Ghost Empire

by Richard Fidler

  A member of the emperor’s court, Ducas, was present at the reception of Cardinal Isidore. Ducas saw through the shadowplay:

  The Emperor received them graciously and paid them due honour, after which they settled to a discussion of the Union. They found him in favour of it, as were the principal lay members of the church. But the majority of the priests and monks, the abbots, archimandrites and nuns, were against it. The majority, did I say? My mention of the nuns compels me to alter my words and make this clear, that not a single one of them consented; and the Emperor himself only pretended to agree.

  AND SO ON TUESDAY 12 December 1452, the union of the eastern and western churches was officially sealed in a miserable ceremony in the Hagia Sophia. The rite was Catholic rather than Orthodox; the language Latin, not Greek; the bread unleavened. The pope and the absent Patriarch were honoured. Constantine appeared to be subdued and depressed as he sat on his throne under the great dome.

  A crowd of distressed anti-unionists gathered at the Monastery of the Pantocrator, calling on Gennadius to instruct them on what to do next. Gennadius refused to leave his room. He scrawled a note and pinned it to the door of his cell: ‘O unhappy Romans, why have you forsaken the truth? Why do you not trust in God, instead of in the Italians? In losing your faith you will lose your city.’

  The anti-unionist majority felt heartsick and abandoned. Groups of monks wandered about, wailing in anguish. The city’s taverns filled up as people drank themselves into a stupor, stumbling into the streets with bowls of wine in their hands, cursing the faithless unionists.

  The following morning, Isidore penned an upbeat letter to Rome: the Cardinal was pleased to inform His Holiness that his mission had been accomplished and the two churches were now officially ‘united and Catholic’.

  It was an empty victory. The Orthodox faithful shunned the Hagia Sophia as if it were a pagan temple. Justinian’s great church, which had rung out with the voices of the faithful for nine hundred years, became empty, dark and silent.

  Friend of the Infidels

  TWO HUNDRED AND FORTY kilometres up the road in Edirne, Mehmed received reports of the religious turmoil in Constantinople with growing excitement. The sultan was restless, obsessive. He lay awake at night in his palace, configuring and reconfiguring in his mind his plans to attack the city. He would often rise from his bed and stride over to his desk to incorporate some new thought into the plan. He spent his days sketching and memorising the walls and outposts, grilling anyone he could find with any knowledge of the city’s defences.

  Despite the huge disparity in size between the Ottoman and the Roman armies, Mehmed could not hope to succeed unless he brought overwhelming military superiority to the city walls, sustained by strong supply chains. He would also need the full and enthusiastic support of his advisors. The Janissaries Shihabettin and Zaganos were eager, but Halil was still advocating caution and warning of a European backlash. Behind his back, Halil’s rivals nicknamed him ‘Friend of the Infidels’.

  Late one night, Halil was shaken from his sleep by two eunuchs, who told him the sultan required his presence immediately. Fearing the worst, Halil took with him a bowl of gold. He was brought to the sultan’s quarters, where he saw Mehmed sitting up in bed. Halil laid the gold at his feet. Mehmed, taken aback, asked what on earth he thought he was doing.

  ‘It is the custom,’ replied the vizier, ‘that when a nobleman is summoned by the sultan at such an unusual hour, he must not arrive with empty hands.’

  ‘I have no need of your gold,’ Mehmed scoffed. ‘I want only one thing from you: your help in taking possession of Constantinople.’ The sultan gestured to the tangled bedcovers around him. ‘Look at my bed, in which I have been tossing and turning from side to side all night.’ Then, hinting that he knew of the bribes Halil was receiving, he warned, ‘I tell you Halil: do not be softened by gold or silver. We shall fight the Romans bravely, and with Allah’s will, we shall take the city.’

  BY JANUARY, Mehmed could wait no longer. He called his advisors, and after hearing arguments for and against, announced he would pursue his heart’s desire – to lay siege to Constantinople relentlessly, by land and sea, until he could break the city and take the world throne of the Caesars for himself.

  He told his advisors he would need to bring overwhelming force to take the city quickly, before the Christian powers in Europe could muster themselves to respond, and before his army could suffer the demoralisation and disease that would inevitably accompany a prolonged siege.

