3rd week- sorry, I couldn't find the word document I saved this in until now!

I found it interesting earlier in this week’s class, when Dr. Metcalf briefly mentioned the gazi warriors being misunderstood, that they happen to be Muslims that were warriors, conquerors, seems to be a theme in history/media now, tying Islam to violence.

The whole idea of the Janissaries is fascinating, slaves from conquered areas being used as soldiers and rising up in societies. The somewhat elaborate system is pretty clever, they were slaves and had limitations like they couldn’t marry until retiring, but then these boys were given immense opportunity to rise up in the Ottoman hierarchy and cumulate wealth. It worked well for the Ottomans, because they took the strongest, most promising boys for their army, and the families of the children eventually understood the positive aspects of exchange. It was just generally interesting, sorry if I am summarizing a little bit.

The lecture on the Fall of Constantinople was interesting, and I really enjoyed the discussion of the different versions of the Fall of Constantinople. The ingenuity of Mehmet II was clear- he actually built a castle nearby to base his siege from, to be honest it peaked my interest as a tourist if nothing else! The siege and fall of the city was important however, since Constantinople was the “symbolic center of eastern Christendom” until it fell, and Istanbul proved to be strategically located for the Ottomans.[1]

Comparing the different accounts of the event and discussing which would be more influential to a historian was surprising, as I had a completely different view from the rest of the class. The issue of the use of subjective accounts in research has been coming up in other classes, and usually brings heated discussion. I still stick by my choice, the second article, as the most useful but I understand whole all the accounts are important to research in their own way, even the last account in which the Christian author used a historical event for his political agenda.

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[1] Cleveland 39

Islamic culture and the Seljik Turks

In class last week we learned a little more about Islamic culture and the beginnings of the Ottoman Empire. I already knew some of basic information about the religion, but I was interested to read and learn about women in the culture and more similarities to Christianity. In one of the books, Esposito's I believe, they mention that Mary, mother of Jesus, is mentioned more times in the Quran than she is in the New Testament, and then in class we learned about Muhammad’s first wife who was a strong woman who ran her own business and proposed to Muhammad. This contrasts with the typical portrayal of the sexist nature of Islam, as we had learned about the choice involved in wearing a veil and its meaning in modern society. In previous classes I have tended to be more interested in gender issues, and will probably bring this up in the future, just to warn you all.

This is the first history class I have taken that really discusses the history of the Turks, and the rather large scale battle of Manziked between the Seljik Turks and the Byzantines was interesting. The outcome of the battle was particularly important as they moved into Anatolia and the area went from a Greek speaking Christian area to a Turkish speaking Muslim one (Cleveland 33). Later the Mongols come and are characteristically disruptive, and affect Turkish culture.

The film we watched in the first class was still on my mind earlier this week, and when I was looking through ‘Middle East’ section on http://news.bbc.co.uk/ I noticed the different portrayal of civilian causalities. There was a story about a little girl who was recovering from severe wounds from a fire started by Israeli soldiers who used white phosphorus, which causes terrible burns. I can’t find that particular story now, but here is another one about a family that was affected by the fires: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7848768.stm. Out of curiosity I looked at the international part of CNN’s site, which I have never liked, and could not find a similar story or one that was concerned over the use of white phosphorus against civilians. I did find another on the BBC site which further discussed the use of white phosphorus and concerns by human rights groups (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7850085.stm). This seems to follow the idea of the film we watched, that the U.S. media does not give a fair portrayal of the situation even when civilians are targeted with dangerous weapons.