Adomanis Draws the Wrong Lessons from 1453

To the editors:

I was shocked to read the conclusions drawn by Mark A. Adomanis about the 1453 capture of Constantinople by the Ottoman armies of Mehmet the Conqueror (Op-ed, “Lessons From The Year 1453,” Sept. 24). Not only was this editorial an example of the worst sort of reductive history but, sadly, it fit far too closely with the Bush administration’s vocabulary of East and West, of infidels and holy Crusaders, to have been the result of objective analysis.

Adomanis first suggests that the Byzantines would have benefited by allying themselves with the Italian city-states instead of following the “shameful road of appeasement,” much as (according to him) modern France would benefit from allying with America. I fear that he has lost track of how complicated the political divisions of the medieval Mediterranean really were. Constantinople fell in 1453 not because it failed to collaborate with western Europe but because of centuries of economic decline and lack of military innovation. Hastening this collapse was the brutal ambush of Constantinople by Venetian Crusaders in 1204; ignorant Christian warriors melted ancient Greek statues to sell their bronze by weight, they picked the gems out of precious Orthodox relics.  Why would residents of Constantinople ever want to ally with the pillagers of their heritage?

Furthermore, Adomanis writes that Pera, a colony near Constantinople, suffered by forsaking “a greater sense of Western kinship” and failing to associate itself with Byzantium.  This sense of “Western kinship” is bizarre; modern European states have a good deal more in common, in terms of political and economic infrastructure, with the Ottoman empire that with the antiquated structures of Byzantium or, for that matter, of Pera.  The only logical definition Adomanis can have in mind for “Western kinship,” then, is religion.  If he will insist on defining all historical battles as binary showdowns between Christianity and Islam, he should at least be forthright about it.

Adomanis’ final “lesson” is that we need to react early to small threats before they grow into apocalyptic battles for civilization, by which he seems to mean that the feudal states of Europe should have built a proto-alliance (of the willing) to hunt out the Ottomans when they were still just Balkan colonists. That’s ridiculous for two reasons: one, battling people who don’t pose a threat is a great way to over-expend resources.  Should Europe also have allied to crush the Magyars, or the medieval Bulgarians, just in case?  Moreover to suggest a parallel between the expanding Ottoman Empire and modern “Islamic radicalism” is the sort of conflation that allows Americans to excise the (primarily) Muslim East from our ideas of the past. Adomanis, not unlike the current administration, seeks to turn Islam into a modern and violent phenomenon instead of part of a shared global heritage.

SARAH K. BURKE ’05

September 25, 2004