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Updated: July 5, 2025
The summer is in all its glory, the gardens are gorgeous in their fresh verdure, the clear waters of the Bosporus glitter like brightly polished metal. But what a day of humiliation and terror was this day of May, 1453! In the early morning tidings of misfortune were disseminated among the citizens. The Turkish Sultan had stormed in through the walls with his innumerable troops.
In 1453 Constantinople was taken by the Turks, and many Greek scholars, with their manuscripts, fled into Italy, where they began teaching their language and literature, and especially the philosophy of Plato. There had been little or no knowledge of Greek in western Europe during the Middle Ages, and only a very imperfect knowledge of the Latin classics.
When at last the eastern capital of the Empire fell, it was not into the hands of the Germans, but into those of the Turks, who have held it since 1453. There will be no room in this volume to follow the history of the Eastern Empire, although it cannot be entirely ignored in studying western Europe.
*Garrick is here quoting from one of Johnson's own poems in which he describes the decline of the drama at the Restoration. The story of Irene is one of the fall of Constantinople in 1453. After Mahomet had taken Constantinople he fell in love with a fair Greek maiden whose name was Irene. The Sultan begged her to become a Mohammedan so that he might marry her.
Why, in 1453, did not Constantine in his day of trouble listen to your brainy countryman, and save Europe from the inroads of the Turk? Well, I hastened to Washington City, determined that no ear other than the President's own should hear the secret; and that no power on earth should draw it from me. I went to the White House.
Less than a century later, viz., between the years A.C. 475 and 480, the Western Empire was finally extinguished by Odoacer; the Eastern Empire surviving it nearly a thousand years, lasting as the latter did from the partition in A.C. 395 to the capture of Constantinople by Mahomet II. in A.C. 1453.
All nations have a share in them. They go back to Austria's annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1908; to the Congress of Berlin in 1878; to the Franco-Prussian War in 1870; to the Prusso-Austrian War in 1866; to the conquest of Constantinople by the Turks in 1453. Yes, they go back further still, if you like, to the time when Cain killed Abel!
During the first two centuries of the University's existence, the Chancellor was a resident official; but in the fifteenth century it became customary to elect some great ecclesiastic, who was able by his influence and wealth to promote the interests of Oxford and Oxford scholars; such an one was George Neville, the brother of the King-Maker Earl of Warwick, who became Chancellor in 1453 at the age of twenty.
Thus every particular of the history of this man who showed so great a genius for colonisation, is of the deepest interest, and it is well worth while to record some particulars of his family, his education, and his early exploits. Alfonzo d'Alboquerque or d'Albuquerque, was born in 1453 at Alhandra, eighteen miles from Lisbon.
Lords it had of the last, and the great line of the Earls of Shrewsbury presently rose and led Sheffield men back to battle in France, where the first earl fell on the bloody field, and so many of the men died with him in 1453 that there was not a house in all the region which did not mourn a loss.
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