Re-establish Byzantium?

[molly bloom]

Originally posted by paiktis22
And while you keep trying to protect your pride (which is rather amusing in such intensity) do me a favour and include the date of the application by Greeks for Constantinople to remain under their control in your next post.

BTW also denying the Greek Armenian middle classes in Constantinople and Izmir of all places simply verifies my suspicion of a very superficial knowledge on your side. This is a point to whoever is a shall we say connaiscer of the era and place, is a self proven fact. But research it if you must. Using good sources which you'll provide here.

Bon courage Obsessive behavior at its finest I presume

The obsessive behaviour here would be better described as your trying to salvage some scrap of what passes for Hellenic pride out of this thread-

you assert the Greeks reoccupied Istanbul in the 1900s.

You provide no evidence.

You assert that the middle classes of the Ottoman Empire were the Greeks and Armenians

You provide no evidence.

You assert that the Ottomans 'snatched babies from their mother's embraces' -

You provide no evidence.

And so on.

Superficial knowledge on my part? I don't think so.

If this is what passes for your version of history, I feel deeply embarrassed for you.

[Bereta_Eder]

Well said molly bloom! Everything you quoted from me it's true, laughing at it simply makes you look ignorant. All these facts are in various books and sources which I suggest you research.

I never knew the heights of your obsession but you can make good use for it and find some english sources for these Good luck

[Bereta_Eder]

Oh or anyone else for that matter.

The crude guidelines are so conveniently included in molly bloom's post. :

[molly bloom]

Originally posted by paiktis22
Well said molly bloom! Everything you quoted from me it's true, laughing at it simply makes you look ignorant. All these facts are in various books and sources which I suggest you research.

It was difficult quoting any 'facts' from you- as I pointed out, there's a difference between an assertion or opinion, and a fact. Clearly there's a drought of facts on at the moment, else I feel sure you should have found one or two to back up some of your more amusing claims.


Congratulations- Apolyton has a new Hellenic Fez.

[Bereta_Eder]

I never doubted you would be quick to label me something like that. Typical looser attitude. Well too bad about that.

*sigh* predictable

In any case,
You have so graciously given the crude guidelines so you're of some use. People who are interested can look them up at the internet and the libraries. Finding sources on the internet for facts is not my idea of losing my time. Anyone interested is more than welcome to find the sources.

[Dr Strangelove]

Originally posted by molly bloom


The obsessive behaviour here would be better described as your trying to salvage some scrap of what passes for Hellenic pride out of this thread-

you assert the Greeks reoccupied Istanbul in the 1900s.

You provide no evidence.

You assert that the middle classes of the Ottoman Empire were the Greeks and Armenians

You provide no evidence.

You assert that the Ottomans 'snatched babies from their mother's embraces' -

You provide no evidence.

And so on.

Superficial knowledge on my part? I don't think so.

If this is what passes for your version of history, I feel deeply embarrassed for you.

I know for a fact that the British occupied Istanbul for awhile at the end of WW1. Since the Greeks were allied they may have participated in the occupation. IIRC the greeks occupied much of the Aegean coast of Turkey too. Turkish outrage over these indignities helped propel Ataturk's career. By taking a strong stance against the occupation and driving out the allies he was able to win approval by the people for his reforms, many of which required that the people accpet the loss of features of Turkey that had once been sources of national pride.

[molly bloom]

Originally posted by Dr Strangelove
I know for a fact that the British occupied Istanbul for awhile at the end of WW1. Since the Greeks were allied they may have participated in the occupation. IIRC the greeks occupied much of the Aegean coast of Turkey too. Turkish outrage over these indignities helped propel Ataturk's career. By taking a strong stance against the occupation and driving out the allies he was able to win approval by the people for his reforms, many of which required that the people accpet the loss of features of Turkey that had once been sources of national pride.

Doc- I mentioned the Allied Powers were in occupation of Istanbul, and that there was an Allied Fleet in Istanbul, at the end of hostilities between the major powers-

'Could it be because you’re thinking of when, after August 1920, the Treaty of Sevres between the Ottoman Sultan and the victorious Allied Powers saw Istanbul occupied by an Allied Powers fleet?'

