S14E04

Welcome to Echoes of History, the place to explore the rich stories from the past that bring the world of Assassin's Creed to life. I'm Matt Lewis. Today we're returning to the Renaissance Adventures of Ezio Auditore. In Assassin's Creed Revelations we can travel to 16th century Constantinople, the heart of the Ottoman Empire. But not long before Ezio's story begins, the city was the heart of the Byzantine Empire. How did the Ottomans conquer the mightiest city in the Western world? And what did this mean for its people and for the rest of Europe and Asia? This journey has not been what you expected. Although having never travelled this far east before you're not entirely sure what you did expect. The tales you've heard, the ones you grew up being told of the strange eastern lands prepared you for a more dramatic voyage over the sea. Rather than the broiling waters, aquatic beasts and heathen pirates that you envisaged, your ship has sailed unmolested across the Mediterranean Sea. The other passengers from Florence, merchants with more experience making this trip, have seemed completely unfazed by the prospect of close encounters with Muslims. Indeed, they've been much more worried about corsairs from Venice. For this reason, most travellers from Florence take the long route over Terra Firma, towards the land bridge that makes Constantinople the city of both east and west. Despite the calm of your fellow Florentines on the boat, you look upon the docks of Constantinople with some trepidation. You remember stories from your grandparents about the misled Christians in this part of the world and the dangers they posed to good Roman Catholics. The current occupants of the city, though they have been here for two generations, still carry the threat of the new as well as the alien with their different language, art and faith, you should feel in even more danger. Yet this instinctive fear is almost entirely subdued by the view in front of you. It's known as the greatest city in the world but you didn't realise just how enormous the grandeur of this place is. The architecture is simply stunning. From the Sultan's palace to the Haggaiya Sophia, you didn't expect such a fascinating fusion of Christian and Muslim cultures. Ancient buildings that witnessed pagan sacrileges recall the name Byzantium. Romanesque churches speak to the Emperor Constantine's transformation of the city and flags bearing the star and crescent identify the new masters, the Ottoman Empire. As you walk down the gangplank and take your first step into this exotic world, you can't help but be amazed by the sights, sounds and smells that surround you. Bright colours adorn every citizen, rich spices fill the air and the cacophony of tongues from every corner of the earth almost overwhelms you. A smile spreads across your face. Whatever happens next on your journey, you have a feeling that you'll enjoy exploring the streets and the rooftops of Constantinople. This is our introduction to Constantinople in Assassin's Creed Revelations. To guide me through the city's transformation from Christian to Muslim and Roman to Ottoman, I'm joined by Dr Gemma Masson. In addition to her work as an editor for the H-Empire Network, she's on the committee of the Travellers in Time Ottoman Lands Conference. Welcome to Echoes of History, Gemma. It's fantastic to have you with us. Thank you. Thank you for having me. I'm really excited to find out more about the fall of Constantinople, which is a pretty seismic moment, I think. So in Assassin's Creed Revelations, we visit Constantinople or is it Istanbul? That's going to be my first question, I think. In 1511 with Ezio, so he travels from Italy to what used to be the capital of the Byzantine Empire is now an Ottoman city. So I guess, yeah, my first question is when Ezio gets there in 1511, is he calling that city Istanbul or Constantinople? Both. There's a very long legacy of names. The first reference to a settlement in that part of the world is in Pliny the Elder. So humans have lived in this area for a very long time. There are linguistic discussions about whether the name Istanbul has a Turkish origin in the etymology or it has a Greek origin, obviously Constantinople being Greek, the city of Constantine. So really, everyone named it whatever worked best for them. So you've got sort of Costantinae, which is the Arabic version of Constantinople. Istanbul, there's a theory that after the conquest, the city became known as Islam Bol, which means full of Islam. There's the Greek argument of Stynkolod, meaning to the city. I think when you look through archives, and I did a search in the British archives and the Ottoman archives for how many times each different name and spelling and conjugation of the city came up, and pretty much a whole variety of names is being used. It was 1923 when there was actually a law passed by the Turkish post office that said we're no longer delivering mail that's addressed to Constantinople, you have to write Istanbul. But really up until very recently, and the origin of the Turkish Republic, people were calling the city whatever felt best to them because it is a very multicultural city. And there was a lot of that Greek Orthodox identity was retained after the conquest. And that's something we can get into talking about as well, the Ottomans and their multicultural systems of rule. But yet there is no way no short answer, everyone called it whatever they wanted to. I think that's absolutely amazing that you could send a letter up until the hundred years ago to Constantinople still, because I think we imagine Constantinople simply ceased to exist at the end, middle of the 15th century. I'm