The Fourth Crusade
Just over 800 years ago, on 13th April, 1204, the Fourth Crusade sacked the city of Constantinople, capital of the former Byzantine Empire, in an orgy of slaughter, rape and destruction. The city quickly shrank from 400,000 to 60,000. A short lived Latin Empire was set up in its place. Barely a year later, in the far East, a storm was set to begin. It would overturn principalities, kingdoms, caliphates and empires, and would also introduce Europe to gunpowder.
For centuries, Persia had vied with the Greco-Roman world for cultural ascendancy. The Roman Empire split and Persia succumbed to Islam. The Mediterranan Sea became a muslim lake, and former parts of the Roman Empire such as Egypt, North Africa, (V)Andalusia and Southern Italy gradually fell to the enemy. The rump of the Byzantine Empire held on in what is now the Balkans and Turkey. But its capital was now in ruins. Who would now stand up against the caliph? There was no Spain, just a handful of warbands, holding out in the Pyrenees and the Asturias; no Germany or Italy – just the Holy Roman Empire and its never ending feud with a debauched papacy. The Angevin Empire was declining and, like most of Western Europe, was little more than a made up patchwork of lands.
The fall of Europe to Islam could and should have seemed inevitable
Refugees
To your average educated Byzantine the choice was fairly clear; go and live among the savages that had just sacked Constantinople or head for civilisation. The rude, petty realms of the West were hardly the height of culture; there were other alternatives for the educated Byzantine.
The other big European city back then was Cordoba. Never mind it had actually been headed up a rival to the Abbasid Caliphate – the Ummayad Caliphate – it was civilised. As far as the savages (sorry West Europeans) went, the best of them was the Norman Kingdom of Sicily – freshly carved out of the Aghlabid Emirate.
The main alternative for a displaced Byzantine was to get used the idea of Islam. Although Anatolia, Eygpt and Syria was Crusader stomping grounds, further East was more secure. And by the way they had a good number of civilised cities to live in, many of which were as big as or larger than Constantinople or Cordoba. Baghdad, the centre of the Abbasid Caliphate, had over one million people and next door to it was the powerful Khwarezmian Empire. Some of its cities such as Bukhara, Samarkand, Merv and Old Urgench, had been established for thousands of years.
Mongols
The choice seemed clear. But within 15 years, the cities of the east were being systematically destroyed by the Mongols. Any Byzantines who had fled there were either dead, enslaved or landless; plus now other uprooted people were on the move. Where would a civilised person go? To the land of the Mamluks? The objective of the Mongols was the subjugation of all. Why would they give that place a miss? The Crusader states were (as always) in paralysis, the Byzantine Empire was controlled by Latins. The Italian City States and Norman Sicily might have seemed a worthwhile bet – it was either that or go and take your chances in the next slaughter.
The Mongols were famously arrogant. In 1260, Hülegü sent envoys to Qutuz in Cairo, demanding his surrender:
From the King of Kings of the East and West, the Great Khan. To Qutuz the Mamluk, who fled to escape our swords. You should think of what happened to other countries and submit to us. You have heard how we have conquered a vast empire and have purified the earth of the disorders that tainted it. We have conquered vast areas, massacring all the people. You cannot escape from the terror of our armies. Where can you flee? What road will you use to escape us? Our horses are swift, our arrows sharp, our swords like thunderbolts, our hearts as hard as the mountains, our soldiers as numerous as the sand. Fortresses will not detain us, nor armies stop us. Your prayers to God will not avail against us. We are not moved by tears nor touched by lamentations. Only those who beg our protection will be safe. Hasten your reply before the fire of war is kindled. Resist and you will suffer the most terrible catastrophes. We will shatter your mosques and reveal the weakness of your God and then will kill your children and your old men together. At present you are the only enemy against whom we have to march.
(Qutuz responded, however, by killing the envoys and displaying their heads on Bab Zuweila, one of the gates of Cairo.)
“At present you are the only enemy against whom we have to march.”
bears thinking about. Civilisation over most of the Old World had been dealt an almost fatal blow. The Golden Age of Islam was snuffed out. You either fled or were dead. The peace of the charnel house prevailed.
A History of the World Conqueror
I suspect that the refugees who fled to the West can’t have harmed the embryonic state of the Renaissance….
That argument aside, I have been interested in the fall of the Khwarezmian Empire for a number of years. I managed to track down an account of the destruction caused by the Mongols. It was made by ‘Ala-ad-Din ‘Ata-Malik Juvaini in Ta’ rīkh-i jahān-gushā (translated by John Andrew Boyle PhD in 1958 as A History of the World-Conqueror ).
Junaivi was educated and a historian. He held an administrative office and provides a first hand account of events such as the destruction of the Isma’ils (Assassins) of Alamut. He had the confidence of the Il-Khan Hülegü, the Mongol Conqueror of Baghdad.
The translation, a two volume work, is out of print. The hard copy prices on Amazon are outrageous. It is also available in PDF and in Kindle. PDFs aren’t ideal for studying from – you’re tied to a computer screen and I see quite enough of them, thank you. The Kindle edition is littered with OCR (Optical Character Recognition) artefacts – Boyle’s translation has an abundance of diacriticals which the producers of the Kindle edition have made no attempt whatsoever to deal with. The annotations could and should have been hyperlinked at the relevant text. Instead they (as well as page headers) litter the text. The result is predictably dire.
This translation was under the auspices of UNESCO and I have asked them for the copyright status. I might do a POD (Print-on-Demand) edition depending on what they say. The full work is about 300,000 words which would equate to two hard copy volumes of about 400 pages each.
As a precursor to doing a POD, I have prepared the basis for a cover image from a frontispiece in the original work.
Cover image: Terken Khatun imagined herself to be a mover and shaker – and then she got caught.
Terken-Khatun-Captive-to-Mongols
Original frontispiece: This is what I worked from, It has two damaged sections. I ‘fixed’ one and invented some crease marks to go with the other. For the colours I peeked at a number of Persian miniatures.
Initial Image of Terken Khatun Captive – be aware the original is at 90° to this… a ‘frontispiece’
The Rise of the West
In 1260, Junaivi’s account stops. He was still alive and well, and continued to be a highly regarded administrator for the Mongols.
In 1260, the Mamluks won the battle of Ain Jalut, thus dispelling the aura of Mongol invincibility.
By 1261 the Byzantines finally reconquered Constantinople but their empire was a shadow of its former strength. Venetian coffers were full to bursting with Byzantine loot. Knowledge and science – stuff long destroyed (along with the West Roman Empire) by our ancestors – began to circulate in the West. It took a while but gradually a Renaissance began to bloom.
For two more centuries Constantinople stood as a bulwark against the Turk, but in 1453 the last of the Byzantine Empire was swept into the rubbish bin of history. In another century, the Turk was at the walls of Vienna, yet Islam’s time had passed. The nations of the West were now strong enough to stand up for themselves.
Can I go back to writing Science Fiction now?
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