Today
The Mad Monarchist remembers HAH Ecumenical Patriarch Gregory V of Constantinople, saint and ethnomartyr who was hanged, in his vestments, from the St Peter Gate in Constantinople in retaliation for the rebellion of the Greeks on the day of Easter in 1821, to the outrage of the Orthodox and civilized world. It was a dark stain on the reign of Sultan Mahmud II and ensured that the great powers of Europe would turn against the Ottoman Empire and support Greek independence. You can read more about his life
here. May he always be remembered.
The fact that ottoman empire existed for hundreds of years, is in my opinion the second greatest mistake the European civilization ever make.
ReplyDeleteThese animals were nothing more than rapacious rapists and butchers, almost all valide sultans were Christian girls kidnapped from their land and sold into the sultan’s harem. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Valide_Sultans
They were also deliberately festering hatred between Christian and Jews.
Interestingly, they also butchered several muslim leaders, the Saudi king was one of them.
The passing of this bastard empire, I do not regret.
I cannot look upon the Ottoman empire without a tinge of sadness at the fate of great Constantinople, Gem of the Christian east. I've been reading a lot about the Byzantine Empire in the last couple of years, and I sympathize with the Byzantines. Often, when I look at the United States and the values I was raised to hold dear and what is now held as dear by the majority of people here, I feel much as a Byzantine Merchant would have felt to return to Constantinople to find it in the hands of the Turks. I, too, feel like a man without a nation.
ReplyDeleteIt is certainly the case that the Ottomans subjegated local populations and eradicated their cultures and beliefs, in favour of their own Islamism. Are we now witnessing something similar, in Europe, albeit of a more subtle nature?
ReplyDeleteI imagine I share the general European hostility to the Ottoman Empire (less than others perhaps - we did fight with them once or twice after all), but I think it was preferable to a democratic Islamist Middle-East that we are seeing emerge now, in the same manner in which the socialist/nationalist dictators that until recently inhabited the area are better.
ReplyDeleteThe Islamic world always seems a tad unstable anyway.. Add democracy, the most schizoid of governments, and the place becomes a dangerous, wild beast.
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