the shrines of the city represents
a real and permanent evacuation of the citys spiritual time, leaving it bereft
in all too human history. Such removal is recorded in Byzantine writings as,
naturally, sacrilegious theft; but in crusader literature, it figures as a process of
recuperation and discovery, a move from darkness into light light such as
Partonopeu holds up to his future imperial bride, depriving her of her powers and aligning her subjects with his own time, which is what union of the
churches must entail.
It is worth adding that in Orthodox understanding the spiritual
light of the Eastern Church, represented in the gold background of its icons,
was literally the light of Christs transfiguration accessible to its holy men
such as hesychasts, and the citys true illumination. It is as though Partonopeus torch, crusader discovery, quenches that greater light, unknown to
them, and removes from Byzantium to use the Greek word for transfiguration the power of metamorphosis, of change within time.
1453
So to itself, in which well under , men in Constantinople fail to

withstand the Sultans ,, and to quote Gibbons harsh but hardly
incorrect judgment Christendom beheld with indierence the fall of
Constantinople. Certainly, Pope Pius II (Aeneas Sylvius) dedicated his
papacy to reversing it; but the princes of Christendom stayed away from the
councils that he called. Certain elements of the story stand out: the severing of the great chain that the Byzantines had stretched across the waters of
the Golden Horn; the Sultans building of castellated fortifications all along
the Bosphorus facing the Byzantine defenses; his opportunistic purchasing
of great Genoese cannons already declined by the Byzantine emperor, who
could not aord them this indicates a new period of technology much
noted since, but hardly at all at the time; the Turks final mass breaching
of the walls through lack of defenders; the heroism of the small band of
Genoese volunteers led by Guistiniani, and the proportionate dismay of the
Byzantines when he left the scene wounded on the final day; the even greater
dismay when the great Hodegetria icon was paraded through the city in a
fierce storm, and was let fall to the ground; the emptiness of Hagia Sophia,
until the final days abandoned by the Orthodox faithful after the emperor
accepted the outcome of the Council of Florence and reconciled with the
Western Church; the myth that the emperor passed into its walls at the
moment of defeat, nonetheless given shelter by the Virgin until the last days
of all. My interest here is in the temporalities that were instrumental at the
time in shaping expectations of the outcome and responses to it.
For the conquest, there was an available framework of eschatology
with which to understand Constantinoples capture: it is predicted in sura
XXX of the Quran, and is the subject of further prophecies. Nevertheless,
eight centuries had elapsed between prophecy and fulfillment; as with Christianity, the eschaton was long deferred. That the deferment occurred with
rather less pain is suggested by Muhammads reputed response on being told
that the city had not in fact fallen: Make the deadline ten years. And then:
One day, not now. The Ottomans did not necessarily regard the Byzantine Empire as its major other; the emperors had often collaborated with the
Turks, and served as their vassals in time of hardship. By , the Ottomans had long swept past Constantinople; more than a third of their empire
was already in Europe, and its main enemies were Slavs in the west and other
Turkic peoples in eastern Anatolia. Moreover, their empire was hegemonic:
they took the conquered into service (and were soon well served by a succession of Christian viziers), and did not force mass religious conversion, generally tolerating both Jews and Christians and promoting trade and cultural
exchange with Europe, especially Venice. Sultan Mehmed II reinstated the
Orthodox patriarchate in Constantinople, and the Eastern Church thrived
under Ottoman control, making retrospectively plausible the lines famously
attributed to a leading Byzantine in : Better the Sultans turban than
the Cardinals hat. Mehmed for his part styled himself emperor of Rome
and of the world; he saw himself as avenging the Trojans, and was said to
possess more copies of Homer then of the Quran. His greatest sixteenthcentury successor, Sleyman the Magnificent, spoke of my Stambul . . .
home of all the emperors of Rome. Both sultans were patrons of a new wave
of Ottoman world history, in which the Ottoman Empire was represented as
the last valid world empire. In spite of the strong eschatological undertow,
then, the Ottoman response to their capture of Constantinople was mainly
mythological, its focus on Troy and Rome and eastern reappropriation of
translatio imperii, and more or less shrewdly geopolitical and contemporary.
Strikingly, the same is mainly true of the Italian response to it, even from the
papacy: though the language was that of catastrophe, it was not contextualized among the signs of judgment but rather lamented as the most urgent of
geopolitical issues.