blown away that you could send a letter 100 years ago. I'd say Byzantium ceased to exist, there are like Byzantine institutions that remain, but Byzantium as a physical empire, by 1453, Constantinople was all that was left of it. And when that was conquered, then that was the end of Byzantium. But yes, Constantinople, I mean, we see coins minted in the Ottoman Empire with written in Arabic script, cost antinea on them. And this was very common for the Ottomans to adopt kind of native names and systems of rule and cultures to make the integration into the Ottoman Empire easier, both for them and for the newly conquered peoples. That was kind of their MO when they conquered a territory quite often. So it's not very surprising. Yeah, well, you've amazed me in the first five minutes. So I'm hoping we can keep this up because that's really cool fact. I didn't know that at all. And just to give us a bit more background on Constantinople, Istanbul, where is it geographically located? And why is that location important? Istanbul sits on two continents. It's a city that sits half of it in Asia and half of it in Europe, separated by the Bosphorus the Golden Horn. And when I lived in Istanbul as a PhD student, when I was doing my research there, I actually lived on one continent, and then I would go to school and university on the other one. And my daily commute was just to take the ferry. And it's amazing that you can do that. Like a lot of key historical settlements, its control of the water gave you control of sort of trade and supplies, and it was a defensible position as well. So yeah, I really think that that access to the Golden Horn to the Bosphorus to the sea was what made it a really very strategic, very important settlement, historically speaking. Yeah, so I guess we've got somewhere that bridges two continents, but is also a bit of a bottleneck for that trade between East and West, which is flowing by this period. If lots of it is funneled through Constantinople, I guess that just makes it increasingly important. History economically as well, and you have two continents touching, you have so many cultures meeting there as well. So it's always been even pre-optimism, it's always been a huge sort of cultural kind of melting pot. This is something referred to in the game as well. It talks about the different districts and the different sort of communities that live there. And that was very common. There's like Galata and Perra, and this was very much kind of the European district, and it's where you would have a lot of European ambassadors, palaces would be, and they would all be kind of like kept together in one part of the city. So yes, a lot of communities kind of living all together under the banner of Constantinople slash Istanbul. I have no strong feelings either way, I just call it Istanbul because I used to live there. And yeah, in most Ottoman history writing, it's called Istanbul, whereas a lot of my business friends it's called Constantinople. So that's what enters into their lexicon. I wondered if you could talk us through kind of the broad strokes of the fall of Constantinople. So kind of when did it occur and who are the main players involved? Well, fall conquest terminology matters when we talk about history, that's the thing as well. So people say fall, if they have very negatively romanticized versions, people call it conquest if they have this idea of this mighty great achievement. Again, the terminology can tell you a lot about the sympathies of who's talking about the historical topic. But yes, Constantinople taken by the Ottomans in 1453, under a very young Sultan Mehmet II. This was a young man who was determined to stamp his name on history. He was going to make achievements that made him remembered. I think part of it is he didn't want to be remembered as a Sultan who lost his throne because there was a very unusual method of succession with Mehmet in that his father Murad didn't initially die on the throne. He wanted to retire and go and meditate up on mountaintops with Sufis. And he did that when Mehmet was very young in his teens. So Mehmet kind of had a first rule just for a few years. And then a lot of the advisors were like, oh my God, this kid is very unprepared. He's talking crazy talk. This is wild. And they begged his father to come back, which he did. And I think that really had a very strong impact on the young Mehmet that he was like, this is not what I'm going to be remembered for. I have big ideas and I'm going to make them happen. And in 1453, he did just that. He wanted to take Constantinople. He wanted to be the new emperor of Rome because Byzantium often called the Rome of the East and Constantinople the sort of the new Rome. He wanted to be the ruler of the Roman empire by right of conquest. And that is something that is kept in the legacy after the taking of Constantinople. He wants to preserve a lot of the Byzantine legacy because he still wants to be this is Rome and I rule it. Mostly your key player is this very young, very sort of exciting Sultan who would become known. This really cemented his place in history and he, and it became known as Mehmet El-Fati, which means Mehmet the Conqueror in Turkish. And that's how he's now remembered right down history by the time Constantinople was taken. It was basically geographically speaking practically all, but was less of the Byzantine empire. And it was sort of the last stand as it were. And there are all these very romanticized narratives about the siege talks about, you know, the emperor ripping off his imperial purple and flinging himself into battle with his men and things like that. But I really think people knew