Ahmet Özcan
Mr. Donald M. Nicol*,
We, the people ‘from here,’ say, ‘history repeats itself.’ History is the endless repetition of the same… The re-enactment of similar patterns… ‘Here,’ time does not advance; it turns. Time is maternal, fertile. But birth and death, beginning and end, rise and fall are not dialectical opposites, rather like the two sides of the same coin.
Where is this the ‘here’? When your English ancestors invaded, it was the Ottoman land. It was Eastern Rome. You called it Asia Minor and the Middle East. ‘Here’ is that place…
We, the people ‘from here,’ have for a long time lost many of our capacities, including our memory. It has been said, social memory maintains its vitality through beliefs, customs and institutions, we, have fallen ill with the disease of recklessly abandoning our dynamics of ‘vitality’. As a result, we can hardly remember not only eight centuries ago, but even eight years ago.
Mr. Nicol,
First of all, credit where it is due; your work, written with objectivity and fluency, revived our memory; I must say I benefited greatly. Especially, you possess an intuitive ability I rarely encounter in Western researchers.
You start the process of Byzantium’s decline with the Crusade of 1204, when the Latins occupied Constantinople and ruled it for 57 years until 1261. The Crusader army, which set out to retake Jerusalem, came to Constantinople at the invitation of the Byzantine emperor. The splendor, architecture, and wealth of Istanbul at that time whetted the appetite of Europe’s roguish crusaders, and it turned into an invasion against Byzantium and Orthodoxy, whom they had a grudge against since the sectarian divide. Churches that did not convert to Catholicism were plundered, even nuns in Hagia Sophia were raped, priests were tortured to death, Latin clothes and the Latin language were imposed, Latin customs enforced, Latin was made the official church language, the Latin alphabet was forced upon the people, Latin music, hymns, and instruments were elevated. A war was waged against Orthodox Greek culture. Along with Orthodoxy, the Greek alphabet, Greek language, Greek music, and Greek clothing were degraded. Latinization became the official ideology of Eastern Rome for 50–60 years. Most interestingly, the Byzantine nobility and bureaucracy, especially the army and the wealthy class, who collaborated with the Latins, adopted Latinization together with the intellectuals and artists they supported, and after a while they practiced a Latinism that was harsher and more lustful than the Crusaders. Eastern Rome became a vassal of Western Rome and the Catholic Church. This self-colonization continued until the 1260s, when dynastic quarrels and church conflicts in Europe forced the Latins to abandon Constantinople. After this, Byzantium turned its face toward the East, toward the rising power of the Islamic world. It was under these conditions that a Byzantine priest uttered the famous words: “I would rather see the Turkish turban than the Latin headgear.” Since the Crusader lords plundered church property and the lands of Greek peasants, Ottoman campaigns against them were seen by Anatolian Greeks as salvation, and therefore they converted to Islam voluntarily and en masse. The Ottomans, far from opposing Orthodox Byzantium, actually collaborated with the last Byzantine dynasty that had withdrawn to Nicaea, fighting and conquering the domains of these Latin lords. The theses of historians who try to explain the rapid growth of the Ottoman principality and its expansion into the Eastern Roman lands as heirs, and of the glorious historians who, with empty rhetoric, create a myth about the Ottoman principality, neglect this important detail.
It is truly surprising to see that the contradictory and tense relationship that Byzantium, which was reorganized as the Eastern Roman Empire after the great division between the Eastern and Western churches, known as the schism (separation) in 1054, experienced with the ‘West’ after this invasion, continues through us today.
