Ghost Empire

by Richard Fidler

  The people of Constantinople woke up to a new terror the next morning. Looking out their windows, they saw the city was blanketed in fog – no one had ever seen such thick fog at that time of year. The haze hung over the city all day. Perhaps this was proof that Gennadius had been right all along: their capitulation to the Latin church had driven God to abandon the city, for it was said that ‘the Divinity conceals itself in cloud, and appears and again disappears’.

  The atmospheric weirdness came to a climax of sorts that night. At dusk, witnesses in the city looked up and saw an unearthly band of red light glowing around the upper levels of the Hagia Sophia. The weird light rose up from the windows of the great church onto the copper dome, rode up to the tip, and then it just . . . winked out. In the street someone wailed, ‘The light itself has gone up to heaven!’

  Outside the walls in the Ottoman camp, Mehmed saw the strange lights too, and wondered what they portended for him. He called for his astrologers, who were quick to assure him that the lights were surely an excellent omen: they said it meant the light of Islam would soon be coming to the city.

  More strange lights were seen that night emanating from the countryside behind the Turkish camp. The defenders on the walls hoped the flashes might indicate the arrival of a rescuing army, but no such army appeared.

  THE LIKELY CULPRIT behind these strange portents in the sky lay 15,000 kilometres to the east, on the far side of the world. Sometime in 1452, the year before the siege, a volcanic island in the Pacific Ocean exploded. The island of Kuwae, in the Vanuatu archipelago, erupted with a force equivalent to two million Hiroshima-type bombs, throwing up forty cubic kilometres of rock and dust into the sky.

  The massive eruption rates as one of the biggest volcanic events in human history, and the spreading plume of atmospheric dust affected weather all over the world, spoiling crops in China and Europe. Most likely the strange lights reported in May 1453 were either a manifestation of St Elmo’s Fire or an optical illusion, a reflection of an ‘intensely red twilight glow by clouds of volcanic ash high in the atmosphere’.

  The Romans had no knowledge of such things.

  The volatile weather, the fog, the ghostly electricity, the awful spectacle of the Virgin hurling herself into the mud – all of this blighted the already weak morale of the city, and ruined its spiritual confidence. The people of Constantinople were without, it seemed, a single friend in Heaven or on Earth.

  THE EMPEROR, despite the pressures, remained resolute. His closest friend, George Sphrantzes, came to him with a delegation of ministers and begged him to leave, to save himself from the coming cataclysm. Constantine, overcome with emotion and exhaustion, heard their pleas and fainted. When he recovered he declared he would stay. The emperor would fight and die with his people.

  Two Days Before

  ON 27 MAY, the middle section of the walls was pounded all day by cannon fire, giving the defenders almost no opportunity to repair the damage. Parts of the ancient outer wall began to crumble.

  The endgame of the siege was almost upon them. Mehmed summoned his officers and told them to prepare for one final push. A general attack by land and sea would begin in two days. They were going to push wave after wave of men at the heavily damaged central section of the walls. At some point, he said, the hammer blows would open a crack in the defensive lines and they would break into the city. The siege was about to end for them, in death or glory.

  Great fires were lit right along the line of the Ottoman camps that night. Mehmed’s soldiers shouted and sang and around the flames. The Turkish tumult was heard within the city. Soft cries of kyrie eleison, kyrie eleison were raised up from the city’s churches to the night sky. Lord have mercy. Lord have mercy.

  The Day Before

  IN THE MORNING, thousands of Ottoman soldiers moved forwards to fill in the empty moat with earth, rocks and branches. The sultan’s cannoniers hauled the artillery into position. Hundreds of long ladders were brought up to the frontline.

  At dusk, rain began to fall. The sultan mounted his white horse and galloped along the entire length of the Theodosian Walls, inspecting his troops. Mehmed had been advised that an appeal to their jihadi spirit would fall flat, so he enticed them with visions of the treasures of that awaited them.

  ‘Here is the great and populous capital of the ancient Romans,’ he said, gesturing to the walls behind him. ‘A city which has reached the very pinnacle of good fortune and glory . . . the head of the whole inhabited globe. I give it now to you for spoil and plunder. Unlimited wealth, men, women, children, all the other adornments and arrangements. All these you will enjoy like a brilliant banquet.’