What, however, were the responses of the subjected, and in what
phenomenologies of time were they grounded? This may be gauged by looking at three witnesses from all the way across the wide geographical expanse
that once denoted the Byzantine Empire. It may be a noteworthy irony that
all three of these figures of Christian defeat are named after the Anatolian
saint, George: () George of Hungary, the Hungarian captured while fighting the Ottomans in Romania in , who was then long enslaved in the
Ottoman Empire and escaped, was recaptured and granted freedom, and
then published his treatise on the Turks in ; () George of Trebizond, a
leading Cretan churchman and intellectual whose family came from Trebizond, an oshoot of the Byzantine Empire on the Black Sea, who wholly
threw in his lot with the papacy and the Roman Church; and () George
Sphrantzes, a Thracian who served the last Byzantine emperors in high
political oce, was captured in the fall of Constantinople, was enslaved and
ransomed, and fled from Sultan Mehmed yet again when he invaded the
Morea in , and died as a monk in Corfu in .
George of Hungarys Latin treatise on the Turks is part of a considerable literature after and throughout the sixteenth century profiling
and second-guessing Europes most formidable potential enemies. George
sees them as well established in the West and oers his life story as a parable
of their global reach. The slave economy did not as such dierentiate Turks
from Europeans, especially Italians: the slave market was one of the major
ties between East and West. Treatment of slaves varied widely from place to
place, and it is unclear how unfortunate Georges situations were. His treatise
manifests what may strike modern readers as three inconsistent attitudes to
the rise of the Turks: apocalyptic, ethnographic, and confessional. The first
is frankly apocalyptic, in a distinctly Western way, citing Joachim of Fiores
commentary on Revelation chapter . Georges third chapter How the
sect of the Turks is terrible, and how we must fear it () proclaims that
all contemporary events teach us to expect the end of time. Now, the apocalyptic genre normally conduces to moral certainty and the confidence in an
endtime that will confute ones enemies. Yet George attributes such confidence to only one sort of Christian kept in slavery by the Turks, whom he
tacitly sees as exceptional:
I have seen with my own eyes men who stayed firm in their simplicity and in their Christian faith, who execrated the customs and
actions of the Turks, and who, after several attempts at flight, bore
torture with constancy and died notwithstanding in the faith of
Christ. They are, in my opinion, martyrs. I have seen others of this
kind return to their homeland after they were freed. ()
But there are two other types of Christians held captive by the Turks. The
second, over the long duration of imprisonment, develop the desire to understand the culture of the Turks and to fathom its secrets:
It is to this kind that I belonged, and I worked hard, despite the
dangers, to research and bring to light the heresy that hides itself
under the aspect of religion. In my project divine grace did not
abandon me, and all has turned to my benefit. ()
From this experience George derives his title, A Treatise on the Ways, Customs, and Perfidy of the Turks, and also the works nature, two equal parts
ethnography and horror. George knows a great deal about Turkish life and
history, and he reports on them copiously, more like the author of a Lonely
Planet guide than a hellfire preacher.
The third group of Christian captives comprises those whose interest in Turkish manners leads them to renounce their Christian faith from
a conviction of Turkish superiority. Georges horror of this is so immediate
that the most recent editor of his work suspects him of covert autobiographical confession ( ). His real fear is not the perfidy of Turks but that of
Christians, and his text, voicing his suspicions that Christianity is weaker
than Islam, finds itself on a referential precipice, with its choice between an
apocalypticism without triumph and an ongoing history of attrition, set to
fall not only into a foreign belief but also an alien temporality.
With his theme of Christian weakness, George of Hungary oddly
complements George of Trebizonds theme of Ottoman strength: not, however, Islamic strength, since George of Trebizond, writing in Greek, professes belief in a prophecy he has heard that Islam will soon cease to be
taught in Constantinople following its conquest. This is a simple strategy
which enables George of Trebizond to avoid the Muslim peril while actively
courting the sultan whom, as a ruler who can Aristotelianize, he compares
eulogistically to Constantine: to the degree that Constantines glory outshone all others, so too will your glory outshine his, just as the sun outshines
the moon. The enemy in Georges text on the Eternal Glory of the
Autocrat, is not Islam but the church of Constantinople, overweening in
the power and dignity of the royal city and lawlessly splitting the church.
