Nonsense About Ottoman Cyprus, Etc.

IT'S past 3:40 in the morning and I should really be going to sleep. My schedule for tomorrow looks like this: Wake up at 7 a.m., shower, clean up a bit; go to university; spend 6-8 hours at university depending on whether I'll come home during the 2-hour break; clean up a bit more; and prepare for the weekend since I don't seem to have classes on Fridays yet.

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THE Latin class may have to be dropped because both tutorials clash with Greek classes, but I finished a worksheet except for two questions this evening, and it was rather a monumental undertaking. First of all, hopping between Wiktionary, a paperback English-Latin dictionary, a German treasury of Latin vocabulary, and a German-Latin website, to search out the mot juste for the German-to-Latin translations and verify the declension or conjugation took a while. Besides I buried myself in the Latin grammar, where it explains when to use an ablativus cum infinitivo construction, which constructions to use to replace nonexistent future conjunctives, etc., and that non dubito pairs with quin instead of quod or ut or ne. It's like trying to learn the rules and 'plays' of chess. I played this little sport every Sunday morning last semester, to submit the worksheet per email as obligatory, so at any rate it's not unaccustomed.

THEN I read a few brief paragraphs which were assigned to us from a history (an introduction to the Ottoman Empire which also stood on last year's Ottoman history lecture reading list) to illustrate the realities of Ottoman rule. For instance in Cyprus, this rule began when it was conquered from the Venetians who had held it since the 15th? century in 1571, despite the victory of the inimical Spanish and Portuguese(?) in the Battle of Lepanto in the same year. (The author wrote that this battle was 1571, but someone crossed out the 1 and wrote a 3 in its place. Perhaps I must consult Wikipedia to decide whom to believe.) Cyprus was muchly interesting to its various occupiers due to its cotton and sugar-based agricultural industry. In the late 16th century (?) the Ottomans began resettling Anatolians to Cyprus. But the Orthodox Church remained on the island, and aside from things like the non-Muslim head tax, the religion was mostly allowed to peacefully coexist with the Empire's Sunni faith. The island was not in the 'core' of the Empire — which was mentioned in this afternoon's Ottoman history lecture, — where the Ottomans felt comfortable ruling completely. (Egypt was, for example, recalcitrant and stood outside of the core.) Since the details are most likely askew, I will copy-edit them tomorrow.

SADLY (?) the second article we were to read for the Cyprus seminar has refused to load itself, at least in timely fashion, so I can't read it. Tomorrow morning I must decide, also, whether to print out 50ish pages of Latin vocabulary. I definitely do not feel like it. (Think of the trees! And the time spent when I would prefer to do something else before the epistemic — if that is a word — onslaught.)