A List Of Absences

(Istanbul.)

Poul Anderson's list descriptions often present dynamic urban life. However, one negative list evokes the opposite. Constantinople on 13 April, 1204, has no:

slap of buskins;
clop of hoofs;
rumble or squeal of cartwheels;
ringing bells;
voices;
children's games.

Instead, there is:

stillness;
the distant roar of shrieks and a fire;
a dog's desperate bark.

Poul Anderson, There Will Be Time (New York, 1973), X, p. 105.

Anderson always emphasizes the suffering caused by war. However, this is not a war but a massacre of Eastern Christians by Western Crusaders:

"So perished much classical art, and nearly all classical writing, which Constantinople had kept safe until these days. It was not true that the Turks of 1453 were responsible. The Crusaders were there before them.
"Afterward came the great silence, broken by furtive crying, and the stench, and the sickness, and the hunger.
"In this wise, at the beginning of that thirteenth century which Catholic apologists call the apogee of civilization, did Western Christendom destroy its Eastern flank. A century and a half later, having devoured Asia Minor, the Turks entered Europe." (IX, pp. 100-101.)

Anderson comments on conflicts in the twentieth century - and in the thirteenth.

To this day, I understand, Muslim jihadists describe their Western antagonists as "Crusaders." We live with history but can transcend it.