that it was, it was a Hail Mary and it was a last hurrah. Anyone in the city and you, the Byzantines kind of knew that. I said the emperor, the final visiting emperor, I believe died without issue again, not a Byzantines. So yes, he died without issue. So in comes Mehmet, you know, I am the Sultan. I am also the emperor of Rome. I am also the conqueror. I'm the man has so many titles. It's, it's crazy. But what is also very interesting is the young Mehmet around the time of his first rule, he had a, well, a couple of rather interesting school friends. And this links into kind of one of my other areas of research interest as being interested in draco studies, because Mehmet actually went to school with Vlad the Impaler. Vlad and Radu, Vlad's younger brother were the middle and youngest son of Vlad Dokul of Velakia, modern day Romania. And Velakia was a vassal state belonging to Murad Mehmet father. And they were sort of royal hostages. So they were taken to the Ottoman court as children. They were given a royal education. It was kind of a gilded cage thing, but they learned, you know, Arabic, the Quran warfare, all this kind of stuff. And the idea is I've got your sons, you're going to behave and be a loyal little vassal and pay your tribute. And Radu went all in for it. He was, you know, he wanted to convert. He was a Muslim through and through. Vlad went, I'm going to learn all about you so I can kick your butt later and I can defeat you. Their father did rebel and both the father and the eldest brother were killed. So the Sultan sends Vlad back and he goes, okay, you can go and be a good little vassal. Vlad wasn't a good little vassal. And that led to a whole lifetime of warfare with the Ottomans and all kinds of very interesting things. But I also think that must have had an effect on Mehmet because Mehmet of Vlad, you've got these two very strong personalities. I mean, they're young boys, they're teenagers, but they would be considered men. And they're both really determined to do something big for the history of their countries and their people. And I think they're both seen as heroic figures in the history of their respective countries. They're both heroes. And I think maybe having that to play off those two personalities together definitely incited something in both of them. I'm impressed again. So the Sultan went to school with Dracula. Pretty much, yeah. And was the rivalry between the Byzantine Empire and the Ottoman Empire primarily based on religion or is it political? Is it territorial? Is it all of the above? Here's the thing, the whole question of religious persecution, I often find religion being, I think it's very convenient, the way to use in history and it hides a multitude of sins and you can go, well, we're doing this for God and that's the perfect justification to some people because how are you going to argue with that? But I do think realistically, a lot of motivations were a lot more territorial, as you said, financial, political, because to be perfectly honest, between Muslims, Christians and Judaism, they all have this kind of united idea of being people of the book. Right? And definitely in the Ottoman Empire, there was a very great policies of toleration. You can practice your freedom of religion. You can speak whatever language you want. Non-Muslim citizens just had to pay a kind of a poll tax. It was called the jizya and that was just the tax you paid for being a non-Muslim subject. And you could practice your religion, your business, your faith, whatever. It didn't matter as long as you paid your taxes. Basically, the Ottomans were very practically minded, I think. And a lot of people mischaracterized and romanticized the history as being very crusadery, religiony. And the reality is just not like that at all. Yeah, I wonder whether there was an element of this almost being a closing episode of the Crusades, particularly for Mehmed, if he's keen to remind everybody that Constantinople is effectively the Rome of the East. So he's now ruling the Roman Empire. We've had a situation where the Pope in Rome has been sending people to the Near East for centuries as Christians to fight Islam. And all of a sudden, we've got Islam in charge of what is now considered the capital of the Roman Empire. So there's a little bit of a, you know, a bite back, a conclusion almost to the long period of crusading in the East. You pull back to the Great Schism and things like that, because you've got the Orthodox Church versus Roman Catholicism. The way I kind of always looked at it was the sort of Christians moving east and then Muslims moving west was almost like a pendulum swing in that the Christians came in and then they get pushed back and then come the Muslims. You've always had this kind of, oh, the Christians are the big people, know the Muslims are, so there's this kind of seesawing action. But yes, sort of crusading mentality. It was very much about sort of legacy and legend from Mehmed. He wanted to be a legend and he did become one. And I think very much in how he will present himself internationally. So we have the famous Bellini portrait of Mehmed. I'm not sure if you've seen this, but the portrait in the composition of that portrait is strikingly similar to how European rulers, particularly Venetian dojos were painted. And to my mind, I really see Mehmed going, I want to present myself as a mighty ruler to these people. How do they comprehend the image of a mighty ruler? I'm going to have myself portrayed in that way. So he was very smart when it came to that. And he would very much meet people where they were. Again, that was kind of an Ottoman practice of this is how they understand