The West or Crusaders or Latins at that time referred to the merchant-pirate imperialists of the Middle Ages, primarily the Venetians and Genoese, as well as the French, Flemish, Germans, Normans, Lombards and Catalans. The division between the Latin West, centered on the Roman Catholic Church, and Orthodox Byzantium went far beyond a simple sectarian split. The words of Byzantine historian Niketas Choniates in 1205 make this clear enough:
“There is a vast gulf between us and the Latins. We are poles apart. We have no thoughts in common. They are arrogant, afflicted with the disease of superiority, and they delight in mocking the simplicity and humility of our manners. But we see their arrogance and insolence as nothing more than the snot that runs from an upturned nose…”
Moreover, it became clear with the Latin invasion that Western goals such as “the Holy Crusade, the reunification of the churches, and the security of Christianity” were, as you put it, “very useful in hiding their real ‘cause’; greed, ambition, commercialism, and therefore not very idealistic, under a moral veil.” For this reason, as you say: “The revived Byzantine Empire after the Latin occupation had to preserve its existence not against northern barbarians or eastern infidels (the Turks!), but rather against western Christians.” Byzantium’s perception of the ‘West’ as a strategic threat made the Turkish expansion in Anatolia much easier.
During the Latin invasion, the imperial center was fighting against the invading Latins as two different factions in two separate centers, Nicaea (İznik) and Thesselonike (Selanik). But since Anatolia was Byzantium’s true and natural core, it supported the Nicaean center, playing a role in the empire’s restoration after the occupation. Thessalonica (Greece), however, remained a rival claimant, never gaining Byzantium, right up until its final collapse.
This process gives us a sufficient idea about the main character of Byzantium’s historical legacy. Neither Greece nor the Bulgarian, Serbian, or Albanian kingdoms, with their histories of wanting to replace Byzantium whenever it weakened, ever truly became ‘Byzantine’ or heirs to Byzantium. In fact, this ‘geopolitical reality’ holds true in Ottoman times and even today. Byzantium, after centuries of guarding its legacy against Balkan powers with jealous care, ultimately passed it on to a new rising force in Anatolia, the Muslim Turks. Interestingly, the Ottomans, seen as Byzantium’s continuation, also withdrew to Ankara and resisted after a Western invasion, just as Byzantium had once retreated to Nicaea. In the end, neither Catholic West nor the Hellenic-Slav Balkan powers could ever truly possess Constantinople. But strikingly, those Balkan powers, every time, rebelled or broke away from Byzantium with Western support.
Mr. Nicol,
Reading your book, one comes to better understand the famous expression ‘Byzantine intrigues.’ In both its strong and weak years, Byzantium’s palace intrigues, the balancing act between emperor and patriarch, religion and state, local commanders, petty principalities, dizzying tactical games with rival kingdoms, civil wars, and the struggle for dominance between nobles, soldiers and merchants are truly breathtaking intrigues. Relations with the West, which revolve around a love-hate pendulum, and especially the efforts to ‘unite the churches’ with the Papacy, are grand political games aimed at both stalling the West and preventing its potential attacks. By coincidence, we too in recent years have been trying to ‘unite’ with the EU!
Mr. Nicol,
To speak frankly, the fact that during Byzantium’s last century the Ottoman principality forced it to pay tribute, and even determined who would ascend the throne, while giving me pride as an Ottoman descendant, was thought-provoking as a supposed heir of “Eastern Rome.” It means that even a vast empire, when on the brink of collapse, may be reduced to paying tribute just to survive. Looking at Byzantium’s final years, one sees clearly that the honor of a state can be as important and meaningful as the honor of a person.
Mr. Nicol,
The civil war of the 1340s, beginning when a nobleman named Kantakouzenos declared himself emperor after the death of the ruler he had served as close friend and advisor, with support from other nobles, is quite intriguing. A bishop said: “To be emperor of the Romans is undoubtedly determined by God; but those who eat unripe figs must bear the swelling of their lips.”
The rivals of this ‘unripe fig-eater’ Kantakouzenos organized the poor into revolt. Calling themselves the Zealots, they launched the Zealot Revolution, which in 1342 resulted in a republican-like regime in Constantinople. This regime led to seven years of anarchy. Kantakouzenos, who eventually regained the throne with the support of the Turks and Serbs, gathered representatives from all segments of society and asked for help and support in order to fix his depleted economy. Everyone is helping and donating except bankers and usurers.
I don’t know if this is a law. Whether during the Latin invasion or during the final years of Byzantium’s collapse, bankers, usurers, and those engaged in business with the West did not hesitate to protect the interests of the Latins. They even compete to hand over the keys to the city during the occupation. They also engage in charming schemes to perpetuate Latin interests, such as opening Latin-language colleges, spreading Latin learning, customs, and culture, and converting to Catholicism. Coincidence or not, similar things happened in the late Ottoman years and during the Armistice period. Well, what about today?
