Today in history, a little-remembered episode that casts a long shadow over the present occurred. When we are told that modern-day jihadists have “hijacked” a peaceful religion, the events on a lonely hilltop at Otranto force us to confront a more uncomfortable truth: Entire caliphates — the most legitimate seat of Islamic power — once acted with the same “radicalism,” the same theological certainty, and the same blood-soaked methods as today’s “extremists.”
Background
When he conquered Constantinople in 1453, Ottoman Sultan Muhammad II — known as “the Conqueror” — was only 21 years old, with decades of conquest still ahead of him. The prophecies of his faith told him that “we will conquer Constantinople before we conquer Rome,” and he intended to see the second half fulfilled. Expanding through the Balkans, he crossed into Italy and in 1480 seized the city of Otranto.
The sack was merciless: More than half of its 22,000 Christian inhabitants were massacred, and 5,000 were carried off in chains. Then came the sultan’s “magnanimous” gesture: freedom for 800 captives on the single condition that they embrace Islam.
Instead, they chose the words of one among them: “My brothers, we have fought to save our city; now it is time to battle for our souls!”
Martyr’s Hill
So on August 14, 1480, an outraged Muhammad ordered the ritual decapitation of all 800 Christians on a barren knoll that would forever after be known as Martyr’s Hill. Their archbishop was slowly sawn in half to triumphant cries of “Allahu Akbar!” The skeletal remains of some of these martyrs are still displayed in the Cathedral of Otranto, silent witnesses to what took place.
In the words of an Italian contemporary,
When the city of Otranto was taken by the Ottoman forces in the year of Our Lord 1480, the invaders demanded that the Christians renounce their faith and convert to Islam. Those steadfast in the Christian confession — numbering over eight hundred — refused this demand. As a result, the Sultan’s men led them forth to the place now called the Martyrs’ Chapel and there, with cruel hands, executed them by the sword. Their bodies were left unburied, a grim testament to their faith and courage in the face of death. These brave souls have since been venerated by the faithful as holy martyrs who bore witness unto death rather than deny Christ [from Giovanni Antonio Summonte’s Historia della città di Napoli].
This was not the work of “lone wolves” or “twisted radicals.” It was the command of the most powerful Muslim ruler of his age — a man who was the virtual head of Sunni Islam and who kept around him a cadre of ulema, muftis, and scholars to approve his treatment of unbelievers. The same apparatus that administered the caliphate’s laws also sanctioned its beheadings.
Today’s political refrain that jihadist violence is a distortion of Islam collapses in the face of such history. The slaughter at Otranto was Islam as practiced by its caliph, its jurists, and its armies — just as the mass beheadings by the Islamic State and similar organizations were Islam as practiced by its self-declared caliph and his scholars. The difference is one of century, not of creed.
Incidentally, Sultan Muhammad II remains a hero in modern Turkey. President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s conversion of the Hagia Sophia back into a mosque was partly in homage to the man who had drenched Christendom’s greatest sanctuary in blood.
Not an Aberration
Otranto was, moreover, not an isolated atrocity. As recorded in centuries of chronicles, the leaders and spokesmen of Islam — sultans, caliphs, emirs, ulema, and sheikhs — have repeatedly spoken and acted like the Islamic State (or rather, the Islamic State has modeled itself on them). The record is consistent across nearly 14 centuries.
Even more sobering is that, then as now, much of the West preferred to deny reality rather than confront it. Pope Sixtus IV, appalled at Europe’s indifference after Otranto, warned:
Let them not think that they are protected against invasion, those who are at a distance from the theatre of war! … The Turks have sworn the extinction of Christianity. A truce to sophistries! It is the moment not to talk, but to act and fight!
This was an old lament. A generation before Constantinople’s fall, Cardinal Julian had already chastised Christendom for its factious indifference:
Look all around you, and see how the people of Christ are trodden upon and devoured by Turks, Saracens and Tartars [Muslims all]. Why do you not commiserate with the many thousands of your brothers, who year after year are reduced to the harsh servitude of the infidel?… But what is more pitiful, is that many of those who are led into captivity, and who are not able to bear such a hard servitude, deny the Catholic faith, and are led to the abhorrent sect of Mohammed. How many kingdoms, provinces, cities, towns are daily seized and depopulated? They have now cornered you in a small area in the west… Discord among Christians is the cause of all these calamities. If they would only grow wise and harbor love, this sort of persecution would soon end.
But the West remained in a stupor. Some 85 years after Otranto, in 1565, as the Ottomans prepared their massive siege of Malta, Pope Pius IV complained that the King of Spain “has withdrawn into the woods and France, England, and Scotland are ruled by women and boys.”
The Pattern Recognized
A few saw the pattern clearly. Sebastian Brant’s Ship of Fools (1494) lamented how Christendom had lost the strongholds it once held across the East:
Our faith was strong in the Orient … But now … we perish sleeping one and all / The wolf has come into the stall / And steals the Holy Church’s sheep / The while the shepherd lies asleep … Four sisters of our Church you find … Constantinople, Alexandria, Jerusalem, Antioch / But they’ve been forfeited and sacked / And soon the head [Rome] will be attacked.
To learned Europeans, the Ottoman threat was simply the latest wave in a relentless tide. As one contemporary clergyman put it: “The Arabs were the first troops of locusts … the Turks, a brood of vipers, are worse than their parent, the Saracens, their mother.”
The names change — Umayyad, Abbasid, Ottoman, al-Qaeda, Boko Haram, Islamic State — but the creed and the methods remain. Each is a fresh brood of vipers hatched from the same nest, carrying forward the same jihad.
The Martyrs of Otranto are a reminder that the past is never really past, and that the chasm between the Islam of the caliphates and the Islam of modern “extremists” is an illusion we impose on ourselves.
Raymond Ibrahim, author of Defenders of the West and Sword and Scimitar, is the Distinguished Senior Shillman Fellow at the Gatestone Institute and the Judith Rosen Friedman Fellow at the Middle East Forum.