Unfortunately, paiktis was unable to come up with a date (or any evidence for that matter) to support his assertion that 'the Greeks' reoccupied Istanbul in 'the 1900s'-

(such as when greeks did recapture constantinople in the early 1900's but i bet you didnt know that either).

you'll notice the vagueness of '1900s' but he does say 'the Greeks', not the Allied Powers, which is curious, because the British occupied the 'Zone of the Straits' from 1919-1922, and the Graeco-Turkish War ended with the defeat of the Greeks by the Turks in 1922, when, coincidentally, Great Britain evacuated Istanbul and the Straits.

Interestingly, at the Paris Peace Conference, the Allies tried to get America to accept mandates for Istanbul and the Dardanelles and the former Ottoman province of Armenia.

[Ted Striker]

Let's talk about the Turkish Battleship fiasco!

[Mordoch]

Originally posted by paiktis22
I was under the impression we were talking about how much people suffered.

Let's take it one by one:

A fact which I provided was the snatching of babies from their mothers' embraces, a thoroughly barbaric act to do on a conquered peoples in large numbers and on regular intervals.


Do you:
a) deny that?
b) think it's not barbaric?
c) can point me out anything more barbaric than that?


Let's take it one at a time, shall we if you insist.

I can point personally to something similar that happened to Jews in Catholic countries. If a Christian servant secretly Baptised the family's child and then reported this fact later to church authorities, including through confession, the Church or secular authorities would order the child seized from the Jewish family's household and kept permantly seperated from them. The child was then raised as a Christian, since the act of Baptism under any circumstance was enough to make someone Christian, and it was not acceptable to have a Jewish family raise a Christian child.

In fact, as late as 1858, police under the orders of the Catholic Church burst into a Jewish household in Italy in the middle of the night to seize their child!

Bologna, 1858: A police squad, acting on the orders of the Inquisitor, invades the home of a Jewish merchant, Momolo Mortara, wrenches his crying six-year-old son from his arms, and rushes him off in a carriage bound for Rome. His mother is so distraught that she collapses and has to be taken to a neighbor's house, but her weeping can be heard across the city. With this terrifying scene--one that would haunt this family forever--David I. Kertzer begins his fascinating investigation of the dramatic kidnapping, and shows how this now obscure saga would eventually contribute to the collapse of the Church's temporal power in Italy. As Edgardo's parents desperately search for a way to get their son back, they learn why he--out of all their eight children--was taken. Years earlier, the family's Catholic serving girl, fearful that the infant might die of an illness, had secretly baptized him (or so she claimed). Edgardo recovered, but when the story reached the Bologna Inquisitor, the result was his order for Edgardo to be seized and sent to a special monastery where Jews were converted into good Catholics. The Inquisitor's justification for taking the child was based in Church teachings: No Christian child could be raised by Jewish parents.

http://www.davidkertzer.com/books_edgardo_a.htm

[CharlesBHoff]

Originally posted by paiktis22
I was under the impression we were talking about how much people suffered.

Let's take it one by one:

A fact which I provided was the snatching of babies from their mothers' embraces, a thoroughly barbaric act to do on a conquered peoples in large numbers and on regular intervals.


Do you:
a) deny that?
b) think it's not barbaric?
c) can point me out anything more barbaric than that?


Let's take it one at a time, shall we if you insist.

First than 8 year old boy isnot than baby. You inply that the Ott took newly born baby from they mother breast. First there was no bottle feeding of baby with baby formular you buy at the Christian Fundie fravor store Walmarket. In fact the Ott didnot never excute than woman nurseing than baby until the child was 2 or 3 year old and many time the Sultan pardon just womans as than act of kindness. Christian state execute woman nurseing baby all the time.

[Bereta_Eder]

At last concrete examples. We are starting to get somewhere.

And as I am sure you see none of what you've pointed out even compares with the status of horrour that prevailed under the Ottomans in the largely christian populated areas.