rule. This is how they understand we're going to adopt, you know, we can adapt to present ourselves how we want to be to these people. Yes, quite pragmatic and kind of smoothing that transfer of power and making it as easy as possible for the people who have been conquered kind of thing. Very pragmatic. Yes. Once you've kind of had the initial conquest, they're like, that's it, you know, no more drama, just get on with it. This is what we're doing now. This is where we're at. It spoke to their financial interests, right? Because if you're not Muslim, you're paying extra taxes to be not Muslim. So to a certain extent, financially speaking, it's in the ruling classes best interest for people not to convert, you know, it's not so much this kind of evangelical, crusading, make the whole world our religion kind of mentality. And so just before we leave the fall of Constantinople altogether, and I'm conscious I'm still calling it fall, and we'll maybe get back to that a little bit later. So fall or conquest, when the city actually falls, is it a violent moment? Or are we talking about the conclusion of a long campaign? It was a long campaign. The Ottomans had sort of over the preceding years captured all the land up to Constantinople. Right. So think about sort of placing something on a rug, you want to get to it without touching the rest of the rug, you roll up the rug to get to it. Same principle. It was a long siege and the Ottomans were using some very advanced military technology for their time. They're using siege towers, heavy artillery, Greek fire, they're tunneling under the walls to place bombs under the walls of the city. Mehmet had his Hannibal elephants on the Alps moment when he moved his navy over land to cut off supplies coming up the Bosphorus. So he kind of rolled all these huge ships on logs over land, built an entire fortress called Ramelli-Yisari, the throat cutter, and strong a huge heavy chain right across the Bosphorus, the Golden Horn to prevent any supplies or reinforcements getting to the city. The kind of thing that makes you look absolutely mad unless it works. If it works, you're a genius. Exactly. Yeah, you know, just do this like an absolute madman, your men start looking at you funny, and then it works and they're like, oh, you know, kind of invade Russia in winter kind of crazy punt, as it were. But the final straw was traitors within the city, traitors, again, terminology matters. There was a betrayal and someone essentially left a back door open for the Ottomans because they were like, we've had enough of this. So there was sort of this three days of violence in the aftermath of conquering the city, but there isn't kind of a prolonged persecution of the people inside after that from what you said earlier about the fact that people are allowed to continue in their own faith. Do we know how much of the fabric of the city is destroyed? Because presumably a long siege and all of that bombardment and Greek fire has caused lots of material damage too. Yes, well, you can still see the old Theodosian city walls or what's left of them still standing today. If you go to Istanbul, they're now kind of within the bounds of the city because obviously every city expands over its history. So it's now much bigger than it was. There are still sort of ruins of the city walls standing. I don't know. I imagine a lot of civilian homes obviously would be would be destroyed. A lot of the accounts mostly talk about the churches and the Hajjus of Theia in particular, what was the great Orthodox Church then became a mosque and has just in very recent years, if you keep up with this kind of news, has been restored to being a mosque because it was just a heritage site for a while. But what was interesting about that is that they kept the architecture and they kept a lot of the murals were simply instead of being destroyed, were just covered by whitewashed paint. And they've actually in recent years been able to be restored. So yeah, people mostly talk about the loss of life and the loss of the religious spaces. I think mostly the damage would be within the city, the three days of plunder, the siege damaged sort of the edges of the city, the city walls and you lost lives. But most of the damage in the city would come, as I said, during the time of plunder and you know, you wouldn't kind of beat up or break too much of your own plunder because you want to profit from that. But yes, Mehmet did put some very big building project in place to put his mark on the city. That's something we can get into. I'll have to keep my voice down because right now I'm between the actual bedsheets of some of history's most famous figures. Want to know more about what Hitler might have been like in the sack or Julius Caesar or our very own Billy Shakespeare? You wouldn't believe the details I'm able to uncover here on Patwix the Sheets, a podcast by History Hit. Because sexuality explored through historical lens can reveal a surprising amount about the human experience, what's and all, if you'll excuse the pun. And we don't just stop at sex, expect outrageous scandals throughout the centuries, as well as probing into everyday issues, the nitty gritty of human life that really connects us to all people throughout history. Join me, Kate Lister, every Tuesday and Friday on Patwix the Sheets to find out more. Listen wherever you get your podcasts. Right, time to slide out here and avoid the bedpan. So I was going to ask about the changes that came immediately following the Ottoman takeover of the city. So presumably the big switch is in religion. It's no longer a Christian city, it's now an Islamic city. But presumably there is a big physical