The Immortal Emperor

by Donald M Nicol

  The Sultan's own reply to Constantine's impertinent requests was more laconic. He promised simply to examine them and to act upon them justly and honourably as soon as he returned to his European capital at Adrianople. This he did without delay. He made peace with the rebels in Asia Minor and crossed the Bosporos in the winter of 1451. He considered that Constantine had broken the terms of their agreement of March 1449. He revoked the small concessions which he had then made. He gave orders for the encirclement of Constantinople to begin. Constantine had fatally misjudged his enemy. Mehmed's father had gone into battle against the Christians at Varna in 1444 with the text of their broken truce nailed to his standard. Mehmed's moral indignation was perhaps less well founded. But what he took to be the perfidy of the Greeks gave him the pretext for concentrating all his energies and resources on the siege and capture of Constantinople. This had been his ambition since the moment when he came to power. The time had come for its fulfilment.45

  4

  THE FALL OF

  CONSTANTINOPLE

  As soon as he got back to Adrianople the Sultan began to plan the construction of a fortress on the European shore of the Bosporos. Thirty-five years earlier his grandfather Bayezid had built a castle on the Adriatic shore of the straits. It came to be called Anadolu Hisar. Mehmed proposed to build its pair on the opposite side, thereby controlling the sea traffic up and down the Bosporos and blockading Constantinople by land and sea. In the winter of 1451 he ordered skilled masons and labourers to be gathered from all his provinces and building material to be transported to the site which he had selected, at the narrowest part of the channel. The people of Constantinople feared the worst. They sensed that all the prophecies about the end of their world and the coming of the Antichrist were about to come true. In the spring of 145z they could see that work on the fortress had begun. All that the Emperor could do was protest. He sent messengers to the Sultan to remind him of their treaty. He pointed out that Mehmed's grandfather had respectfully sought permission from the Emperor Manuel II before building his castle on the Asiatic side of the straits, which was in any case on Ottoman territory. Mehmed was not inclined to explain what he was about nor to be conciliatory. Clearly both sides of the Bosporos were in Ottoman control. His grandfather had had it in mind to build a fortress on the European shore. He did not live to achieve it. What the Sultan did or proposed to do was none of the Emperor's business.

  Constantine's messengers came back to report. It was now obvious that the new fortress was to serve two purposes. It was to guard if not to close the channel to and from the Black Sea in order to starve Constantinople of its food supplies and deprive the Emperor of the customs dues payable by Italian ships plying up and down the Bosporos. Worse still it was to be the base from which the conquest of Constantinople was to be directed. There was panic in the city. By March 1452 the materials and workmen were assembled on the chosen site. Construction of the fortress began on is April. It was finished in August. It came to be known as the European castle, Rumeli Hisar, across the water from Anadolu Hisar, the castle of the East. The Turks called it BoghazKesen, the Greeks Laimokopia, the cutter of the channel, or of the throat. To clear the site the Turkish workmen demolished some churches and other buildings which stood in their way. In June some of the local Greeks dared to object. They were rounded up and massacred by the Turks. Some Greek farmers at Epibatai on the Sea of Marmora were incensed when the Turks set horses and pack animals to graze on their land and ravage the crops just when harvest time was coming round. The Sultan turned his troops on to the villagers and murdered forty of them. The historian Doukas believed that it was this incident which began the conflict that was to end in `the destruction of the Romans'. It provoked the Emperor to make a formal declaration of war on the Sultan. He closed the gates of Constantinople and arrested all the Turks inside it. It was a futile gesture and he set them free after three days.'

