Is there a link between the siege of Constantinople of 1453 and the fall of Tenochtitlan, the capital of the Mexica Empire, in 1521? Can we analyze together events that were separated by seventy years and link two peoples who had no knowledge of each other’s existence? Eleni Kefala poses these questions in her attempt to examine the sieges of these once imperial cities. Through beautiful prose, which is as attentive to form as it is to content, she compares what is not usually compared. While traditional readers might wince at the thought of bringing together the pre-Columbian with the Byzantine, Kefala does exactly this with much insight. As she explains in her Preface, the study came into being in Dumbarton Oaks, the only research institution in the world which fosters research into these two unrelated societies.
The general aim of the book is to investigate collective memory and response to trauma by looking at how the people of Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine Empire, reacted to the seizure of their city by the Ottoman forces, and how the inhabitants of Tenochtitlan-Tlatelolco, the capital of the Mexica Empire, understood the sacking of their city by Spanish fighters and their indigenous allies.[1] As a literary scholar, Kefala focusses specifically on three sorrowful poems about these two events, “The Lament for Constantinople,” the “Huexotzinca Piece,” and the “Tlaxcala Piece.” Composed anonymously in the decades after the conquest of each city, these laments attempted to come to terms with the loss of empire and the passing of a way of life. Kefala reads all three texts with a sharp critical eye, sensitive to the literary qualities of each poem, demonstrating how each makes its claims of trauma through rhetorical devices.
It is fascinating that predictions of doom began to foretell the end of the Byzantine and Mexica Empires decades if not centuries before the actual events.[2] Byzantine eschatological scenarios calculated that the world would end at around 1492, the year that Columbus sailed for the New World and which marked the fall of Granada. Although Byzantine prophecies missed their target by about forty years, they did predict the end of their society and, in a serendipitous way, the fall of an empire across the world whose existence they had not known.
After examining how the people of each empire were obsessed by the looming destruction of the world, Kefala poses the central question of her investigation: “What is there to compare between the imperial cities of Constantinople and Tenochtitlan beyond the fact that, on the grand scale of history, they were conquered nearly simultaneously” (9). What do Byzantium and America have in common?
Although Kefala does not devote much time to exploring the theoretical nature of her enterprise, by trying to link America and Byzantium she engages in what I have called elsewhere “incongruous comparison,” which I define as an attempt to juxtapose ideas, authors, institutions, texts that do not share a common history or geography. Incongruous comparison highlights both the logic and agreement that traditional conceptions of comparison presume and necessitate and the discordant note that this practice actually strikes.[3] Needless to say, these comparisons risk being rejected by traditional scholarship for, despite the paeans to interdisciplinarity, scholars still look askance at outsiders stepping into their fields.
Kefala engages in incongruous comparison with great profit. What allows her analysis to take place are two developments which she says occurred at the “cusp of modernity.” In the first process, that of “exogenous inferiorization,” western Europeans cast non-European peoples and cultures as subordinate. And in the second, “endogenous inferiorization,” Europeans defined certain periods of their own past, such as the Byzantine era, as minor. This “irrational myth of modernity,” the representation of the West as superior and the simultaneous representation of the Other as savage and belated, brought together “the Eastern Roman Empire and indigenous America in an unlikely relationship” (11).
Kefala devotes the bulk of her study, Chapters Three and Four, to an analysis of the three above-mentioned laments, which relied on written sources as well as long oral traditions in their respective cultures. While all three texts deal with sorrow and destruction, they differ in how they assign blame. For instance, whereas the “Lament for Constantinople” rails against the enemy Ottomans, the “Huexotzinca Piece” focusses on divine intervention, and “Tlaxcala Piece” castigates the Spaniards along with Mexica’s historical enemies who allied themselves with the invading Europeans.
Kefala begins Chapter Four by referring to the many laments that had been generated by the fall of Constantinople. Indeed, there is a long tradition of the ritual lament that scholars have traced back to Homer’s Iliad, Greek tragedies, and the service of the lamentations of Good Friday in the Orthodox Church. Kefala focusses specifically on the most famous of these, the “Anakalema tes Konstantinopoles” (Lament for Constantinople), which was written in the vernacular Greek of the time so as to be intelligible to a vast number of readers and listeners. Remarkably, it bears a close resemblance to the account of the siege of Constantinople by the Byzantine historian Michael Kritovoulos (1410–1470) in his History (known as History of Mehmed the Conqueror, 1467), which, according to Kefala, shows that both authors relied on shared sources. The lament portrays the sacking of Constantinople as a traumatic event that signaled the divine abandonment of the city and the empire.
Kefala then turns to the Mexica songs, the “Huexotzinca Piece” and “Tlaxcala Piece,” which, in providing the indigenous perspective of the siege of 1521, defy the Spanish versions promulgated by the letters of Cortés to the Emperor Charles V and by Bernal Díaz’s del Castillo’s (1496–1584) True History of the Conquest of New Spain (1550’s–1584). The two Mexica texts, part of what are known as the Cantares mexicanos, also drew on traditional sources and written accounts to articulate their claims of trauma. Both were composed by educated songwriters who were aware of traditional modes of poetry and of telling stories of war and sorrow.
Kefala argues that, unlike the Byzantines, the Mexica did not necessarily see themselves as conquered, vanquished, or helpless. While Spanish writers presented the conquest as a discontinuity and rupture from the past, indigenous people saw it in the context of human negligence and the ongoing shift of fortune resulting from war and conflict. But all three texts, though separated by many decades and thousands of miles, mourn the fall of each city as a synecdoche for the destruction of their respective empires.
In the final chapter Kefala addresses the differing fate of these songs. The “Lament for Constantinople” became an important source by which later Greeks understood the taking of the city and the fall of the Byzantine Empire. It was appropriated in the struggle for Greek independence launched in 1821 and, once the state had been established, it was incorporated into school curricula and is widely known today.
The Cantares mexicanos, by contrast, disappeared only to be discovered in the second half of the nineteenth century. What accounts for this difference in fate? Kefala argues that, while the authors of the two Mexica laments saw the siege of Tenochtitlan as a traumatic event, the society around them was not inclined to trauma claims. Moreover, the nationalism of the creoles that led to the Mexican war of independence (1810–1821) saw the conquest as a rupture leading to the creation of a new entity, the Mexican nation state. Even though the discourse of mestizaje traced a continuity between the pre- and post-Columbian past, in reality it marginalized indigenous traditions. The two laments were never part of school curricula.
Ultimately, however, we also have here different conceptions and practices of empire, something that Kefala never discusses. The Ottoman Empire represented the traditional form of empire which expanded its contiguous territory and which managed diversity through its system of millets, wherein each millet (ethno-religious group) enjoyed considerable cultural autonomy. The Orthodox church, for instance, enhanced its power and prestige under Ottoman control. Although there were periods of forced or voluntary conversion, the Greek-speaking Orthodox subjects of the Ottoman Empire preserved their cultural autonomy and could launch in 1821 the first nationalist struggle for independence, that is, a war against foreign rule.
The situation could not have been more different in Latin America. The Spaniards came to plunder and also to proselytize, as the Peruvian Marxist writer José Carlos Mariátegui (1894–1930) makes clear.[4] The priest was as important as the soldier in the conquest of Latin America. That the Spaniards did not succeed entirely does not mean they did not try to exterminate local religious worship. And the empire they created pointed to the new systems of modernity by which the metropolis extracted labor and resources from distant territory for its enrichment.
In short, the pre-Columbian past could not fare as well as the pre-Ottoman could in the case of Greece. We can see this in the case of two historians. Writing in Greek rather than the language of the conquerors, Kritovoulos saw himself as heir to a distinguished tradition of Greek historiography going back to Thucydides. By contrast, Garcilaso de la Vega el Inca, the author of the Royal Commentaries of the Incas (Comentarios reales de los Incas, 1609), composed his history of the Incas in the language of the conquerors in order to explain to them the culture of his maternal ancestors. Born to a conquistador father and an Inca princess, he was one of the first Americans, if by that we mean a product of the mixing of colonizer and colonized. But, as a Catholic confronting the harsh measures of Spanish censors, he had to reconcile his Christian faith with the idolatry of the Incas. In order to succeed he had to concoct the improbable theory that the Incas, in their worship of the Sun, had actually paved the way for the triumph of Catholicism in the Americas.[5] In other words, Garcilaso de la Vega el Inca experienced the assimilating pressures of the new type of empire which attempted to obliterate previous cultural practices as much as exploit the people who had conceived them. His Spanish readers were not interested in Inca laments.
Writing about the situation in Mexico, Kefala concludes that the tears about the fall of Tenochtitlan have been relegated to memory. But, in comparing the different fates of the Greek and Mexica laments, Kefala demonstrates what we gain when we engage in incongruous comparisons, when we bring together songs, authors, and places distantly removed. The one begins to illuminate the other in surprising ways, the strange becomes familiar and the familiar strange. Coming to the end of her book, you cannot help but agree that it does make sense to compare the incomparable.
Notes
[1] The Mexica people whom Cortés encountered in 1519 spoke Nahuatl and probably did not refer to themselves as Aztecs, a name that became popular in the nineteenth century. Likewise, the Byzantines called themselves Romaioi, that is, Romans.
[2] The same thing happened in the Inca Empire.
[3] See my blog a “Journey through Comparison.”
[4] José Carlos Mariátegui. Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality. Translated by Marjory Urguidi. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1971.
[5] I have discussed this in “From Cuzco to Constantinople. Rethinking Postcolonialism,” in Postcolonialism Cross-Examined. Multidirectional Perspectives on Imperial and Colonial Pasts and the Neo-Colonial Present. Edited by Monika Albrecht. Routledge, 2019.