  The Blood Tax

  AN OLD MILITARY ADAGE has it that amateurs concern themselves with tactics, but professionals worry about logistics. Mehmed’s instinctive aggression was tempered by a painstaking attention to detail, and he directed his restless mind into the complex business of mounting an amphibious assault on the world’s most heavily fortified city. Workers across his empire gathered timber, iron, hemp, sulphur, tin and scrap bronze, which were fashioned into ships, armour, chain mail, arrows, crossbows and tents. Mehmed mobilised every regiment in his army and cancelled all leave. He put out a call to arms and was promptly answered by the arrival of volunteers from all over the Ottoman lands, inspired by the prospect of glory on the battlefield, and the chance to share in the fabled treasure of the city of the Romans.

  At the heart of Mehmed’s army were his Janissaries, an elite corps of professional soldiers who served as crossbowmen, musketeers, sappers and engineers. The Janissaries wore distinctive white turbans and blue woollen coats; they marched to military music, lived in barracks and, unlike the ghazi volunteers, were paid for their service. All their ranks were taken from the jargon of the kitchen. The commanding officer of each company held the title of çorbaci, ‘soup cook’, and wore a ladle as his insignia, to symbolise his humility before the sultan. Other ranks were known as ‘chief cook’, ‘baker’ and ‘pancake maker’. Janissary regiments would gather around a kazgan, a heavy cauldron, in which their pilaf was cooked. When they turned mutinous, they would signal their unhappiness by overturning the kazgan and beating on it with spoons, creating a great clanging din to indicate their rejection of the sultan’s rice.

  They were all orphans of a kind, with very few links to anything outside their elite band of brothers; the corps of Janissaries was the only family they knew or cared for. They had all been born into Christian families within the Ottoman empire. Once they reached boyhood, they were taken away from their parents as payment of a ‘blood tax’, known as the devsirme, that was levied by the sultan on his Christian subjects.

  The boys were sent to a Muslim home where they were circumcised, indoctrinated into Islam and brought into a daily regime of constant military training. As the memories of their early lives faded away, they received instructions in Turkish, Persian and Arab literature, conversation, horsemanship, javelin throwing, wrestling and archery. Family life was replaced by the comradeship of the barracks. Over time a Janissary would forget his childhood, his family and his home. He would know ‘no lord and father other than the Sultan, no will but his, no hope but in his favour’. Mehmed’s second vizier, Zaganos Pasha, had himself been taken from a Christian family in the Balkans as a boy.

  This process of rigorous training and indoctrination moulded the boys into disciplined, dedicated warriors. On reaching adulthood, they were inducted into the most professional corps of soldiers in Europe. A Janissary would always officially retain the status of kapukulu, ‘slave of the Sultan’. But they were well treated and highly prized by their sultan. In battle, their role was often decisive. Initial fighting would typically be carried forward by the ghazis, the regular soldiers. Janissaries would be held back until the critical moment, when they would charge into the attack with overwhelming force.

  Drawing of a fifteenth-century Janissary by Gentile Bellini.

  public domain/Wikimedia Commons

  BY THE SPRING OF 1453, Mehmed’s preparations were complete and his 60,000-strong force of Janissaries, infantry and cavalry set out from
Edirne towards Constantinople, followed by a retinue of cooks, blacksmiths, carpenters and holy men who offered prayers for the journey.

  Somewhere within that vast marching mass of soldiers was the sultan’s secret weapon: an artillery device so immensely huge and heavy that a team of sixty oxen and two hundred men were required to haul it along the muddy track on a train of wagons. The sultan’s soldiers caught glimpses of it as they passed; it was the bronze barrel of a cannon, the biggest the world had ever seen.

  The Great Bombard

  THE BRONZE CANNON was the creation of an ingenious Hungarian metalsmith named Urban, who had been wandering around Europe offering his expertise to anyone who could afford his services. The year before, he had arrived in Constantinople and met with the emperor. Urban offered to help the emperor’s engineers cast super-large, single-piece bronze cannons. Constantine agreed to pay him a small retainer, but the sad truth was the imperial treasury was nearly empty – there was no money to develop new bronze cannon pieces, not enough to even keep up with Urban’s wages. The Hungarian was running out of money and food, so he left the city.

