The Present Shapes the Past . . .

So said the historian Marc Bloch. An important point if you want to contemplate how human kinds endure for centuries. What's the nature of our connection to those long-dead people we claim as forbears?

A good example comes from The Economist's review this week of a book about the day in 1453 when the Greeks lost Constantinople to the Turks under Mehmet the Conqueror. The anonymous Economister writes:

Were they “Greeks” and “Turks” in the modern sense? Of course not, because the nation-state had not been invented. On the attacking side, the best troops were Slavic; so, it seems, were at least half the genes of Mehmet; his feisty commander, Zaganos Pasha, was of Greek origin. The defenders included Venetians, Catalans and above all Genoese.

We moderns, alive now, are the ones who decide that today's Greeks and Turks are ``the same'' as the two sides that fought in 1453. To note the ``Greeks'' weren't Greek and the ``Turks'' not all Turkish is not to debunk cherished traditions. It is simply to note that our connection to the past is always made in the present. When people try to find great and eternal truths in that connection, then, they're chasing their own tales.