Mehmeds role is awesomely simple:
in your victory, God transferred the kingdom to you in order to
gather through you all the races into one faith and one church,
and to exalt you as the autocrat of the whole world and king not
merely of things perishable, but also of the very heavens. ()
Mehmed is the king divinely ordained to be the governor, minister, and
guardian of the final and true conversion of all the peoples to Christ and
the reformation of Christians (). Georges text had come to the attention of the greatest Byzantine convert to Catholicism, Cardinal Bessarion,
who alone in the curia read Greek as easily as Latin and was not impressed.
Georges adoption of a markedly apocalyptic tone is a defensive and authorizing improvisation, endtime on the spur of the moment. He admits in a
letter to the pope to having unduly flattered the sultan. The fact is, however,
that he can seriously put forward a scheme for the union of Constantinople
and Rome, sultanate and papacy, in the way that a visionary like Jean Monnet might have proposed a European Union. George sees the demise of
the Byzantine Empire as a positive and enabling event toward this end; and
his main theological concern is not any anxiety about blasphemous backsliding or adopting the mark of the Beast, but rather the intellectual diculty
of persuading an inconveniently smart sultan (who also dreamed of uniting
Constantinople and Rome, but not on Georges terms) that a religion in
which God is three is more or less the same as a religion in which God is
indivisibly one. leads George of Trebizond to a visionary, if chimerical,
new period of geopolitical entrepreneurship.
It leads George Sphrantzes in his Chronikon of the Byzantine Empire
to what sounds ominously like a more modern period, or rather an abyss:
I am George Sphrantzes, the pitiful First Lord of the Imperial
Wardrobe, presently known by my monastic name Gregory. I
wrote the following account of the events that occurred during
my wretched life. It would have been fine for me not to have been
born or to have perished in childhood. Since this did not happen,
let it be known that I was born on Tuesday August th, .
Sphrantzes date (the equivalent of ) is the Byzantine date supposedly
calculated from the creation of the world: with the apocalypse due after
seven thousand years, it situates his text in the closing years of end time. Yet
Sphrantzes, his entire world lost, has already lost confidence in Byzantine
chronology. His pain comes from the failure of his personal time not merely
to end but to have telos or meaning.
Amid the political and national appears the personal and familial:
his marriage in , and the birth in of the oldest son John; a second
son Alexios in who survived for only days; a daughter Thamer in
, with Constantine as her godfather; a third son, also named Alexios, in
, and Andronikos in , who lived for only eight days (). If one
assumes that the Byzantines were somewhat inured to infant mortality, the
first note of major bereavement occurs in , and it is inauspicious:
on August th . . . my son Alexios passed away. He was five years
and eleven months old. I was extremely aected by his death, but
I did not suspect what sadder misfortunes were in store for the
future. ( )
It is the peripateia of Sphrantzes account and a sign that for this public man,
in his doomed polity, there was to be no personal time such as he tried to
write in. The blow falls immediately after the fall of Constantinople, which
occurs with a brief notation of changing temporality in a short paragraph of

five lines ending: alas for me, I did not know what times Providence had in
store for me! Sphrantzes has one more paragraph of brief eulogy to my late
emperor, the martyr and to the Palaeologan dynasty which ruled over the
city for years, months and days. Then: I was taken prisoner and
suered the evils of wretched slavery, from which he was ransomed after
three months, to find that my wife and children had passed into the possession of some elderly Turks, who did not treat them badly. Even here there
is the note of parental pride: my childrens beauty and proper upbringing
could not be concealed; thus, the Sultan found out and bought them ().
By September , a year later, he has been reunited with his wife but without any children. We know only that in September his beloved Thamar
died at age fourteen of an infectious disease in the Sultans seraglio. . . . Alas
for me, her wretched father! (). And what he seems to have felt as the
most crippling stroke of all had already fallen in December , less then
eight months after the fall of Constantinople:
In the same month and year, the most impious and pitiless Sultan, with his own hand took the life of my dearest son John, on
the grounds that the child had conspired to murder him. Alas for
me, his unfortunate and wretched father! My son was years
and months less a day, yet his mind and body proclaimed a
much more mature person. ()
These losses overwhelm the temporalities of Sphrantzes book of Constantinople, the city, and of the Byzantine and Ottoman Empires; and there
is no note of either spiritual consolation or apocalyptic vengeance. Simply in
Sphrantzes and his wife leave secular life and their marriage and each
enters monastic orders, changing their names from George and Helena to
Gregory and Eupraxia (). Sphrantzes records an old age plagued by illness,
continuing his writing until the month before his death in , itself a sad
epilogue to what amounts to his opening prayer not to have been born or to
have perished in childhood. The duration of the Palaeologan dynasty is the
longest period that Sphrantzes marks; the shortest but for the lives of two
baby sons is the reign of the last emperor, years, months and days
(). His recording of such periods is punctilious, but they are the periods of
names of lives and endeavors, attempts to retain a past human lifetime: that
is all the purposefulness there is, and the end is no more than his book, the
work of one who would have lived his life backwards in order not to have
been born, yet one who does not quite resign all to oblivion and the stream
of time.
The eective climax of Sphrantzes Chronikon is unexpected, a
record of the confession of faith he and his wife made when they renounced
the secular life. It is polemical, superorthodox in its Orthodoxy, and squarely
based in the position dossiers drawn up by the Byzantine clergy to argue
their case in the Council of Florence. Sphrantzes is against the union of
, which he cites as the greatest single calamity to have befallen Constantinople in its overriding of the local way, the way he so roundly reasserts.
Its peroration is on the Filioque clause of the Nicene Creed, the most longstanding dierence between Eastern and Western churches; discussion of it
in council after council is most often cited as arid or pedantic, not least by
ecclesiastical historians, but we should hear Sphrantzes authentic passion:
I confess with certainty that the Holy Ghost does not issue from
the Father and the Son as the Italians claim, but without separation from the very manifestation of the Father, just as the Son is
without dierentiation or separation born from the same manifestation of the Father; that the Holy Ghost is sent by the Father and
the Son, however His grace and kindness grant. ()
And we should understand what we have lost in our understanding of his
culture, the extent to which religious dierence matters and that specific
dierence mattered, going to the core of the nature of God and Gods relation to the Church. As D. M. Nicol says of the relation between Eastern
and Western churches, Byzantium and the West: there were no points
of convergence. The two societies were quite literally worlds apart. The
Ottoman Empire was more solid, and more flexible, than Christianitas ever
was; Eastern Christians often seem to have accommodated themselves to it,
even aware at times of the profound kinship of Christianity and Islam . . .
[T]he simple truth has been lost by our tendency to think of Christianity as
a Western religion rather than the Oriental faith it actually is. If we are
finally unable to find intellectual and imaginative sympathy for Sphrantzes
credo, that is itself a measure of the end, the sheer closure of a period which
his work, more profoundly than Gibbons, allows us to intuit. What closes,
however, is not Eastern Christendom or the history of its relations with both
Western Christianity and Islam, which is ongoing and fraught, but rather
the period, already well into extra time, in which it was possible to envision
a united Christianity. The forced union of , for Sphrantzes, is already a
sign of its true passing. Yet it was however formulaic as linear or as recursive from the first, a periodic fantasy.
1953, 1918
I let two dates stand as a mere caricature of the twentieth century: , for
one specific association but also because the end of World War I is a convenient point at which to mark the calamitous eects of nationalism in Europe
and the Middle East; because it was the five-hundredth anniversary
of the capture of Constantinople and was for the first time commemorated
as the great miracle in public celebrations in the city whose name had
become the politically correct Istanbul. As Orhan Pamuk explains:
It was westernization and Turkish nationalism that prompted
Istanbul to begin celebrating the Conquest. At the beginning of
the twentieth century, only half the citys population was Muslim,
and most of the non-Muslim inhabitants were descendants of
Byzantium Greeks. . . . it was the nationalists, then, who insisted
on the word conquest. By contrast, many Ottomans were content
to call their city Constantinople.
Three years later:
the Turkish state deliberately provoked what you might call conquest fever by allowing mobs to rampage through the city plundering the property of Greeks and other minorities. . . . [N]ot
only did the rioters sack and burn little Greek groceries and
dairy shops, they broke into houses to rape Greek and Armenian
women. So it is not unreasonable to say that the rioters were
as merciless as the soldiers who sacked the city after it fell to
Mehmet the conqueror.
This really was the end of the Greek presence in Istanbul, and the silent continuity of Byzantium in the shoe stores, patisseries and haberdashery shops
around the center of the old European city. As this implies, the new temporality of Turkish modernism was self-consciously recursive, neatly eliding
the five-hundred-year duration of the Ottoman Empire; but as a new historical development, it is linear time behaving as if it were eschatological. It was
a program called Turkification, a mid-century example of the violence fermented by nationalism in twentieth-century Europe and beyond, in which
peoples who have lived in a common space are separated, voluntarily or not,
into national spaces: the myth of eternal Hellenism on the one side and on
the other the morphing of the Ottoman into the Turk, which secured the
Turkish state under Ataturk from the scissors of Lloyd George and Venizelos.