change as well. There is stuff that needs to be rebuilt. And as you said, Meghmed is going to want to put his stamp on the city now. Yes, Meghmed builds a big mosque complex and starts to work on a big palace complex as well. That would eventually be top kappa, as we know today. Christians, Jews, whatever, you were still allowed to practice your faith, as we've discussed. And there was kept the Patriarch of Constantinople that continued to be a role under the Ottoman sultans, who would be kind of like the Orthodox, the Orthodox Pope, head of the Orthodox Church, as it were. And yes, so that position stayed, you know, you still had your priests and everything like that. And it was really the job of the Patriarch to kind of mediate between the Muslim rulers and the Orthodox citizens. And a lot of these different communities had their own sort of local neighborhood courts for their internal disputes, things like that. A rather interesting case I read was, I cannot remember if it was a Christian woman or a Jewish woman, but she was going through a divorce. And she chose to take her case, her divorce case, to the local Muslim Community Court instead, because under the Muslim law and in their court, women had more rights in the case of divorce. So that was a very deliberate choice that she made. There's always an opportunity to pick and choose the legal system that will give you the best result. Exactly. Yeah. We got big building projects, which of course created employment. Obviously, you've got, I mean, everything takes time. It's not like immediately within a year we had all these, you know, lovely big mosques that we still see in Istanbul. And it, you know, it takes a while for the skyline to change. And a lot of buildings, hammams, bathhouses, water fountains, spring up over the centuries, they're sponsored by members of the royal family. Part of the sort of Muslim idea was one of the great commandments of five pillars is you must do good works. So people would, you know, build schools, build mosques, build, you know, whatever. Mehmed's two big things were Topkappa and the big mosque complex. Again, you can see outside Topkappa to this day, they've got huge panels with titles. And I mentioned that Mehmed had lots of titles. He's the Sultan of Rum now that he's conquered Constantinople. He's, you know, God's shadow on earth, you know, rule of the faithful, all this kind of stuff. It's like a huge list of things at the entrance to Topkappa Palace designed to let anyone know who was coming in that you're in my house now. Basically, I am large and in charge. I was going to ask next whether there were significant changes that people would have felt to the laws that governed everyday life, but it sounds like they were almost two systems running in parallel for a while at least. As I said, the Ottomans would adopt a lot of native practices, but they also right throughout their history had taken a lot of native peoples into their infrastructure. They were very good at delegating and saying, Hey, I see you're really good at doing this particular task. Would you like to come and do that on my payroll? So really, a lot of the Ottoman army and civil service definitely in the early years were recruits from previously conquered peoples, let's say, but they retained their own religion, language, practices, what have you. And also, it was in the Ottomans interest to have that because of language, right? They're conquering so many different lands. And, you know, to have every member of the Turkish civil service have to learn Greek and Romanian and Bulgarian and this and that. So really recruiting from conquered peoples and giving them an opportunity for social mobility a lot of the time. This is something that comes up in the military in particular. My PhD thesis, I studied the Janissary Corps, which were a specific group of soldiers in the military. And in the earliest days, they had their origins in being almost a slave army. It was a kind of conscription from conquered territories every few years, they would go and take a certain number of boys based on, you know, the certain number of households in the village, but there was some very strict rules about you can't take the only son, you can't take married men, you can't take anyone who's physically or mentally infirm, that kind of thing. But this conscription, it was called the Dev Shamei, or the blood tax, some people call it. It's another thing in Ottoman history that people have very strong fins about some people go, it's terrible and you take our sons away and you turn them into Muslims and you train them to come back and kill us. But again, the reality is a bit more complex, because if you're living in a small provincial village herding sheep, then you get recruited, you have an elite education, you have a career in the military, and you have social mobility, because a lot of boys recruited this way, if they didn't become soldiers, they became Marx civil servants, members of the domestic power structure, some of them became Grand Vizier. So it was really a meritocracy in the Ottoman Empire, if you had the skills it didn't matter where you came from, whether or not you were Muslim, and my Janissary Corps really, from the earliest days they were like that, and they were the elite soldiers and the sultan's personal bodyguard, so you get comparisons between the Janissaries and the praetorian guard of Rome, let's say, in that they were so close to the ruler, they were the bodyguard. In later years they would play Kingmaker, and then there's this whole question of the corruption of the institution, which is something I addressed in my thesis, which I said I could go off on a