The Politics of Holy War after 1453: Greek Émigrés in the West and the Call for Crusade for Constantinople
When:
—
Venue:
Birkbeck Main Building, Malet Street
'The Politics of Holy War after 1453: Greek Émigrés in the West and the Call for Crusade for Constantinople'
A public talk by Aphrodite Papayianni (Honorary Research Fellow at Birkbeck)
Few events in history have so dramatically reshaped the world order as the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in May 1453. In its aftermath, the subjugated Greek population faced three stark, urgent choices: to accept the new status quo, to organise military resistance against their new rulers, or to seek military assistance from the West in the form of a crusade. Although Loukas Notaras, the last Byzantine 'mesazon' (chief minister), is said to have declared in 1453 that he preferred Ottoman rule to union with the Latins, several Greek scholars who fled to the West just before or shortly after the city’s fall, alongside those who remained under Ottoman rule, began appealing to Western rulers and the papacy to launch a crusade against the Ottomans. Kenneth Setton, in 'The Papacy and the Levant', wrote that in 1453 “the European abandonment of Constantinople to the Turks had shaken the conscience of the West.” Whether that conscience was truly stirred or not, many Greeks, believed - or at least hoped - that that it had been. And so they kept appealing, in different ways, urging Western rulers and the pope to organise a crusade against the Ottomans.
Hosted by the Birkbeck Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Worlds
Contact name: Brodie Waddell
Speakers-
Aphrodite Papayianni
—
Honorary Research Fellow in the School of Historical Studies
Tags: