{"id":110346,"date":"2025-05-29T22:55:13","date_gmt":"2025-05-30T03:55:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=110346"},"modified":"2025-05-29T22:55:13","modified_gmt":"2025-05-30T03:55:13","slug":"110346","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=110346","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"

May 29: The Last Day of the World<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cOn May 29, 1453,\u201d the state-run Turkish broadcaster TRT World\u00a0reported<\/a> happily on Thursday, the 572nd anniversary of the fateful day, \u201ca 21-year-old Sultan Mehmed II led the Ottoman army to a decisive victory over the Byzantine Empire. The conquest of Istanbul remains a shining jewel in the crown of the Ottoman Empire.\u201d Recep Tayyip Erdogan\u2019s desire to restore the lost glory of that empire is well known, but those who are the children and heirs of the victims of its bloody expansion look on this anniversary with somewhat less enthusiasm than TRT World displayed.<\/p>\n

Some Greek Orthodox Christians to this day refer to May 29, 1453, as \u201cthe last day of the world.\u201d In a very real sense, that is exactly what it was: the end of over two thousand years of the Roman Empire, the end of what had for centuries been the world\u2019s foremost power and leading Christian state. The conquest of Constantinople meant the eclipse of Christianity in Asia Minor, which had been such an important center of the faith that three of Paul\u2019s New Testament epistles \u2014 Galatians, Ephesians, and Colossians \u2014 were addressed to Christian congregations there.<\/p>\n

Constantinople had been the center of Christianity in the eastern part of the Roman Empire, and the second see in the Church, after only Rome. After the East\/West schism of 1054, Constantinople was the heart of Orthodox Christianity. As\u00a0\u201cThe History of Jihad<\/a>\u201d recounts in detail, however, on Tuesday, May 29, 1453, the armies of the Ottoman Sultan Mehmet II finally broke through Constantinople\u2019s defenses after a long siege, marking the end of the great Christian Roman Empire.<\/p>\n

The conquerors were extraordinarily brutal, raiding monasteries and convents, emptying them of their inhabitants, and plundering private houses. They entered Hagia Sophia, which for nearly a thousand years had been the grandest church in Christendom. The faithful had gathered within its hallowed walls to pray during the city\u2019s last agony. The Muslims halted the celebration of\u00a0Orthros<\/em> (morning prayer), while the priests, according to legend, took the sacred vessels and disappeared into the cathedral\u2019s eastern wall, through which they shall return to complete the divine service one day. Muslim men then killed the elderly and weak and led the rest off into slavery.<\/p>\n

The Byzantine scholar Bessarion wrote to the Doge of Venice in July 1453, saying that Constantinople had been \u201csacked by the most inhuman barbarians and the most savage enemies of the Christian faith, by the fiercest of wild beasts. The public treasure has been consumed, private wealth has been destroyed, the temples have been stripped of gold, silver, jewels, the relics of the saints, and other most precious ornaments. Men have been butchered like cattle, women abducted, virgins ravished, and children snatched from the arms of their parents.\u201d<\/p>\n

When the slaughter and pillage were finished, Mehmed II ordered an Islamic scholar to mount the high pulpit of the Hagia Sophia and declare that there was no God but Allah, and Muhammad was his prophet. The magnificent old church was turned into a mosque; hundreds of other churches in Constantinople and elsewhere suffered the same fate. Millions of Christians joined the ranks of the\u00a0dhimmis<\/em>; others were enslaved, and many were killed.<\/p>\n

Once the Muslims had thoroughly subdued Constantinople, they set out to Islamize it. According to the Muslim chronicler Hoca Sa\u2019deddin, tutor of the sixteenth-century Sultans Murad III and Mehmed III, \u201cchurches which were within the city were emptied of their vile idols and cleansed from the filthy and idolatrous impurities and by the defacement of their images and the erection of Islamic prayer niches and pulpits many monasteries and chapels became the envy of the gardens of Paradise.\u201d<\/p>\n

It has come to be known as Black Tuesday, the Last Day of the World. Ever since, many Greek Christians regard Tuesday as unlucky. The world has forgotten what happened on Black Tuesday and on so many other days like it from India to Spain, and today persists in the fantasy that Islam does not contain an imperialist impulse and that Muslims can be admitted without limit into Western countries without any attempt to determine how many would like ultimately to subjugate and Islamize their new countries, the way their forefathers did to Constantinople so long ago.<\/p>\n

Related:<\/strong>\u00a0<\/em>Is the West Suffering From an Absence of Islam?<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

There are, however, some people who remember \u2014 and they want to do it again. Back in 2008, Sheik Ali Al-Faqir, former Jordanian minister of religious endowment,\u00a0said this<\/a>\u00a0on Al-Aqsa TV: \u201cWe proclaim that we will conquer Rome, like Constantinople was conquered once\u2026\u201d Hamas MP and Islamic cleric Yunis Al-Astal\u00a0said this<\/a>, also on Al-Aqsa TV several years ago: \u201cVery soon, Allah willing, Rome will be conquered, just like Constantinople was, as was prophesized by our Prophet Muhammad.\u201d<\/p>\n

The man who was the most popular Islamic TV preacher until his death several years ago, Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, also remembered.\u00a0In writing about<\/a>\u00a0\u201csigns of the victory of Islam,\u201d he referred to a hadith: \u201cThe Prophet Muhammad was asked: \u2018What city will be conquered first, Constantinople or Romiyya?\u2019 He answered: \u2018The city of\u00a0Hirqil<\/em>\u00a0[that is, the Roman emperor Heraclius] will be conquered first\u2019 \u2013 that is, Constantinople\u2026 Romiyya is the city called today \u2018Rome,\u2019 the capital of Italy. The city of\u00a0Hirqil<\/em>\u00a0[that is, Constantinople] was conquered by the young 23-year-old Ottoman Muhammad bin Morad, known in history as Muhammad the Conqueror, in 1453. The other city, Romiyya, remains, and we hope and believe [that it too will be conquered].\u201d<\/p>\n

Mehmed the Conqueror was motivated by exactly the same religious ideology that motivates the Islamic warriors of the contemporary era. They remember, and still celebrate, what happened in Constantinople on May 29, 1453. For free people in the West and elsewhere, May 29 should be a day for all those threatened by Islamic jihad and Sharia oppression to redouble our efforts to resist, so that more such catastrophes may never again destroy the lives of free people.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

May 29: The Last Day of the World \u201cOn May 29, 1453,\u201d the state-run Turkish broadcaster TRT World\u00a0reported happily on Thursday, the 572nd anniversary of the fateful day, \u201ca 21-year-old Sultan Mehmed II led the Ottoman army to a decisive victory over the Byzantine Empire. The conquest of Istanbul remains a shining jewel in the … Continue reading “”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28,34],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-110346","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history","category-moslems-jihadis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110346","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=110346"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110346\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":110347,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110346\/revisions\/110347"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=110346"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=110346"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=110346"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}