A world Without Islam pdfdrive com

Russia and the Third Rome
The Eastern Roman Empire had come to an end, but the imperial tradition of
Orthodox faith could not be allowed to perish with Constantinople. It was
quickly taken up by Tsar Ivan III of Russia, who moved to declare Moscow the
“Third Rome”—successor to the Roman and Byzantine Christian seats of power.
To strengthen his claim, he forged a vital dynastic link to Constantinople through
his marriage to Sophia Paleolog, the niece of the last emperor of Byzantium.
Ivan III also adopted for his own use the Byzantine coat of arms—the double-
headed eagle—which still remains on the Russian coat of arms today.
The assumption of the title of “Third Rome” denoted far more for Moscow
than mere imperial pretension: it represented a messianic vision of a new
civilizational and spiritual role, an obligation that had now fallen upon Russia to
preserve the true faith of Christianity against the heresies and evils of both
Roman Catholicism and Islam. The messianic flavor of this new Russian mission
is perfectly captured in a letter from the monk Philotheus of Pskov to Tsar Basil
III:
The Church of Old Rome fell for its heresy; the gates of the Second
Rome were hewn down by the axes of the infidel Turks; but the Church of
Moscow, the Church of the New Rome shines brighter than the sun in the
whole universe. Thou, Basil, art the one universal sovereign of all the
Christian folk; thou should hold the reins in awe of God; fear Him who
hath committed them to thee. Two Romes have fallen but the Third stands
fast; a Fourth there cannot be. Thy Kingdom shall not be given to another.
Continuities, with or without Islam, do not stop there. The concept of “Third
Rome” was not lost on the Ottomans either. In a fascinating fusion of Muslim
and Christian historical visions in the Eastern Mediterranean, Sultan Mehmet II,
after the conquest, began to refer to himself as the successor to Byzantine
imperial tradition and adopted the title Kayser-i-Rum (Emperor of the Roman
Empire). He drew on selected Byzantine court and administrative customs for
his own empire, including maintenance of its multinational, multireligious
character. In a fascinating extension of the same theme, the Turkish historian
I˙lber Ortayı suggests that Mehmet now saw Ottoman Constantinople itself as
the “Third Rome”—successor to pagan Rome in Italy and to Eastern Orthodox
“Rome” in Constantinople—now an “Islamic Rome” in Istanbul. In this view,

---

Islam did not represent a rejection of Eastern Christianity; rather, in powerful
continuity, it picked up and smoothly adopted much of the Eastern imperial
tradition from Christianity and integrated it into what would be the world’s
biggest and longest-lasting Muslim empire. Empire looms larger than faith in
this great transition.
A recent reviewer of a book on the Ottomans and the West comments:
… the skirmishes and the pitched battles that raged between the
Hapsburgs and the Ottomans [around the gates of Vienna], and their
numerous vassals on both sides, represented not so much a “clash of
civilizations” as a collision of empires. For all the pious sloganeering that
accompanied it, the struggle was only incidentally one between Islam and
Christianity. Territory was the aim, along with something less tangible but
equally compelling: the right to claim the legacy of the Roman Empire….
Had not… Mehmed the Conqueror toppled the Byzantines and seized
Constantinople two centuries before? Far from wishing to obliterate the
Byzantine past, the Ottomans meant to assume it as their own…

---