  The Turkish historian Tursun Beg tells a somewhat similar tale about a scuffle between some shepherds and a group of Turkish soldiers. Those in the city thought that this was the beginning of war and closed the gates. Some of the Sultan's officers who had been sight-seeing found themselves shut in. The Emperor saw that they were well-treated and sent back to their camp with an escort. But the Sultan was angry. He would accept no apologies and sent back a challenge: `Either surrender the city or prepare for battle. '2 The only practical measures that Constantine could now take were to lay in all the provisions that he could find to endure at best a blockade and at worst a siege of his city by land and sea, while looking to the repair and defence of its walls. At the same time he addressed even more urgent appeals to the west for help and support. At the end of 1451, when the Sultan's intentions were clear, he had sent a message to Venice to report that, unless reinforcements were sent at once, Constantinople would fall to the Turks. The Venetians replied in February 1452. They sympathised with the Emperor's plight. But they were preoccupied with a war against their neighbours in Lombardy. The best that they could do was to ship to Constantinople the gunpowder and armour which the Emperor had requested. It seemed that the Venetians had lost heart in the rescue of Christian Constantinople. Its conquest was inevitable. They would rather not take the risk of damaging their interests there by interfering with the Sultan's plans.

  Their mood changed some months later. The Sultan Mehmed had let it be known that as soon as his fortress of Rumeli Hisar was finished and its guns were in position all ships sailing up and down the Bosporos would have to stop there and pay a toll. Any that refused would be sunk by gunfire from the walls. In November 145z a Venetian merchant ship passing that way from the Black Sea ignored a command to heave to. The guns from Rumeli Hisar struck it. Its captain and thirty of his sailors were arrested when they got ashore. All were put to death. The Venetians, who had thought that they were protected by their treaty with the Turks, now found that they too were at war with the Sultan.'

  As the months wore on the situation became more and more critical. Constantine sent to the Morea asking for one or other of his brothers to come at once to Constantinople to help him. He hoped that he could now awaken the conscience of the Christian west by alerting its rulers to the fact that a Turkish siege of Constantinople by land and sea was imminent. In his desperation he offered new and extravagant incentives and rewards to any who would bring or send immediate reinforcements. To John Hunyadi, who had suffered a second defeat by the Turks at Kossovo in 1448, he issued an imperial chrysobull promising him either Selymbria or the city of Mesembria on the Black Sea coast. To King Alfonso V of Aragon and Naples he issued another chrysobull offering him the island of Lemnos. He appealed to the Genoese rulers of Chios promising to pay them for their help. He repeated his appeal to Venice; and he sent another ambassador on his rounds, to Ragusa, to various Italian towns, and above all to the pope. His entreaties brought little practical response.' The pope, Nicholas V, was well meaning and sympathetic. But he held to a different set of priorities. Like all his predecessors, he believed that the papacy could not go to the rescue of the Christians of the east until they had been seen to repent of their errors and had accepted union with the church of Rome. The order of priorities on either side is well expressed by Edward Gibbon:

  The Greeks insisted on three successive measures, a succour, a council, and a final reunion, while the Latins eluded the second, and only promised the first as a consequential and voluntary reward of the third.'

  On his deathbed in 11455 Nicholas V, with all his cardinals around him, justified himself by saying that he had always intended to do everything in his power to help the Emperor Constantine. But he had known from the start that he alone could never muster the forces needed to oppose the formidable might of the Turks. The Emperor should therefore have approached the other Catholic rulers of the west. The Venetians gave him the same reply. They declared that they would come to the assistance of Constantinople provided that other Christian powers would do the same. It was a dusty answer.'