tangent there because it's my thesis research, but I'm not going to. The Janissaries, the way they look physically, and I do think that this would be for ease of game animation, they all look the same, and they've all got masks which they wouldn't have, and the impression seems to be that they just wandered around in their full military dress regalia all the time. That wouldn't be the case, and the the colour of their uniforms is quite quite different because they're wearing this kind of deep kind of like greyy brown bronze thing. I can tell they're Janissaries because they have a very distinctive headdress, this almost a sheet goes down the the back of their head, like down the back of their neck, so this has quite an apocryphal origin. On the real Janissary uniform it is a white headdress and they would be wearing red, but the Janissaries belonged to a particular branch of Sufi Islam called Bektashism because again the the Janissaries were recruited from non-Muslim citizens of the empire, and Bektashism was a more liberal version of Islam you were permitted to drink alcohol, be in the presence of unveiled women. Again the idea of making the conversion easier on non-Muslim born recruits. Where the headdress comes from is a very apocryphal legend about the origin of the Janissary Corps claiming that Haji Bektash himself was present at their inauguration and he blessed the first armed soldiers and in doing so he placed his hand on their head and his sleeve ran down the back of their head which is where the design comes from for the the Janissary headdress. Unfortunately that's not the case, Haji Bektash was deceased way before the the Janissary Corps but that's kind of a little bit of the the lore and legend they liked to keep around the Janissary Corps. So aesthetically yeah the colour scheme wasn't right, I don't think they were wearing masks. There's also a hint in one of the game trailers that they are these kind of like swag-going bully boy people. That comes from later in Ottoman history when people start talking about the Janissaries becoming corrupt and that's a whole other question of changes in their recruitment process and a whole other appeal. So we're sort of seeing that degree of pragmatism that we spoke about earlier. This is the best way to get the area ruled and also to encourage some acceptance of the new rule too. Very much and I think a lot of because again we're talking about the history and popular culture with the Assassin's Creed game. A lot of the popular culture again is responsible for romanticizing and polarizing these views of events in history which I understand because popular culture is entertainment. You want there to be a good guy and a bad guy and you want to have these very strong fields and you want to feel invested but it can oversimplify. And if you look at popular culture created from former Ottoman lands, particularly in the 20th century, ones that kind of fought and rebelled and sort of threw off the Ottoman rule in the 19th century. A lot of the popular culture is very much the Ottomans were almost sort of cartoon bad guys, a very sort of orientalized view of Islam as being very villainous and the soldiers being very bloodthirsty and almost inhuman and that's just not the case at all. Whereas all the Christian crusaders who'd been out that way were such lovely people. Yes they were all so righteous and so pious and yeah again it's popular culture. I don't have a problem with history in popular culture but I think it has to be handled responsibly. I don't think you have to play with being 100% accurate to the history. I very often think that history in popular culture can be what spurs someone to take an interest in history and to go and maybe read a history book about whatever they've seen. But people need to understand that nine times out of ten in history things really always are more complicated than you can portray in a movie or a TV show or a computer game. Yeah absolutely. I'll have to keep my voice down because right now I'm between the actual bedsheets of some of history's most famous figures. Want to know more about what Hitler might have been like in the sack or Julius Caesar or our very own Billy Shakespeare? You wouldn't believe the details I'm able to uncover here on Betwixt the Sheets, a podcast by History Hit because sexuality explored through a historical lens can reveal a surprising amount about the human experience. What's and all if you'll excuse the pun. And we don't just stop at sex. Expect outrageous scandals throughout the centuries as well as probing into everyday issues the nitty-gritty of human life that really connects us to all people throughout history. Join me Kate Lister every Tuesday and Friday on Betwixt the Sheets to find out more. Listen wherever you get your podcasts. Right time to slide out here and avoid the bedpan. For someone like Ezio, so in the game Ezio travels from Florence to Istanbul in 1511. What would a Florentine going to the city during that time, what do you think they would have made of it? Would they have felt tolerant of the Ottomans being there? Would it have concerned them? Would they have preferred it had stayed as the Eastern Orthodox Church even though that was a kind of rival to the Roman Church? Do we have any sense of what sort of Western Christians were thinking about Istanbul during this period? You have certain Western Christian groups and countries that had actually quite amicable, very positive, very productive relations with the Ottomans. France for example, one country that had a very very close relationship with the Ottomans for centuries. Venice was another one. Venice being sort of a place of sort of