The main thrust of Islam into Europe after its defeat at the hands of Charles Martel at the Battle of Tours in AD 732, was to be in the East – via its centuries long campaign against the Byzantium Empire – the eastern continuation of the Empire of Rome. After the Crusades, the Turks were delayed no further and rapidly advanced into Europe. Bulgaria fell in 1389; Salonica in 1430; Serbia in 1438; and Greece in 1446. In 1453, Constantinople finally fell to the armies of Islam.
Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727), wrote the following concerning the Sixth Trumpet of the Apocalypse (which he believed symbolically heralded the rise of the Turks), and their eventual capture of Constantinople:
“The sixth trumpet [of the Apocalypse (Revelation 9:13)] sounded to the wars, which Daniel's King of the North made against the King [of the South]... In these wars the King of the North, according to Daniel, conquered the Empire of the Greeks, and also Judea, Egypt, Lybia, and Ethiopia: and by these conquests the Empire of the Turks was set up... These wars commenced A.C. [Anno Christi] 1258, when the four kingdoms of the Turks seated upon Euphrates... were invaded by the Tartars under Hulaeu, and driven into the western parts of Asia minor, where they made war upon the Greeks, and began to erect the present Empire of the Turks.... They slew the third part of men [i.e. in prophetic language – they captured a third part of the land area of the old Roman Empire], when they conquered the Greek Empire, and took Constantinople, A.C. 1453. and they began to be prepared for this purpose, when Olub-Arslan began to conquer the nations upon Euphrates, A.C. 1063. The interval is called an hour and a day, and a month and a year, or 391 prophetic days, which are years....” (From: Observations Upon the Prophecies of Daniel and the Apocalypse of St. John; published posthumously, London, 1733).
As a brief aside: the reprint of Newton's above work that I have, is an exact photographic duplicate of Thomas Jefferson's personal copy. In the 1991, Introduction to this facsimile edition, Arthur B Robinson writes the following:
“In 1988, having learned of this book in the rare books card catalogue of the Library of Congress, I asked to read it. I was astonished when, a few minutes later, I was handed Thomas Jefferson's personal copy. (The book is in excellent condition and has Thomas Jefferson's initials on pages 57 and 137. Two hundred and fifty years ago it was common practice for printers to label the page signatures with capital letters at the bottom of the actual text. Jefferson would turn to the 'J' signature and add a 'T' before the 'J' and then turn to the 'T' signature and add a 'J' after the 'T'. In this way he identified his personal books.)”
In the aforementioned quote, Newton writes: “The interval is called an hour and a day, and a month and a year, or 391 prophetic days, which are years....”, basing his calculation on the Protestant Reformers' Historicist interpretation of Bible prophecy. (In which – unlike the Futurist interpretation predominant in the Church today – these time periods are taken as being symbolic: where a day = a year; rather than being a literal time period. The Reformers' interpretation is based on, Numbers 14:34 and Ezekiel 4:6). Francois du Jon, the Huguenot leader, lawyer, theologian and preacher, wrote thus:
“Daies is commonly taken as yeares, that God in this sort might shew the time to be short, and that the space of time is definitely set downe by Him in His counsaile. The daies must be reckoned for so many yeares, after the example of the Prophets Ezechiel and Daniel.”
Some Historicist interpreters see in the, “hour and a day, and a month and a year” time period given above, a far more accurate, “space of time... set downe by Him (God) in His counsaile”; for they point out, that in the Greek the word translated “year” in Revelation 9:15, is not used elsewhere in the biblical prophecies, and that a more exact translation would be, “that which returns into itself... a full year of three hundred and sixty five and a quarter days, in which time the solar orb returns to the same spot...”; rather than the traditional reckoning of the biblical year, as being a year consisting of three hundred and sixty days.
Using the above measurement, and deducting three days for every 130 years, to keep the Gregorian calendar accurate. And by reckoning, “an hour” as a twelfth part of a day, i.e. a twelfth of a prophetic year, or thirty days – for Christ says (bearing in mind the different method of reckoning time in Eastern lands): “Are there not twelve hours in the day?” (John 11:9); which would give the following figures:
A year = 365 years 91 days
A month = 30 years
A day = 1 year
An hour = 30 days
Less 3 days
A total of 396 years and 118 days.
On the 18th day of January, AD 1057, Togrul Beg and his Turkish cavalry crossed, “the great river Euphrates” to wage war on the Byzantium Empire. Exactly 396 years and 118 days later (to the very day, as ordained by God's word), on the 16th day of May, AD 1453, the prize of Constantine's city of “New Rome”, Constantinople, fell to the forces of Islam under the command of Mohammed II.
Now to move on to what I wrote near the beginning of this post (and at the end of Part I) when I stated that, “the capture of Constantinople, would be a part of a series of events, that would have a profound and revolutionary affect on Christianity in Western Europe...”
The following is quoted from the book, The Jeremiah Diagnosis (published by Highland Books, 2000) and written by Derek Frank – who at the time of its writing was the Anglican Chaplain of All Saints', Vevey with St Peter's, Château-d' Oex, in Switzerland. In the first chapter, he writes the following:
“With the eye of faith it is not hard to see the sovereign hand of God throughout the story of the sixteenth century Reformation... [With] the emergence of the Renaissance.... scholars were consciously living a 're-birth' of classical learning... Though certain classical authors had been known through the Middle Ages, the study of Greek had been almost unknown in Western Europe before 1400.”
Now, here's the part that I find so fascinating: continuing straight on from the above, Derek Frank writes the following:
“However, when in 1453 Constantinople was sacked by the Turks, its classical scholars fled westwards, taking their books with them. With the arrival of both Greek manuscripts and academics who could read them, came two things. One was the opening up of the rational ways of Greek thinking, which was to have such great upside and also such great downside for the Reformation. The other was the technique it brought of going back to the original text, to ask what it originally meant. It was this which was to be critical in Luther's seminal discovery that the Greek word dikaios, 'just', contained two meanings, 'justice' (actually being just) and 'justification' (being counted as just).”
In Revelation 10:1-2, immediately after the Turkish second “woe” of the Sixth Trumpet, there appeared to John a vision of a, “mighty angel come down from heaven, clothed with a cloud: and a rainbow was upon his head, and his face was as it were the sun, and his feet as pillars of fire. And he had in his hand a little book open...”: The “Open Bible” of the Reformation.
After the first “woe” of the opening of the “bottomless pit” in the Apocalypse, and its ensuing plague of symbolic “locusts”, Revelation 9:12, states: “One woe is past; and, behold, there come two woes more hereafter”. Having dealt with the second, or “Turkish” woe above; the last or Seventh Trumpet “woe”, was to be subdivided up into seven vials or bowls of wrath, that are poured out upon the earth.
Concerning the Sixth Vial which is: “poured out... upon the great river Euphrates; and the water thereof was dried up...”, in the explanatory notes of our family's Bible (which does not contain the year of its publication – but is inscribed with the year 1866), the following is stated about this vial:
“The Euphrates is here used for 'the empire founded by the Euphratean horsemen [the Turks] of the sixth trumpet,' and the drying up of its waters 'to imply the exhaustion of all the political sources of wealth and power which contribute to the strength and greatness of... [that] empire...'”.
In Isaiah 8:7, God compares the conquests of the Assyrian empire to a river in flood: “Now therefore, behold, the Lord bringeth up upon them the waters of the river, strong and many, even the king of Assyria, and all his glory: and he shall come up over all his channels, and go over all his banks.”
In Revelation 16:12, the same imagery is used – but in reverse – to show the drying up of an empire!
All of the Ottoman provinces in North Africa passed into the hands of the European Powers before the outbreak of the First World War. France conquered Algeria 1830-47; Tunisia became a French protectorate in 1881; in 1912 Morocco ceased being an independent sultanate and became French and Spanish protectorates; Libya was conquered by Italy in 1911; and Egypt was under British occupation from 1882.
It was in the dried up left overs of the Turkish Empire in the Balkans – with its ethnic mix and its imperfectly formed borders – that the shots that would throw the world into the horrors of the First World War were fired. Whilst touring Sarajevo, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire was assassinated by Gavrilo Princip, a member of the Black Hand gang.
In The War of the World television series (Channel 4, 19th June, 2006; based on his book of the same name), the British historian, Professor Niall Ferguson remarked:
“The difficult thing to work out, is how an act of terrorism [the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand] in an obscure corner of 'Ruratania', could have such massive consequences? How exactly could the gunshots... have sparked-off the first of the century's two world wars? A conflict that all over the globe raged and claimed nearly 10 million lives. After all, assassinations were ten-a-penny in the early nineteen-hundreds. Terrorism was all the rage amongst extreme nationalists. Why did this one criminal act have such vast world shaking consequences?”
(“There was a great earthquake, such as was not since men were upon the earth, so mighty an earthquake, and so great.” Revelation 16:18).
Professor Ferguson continued:
“The answer is that when the Archduke was shot, he was driving over one of the world's great fault lines; the fateful historic border between the west and the east – the Occident and the Orient. The trouble with geological fault lines is as the earth's tectonic plates grind uneasily against one another, they're where earthquakes happen. There in Sarajevo it was the geo-political tectonic plates – known as empires, that were shifting. Turkey's was giving way [drying up!]; Austria's was pushing forward; and so too was Russia's...”
“Once, Bosnia had been a part of the Ottoman Empire... but in 1908 Austria had annexed Bosnia. When a Serb murdered their Archduke, the Austrians... demanded redress from Serbia and the Russians felt they could not afford to see Serbia humiliated. All the ingredients were thus in place for an imperial war between Austria and Russia over the balance of power in the Balkans.”
Borijove Jevtic, another Black Hand member, even went as far as stating that the very date of Franz Ferdinand's visit incensed him:
“How dared Franz Ferdinand, not only the representative of the oppressor but in his own person an arrogant tyrant, enter Sarajevo on that day? Such an entry was a studied insult. 28 June is the day on which the old Serbian kingdom was conquered by the Turks at the battle of Amselfelde.... That was no day for Franz Ferdinand, the new oppressor, to venture to the very doors of Serbia for a display of the force of arms which kept us beneath his heel. Our decision was taken almost immediately. Death to the tyrant!”
In the First World War, for the first time in human history, warfare's reign would no longer be confined to the land and the sea – for it claimed for itself a new realm in which to rage its rain of fire, death and destruction: that of the air.
“And the seventh angel poured out his vial into the air; and there came a great voice out of the temple of heaven, from the throne, saying, It is done.” (Revelation 16:17)
Ferrar Fenton translates the proclamation as:
“It has come.”
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