btw Fred, I personnally am a Greek Orthodox Christian. In Eastern Christian culture, there has been a saying for a few hundreds of years:
"It is better to suffer under the sword of "Muhammad" than live thru the blessing of the pope." That was first said *BEFORE* the fall of Constantinoupoli in 1453 AD and has remained true until very recently.
This was something new to me. Although I was aware of the Eastern Orthodox Church being separate from the Roman Catholics, itself different from the Anglican and Protestants, an attitude of this sort was something interesting.I remember Yusuf Islam (formerly Cat Stevens) once told us in Doha about his childhood that he hated Islam because being of Greek ancestry, they hated everything Turkish and Islam was one such thing. So why did the Eastern Orthodox church have such an intense rivalry with the Romans? Is this something real and historically documented? Well yes it seems so.
Ducas or (Wikipedia:Doukas_(historian)) is quoted to have remarked on the scene inside Hagia Sofia during siege of Constantinople in 1453,
- "Pg 93, Mehmed the Conqueror and His Time. Babinger,Hickman Princeton University Press 2nd Ed"
“If at that moment," writes Ducas, “an angel had really descended from heaven and cried out, ‘Accept church union and I will drive your enemies from the
city,’ they would still have refused to profess union and would rather have surrendered to the Turks than to the Roman church?"
The Greek admiral and commander Lucas Notaras is also quoted to have said,
"Rather the Turkish turbans than the Roman miter."Pg 96 Ibid
The reasons for this mostly trace back to the sack of Constantinople by the Romans in the Fourth Crusade, a destructive invasion like that of Baghdad by Mongols.More on that later.
