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Ρομά/Τσιγγάνοι/Γύφτοι

Δημήτρης Καπράνος

22 November, 2023

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«In this way in our wretched age this ancient, noble, wealthy city, […], captured by ragging barbarians, was sacked for three days and reduced to wretched servitude […] . It [i.e. Constantinople] is now a vanquished captive, cruelly and basely destroyed; its citizens […] brutally slaughtered before their fathers’ gates, noble virgins, innocent boys, worthy matrons, venerable nuns, seized, slain, raped; its churches […] torn to pieces […] What more is there to say? Wherever you went you heard nothing but groans and wails. O the shameful barbarity, O the inhuman cruelty, O the intolerable viciousness and savagery of the perpetrators! […] Add to this that the raging barbarians who did all these heinous deeds not only captured a royal city, destroyed its churches, and defiled their sacred ornaments, but accomplished the ruin of an entire nation, obliterating the civilization that was Greece: more than 12o.ooo volumes […] [were] destroyed. And so, the Greek language, and the literature of the Greeks created, extended, and perfected by so great an expenditure of time, so much labor, so much skill-annihilated, extinguished!» Lauro Quirini, Βενετός, (1420 - c. 1479).
Letter to Pope Nicholas V, on the Fall of Constantinople (Candia, Crete, 15 July 1453), in Renaissance Humanism: An Anthology of Sources/edited and translated, with an introduction by Margaret L. King, Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 2014, pp. 108-12.