By Raymond Ibrahim:
A little remembered event that occurred 538 years ago today – the ritual decapitation of 800 Christians who refused Islam – sheds much light on modern questions concerning the ongoing conflict between Islam and the West.
Context: Though primarily remembered for sacking Constantinople in 1453, because Ottoman sultan Mehmed II was only twenty-one years old then, he still had many good decades of jihading before him. He continued expanding into the Balkans, and, in his bid to feed his horses on the altar of Saint Peter’s basilica – Muslim prophecies held that “we will conquer Constantinople before we conquer Rome” – he invaded Italy and captured Otranto in 1480. More than half of its twenty-two thousand inhabitants were massacred, five thousand led away in chains.
Read more: American Thinker