  Mehmed reminded them that if they broke through they would be entitled to three days of plunder, in accordance with medieval custom.

  ‘Take whatever property you can find,’ he offered. ‘But remember, the buildings belong to me.’

  But the city’s fabled treasures were long gone, stolen two-and-a-half centuries ago, spirited away to faraway Venice and France. However, Mehmed’s soldiers weren’t to know that, and so, despite their weariness, they went about their preparations with renewed energy.

  Inside a guard tower.

  Richard Fidler

  THE MEN ON THE WALLS were hungry, sore and exhausted. The defenders were a mix of local men, Genoese archers, Venetian marines and a band of Turks. Prince Orhan, the pretender to the sultan’s throne, and his men had no choice but to fight to the death for Constantinople. They faced the coming struggle with no illusions, aware that the final battle would be upon them within a few hours.

  Church bells rang out across the city. Inside the Blachernae Palace, Constantine XI gathered his commanders and advisors and delivered a passionate speech. He singled out each faction – the Genoese, the Venetians and his own troops – for praise, and called on them to put aside their differences, and be willing to die in defence of their God, their families and their emperor.

  Neither Constantine nor Mehmed could be confident of the outcome. The final onslaught would certainly be fierce and terrible, but both rulers were aware the defenders on the walls might still somehow find it within themselves to hold off the Ottomans. For them, it was a matter of life and death: if the assault failed, Mehmed would be forced to call off the siege and trek back to Edirne, where he would almost certainly be assassinated. Constantine, for his part, knew he was hours away from either a martyr’s death or eternal fame as the emperor who saved the city – but only if his men could somehow hold the line at the walls for one more night.

  At sunset, as the shadows lengthened across the city, people came out of their homes spontaneously, and converged on the Hagia Sophia for vespers. The church, darkened for nearly five months, was again ablaze with golden light. Old hatreds were put aside as Orthodox and Catholic bishops sang the liturgy together. Constantine arrived late for the service, entering the narthex through the Imperial Gate. Trembling with emotion, he took the holy sacrament, fell to his knees and begged God for forgiveness for his sins. The emperor then drew himself up, bowed respectfully to everyone present, and strode out of the church. As he departed, a terrible cry of anguish went up from the congregation.

  The Night Before

  AS NIGHT FELL ACROSS the fearful city, the men on the walls saw thousands of fires light up along the Ottoman lines, giving their camps a hellish appearance. Then a great and terrible noise erupted into the night sky, a combination of wild shouting, cymbals, drums and cannon fire.

  Then, at midnight, the Turkish camp fell ominously silent.

  1.30 am, 29 May: The First Wave

  AN HOUR AND A HALF after midnight, Mehmed gave the order and a blast of noise erupted from the Ottoman camp. The sultan’s artillery opened up a bombardment; heavy marble balls whistled through the air and crashed into the battered walls and towers. Inside the city, church bells rang out, signalling the final battle had begun. Women rushed to the walls through the darkness, carrying heavy stones for the artillery and water for the thir
sty men.

  With a tremendous cry, the Ottoman line of attack pressed forward along the full five-and-a-half kilometre length of the land walls, forcing the city’s defenders to space their meagre numbers further apart. The heaviest assault was directed at the weakest section in the centre, at the St Romanus Gate.

  Peering into the darkness, the defenders on the walls caught flashing glimpses of soldiers rushing forward, briefly illuminated by the flare of cannon fire. These were the sultan’s Irregulars, his shock troops: a mix of Christian Slavs, Germans and Greeks from Mehmed’s lands, bound to him by the medieval code of vassalage. The Irregulars charged forward, dodging missiles, bearing tall siege ladders and whatever weapons they had brought with them from their homelands. They ran at the wall in a huge, terrified mass, driven forward by the sultan’s military police, who lashed out at waverers with rawhide whips and iron rods.

  At their rear stood a line of Janissaries with scimitars, ready to behead deserters. The defenders high up on the battlements fired arrows, rocks and missiles, knocking down hundreds of the Irregulars before they could get close to the walls. Giustiniani’s men were amazed by the ease with which they shot down the enemy, even as they were appalled by the carnage.