merchants and traders. The Venetians and the Ottomans had very very strong connections. And then you see the young Suleiman who comes up in the game who meets Ezio on the ship. And actually when he not too far into the future would become the Salsan, he had this very dramatic crown made in Venice to himself. Again think back to Mehmed portraying himself in a way Europeans would understand as mighty rulers. So that's still something that Suleiman kept on with. I don't know so much about Florence specifically and their relationship with the Ottoman Empire. You're talking about an un-unified Italy at this time. It's not one country. So Florence, I don't know, I mean being very much about coming up to sort of the renaissance and being very much about the arts and learning and things like that. I think a Florentine would probably appreciate the city of that time. It was a centre of just all kinds of cultures. You've got lots of languages, you've got libraries. The Ottomans were for studios, record keepers. They like their libraries and they like their archives. That's one thing that's actually a very very big blessing to historians. So yes, I think a Florentine would actually appreciate and the fact that the city's very aesthetic, very beautiful, the architecture, the poetry, the music. Yeah I can see a Florentine having a good time. Although Ezio just spent most of his time running around the rooftops and climbing towers and all kinds of shenanigans. I did want to come back to something that we've sort of touched on several times and this is the idea that I would always refer to this as the fall of Constantinople and clearly that's a very Western Christian perspective. Which I'd imagine Western Christians would have perceived it that way in the 15th and 16th centuries as kind of the final fall of the Roman Empire almost. But that obviously, the fact that we still call it that, kind of betrays a bias in our view of history from the West doesn't it? Because as you mentioned before, in Ottoman terms it's a conquest. It's only a fall in Western Christian terms. It's a running meme these days, you know, what's your Roman Empire? But yes, and this is why I think language matters in the teaching of history and in the writing of history. Like I say, a lot of my colleagues who I was in a department with, Byzantineists as a graduate student, all their textbooks, all their histories, they all talked about the fall. All of my works talked about the conquest or sometimes the taking of Istanbul and as much as we just think of it as a set phrase, we learned the fall of Constantinople. The subconscious kind of moral sort of emotional load that certain terminology in history puts on someone, the impact it has, even if you don't think it's happening, you know, the fall of Constantinople, that sounds bad. The conquest of Constantinople, that sounds glorious and it's something that you can encounter with all kinds of things in history. There was one time I was teaching a class called Reformation, Revolution and Rebellion to a group of undergraduates. We got to what the creators of the course called the American Revolution. I had an exchange student from the US in my class who pipes up, that's really interesting because at home we always call it the war of independence. And we were able to actually have a very productive conversation about that kind of perspective and history written by the winner's kind of angle. And again, it happens with going back to my Janissaries because everything's about my Janissaries, the technical term for them in all Ottoman documentation, they are called kul, which means slave, slave of the Sultan. So you pick up a Turkish-English dictionary, you look at that translation slave, you think, oh my God, this is horrible. These people are prisoners, they're being degraded, they're being mistreated. They are not at all. They are social and economic and military elite. But because we in the Western world have that automatic association with the word slave, it has that kind of emotional impact to us. So yeah, cultural context of your own education matters and you definitely need to question your own prejudice when it comes to looking at history, particularly history of other cultures. Because as you say in the West, we're very rooted in Roman Greece and that kind of one way of telling history. And I think this is where teaching critical thinking when people engage with history is super important. History is not just about memorizing names and dates and events. You can ask questions and you can disagree and you should, and you should question yourself all the time. As I say, I would always have referred to this as the fall of Constantinople without meaning it to sound as though I felt it was a negative thing in any way. But it does definitely have that subtext of a fall is bad, a conquest is good. So somehow I am playing into some kind of prejudice about what happened in 1453 without even realizing I'm doing it. Well, that speaks to the historical literature and material and the biases of the historians you yourself have been exposed to. I was asked this question once at a conference, how do you deal with the kind of moral loads of dealing with history and of dealing with tragedies and huge events and things like that? I very clearly said, I have no dog in this fight. I don't have any inherent bias. I'm not Turkish. I'm not Muslim. I'm not orthodox Christian. I don't have anything that gives me a sort of vested interest in portraying a certain narrative, a certain group as villains and a certain group as heroes. I just want to look at what's there. And again, it can be hard when you've been sort of inundated and