Since the 7th Cent Islam has been on the go in conquest of more and more territories. By the 15th Cent they were already firmly established, as the Moors, in Spain. Constantinople, which had been a capital city of the Byzantine Empire it was founded in the 4th Cent had always been a goal. In the ancient world it was the equivalent of London, Paris, and New York combined. Even Mohammed, the founder of Islam, spoke gleefully of it. It was a prize that the Ottomans had eyes on since their founding in the 14th Cent; it was the first major obstacle they had to overcome if they were to capture Rome, their ultimate goal. They had already conquered much of the surrounding countries, including the Balkans (which laid the seed for the Serbian massacre of Bosnian Muslims in the early 1990s) but Constantinople stood steadfast. Her walls seem impregnable.
Another attempt, unsuccessful, had already been made in 1422 by Sultan Murad II (r.1421-51). His son, Mehmed (Muhammed) II, nineteen at the time of his accession, was a whole lot more arrogant, determined and also self-assertively confident. He also had the advantage of new technology. For the first time a way was devised to use the explosive power of gun-powder (invented by the Chinese) for offence in the form of the cannon. Mehmeh, with the help of his Christian and widowed step-mother, found a renegade Christian, Urban of Transylvania, willing to build him a cannon 17 feet in length and capable of firing a solid one-ton ball from a mile away. When ready, Mehmed first starved the City, blockading the harbours so that no food or other replenishments could reach it. Then came the bombardments. The previously impregnable walls of Constantinople were not built to withstand such violence. Though heroically defended by a small army of Genoese mercenaries, the city fell after six weeks of bombardment; sack, murder, pillage and subjugation followed. The Byzantine Empire was no more. Its fall shocked Europe, even as Mehmed renamed himself "Sultan of Rum"—ruler of Rome. Though its significance is seldom noted in books or courses on Church history, the event—and what it portents—cast a very long and ominous shadow over all the events of the Reformation. Come 1571, the European Christians would again face another attack from that direction.
As is the nature of most events in history, however, the loss (depending on which side you are on) is usually also attended by consequences that can bear sweet fruits in the long run that no one can imagine at the time. The first waves of this new phenomenon had already begun when the West met the East for the first significant time during the Crusades. With the fall of Constantinople, however, the flow became a tide. We are talking here, of course, about the rediscovery by the West of the writings of the ancient philosophers, texts that had been lost to them but which had been copied, translated (many into Arabic) and preserved in the East. This rediscovery and re-learning of the old ways was to spark what became known as the Renaissance, the humanist movement which most of us known of as the flowing of art represented by men like Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Raphael. Probably of greater consequences in the long run than these new flowering of the arts, it was this rediscovery of the ancient writings; they planted the seeds for the movement to go back to the ancient sources as the basis of authority, including the Reformation demand for going back to Scriptures, rather than traditions—however highly regarded by officialdom they may be—as the authority for faith and belief.
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