On what became the Greek side, as Mark Mazower recounts the unbearable
story, Lloyd George or Venizelos or both were responsible for the forced
repatriation in less than two years of millions of Jews from Salonika, for
the destruction of the Ottoman city and its Jewish graveyard ultimately
of its Jewish population. On the no less sanguinary Turkish side, the years
leading to and following World War I saw the Armenian holocaust and
the slaughter of Greeks on the Aegean coast. The division of the Ottoman
Empire, along ethnic and national lines it had so long resisted, marked the
genesis of issues that have dominated international policy since, for example
in Kosovo, in Palestine, and in Iraq. As Europe attempts to re-form from
its worst century into a postmodern kind of empire, those in Europe who
oppose Turkeys inclusion might do well to recollect the Duke of Wellington: the Ottoman Empire stands not for the benefit of the Turks but of
Christian Europe. To the extent that we find this acute remark incomprehensible, we are victims of changing periodization.
Whatever the period that contains us, our lives contain many different periods. Some periodization is private, of largely personal significance,
including linear events such as periods of human development, living in
certain places, or the time of death, and recursive events such as a birthday or anniversary. Some of our temporalities are shared and social, without
necessarily being part of a rarer but louder public category of periodization.
One great merit of Pamuks book Istanbul: Memories and the City is the
knowing way with which he places all such temporalities visibly alongside
one another, earlier and later: his childhood and the violent Turkification
of Istanbul; the temporal strata of the city itself, most evidently the contrast
between nationalist Istanbul and Ottoman Constantinople; his own quest
to be first an artist and then a writer set against Turkeys key issues of westernization or not; the history of his family as landowners, entrepreneurs, and
travelers; the shades of Byzantium; and so on. The larger rhythms or periods
we see in public time are composed of many dierent, even incompatible,
temporalities, private and social, that traverse the refugee camps between I
and we. The stories we tell ourselves about empire or the (post)colonial,
especially after a century whose public time has so largely undone a millennium of exchange and interfusion, are stories about temporalities and their
periods, about people and their temporalities in flux, for good and ill about
the tides of emigration and the stream of time. Each period bursts the
banks of another.
It is because in our own brief period we are endowed with multiple
temporalities the individual condition of temporal superstratification
that we are also able to queer periodization. The arts are especially important
in this, though I do not know of too much that refers to or (except
Umberto Ecos archly pedestrian novel Baudolino). The one opera I know
about the fall of Constantinople is not Venetian but German and modern,
and it relates to not . It draws rather aphasically on history (confusing the second, third, and fourth crusades), even more on an eclectic
mythology, and owes something deeply incongruous to both Rigoletto and
to The Rape of the Lock. Its libretto is poor, and has protracted intervals that
would libel adolescence to describe as adolescent. The libretto is the composers work, this being the normal practice of the Wagners. The composer is
Siegfried Wagner, son of Richard, and the opera is Sonnenflammen.
Though Sonnenflammen was supposedly completed in , the
opera was first performed in and then, after a dispute with Siegfrieds
widow, who would have been happy to suppress it, not again until . By
, an opera with the theme of (first) fall of the Byzantine Empire could
hardly have been more topical: one year on either side of the performance
saw the collapse of the Russian, Austro-Hungarian, German, and Ottoman
Empires. The operas closing scene was one vast Wagnerian special eect,
opening with Constantinople in the moonlight and closing with it in flames.