The christian mothers had no choice. They had to see their babies taken away from them simply because they were christian in their (former) own lands.

Can this systematic, all encompassing torture be paralleled to one or two secluded cases such the onces you described? I doubt it can be.


I'm still waiting for someone to come up with the text of the application for the Greeks to retain control of Constantinople (for the shake of accuracy let's just call it like it was called at tha time and not whatever anyone fancies). Plenty of your fog will be dispelled if you do find that text.

Thank you for your contributions.

[Ancyrean]

Hi Paiktis Quite a few allegations you made in this thread. These seem to be revolving around the following:

1) The Ottoman Empire was unbelievably cruel in some respects. Example: babies were snatched from the embraces of others

2) Actually it was crueler than the rest of the world.

3) Yet actually Christians lived a daily life of horror, every day filled with fear, torture, rape and what not. As such, it would be much better if they lived in another Christian country.

Side issues that came up during your postings are:

- Sometime in the 1920s Istanbul was "captured" by Greeks, proved by the fact that they wanted to "retain" the city.

- Constantinople was renamed Istanbul only in 1920s. It was Constantinople up until then.

Would you disagree that any of these are not your views?

I also find your overall approach fundamentally flawed in the respect that you seem judge the events and conceptions of another time in history by today's standards and criteria and arrive at conclusions (like about cruelty) accordingly.

For why, here's my take on the points above, in consecutive posts >takes a deep breath< :

[Ancyrean]

1) Baby snatching: Here's a primer for you on the devshirme system:

Devshirme was not a haphazard method to terrorise the population but rather was done with a view to creating not only a loyal element in the Ottoman army, but also a loyal bureaucratical high level of officials for imperial governance.

Janissary ‘recruiters’ toured around the Balkan provinces of the empire at regular intervals (I don’t remember exactly how regularly, but something like every 5 to 10 years or so) and ‘recruited’ the healthiest and brightest looking kids from the villages they visited in a proportion, no more than say 5 percent (IIRC) of the number of youths in any given area.

Therefore, nobody snatched ‘babies’ from the embraces of anybody, to give a direct reply to the phrasing of your assumption (please read on before exclaiming ‘but snatching kids or teenagers are not any better!’)

After they were taken, the healthiest looking ones would be sent to ‘Janissary hearths’, where they were raised as Muslims, acquired the Turkish language, and were trained in all aspects of warfare (shooting, sword skills, or any given weapon of the time as well as a Spartan physical training) for around 10 years. At the end of that long period, they would join the Janissary regiments, and as such Janissaries were an unmatched fighting force in discipline and skill for at least 200 years. They had no match in Europe and they were the elite that formed the core of the Ottoman Army. They were usually thrown in the battle as a coup de grace, and their presence almost always determined the outcome of any battle they took part in once they were introduced in the battle field.

The advantage of this system is, as kids grew up, many of them, in theory, had no memory of their homes or families, they were not allowed to marry, so in theory they had no attachments to worry about. Their only bond was to the Sultan. Therefore, once they were on battlefield, after a lifetime of training and motivation with no personal attachments, they fought with the frightful combination of skill, ferocity and discipline.

As for the brightest kids, they were sent to the palace instead of the hearth. There, instead of physical skills, they received training for 10-12 years maybe more in maths, accounting, literature, history etc, again most of them forgetting or losing track of their roots. They also did some more years of practice in the palace. Then, they were sent to the various provinces of the Empire to work their way up the bureaucratical ladder, even to become Grand Vezirs (the legendary Mehmet Pasha of Sokol, comes to mind as a spectacular example). Due to their intense training in the palace, they were extremely loyal to the Sultan.

Such opportunities were what made many Christian families to volunteer their sons to the Janissaries, as Molly Bloom pointed out.

But I also must underline that the Janissaries (and the devshirme) were gone by the time when Enlightenment were bearing progressive political fruit (French revolution?), after which time Ottoman tolerance gradually fell behind the expectations unleashed by nationalism.

