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COPYRIGHT 2004 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
"The city was desolate, lying dead, naked, soundless, having neither form nor beauty." This was Constantinople in late May, 1453, when Ottoman armies extinguished the eleven-century dominion of the Byzantine Empire. The writer, a contemporaneous historian named Doukas, recorded the despair of citizens who yearned in vain for aid from the West. To prevent the disaster, two treaties had been made with European powers, subjecting the Orthodox Church to the Pope in Rome in return for promises of military sustenance. The agreements were resisted by many Eastern believers, who had scant taste for ecumenism; and, in the event, no significant help came. Doukas quoted an astonishing sentiment from Constantinople's grand duke, Loukas Notaras: "It would be better to see the turban of the Turks in the center of the City than the Latin mitre." Not for nothing is "byzantine" a byword for counterintuitive complexity in human affairs. It is also the marker of a vast blind spot in common historical knowledge.
The wondrous exhibition "Byzantium: Faith and Power (1261-1557)," at the Metropolitan Museum, has taught me a good deal. I have learned that the term "Byzantium" dates from 1557, when a...
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