Why Turkey Celebrates the Historic Slaughter and Rape of Christians

While the West continues self-flagellating over its past, Turkey just celebrated a day when its ancestors slaughtered, raped, and enslaved tens of thousands of people solely for the “crime” of being Christian.

On Friday, May 29, 2026—the 573^rd anniversary of the conquest of Constantinople (now Istanbul)—Turkey held nationwide celebrations. As usual, Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan participated, including by honoring and finding “inspiration” in Muhammad (or Mehmet) the conqueror of Constantinople:

The faith, determination, and courage of Fatih [Conqueror] Sultan Mehmet and his heroic soldiers during the conquest of Istanbul give us inspiration today to achieve the goal of the Turkish century…. I remember Fatih Sultan Mehmet and our beloved martyrs with compassion, respect, and gratitude, who left us a legacy of this world city of unique beauty, and I greet all our citizens with my most heartfelt sentiments.

In order to understand the significance of what may seem to be benign remarks, some much-needed background is necessary.

Towards the end of the first millennium, the Turks, whose origins lay in the eastern steppes of Asia, had become Muslim and began to raid and conquer portions of Asia Minor, which was then, and had been for a millennium, Christian.

By the end of the fourteenth century, they had entirely conquered Asia Minor (today “Turkey”) and began eying Constantinople, just across the Bosporus. Although generations of Turks had repeatedly besieged it, it would fall to Ottoman Sultan Muhammad II, Erdoğan’s hero.

But why did Sultan Muhammad and his Muslim predecessors attack Constantinople in the first place? What made it an enemy to the Turks?

The same thing that made every non-Muslim nation an enemy: not only was it “infidel”—in this case, Christian—and therefore in need of subjugating; but as New Rome, Muslims—starting with the Muslim prophet Muhammad, as Erdoğan acknowledged during May 29 celebrations—had always eyed and desired it.

That was the sole justification and pretext—the sole “grievance”—that propelled the Turks to besiege it (as their Arab counterparts did eight centuries earlier): the kingdom of Constantinople was peopled by non-Muslims who refused to submit to Islam.

From the start, deceit was part of Sultan Muhammad II’s arsenal. When he first became sultan and was too busy consolidating his authority to engage in conquest, Muhammad “swore by the god of their false prophet, by the prophet whose name he bore,” a bitter Christian contemporary retrospectively wrote, that “he was their [the Christians’] friend, and would remain for the whole of his life a friend and ally of Constantinople.”

Although the Christians believed him, Muhammad was taking advantage of “the basest arts of dissimulation and deceit,” wrote Edward Gibbon. “Peace was on his lips while war was in his heart.”

Muhammad also exhorted his Muslim army with jihadist ideology once the siege commenced in the Spring of 1453, including by unleashing throngs of preachers who cried throughout the Muslim camp surrounding Constantinople:

Children of Muhammad, be of good heart, for tomorrow we shall have so many Christians in our hands that we will sell them, two slaves for a ducat, and will have such riches that we will all be of gold, and from the beards of the Greeks we will make leads for our dogs, and their families will be our slaves. So be of good heart and be ready to die cheerfully for the love of our [past and present] Muhammad.

“Recall the promises of our Prophet concerning fallen warriors in the Koran,” Sultan Muhammad himself exhorted: “the man who dies in combat shall be transported bodily to paradise and shall dine with [prophet] Muhammad in the presence of women, handsome boys, and virgins.”

The mention of “handsome boys” was not just an accurate reference to the Koran’s promise (e.g., 52:24, 56:17, and 76:19); Sultan Muhammad II was a notorious pedophile. His enslavement and rape of Jacob Notaras—a handsome 14-year-old nobleman’s son in Constantinople, whom Muhammad forced into becoming his personal catamite until he escaped—was only one of the most infamous. Vlad III Dracula’s younger brother, “Radu the Handsome,” was also forcibly turned into Muhammad’s catamite.