  That which Gennadios had feared came true in October 1452• Pope Nicholas, acting on his order of priorities, appointed a legate to sail to Constantinople in May of that year to confirm and to celebrate the union of the churches in a ceremony in the cathedral of St Sophia. He was Cardinal Isidore, formerly Bishop of Kiev, whose devotion to the union of Florence had earned him the reward of being, like Bessarion, created a prince of the Roman church. He went by way of Naples and reached Constantinople on 26 October. With him came Leonardo of Chios, the Genoese Archbishop of Lesbos. Isidore brought with him from Naples a company of Zoo archers. So small a body of reinforcements may have been little more than a gesture. But it was a gesture easier for the anxious Greeks to appreciate than the real purpose of Isidore's mission. For he had come to save their souls and not to help them save their city from the Turks.' His arrival in their midst roused the anti-unionists to a frenzy of activity and propaganda. On 1 November their leader Gennadios, who had become passionate in his denunciations of the union, withdrew into his monastic cell and nailed a declaration on the door, bearing witness before God that he would sooner die than perjure the Orthodoxy that was his heritage. The union was an evil deed. It portended the ruin of those who had turned their backs on God.' On 13 September 1452, the month before Isidore's arrival, Theodore Agallianos, a lawyer in Constantinople, an erstwhile friend of Mark Eugenikos and a member of the Synaxis, wrote the first draft of a short chronicle of contemporary events. He concluded with the words: `This was written in the third year of the reign of Constantine Palaiologos, who remains uncrowned because the church has no leader and is indeed in disarray as a result of the turmoil and confusion brought upon it by the falsely named union which his brother and predecessor John Palaiologos engineered ... This union was evil and displeasing to God and has instead split the church and scattered its children and destroyed us utterly. Truth to tell, this is the source of all our other misfortunes."

  The Grand Duke Loukas Notaras served his Emperor's purpose by trying to keep tempers cool. He convinced an assembly of the people that the cardinal had come with the best of intentions and that the celebration of the union in Constantinople would be to their advantage. The noblemen of the city were not so readily persuaded and suggested some form of compromise. But the Emperor overruled them. The soldiers that the cardinal had brought with him from Naples were a persuasive factor. They might be the advance guard of more to come. The Orthodox whose consciences were not so finely tuned as those of Gennadios and his followers felt able to pay a spiritual price for material rewards. If and when rescue came and the city was saved from the immediate danger there would be time to think again in a calmer atmosphere. Cardinal Isidore, who was a Byzantine, was well acquainted with the strength of feeling among the Orthodox. When, after the Council of Florence, he had gone back to his see at Kiev as the pope's legate to Russia, his flock had refused to have him and he had been imprisoned. He had learned to be tactful and diplomatic with his opponents; and he had the Emperor behind him. George Sphrantzes thought that Constantine should make Isidore Patriarch of Constantinople in place of the absent Gregory III, who was not likely to return. His appointment would gratify the pope and might attract more assistance from the Catholic powers of the west. Constantine, however, wisely saw that it would only stir up further trouble and disturbance.'"

  When it became clear that no more western reinforcements were on their way the anti-unionists regained some of their lost ground. There was rioting in the streets. The Latin Archbishop of Lesbos whom Isidore had brought with him told the Emperor that he was being far too lenient. He should arrest their leaders. Like Pope Nicholas V, he thought that Constantine could and should try harder to stifle the opposition. Constantine declined to act on his advice. Instead he summoned the clergy of the Synaxis to meet him in the palace on 15 November and asked them to draft and sign a document stating yet again their objections to the union of Florence. They were glad to do so; and no doubt the Emperor's courteous attention to their point of view did less harm than arresting them and making martyrs of them." It is hard to be sure of Constantine's own sincerity in advertising the union of the churches in the heart of the Orthodox Christian world, in the full knowledge that the rest of that world had spurned it. The historian Doukas believed that the Emperor's devotion to the union was no more than a pretence. John Eugenikos had reminded him of the steadfast refusal of his father Manuel II to compromise his Orthodoxy for the sake of saving his empire. But he had the example of his brother John VIII before him; and he may also have recalled how his ancestor Michael VIII in the thirteenth century, in similar circumstances, had resorted to imprisoning and persecuting his opponents when trying to force them to accept union with the Roman church. As a result he had died excommunicated by both churches, condemned as a perfidious bungler by Rome and as a traitor to his faith by Constantinople. Constantine was no great theologian himself; but he was uncommonly patient with those who were obsessed with theology. His own obsession was the salvation of his city of Constantinople by whatever means. In this he was loyally supported by his Grand Duke Loukas Notaras. Notaras has gone down in history as a die-hard anti-unionist because of a chance remark attributed to him, that it would be better to see the Sultan's turban in the city than the Latin mitre. Yet he had many friends and contacts among the Latins and had sent some of his children to settle in Italy as evacuees. He may have been provoked to make such an intemperate remark by the intolerance of some of the Italians in Constantinople. But he was of one mind with his Emperor on the matter of defending and saving the Queen of Cities by whatever means available.12