  Soon afterwards he appeared in Mehmed’s palace in Edirne where he was welcomed warmly and given food and clothes.

  Urban was brought before the sultan, who asked him, ‘Can you cast a cannon that is able to hurl a stone ball large enough to smash the walls at Constantinople?’

  ‘If you wish, Sire,’ he replied, ‘I can cast a bronze cannon of the size you require. I have examined the walls of the city in great detail. I can shatter to dust not only these walls with the stones from my gun, but the very walls of Babylon itself.’

  Mehmed was pleased and excited by this answer, and so Urban went to work at the sultan’s foundry. Urban’s first large gun was hauled over to the newly built fortress on the Bosphorus, the Throat Cutter; it was this cannon that fired the stone ball that sank Antonio Rizzo’s galley. Mehmed was delighted, and ordered Urban to produce a much larger cannon, twice the size of the first one.

  Urban returned to the sultan’s foundry. Workers laboured for weeks in dangerous and hellish conditions. The cannon shaft that emerged was immense. The barrel, more than eight metres long, was big enough for a man to crawl inside.

  Mehmed requested a test firing and the Great Bombard, as the cannon came to be called, was hauled into position outside the palace. A warning was sent out to the people of Edirne ‘to pay attention, and not to allow the noise and the thunderous roar to terrify uninformed people who might become speechless and cause pregnant women to miscarry’. A black stone ball weighing more than half a ton was hoisted and loaded into the cannon’s gaping muzzle. The taper was lit, igniting the gunpowder, and with a great shuddering boom, the ball was shot out of the barrel. It soared through the air for well over a mile, before landing with a thud, burying itself into the soft earth.

  News of the super-cannon soon reached Constantinople, only intensifying the dread and despair in the city, just as the sultan intended. Mehmed, well pleased with the test firing, ordered the creation of more bronze cannon pieces, but none would be so large as the Great Bombard. The size and destructive power of the cannon encouraged people to reach for superlatives. In Constantinople it was named the Royal Gun and the Romans wondered whether this time, their legendary walls could withstand such a monstrous new weapon.

  The Theodosian Walls were the ultimate expression of everything the Romans had learnt about the protection of their cities against arrows, catapults and trebuchets. The slow advance of technology in the Middle Ages had left these principles unchallenged for a thousand years. Gunpowder, invented in China and carried into Europe along the silk roads, threatened the logic of brittle stone walls. The arrival of the Great Bombard would shatter it.

  The Genoese

  CONSTANTINE paid a high price for bringing his church into the Catholic fold; the effort evidently pained and humiliated him, but it was done and now he and his advisors hoped they would soon see some ships and soldiers from the west. But Venice dithered – there was little appetite for a new Crusade. Embarrassed by the lack of response, the pope sent three Genoese ships to Constantinople, at his own expense, laden with arms and food.

  The Italian city-state of Genoa was torn by the crisis. Genoa, like Venice, was a rich maritime republic with a powerful navy. The plight of Constantinople roused their Christian sympathies, but Genoa’s leaders were attempting to maintain a pragmatic posture of neutrality between Constantinople and the Ottoman empire.

  The situation was further complicated by the position of the colony of Galata: the small Genoese settlement that sat directly across the Golden Horn from Constantinople. If Constantinople fell, would Galata fall too? And if Genoa gave conspicuous aid to Constantine and the city fell anyway, would that poison their trade with the powerful new empire of the Ottomans?

  The governor of Galata appealed to his fellow Genoese for help anyway, and in January 1453 a wealthy soldier of fortune named Giovanni Giustiniani Longo answered the call. Giustiniani, on his own initiative, recruited and equipped some seven hundred soldiers, and arranged for two large galleons to carry them from Genoa to Constantinople at his own expense.