saturated with terminology until someone actually asks you about it and you think, oh yeah, that's actually right. That's really weird. But yeah, that's right. From the West, we've traditionally viewed it as the fall of Constantinople, the final end of the Roman Empire, I guess. And that was viewed as an important, significant moment from the West. How is it viewed from the East? Did the Ottomans view this as a really significant moment too? Or was it just another conquest in the emergence of the Ottoman Empire? Dorgor speaking, this is a huge turning point in global history, not just for the Ottoman gave them a new capital for their empire. They moved their capital to Istanbul from the earlier capital in Adernae. You might know it as Adrianople. It was very significant. This was a huge deal for the Ottomans. They say it became the entire power center for the Ottoman Empire. It's where the royal family lived. It's where the central government was. So no, this was really huge. Pretty much from 1453 onwards, we start looking at a more settled Ottoman Empire because the Ottomans had their origins in the nomadic tribesmen of the steppes. And it was literally only in about 1200, 1300, that century, you have the first Ottoman sultan say, I'm going to build a legacy and I'm going to build an empire. And they were quite mobile for a very long time because that's where their origins were. So the taking of a big, big city, a big urban center, staying in one place and building something was a very big turning point to a certain extent, a lot of new skill sets for the Ottoman civilization to learn. So no, I do think that yeah, that was a huge deal. It's a huge deal globally as well. After the fall of Constantinople, one of the theories about the Renaissance, how the Renaissance came to Europe is that a lot of Byzantine scholars bleed Constantinople after it was taken by the Turks and came to Europe and brought all of their sort of art and enlightenment and education with them. That's one theory. I'm not saying how I feel on that either way, but that's again, another key historical event that's been linked back to the Turkish taking up on Constantinople. Yeah, and I guess ultimately everything that had made Constantinople important to the Byzantine Empire equally makes Istanbul as important to the Ottoman Empire. That position on spanning two continents with a bottleneck for trade, it's as important now to the Ottoman Empire as it always was to the Byzantine Empire. Absolutely. The geography, the access to trade, you know, being on the Silk Road, geographically, it was very important. So it wasn't just about the symbolism of we're going to take Byzantium, we're going to take this big Christian stronghold. It was, this is actually strategically a very good move for us. And as the empire was expanding, again, a capital further west was much just more efficient as well for how they were ruling at that time. Yeah, it's interesting how much is hiding behind that kind of thin film of it being a religious matter of switching between Christianity and Islam because there's so much more going on culturally and politically around it. Yeah, it's never just as simple as a religion, you know, I'm sorry, I know people, there are people of great religious conviction, but for some people involved, religion was maybe their primary motivation. I think for groups and for individuals, everyone had kind of more than one motivating factor. And for some people, maybe religion was the strongest one, maybe finance was the strongest one, maybe politics was the strongest one. Motivations aside, everyone had their own reasons for making the thing happen. Well, thank you so much for joining us, Gemma. It's been incredible to explore this more to find out what was really going on all around this pivotal moment in history, and also to make me think a bit more carefully about some of the words that I use. Before we finish, well, I always allow guests the opportunity to step into Assassin's Creed animus for a moment. If we could send you back in time, is there a particular moment connected to the fall of Constantinople that you particularly like to witness to be there for? There are a couple of things. I think I'd quite like to see the ships being rolled over land. You know, Matt having his big dramatic, I'm going to move my navy over land moment and just to be there when he told his soldiers and to see how they reacted to it more than anything else. I was going to say, I'd quite like to be in the room when he's explaining that plan to everybody and see everybody's faces. I'd love to be a fly on that wall. And I think the other place I'd like to see is the quieter, more secret. I want to see who opened the back gate and let them in during the siege. I want to know who did that. I wanted to be there in the shadows watching that happen. I think it's a tie between those two, but probably the ships actually, if I had to be forced to pick one, I'd really like to see how that all happened. Yeah. Well, thank you so much for joining us Gemma. It's been a pleasure to learn more about the fall and conquest of Constantinople. It's been an absolute pleasure to talk to you. Thank you. I've had a great time. Thank you very much. I hope you've enjoyed this episode of Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hit. In the next episode, we're delving deeper into how the Ottomans changed the face of Constantinople as we take a look at the home of the Sultan's Topkapi Palace. Don't forget to subscribe and follow Echoes of History wherever you get your podcasts. And if you're enjoying it, you could leave us a review too. I'll see you next time among the Echoes of History.