The city is incarnated in the cast of the opera by a woman, Iris, the rainbow
(as Byzantium) linking heaven and earth, who as love-object is pursued by
the emperor Alexios, portrayed here as both cruel and eete (he begins scene
one by making fun of a cripple, and proceeds in easy stages to assassination,
having already caused the suicide of his wife Irene, meaning peace). Iris is
also loved by, and when behaving best loves, Fridolind, a Franconian knight,
exiled on account of his having been unfaithful to his wife and then, worse
still, breaking his crusader vow when consumed by the suns rays, the sonnenflammen of the title (love, Byzantium). Fridolind is conflicted and sings
meltingly of his German homeland (if not of his wife). When he is called
back home by his father, who comes to Constantinople to retrieve Fridolind,
Iris herself wants him to be true to his vow as a man of honor, and sings,
somewhat exotically for a Greek, of the blond heroes of the sagas. It is only
at these two points, a single leitmotif, that Siegfried Wagners music quotes
that of his father Richard, in Tannhauser and Lohengrin, and Siegfrieds
music temporarily improves into superior pastiche. A few bars of homely
blandishment are not enough; Fridolind stays in Constantinople with Iris

and is humiliated by Alexios into becoming his junior Fool, which means
that his Nordic locks must be shorn (Iris retains one and places it in the final
scene on Fridolinds dead head). Poor Fridolind has no better choices: he
really does love Iris, not his wife; the crusaders are horrible hooray Harrys,
who swing into town oering boxing, baptizing, and boozing and other
Wagnerian alliteration; and his father is an insensitive brute, who curses
his son and storms out as soon as he hears of the sons degraded condition.
There is nothing left for Fridolind but to commit suicide in the ruins of
empire as Constantinople burns behind him. The operas ending acts out
in its public time prophecies of the twentieth century such as were reached
by that much more sanguine traveler to Constantinople, as far back as ,
Edmondo De Amicis:
The spectacle should be a cheerful one, but it is not. Once your
initial astonishment is over, the festive colors fade; it is no longer
a grand carnival procession passing by, but humanity itself with
all its miseries and follies, with all the infinite discord of its
beliefs and its laws; it is a pilgrimage of debased peoples and
fallen races; an immensity of suering to be helped, a shame to be
purged, of chains to be broken; an accumulation of tremendous
problems written in characters of blood, which can only be solved
by the shedding of blood; the sense of vast and utter disorder is
depressing.
Rivers of blood transfigure the stream of time.
But Sonnenflammen admits with embarrassing ease to a more social
and private reading having to do with the events of Siegfrieds life. Siegfried
had already written an opera about the medieval knight who was unfaithful to his wife, and given him his own made-up second baptismal name,
Helferich. In the later opera he replaces that name, if jokingly, with that of
an Irish saint recalling his own pet name, Fidi (an ironic pun here upon
faithful?). The father who recalls and then curses him is Richard, who
memorably wrote of his one sons first haircut, at the age of eighteen months,
that Siegfried had lost his innocence; but Richard is also associated musically with Gomella, the fool whose junior the degraded Fridolind becomes.
Nightmarishly, Siegfried the composer also inherits the destiny of his father,
the Fool, even after his father, the German, has disowned him; he is able to
withdraw from being a German, and from being a pan-Teuton, but not from
being a Wagner. For Siegfried is the only mildly attractive Wagner, that is,
the only bohemian and liberal, attractively decadent Wagner. And his father,
in whose operatic footsteps he nevertheless followed, really had despaired
of him, not for his politics but for his homosexuality. The Iris of the story,
Siegfrieds lost love, was a young English composer by the name of Clement Harris, who died fighting for the Greeks against the Turks in Corfu
in , whom Siegfried, sensibly, being by then immune to nationalism,
followed only in the matter of sexuality a sexuality more sublimated and
repressed in the opera than, by most accounts, in Siegfrieds own life. The
wife from whom his operatic ego has fled is the young Winifred Wagner,
Welsh by birth, and vocationally Teutonic, who is to be somewhat consoled
after Siegfrieds (natural) death in in the arms, probably in the bed, of
Adolf Hitler.
There are some queer associations here. First with Partonopeu:
years later, the lure of Constantinople is still represented as that of a woman,
by whom the Frankish knight is enchanted or enslaved. Siegfrieds opera
and life oddly recall George Sphrantzes, whose public history of the fall of
Byzantium, in which his family as the emperors godchildren are already
implicated, clashes with his more intimate social and more private temporalities, all simultaneously in meltdown. Sphrantzes is a father who mourns
his lost son. Wagner, by contrast, is a son who laments the enduring cultural
power of his long-dead father. Siegfrieds opera fantasizes his own suicide
together with the fall of empire, but both versions of his father in the opera,
the German Albrecht and the Byzantine Fool Gomella, remain alive at its
end, just as the crusaders burst in, as an ongoing public and national history
after Byzantiums period ends in flames. Time, we recall with Siegfried, is
not only a maternal stream but a father who consumes his children. Out
of such multiple temporalities, such discordant intersections of space and
libido, are periods made.