[Ancyrean]

But what about the cruelty of taking kids from families? Here we go into (2): For a take on comparative cruelty, let’s look at Europe during the time of practical application of the devshirme system, which is between early 15th century till mid 18th century (even by then the system was not applied as stringently as before) after which hearths gradually were no longer filled by boys from Balkans but by Muslims who turned the institution into a nest of conservatism and corruption (Janissary core was abolished officially in the early 1820s).

So your time frame is roughly 1400s-1770s by the latest (with some stretch). During this period, Europe saw many bloodbaths like 30 years war (a high point of religious intolerance among Christians, let alone towards other religions), inquisitions, pogroms for Jews, witch trials and what not. The chances of having a Muslim community in Europe was virtually nil, having a Jewish one was a dance with death. As compared to these, saying that the devshirme system is a sign of more cruelty on the part of Ottomans compared to their contemporaries is plainly ludicrous. Never mind the other fact that the Ottomans actually permitted communities to keep their languages, churches and traditions at this same time. It didn’t treat them as good as you’d have it today, but with regard to their contemporaries, you have no basis rather than a subjective contempt of things Ottoman.

3) Daily horror: What do you imply with that? Even the most horridly anti-Turkish contemporaries of the Ottoman Empire bring out their worst when there’s a rebellion somewhere in the Empire and there are stories of Ottoman excesses in response to these, which by the way, does not start in the earnest until the decline of the empire. None other than Martin Luther was in such awe of the order, harmony and functionality of the Ottoman Empire at its height that he admonished his fellow Christians for not being able to emulate the Ottoman system but instead succumb to petty squabbling among each other.

“Daily horror” of Christians throughout unending centuries is not a concept that takes root outside Balkan folklore (which took its final shape through the turmoil and excesses during each nation’s war of independence). There was such a thing as Pax Ottomana, you know, pax in the full sense of the word, in which trade and commerce flourished in a unified market and universal order and security of a world empire.

As for any preference to live in another Christian country, in those times the chances of any non-Orthodox kingdom/empire showing the same degree of tolerance to the predominantly Orthodox Balkan peoples were not much really

[Ancyrean]

Now, let’s come to side issues.

-.The issue of the name change from Constantinople (hopefully without offending anybody ) :The name “Istanbul” is of Greek origin to begin with, and was from the Greek slang anyway. So it was actually from the daily repetitions of Greeks that the Turks got the idea that the name of the city is Istanbul, instead of the cumbersome Konstantinoupoulis. So we didn’t invent the word. What’s more, before the conquest of the city, in many cases Turks referred to the city as “Kostantiniyye”, the Arabic corruption of the original word. So, in Turkish minds, it was always Istanbul increasingly after 1453, thanks to Greeks that is. What happened in the 1920s is that foreigners were demanded to acknowledge a practical reality. Just like we don’t call it Bombay anymore today in respect to the Indians who call their city Mumbai now. Therefore invoking a date for the name change might be misleading for many guys who know less about our Turkish-Greek mind games

- Speaking of Istanbul, Greeks never captured Istanbul after WWI. This was in the sense that it was always under the joint allied authority of the British and the French until it was turned over to the nationalist Turkish forces. If Greek troops marched in the city as part of an allied victory parade in 1919, under no time they exercised authority of any kind even in the Greek quarter of the city. But standing on the edge of realization of dreams of untold generations, this was quite a point of injury to the Greek government. So much so that, after having annexed Eastern Thrace up until the town limits of Istanbul, and in the face of sagging public support for the occupation of “Asia Minor” after 3 long years of enormous national exertion there, the Greek govt demanded a council with the Allied Authority to secure the handover of the city to Greece. The Greek Army of the Thrace simultaneously threatened to march on the city in July 1922. Greek and Allied troops briefly faced each other on the edge of the neutral zone, greatly embarrassing the Allies, who had no plans to go that far in their alliance with Greece. Greece even moved some regiments from Anatolia to Thrace as a show of determination, marginally weakening the defences of the Asia Minor front on the eve of the Turkish general offensive in the making. The Allies didn’t budge. Greece didn’t press further. In one month, the Turkish general offensive began and the issue was moot.