There are other ‘laws’ as well; as the state becomes stronger, religion (the church) also becomes stronger, and when it becomes weaker, emperors approach the Catholic Papacy, attempt to change sects, and even the last emperor kisses the hands and feet of the Pope and becomes Catholic. In contrast, the Byzantine Patriarchate is moving into opposition. It is organizing the people, the poor, and the dissatisfied. Domestic politics in Byzantium largely speaks the language of religion. Religion became the language of politics, especially of the poor. The conflict that arises from the State changing its religion to get support from the West or to be protected from its evil, and the reaction of the religion (the Church), is like the unchanging fate of ‘these lands.’
Another… Yes, there is also the corrupt Byzantine concept of the state. There is a tradition of a state that stands on a hilltop, without the people, as the “Sacred Temple” of a select dynasty and groups of nobles. The English historian J. B. Bury wrote of Justinian, one of Byzantium’s greatest emperors: “He established the theory that the expansion, prestige, honor, and exaltation of the state were in themselves the highest goals, and that the state should be valued without regard for the happiness of the men and women who composed it.” That theory sounds strangely familiar to us from here.
Mr. Nicol, there is another detail in your book that caught my attention: You touch upon an important detail about the Timurid Invasion, which suddenly emerged just as the Ottoman Principality was becoming a state and heading towards empire, that is, when it became clear that the Muslim Turks, who were despised as barbarians, represented a new civilization and lifestyle that was particularly attractive to the peoples of Europe, let alone their barbarity. The Papacy sending Dominican priests to Timur, the correspondence between Paris and Timur… And Timur, for no real reason, invaded all Anatolia, destroyed the Ottomans, and then retreated as suddenly as he had come. I don’t know if historians are interested, but I think the ‘Western’ hand in the Mongol, Timur and later Shah Ismail invasions must be an interesting subject. The historical geopolitical dialectic in which Iran, the historical partner of the West and the historical enemy of Rome in the region, somehow pushed every incoming eastern invader into Roman territory is based on squeezing and weakening Rome – today’s Türkiye and the adjacent Ottoman basin – from the west and east. There are still remnants of these invading eastern barbarians, like genetic heirs, with deep, indirect or open collaborators of either Iran or the occupying elements of the West. The trendy neo-shamanist pre-Islamic Turkism, or hostility toward local Kurdish-Arab Muslim peoples of Anatolia, or the westernist, Zionist, and even overtly Islamophobic secular religiosity, are nothing but modern manifestations of this historic Latin–Crusader–Aryan alliance.
Mr. Nicol, the spirit of jihad in the Ottoman Principality, nourished by Islam, and in accordance with the principle of Islamic law that innocents should not be harmed in war, allowed them to easily gain the hearts of the people in the places they conquered and take hold. Moreover, their extraordinary military talent and the political acumen gained by being Byzantium’s neighbor allowed them to outpace other Turkish principalities and become the ‘Muslim continuation’ of Eastern Rome. Yet you also point out that until this transformation, the Ottomans sometimes served as mercenaries for Byzantium and sometimes for its rivals, sometimes even switching sides in the mid-battle if offered higher pay. This mercenary issue struck me.
If this is true, then it must be another law of these lands: before becoming a state, serving as soldiers for other ‘state’s.
To be a state means to have learned to live and fight for oneself, and also to be able to make others fight for you. The Ottomans ceased being a mere principality and became a state once they turned Serbs, rival Turkish principalities, and even Byzantium itself into vassals fighting under their banner.
Thus, we might extend the saying ‘people return to childhood in old age’ to states as well. For some time now, we too have debated the practice of fighting for others in exchange for money. One cannot help but wonder, have we returned to our principality days?
Mr. Nicol, your book refreshes our memories with concise yet truly nourishing insights. Most importantly, through Byzantium you present both Orthodoxy and the Ottomans objectively, even in a laudatory tone.