  Giustiniani was charismatic, brave and experienced in siege warfare. He and his men were warmly welcomed by a greatly relieved emperor. Constantine instantly appointed Giustiniani general-in-chief and gave him command of the Theodosian Walls at its most vulnerable, central point. Minotto, the Venetian bailey in Constantinople, placed whatever resources he had in the city at the service of the emperor, as did Prince Orhan, the pretender to Mehmed’s throne. Other soldiers arrived in dribs and drabs from elsewhere in Europe, but that was it. George Sphrantzes, Constantine’s closest advisor, remarked with some bitterness that they had received as much help from the pope as they did from the Sultan of Egypt.

  IN LATE MARCH Constantine ordered Sphrantzes to conduct a headcount of able-bodied fighting men in the city and an inventory of weapons: crossbows, shields and cannon. Sphrantzes quietly went about his task and reported the terrible news back to his emperor: there were just under eight thousand men in the city, many completely untrained in warfare. The numbers were far fewer than Constantine had expected, and he asked Sphrantzes to keep the figure a secret. He was outnumbered more than ten to one. How was he going to defend his city against so many with so few?

  Constantine shored up his defences and sealed off the Golden Horn. The great chain was dragged across the mouth of the waterway. Ten powerful ships – nine from Italy, one from Constantinople – formed a defensive line behind the chain and waited for Mehmed’s navy to arrive.

  The Doctor

  AS THE SENSE of crisis mounted in the city, a Venetian named Niccolò Barbaro sat down at his desk and wrote in his diary: ‘On the fifth of the month of April: one hour after daybreak, Sultan Mehmed came before Constantinople with about a hundred and sixty thousand men. They camped about two-and-a-half miles from the walls of the city.’

  Barbaro was a ship’s surgeon stranded in Constantinople. Constantine had confiscated his merchant galley for the city’s defence, making Barbaro a virtual prisoner of the siege. In early April, he began to write daily entries in his diary, recording the steady advance of the Ottoman army as it marched up to the Theodosian Walls. Barbaro would be one of the most reliable witnesses of the coming cataclysm.

  THE SULTAN’S FORCES stopped 400 metres short of the city, and spread out along the entire length of the walls. Mehmed’s red-and-gold tent was erected in front of the vulnerable middle segment, between the St Romanus Gate and the Charisian Gate. His Anatolian army was camped to his right, his European army to his left. The white-turbaned Janissaries were amassed behind him.

  The process of hauling the three great cannons up to the line, hoisting them off their ox-carts and laying them into position was agonisingly slow. Meanwhile, Mehmed ordered soldiers to clear the land in front of the walls in preparation for a major assault. Platoons of men scurried up to the empty moat, filling it in as bes
t they could, tipping boulders, timber and soil into the ditch. Coming under heavy fire from the walls above, they made little progress.

  Sappers set to work digging tunnels under the walls, but Mehmed paid little attention. His mind was focused on the imminent firing of his new cannons. The Great Bombard was placed in the centre of the Ottoman line, in front of Mehmed’s tent, so he could observe its impact on the outer wall.

  ON 11 APRIL Mehmed gave the order to commence firing. Tapers were lit, the ground shuddered, and the air was punctured by dozens of blasts along the entire length of the Theodosian Walls. The Great Bombard sent a black marble stone half as tall as a man hurtling through the air. The ball crashed into the wall and sent bricks and shrapnel flying, killing those on the wall who happened to be nearby.

  For the defenders it was an awesome and terrifying spectacle, but for Mehmed, progress was slower than expected. The Great Bombard took three hours to prepare, load and fire. After firing it had to be cooled down carefully, by pouring hot oil into the muzzle, otherwise the barrel would crack. In the meantime, the defenders threw up a protective wooden palisade and repaired the damaged wall segments, stuffing the gaps with wool, branches and soil, which were better able to absorb the shock of the cannonballs.

  The bombardment continued for a week, day and night. Several groups of Janissaries came forward to skirmish at the foot of the walls, but were shot down. The defenders were unsettled by the devotion of the Janissaries to these fallen comrades. Barbaro records that they would come forward and take away their dead, ‘carrying them on their shoulders as one would a pig, without caring how near they came to the city walls’. Then the rescuers too were shot down with crossbows and muskets, and yet even more would come forward to take them away.