Or consider the lecherous behavior of Muhammad’s army once it had conquered Constantinople (the following quotes are all from contemporary sources and eyewitnesses):

When they [the Ottoman army] had massacred and there was no longer any resistance, they were intent on pillage and roamed through the town stealing, disrobing, pillaging, killing, raping, taking captive men, women, children, old men, young men, monks, priests, people of all sorts and conditions.… There were virgins who awoke from troubled sleep to find those brigands standing over them with bloody hands and faces full of abject fury.… [The Turks] dragged them, tore them, forced them, dishonored them, raped them at the cross-roads and made them submit to the most terrible outrages.… Tender children were brutally snatched from their mothers’ breasts and girls were pitilessly given up to strange and horrible unions, and a thousand other terrible things happened.

Because thousands of citizens had fled to and were holed up in Hagia Sophia—for a millennium, one of the Christian world’s grandest basilicas, today a mosque—it offered an excellent harvest of slaves once its doors were axed down:

One Turk would look for the captive who seemed the wealthiest, a second would prefer a pretty face among the nuns. … Each rapacious Turk was eager to lead his captive to a safe place, and then return to secure a second and a third prize. … Then long chains of captives could be seen leaving the church and its shrines, being herded along like cattle or flocks of sheep.

The slavers sometimes fought each other to the death over “any well-formed girl,” even as many of the latter “preferred to cast themselves into the wells and drown rather than fall into the hands of the Turks.”

Muhammad’s entry into Constantinople by Jean-Joseph Benjamin-Constant.

Having taken possession of the Hagia Sophia, the invaders “engaged in every kind of vileness within it, making of it a public brothel.” On “its holy altars” they enacted “perversions with our women, virgins, and children,” including “the Grand Duke’s daughter who was quite beautiful.” She was forced to “lie on the great altar of Hagia Sophia with a crucifix under her head and then raped.”

Next “they paraded the [Hagia Sophia’s main] Crucifix in mocking procession through their camp, beating drums before it, crucifying the Christ again with spitting and blasphemies and curses. They placed a Turkish cap … upon His head, and jeeringly cried, ‘Behold the god of the Christians!’”

Practically all other churches in the ancient city suffered the same fate. “The crosses which had been placed on the roofs or the walls of churches were torn down and trampled.” The Eucharist was “thrown to the ground and kicked.” Bibles were stripped of their gold or silver illuminations before being burned. “Icons were without exception given to the flames.” Patriarchal vestments were placed on the haunches of dogs; priestly garments were placed on horses.

“Everywhere there was misfortune, everyone was touched by pain” when Sultan Muhammad finally made his grand entry into the city. “There were lamentations and weeping in every house, screaming in the crossroads, and sorrow in all churches; the groaning of grown men and the shrieking of women accompanied looting, enslavement, separation, and rape.”

Finally, Muhammad had the “wretched citizens of Constantinople” dragged before his men during evening festivities and “ordered many of them to be hacked to pieces, for the sake of entertainment.” The rest of the city’s population—as many as 45,000—was hauled off in chains to be sold as slaves.

This is the man whom Turkey and its president honor.

The message is clear: jihadist ideology dominates the highest echelons of Turkey. Hating, invading, and conquering neighboring peoples—not due to any grievances but because they are non-Muslim—with all the attending atrocities, rapes, destruction, and mass slavery is apparently the ideal, to resume once the sunset of Western power is complete. According to Erdoğan’s own daughter, Esra, this will happen any day now: “There is little left for the Islamic crescent to break the Western cross,” she tweeted in 2023.

Meanwhile, because Americans are used to seeing their own nation’s heroes toppled—for no other reason than they were white and/or Christian, and therefore inherently evil—the significance of Erdoğan’s words and praise of Muhammad II—who as a Muslim is further immune from Western criticism, as that would be “racist”—remains lost on them.