  Ten days after Constantine's conciliatory meeting with the antiunionist Synaxis, the guns of Rumeli Hisar sank the Venetian ship in the Bosporos. The incident concentrated the minds of the people in Constantinople. They were bound together by common fear and panic. The cry for help at almost any price grew louder. On the following day Gennadios issued a manifesto to stiffen the resolve of those who were wavering. But, as he admitted, it was like trying to put out a forest fire.13 The noise of Turkish guns firing beyond the city walls was more persuasive than the tirades of Gennadios. His manifesto was in the form of a personal confession to prove the point that he at least stood by the truth of his inherited faith, however many others might betray it in their hour of need. It was rather a smug document. By the end of November 1452 Cardinal Isidore felt that the atmosphere in Constantinople was such that he could at last perform the mission which the pope had entrusted to him. The Emperor agreed; and on iz December a solemn liturgy was celebrated in the cathedral of the Holy Wisdom. Constantine and his court were present. The names of Pope Nicholas and the Patriarch Gregory were commemorated. The decree of union as recited at Florence was read out. There were different assessments of the size and of the sincerity of the congregation. Isidore maintained that the whole population of Constantinople was there. Doukas believed that most of those present were merely pretending to celebrate an event of which they disapproved. It was perhaps comforting to be in a crowd at such a moment of danger; and some of the congregation felt that whatever manner of union was being proclaimed was no more than provisional, subject to scrutiny and revision when the crisis was over. It is certain that Gennadios was nowhere to be seen among the celebrants. Having published his manifesto he retired from the fray and pledged himself to embarrass his Emperor no further. His time was to come.14

  Constantine had asked for one of his brothers, Thomas or Demetrios, to come from the Morea to swell the ranks of defenders. The Sultan had foreseen this possibility. To keep them where they were, he ordered the elderly Turahan to invade the Morea again in October 1452, taking with him a large army and his sons Umur and Ahmed. The Hexamilion wall was no longer in their way and they plundered all the Peloponnese from Corinth down to Messenia. Only one setback marred their victory. In an encounter with the army of the Despotate, Matthew Asen, one of the officers of Demetrios, captured Turahan's son Ahmed. He was carried away as a prisoner to Mistra. It was
a small triumph but an encouraging one. King Alfonso of Aragon, who was all for other people smiting the infidel, wrote to congratulate the Despot Demetrios.15 Such instances of co-operation between Constantine's brothers in the Morea were lamentably rare. They spent more of their time disputing the boundaries which Constantine had laid down for them when he became Emperor. They also antagonised Venice by encouraging Albanian brigands to raid the lands around the Venetian colonies. When the Turks eventually determined to complete the conquest and occupation of the Morea they found the going all too easy.

  There would be no help from members of his own family. Constantine pinned his last hopes on Venice, the pope and Alfonso of Aragon. Even while Turahan and his troops were ravaging the Morea, the senators in Venice were considering the urgent plea of the latest ambassador to come to them from Constantinople. They gave him their reply on 16 November 1452.. They insisted that they had already made contingency plans of their own for the protection of Constantinople. They urged the Emperor to apply to the pope to organise a coalition of all the western Christian powers; and they promised to use their good offices with Pope Nicholas and with the Venetian cardinals at the Curia to see that immediate action was taken. Their letter was on its way to the Emperor when the incident occurred of the sinking of one of their ships in the Bosporos. The news took some time to reach Venice. But the Venetians on the spot reacted without waiting for orders from home. For them the danger was palpable. Their baillie in Constantinople, Girolamo Minotto, called an emergency meeting of their council. The Emperor and Cardinal Isidore were there. Most of the leading Venetians in the city voted to stay and share in its defence. Those whose ships were due to sail for home elected to disobey their orders. All agreed that no Venetian ships should leave the harbour without the baillie's permission, on pain of a fine of 3,000 ducats.16