Notes
The epigraph is from George Oppen, Of Being Numerous, no. , in New Collected
Poems (New York: New Directions, ), . I would like to express my thanks to
the editors of this special issue of JMEMS and to Kathleen Davis, Sif Rikhardsdottir,
and Sarah Rivett for their helpful comments on this work.
Anna Comnena, The Alexiad of Anna Comnena, trans. E. R. A. Sewter (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, ), .
This must suce for now to acknowledge my continuing debt to Paul Ricoeur, Time
and Narrative, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer, vols. (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, ), which begins as an extended meditation on
Book of Aristotles Poetics and Book of Augustines Confessions.
Steven Runciman, The Fall of Constantinople, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), xi.
J. G. A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, Volume II: Narratives of Civil Government
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), ; J. B. Bullen, The Myth
of the Renaissance in Nineteenth-Century Writing (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ),
; Jennifer Summit, Topography as Historiography: Petrarch, Chaucer, and the
Making of Medieval Rome, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies ():
.
Matti Bunzl, foreword to Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology
Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, ), x.
Philip Mansel, Constantinople: City of the Worlds Desire, (New York: St
Martins Press, ), .
Fabian, Time and the Other, .
Peter B. Golden, Turks: A Historical Overview, in Turks: A Journey of a Thousand
Tears, , ed. David J. Roxburgh (London: Royal Academy of Arts, ), .
Edmondo De Amicis, Constantinople, trans. Stephen Parkin (London: Hesperus,
), .
The most recent edition of the French is Partonopeu de Blois, ed. Oliver Collet and P.-M.
Joris (Paris: Livre de Poche, ). There is a hypertext edition in process at the University of Sheeld, and a new edition of the English version is being prepared by Sif
Rikhardisdottir and myself (Middle English Text Series, Medieval Institute Publications). Versions of the poem were the subject of a recent issue of Medievalia, .
().
See Sarah Kay, Courtly Contradictions: The Emergence of the Literary Object in the
Twelfth Century (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, ), , for the suggestion that Melior inhabits the realm of the dead; but the resemblances are specific
to purgatory.
Steven Runciman, A History of the Crusades, vol. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ), .
Michael Angold, The Fourth Crusade (London: Pearson Longman, ), .
Jonathan Phillips, The Fourth Crusade and the Sack of Constantinople (London: Viking, ). I have also consulted two contemporary memoirs of the Fourth Crusade,
both edited by Jean Dufournet and entitled La Conqute de Constantinople, one by
Georoi de Villehardouin, rev. ed. (Paris: Flammarion, ), and the other by Robert de Clari (Paris: Champion, ). For recent work on the Mediterranean and the
role of Venice, see Deborah Howard, Venice and the East: The Impact of the Islamic
World on Venetian Architecture, (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University
Press, ).
Gunther of Paris, Historia Constantinopolitana, ed. and trans. A. J. Andrea (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, ), . One might return from this
conjunction to Gowers Florent, Chaucers Wife of Bath, and other versions of the
Loathly Lady in which what is at stake is consent and the need for an almost impossible reconciliation; however, perhaps in such tales we hear the residues of crusader orientalism?
See David Olster, Byzantine Apocalypses, in The Encyclopedia of Apocalypticism,
Volume : Apocalypticism in Western History and Culture, ed. Bernard McGinn (;
repr. New York: Continuum, ); Paul J. Alexander, The Byzantine Apocalyptic
Tradition, ed. Dorothy de F. Abrahamse (Berkeley: University of California Press,
), ; Agostino Pertusi, Fine de Bisanzio e fine de mondo: significato e ruolo
storico delle profezie sulla caduta di Costantinopoli in oriente e in occidente (Roma: Istituto palazzo Borromini, ); and Les traditions apocalyptiques au tournant de la chute
de Constantinople, ed. Benjamin Lellouch and Stphane Yerasimos (Paris: Harmattan,
).
For this material on Byzantine spirituality, see Byzantium: Faith and Power (
), ed. Helen C. Evans (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art; New Haven,
Conn.: Yale University Press, ); Henry Chadwick, East and West: The Making
of a Rift in the Church (Oxford: Oxford University Press, ); F. Donald Logan,
A History of the Church in the Middle Ages (London: Routledge, ), ;
Aristeides Papadakis, The Christian East and the Rise of the Papacy (Crestwood, N.Y.:
St. Vladimirs, ); and Crisis in Byzantium: The Filioque Controversy in the Patriarchate of Gregory II of Cyprus ( ), rev. ed. (Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimirs
Seminary Press, ); Christopher Walter, Art and Ritual of the Byzantine Church
(London: Variorum, ); Michel Balivet, Pour une concorde islamo-chrtienne:
dmarches byzantines et latines la fin du Moyen-ge (Roma: Pontifico instituto di
studi arabi e dislamistica, ).
Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, vols.
(London: Folio Society, ), :.
The Commentaries of Pius II: Books IV and V, trans. Florence Alden Gragg (Northampton, Mass.: Department of History, Smith College, ), .
For the events of and Sultan Mehmed, I have consulted such useful studies as
Runciman, The Fall of Constantinople, ; Halil Inalcik, The Ottoman Empire: The
Classical Age, (New York: Praeger, ); and Roger Crowley, : The
Holy War for Constantinople and the Clash of Islam and the West (New York: Hyperion,
); and the following primary sources: The Siege of Constantinople, : Seven
Contemporary Accounts, ed. John R. Melville-Jones (Amsterdam: Hakkert, ); La
caduta di Costantinopoli: Leco nel mondo and La testimonianze dei contemporanei,
ed. Agostino Pertusi, vols. (Milano: Mondadori, ); Nicol Barbaro, Diary of the
Siege of Constantinople, , trans. J. R. Melville-Jones (New York: Exposition Press,
); Doukas, Decline and Fall of Byzantium to the Ottoman Turks, trans. Harry
J. Magoulias (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, ); Kritovoulos, History of
Mehmed the Conqueror, trans. Charles T. Riggs (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press,
); Tursun Beg, The History of Mehmed the Conqueror, trans. Halil Inalcik and
Rhoads Murphey (Minneapolis: Bibliotheca Islamica, ). On the last Constantine, see Donald M. Nicol, The Immortal Emperor: The Life and Legend of Constantine Palaiologos, Last Emperor of the Romans (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
).
Nadia Maria El Cheikh, Byzantium Viewed by the Arabs (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
Center for Middle Eastern Studies, ), ; Carole Hillenbrand, The Crusades:
Islamic Perspectives (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, ), .
There are excellent recent accounts in Caroline Finkel, Osmans Dream: The Story of
the Ottoman Empire, (New York: Basic Books, ), ; and J. M.
Rogers, Mehmed the Conqueror: Between East and West, in Bellini and the East,
ed. Caroline Campbell and Allan Chong (London: National Gallery; Boston: Isabella
Stewart Gardner Museum, ), ; and see also Mansel, Constantinople, xxx.
David Lawton, History and Legend: The Exile and the Turk, in Postcolonial Moves:
Medieval through Modern, ed. Patricia Clare Ingham and Michelle R. Warren (New
York: Palgrave Macmillan, ), , at .
I cite the French translation of Georges Latin treatise, Georges de Hongrie, Des Turcs:
trait sur les moeurs, les coutumes et la perfidie des Turcs, trans. Jol Schnapp (Toulouse:
Anarcharsis, ). Further citations are given in the text; English translations are my
own. For slavery in medieval Italy, see Steven A. Epstein, Speaking of Slavery: Color,
Ethnicity, and Human Bondage in Italy (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, ).
Collectanea Trapezuntiana: Texts, Documents, and Bibliographies of George of Trebizond, ed. John Monfasani (Binghamton, N.Y.: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and
Studies with the Renaissance Society of America, ), ; hereafter cited parenthetically in the text.
George Sphrantzes, The Fall of the Byzantine Empire: A Chronicle, trans. Marios Philippides (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, ), . Further citations are
given in the text.
D. M. Nicol, The End of the Byzantine Empire (London: Edward Arnold, ), .
William Dalrymple, From the Holy Mountain: A Journey in the Shadow of Byzantium
(London: HarperCollins, ), .
Orhan Pamuk, Istanbul: Memories and the City, trans. Maureen Freely (New York:
Knopf, ), .
Ibid., .
Mark Mazower, Salonica: City of Ghosts (New York: Knopf, ).
For a unique account, and modern consequences, see Robert Fisk, The Great War for
Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East (New York: Knopf, ).
Quoted in Mansel, Constantinople, .
Siegfried Wagner, Sonnenflammen, Opernhaus Halle conducted by Roger Epple,
audio recording by CPO records, CD BCETZ (), with libretto and notes.
I have also consulted Gottfried Wagner, Twilight of the Wagners (New York: Picador,
).
De Amicis, Constantinople, .

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