Perhaps this approach is influenced indirectly by your British nationality and the ‘deeply Protestant-British policy’ of seeing Orthodox Christian and Sunni Muslim states as natural allies against the Catholic world. For instance, within this framework we well know of England’s ties with Russia against Catholic Europe, and its hand in Balkan states. In our ‘here,’ it must be admitted, this influence disguises itself well.
For the last fifty years, America, Russia and Israel have been operating in this region for themselves, as well as obscuring Britain on its behalf.
Mr. Nicol, the last centuries of the Byzantine Empire are almost identical to the last centuries of the Ottoman Empire. As it becomes more and more disconnected from its people, loses the state to devshirmes, leans on the West and tries to change its ‘sect’, becomes more and more introverted out of fear of the West, in short, loses its ability and honor to be a ‘state’, the final collapse becomes inevitable.
The 60 years of traumatic change that Byzantium experienced after the Crusader invasion are also similar to the first 60 years of the Republic established after World War I, the Crusader invasion of the 20th century. Latinization was repeated almost exactly 800 years later as Westernization, the break from Orthodoxy as the break from Islam, the effort to emulate the West in the name of protecting the state as self-colonization, Catholicization and the transformation into the West Roman vassal as the hostility towards the past, the Islamic and Arab worlds and the imposition of a secular-looking Western lifestyle. The only difference was that these contemporary crusaders were protestants and instead of Catholicism, the protestant lifestyle, which was a disguised Aryan religion with the concept of laic/secular, was substituted for Islam. There are other similarities as well; just as the imperial dynasty of that time resisted by retreating to the provinces – Nicea and Trapezeus– and then returning to the centre at the first opportunity and placing its state, religion and culture there, Anatolia showed the same reflex in the second half of the 20th century. Anatolian people protected their religion, identity, traditions, and memory against the devshirme elites, against the treachery of these devshirmes, who lustfully brandished the sword of the infidel, and against the infidels who, posing as saviors, sought to uproot Islam and tradition, the nation’s lifeline. Then brought these authentic qualities back to the their usurped state, and this struggle to reposition real qualities continues to this day.
Beaten one after another by their own state for this or that characteristic, their different language or sect, their excessive piety or political views, and belittled under the enchanting mask of the concept of ‘Turk” used by the Salonikan converts to avoid calling themselves Muslims, the people, whose entire spiritual roots, ontology, and existential dynamics were denigrated, whose collective identity and culture were poisoned, protected their existence and survival by once again taking refuge in Islam – but this time, in a traditional, necessarily provincialized piety. The self-colonizing regime, which took its children and brainwashed them with the lies of pagan, necrophilic religiousism in the state’s military and civilian schools, also injected the nation’s monotheistic spirit with a person-worshipping, idolatry-pagan inoculation through popular culture tools. But the people’s silent and profound resistance to this blatant and reckless infidelization project has never given up. And it will continue until these modern Latin rulers, along with all their idols and infidel lifestyles, are eradicated from the state, the army, and schools.
We are from ‘here,’ Mr. Nicol. In fact, we are familiar not only with ‘endings,’ but also with new beginnings, with continuing where we left off, and with being reborn from our ashes. We have many enemies, fools, traitors, local infidels, and small-minded men, but we also have many friends; companions of the same heart, the same wavelength, the same fabric. Our ‘here’s are very exotic places.
For example, the most lasting friendships are formed after the hardest struggles; the fiercest loves are born of the greatest hatreds; our most beautiful poems were written by our unlettered ones. If your ruling class plays the game of ‘chaos’ in our lands and our region, remind them that in here, order is established after chaos.
Mr. Nicol, if I may take this opportunity, would you please convey the following message from ‘here’ to your rulers in England, their allies and their masters: What you failed to achieve eight centuries ago, you will not be able to achieve today either!
*Bizans’ın Son Yüzyılları (1261-1453), Donald M. Nicol, Tarih Vakfı Yurt Yay., İst, 1999.
Source: Açık Mektuplar, Ahmet Özcan, Yarın Yayınları, İstanbul, 2010.
First publication: Yarın Dergisi – May 2004