Harnessing the Power of the Centuries
“The same God, who has already given thee so large a portion of the Roman empire, will not deny the remnant, and the capital [Constantinople]. His providence, and thy power, assure thy success; and myself, with the rest of thy faithful slaves, will sacrifice our lives and fortunes.”
Amurath Vizier to the Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II[728]
“Beware of the gold and silver of the Romans: in arms we are superior; and with the aid of God, and the prayers of the prophet, we shall speedily become masters of Constantinople.”
Mehmed II’s reply[729]
One lesson history is whispering to us involves the importance of multi-generational projects, projects designed to deliver their fruits in the time of our great-great-grandchildren and beyond, projects like those that slime mold evolved long ago.
This planet’s competition between collective intelligences—its clash of civilizations—now poses a critical question. Can one collective brain outrun others when it is obsessed with quarterly profits, exit strategies, isolation, overnight wins, and instant gratification? Can it be more nimble than its rivals if it fails to focus on long-term goals, very long long-term goals indeed?
Islam’s meme has proven to be an utter failure at producing wealth for the majority of its citizens in the 20th and 21st centuries.[730] In fact, it’s lowered the standard of living in the Muslim Middle East to that of the world’s poorest portion of the globe—sub-Saharan Africa. But Islam’s focus is not short term. It zeroes in on long-term goals and on multi-generational projects—primarily long-term military projects. And in those, it has had overwhelming success.
As one Al Qaeda Manual puts it, the warrior of jihad “should be patient in performing the work, even if it lasts a longtime.”[731] And patient the forces of Islam have been. After the right to jihad was revealed to Mohammed in 624 AD,[732] one of the Hadith says, “The Prophet Muhammad was asked: ‘What city will be conquered first, Constantinople or Romiyya [Rome]?’ He answered: ‘The city of Heracles will be conquered first’—that is, Constantinople.”[733] For 776 years the Muslims then tried to take Constantinople.[734] They began to strip the city of the bulk of its enormous empire within just 10 years of Mohammed’s death—in 642 AD. And they methodically nibbled at what was left for centuries. But Constantinople—the city—held firm.
Why was taking this one city worth so much multi-generational effort? Constantinople was the New Rome.[735] the heir to the Empire of Rome itself. It was also the capital city of Eastern Christianity. Its emperor claimed to be in direct contact with God and to speak on his behalf to the entire world. His only rival as the voice of Christianity was a Roman who seemed poverty-stricken by comparison—the Pope. Ever since its fall to the barbarian Visigoths nearly a thousand years earlier, the Pope’s Rome had been half-deserted and had been stripping the marble from its ancient buildings and pavements to build new, far shabbier structures or to simply to make lime[736].
But Constantinople glittered with riches. [737] The clothes of its leading citizens were woven with threads of gold. The dishes on which those leading citizens served formal dinners were gold as well. The chamber in which the Emperor deigned to see delegations of high-level visitors from lands as distant as the princedoms of a land newly established by the Vikings, Russia, had walls of gold many stories high, walls studded with the golden heads of mechanical lions and birds, heads that roared and sang.
The aisles of Constantinople’s churches were paved with silver.[738] Constantinople’s artisans filled the city with ivory carvings of biblical themes, from the story of Adam and Eve to the story of Joshua and the battle of Jericho. What’s more Constantinople was rich in export revenues. It had stolen the secret of silk-making from the Chinese, then had poured out silks of its own, exporting them at a mind-boggling price to kings, queens, and to the super-rich thousands of miles away. And Byzantine glass bottles and tiles were exquisite, world-famous,[739] and fetched a pretty penny on the international luxury market.
But by 1453, the 811-year-long battle of Islam against Constantinople and its empire had finally stripped the city of almost all of its imperial territories and had cut off its supply of raw materials. What’s more, for centuries Constantinople’s emperor and the Roman pope had squabbled over who carried the full weight and authority of the Roman Caesars and who was Christianity’s authentic connection with heaven. In 1203, the Roman Christians—the Christian kings of Europe and their knights—had mounted a Crusade and, instead of attacking the Muslims, had attacked, raped, and sacked Constantinople.[740] So the city was alienated from—and weakened by—what should have been its Christian allies.
By 1453, Constantinople was down to a mere fraction of its original population[741] and had only 7,000 soldiers, 2,000 of whom were foreign mercenaries. This was a pitiful number of fighters with which to defend the city’s 42 miles of 36-foot-high inner and outer walls.
Allah had kept the forces of the jihad from capturing Constantinople ever since Mohammed had sent his letter inviting the Byzantine Emperor Heracles to capitulate to Islam in 629 AD, 824 years ago. Now Allah would teach his loyal followers how patience and belief pays off.
The Emperor of Constantinople shut down the city’s small number of mosques and put pressure on the citizens who had converted from Christianity to Islam to return to the Christian fold. According to the Quran, this sort of “attack on Islam” is a legitimate cause for war.[742] So the leader of the Islamic Empire of the day, the Ottoman Emperor Mehmed II, seized the opportunity. He and his father had already built permanent forts just outside the city to cut it off from aid and reinforcement. Then on April 2, 1453, Mehmed camped his forces—over 100,000 of them—outside of Constantinople. His troops trained the world’s biggest cannon on the city—a 27-foot-long monster called “the Basilic”[743] that fired a ball nearly the weight of a small car—1,200 pounds. The giant cannon opened holes in the city’s layers of walls, lanes wide enough for files of invaders to penetrate. But it took three hours to reload the Basilic. The citizens and threadbare troops of Constantinople scrambled to repair the breaches while the warriors of Islam labored to reload their superweapon.
The warriors of Islam dug tunnels designed to reach the walls of Byzantium, to undermine their foundations, and to cause them to collapse. The Byzantines told each other, “have patience till God shall have delivered the city from the great dragon who seeks to devour us.”[744] But they were praying to the wrong god. It was Allah who would deliver on his promises, not Jehovah.
Fifty-four days after the siege of Constantinople began, on May 29, 1453, Mehmed ordered his troops to assault the pummeled and exhausted city. Within hours, the Muslim troops had killed the Emperor of Constantinople as he led what was left of his forces. When Mehmed entered the city in a triumphal display, the few citizens who remained alive greeted him with flowers and hoped for the best. They got the worst. For seven hours Mehmed’s troops looted and plundered.[745]
What’s more, the laws of Islam gave the victorious troops the right to seize Constantinople’s remaining citizens—all of them—as “the property of the victor,”[746] to be ransomed, enslaved, kept for sexual purposes, used for labor, or to be sold.
Allah had promised his believers Constantinople and Rome. And Allah had delivered on promise number one. But as Sheikh Yousef Al-Qaradhawi, known as “one of the most influential clerics in Sunni Islam,” said in 2002, “The other city, Romiyya, remains… This means that Islam will return to Europe as a conqueror and victor.” [747]
What sort of lesson in patience would Allah teach his global body of followers—his Ummah—before he would deliver on this second promise? What trials would the people of Islam have to undergo before Allah would give them the city of Rome…and its Empire, Europe?
And what about the other portions of the planet that were still drowning in darkness and disbelief? As the Muslim website Islamic World says, “The Quran clearly and directly asks all human beings to surrender to God(Allah).”[748] Then the website invites you to, “See the audio & video streaming of A Worldwide Islamic State.”
The patience that finally brought Constantinople to Islam is the mark of a superorganism that may have been slow to master modern industrial and military technology, but it’s a superorganism that doesn’t see things in just the short-term, a culture whose memes guarantee that it will stick to a project for centuries.