  The first Irregulars to survive the onslaught arrived at the foot of the outer wall; they planted their long scaling ladders in the soft earth and began to climb. The shattered brickwork of the outer wall had been replaced by a heavy stockade of timber beams, bundles of vine-branches, and barrels stuffed with earth, which the Irregulars clawed at as they scaled their ladders.

  The defenders blasted the invaders with muskets and culverins, dropped heavy stones on their heads, or simply pushed the ladders back, sending stacks of men crashing to the ground. The Ottomans’ greater numbers proved to be no advantage at all as the Irregulars fell over each other, clawing and scrambling for position. Pressed between certain death from the front and Janissary swords at their rear, Mehmed’s Irregulars howled in agony and anguish as the dead and wounded began to pile up in the darkness below. Then Constantine was seen on the battlements, goading his men on. And still the waves of Irregulars kept coming and crashing to the ground in a broken heap.

  After two-and-a-half hours of mass slaughter, Mehmed called back his Irregulars. They had failed to break through anywhere along the line. Nonetheless they had served their grim purpose, which was to wear down the defenders before the real fighting began.

  4 am: The Second Wave

  AS MEHMED’S irregulars pulled back, Giustiniani’s men lowered themselves onto the stockades for another frantic round of repairs. They had just set to work when they heard, in the distant darkness, the clanking of metal and the thumping tread of thousands of marching feet, announcing the arrival of the Anatolian army. These were the sultan’s Muslim troops: heavily armoured, well fed and more disciplined than the Irregulars.

  The columns of Anatolians marched into position in the Lycus Valley, and then wheeled around to face the walls. With another blast of horns and percussion, and a cry of Allahu Akbar! the Anatolians charged at the wall, as the repair workers scurried back up to the battlements.

  Again, crossbow bolts and small artillery fire from the walls easily cut down the sultan’s men. The defenders dropped boulders and poured vats of boiling black oil on their heads. The Anatolians reeled back, and pushed forward once more. The heap of dead at the base of the walls piled higher. Mehmed rode his horse back and forth along the line, shouting encouragement above the terrible din of battle.

  An Ottoman cannon let loose a missile that smashed into the stockade. Rubble tumbled out, leaving a gaping hole in the outer wall. Hundreds of Anatolian soldiers rushed forward into the gap, but with nowhere to go, they soon found themselves pressed against each other, trapped between the two walls. The defenders fired down upon the trapped Anatolians from all directions until every one of them was dead.

  In the final hour of darkness the decimated Anatolian army pulled back. After four hours of fighting, Mehmed had expended the better part of two armies and he was still outside the city. The men on the walls were exhausted, but elated. Mehmed had just one more card to play – his most precious military corps, the dreaded Janissaries.

  5 am: The Third Wave

  MEHMED GAVE the order to attack immediately, to give the defenders no time to rest and repair the damage. The Janissaries, in their pristine white turbans, presented an impressive spectacle as they marched forward with deadly precision and began to dismantle the timbers and barrels of the stockade with grappling hooks.

  Inside the city, the church bells sounded the alarm once more. Again, priests, women and children hauled heavy rocks up to the battlements, and threw bricks at the invaders. Giustiniani’s men hacked at the climbing Janissaries with javelins and axes. Constantine appeared again on the wall, striding back and forth with his advisors; by one account, the emperor drew his sword and personally cut down several of the sultan’s men as they attempted to climb the stockade.

  Barbaro recorded that the Janissaries fought like ‘lions’, spurred on by shouts and crashing percussion that sounded like ‘a thing not of this world’. The roar of the cannon fire created such a din, ‘the very air seemed to be split apart’. Then, as the fading morning star signalled the approach of dawn, the Janissaries began to falter. Constantine sensed a change in the dynamic of the battle and shouted encouragement to his troops. For one dizzying moment, it appeared the defenders had saved their city after all.

  AND THEN THE SMALLEST act of carelessness opened a crack in the city’s defence. Hidden in a fold of the walls around Blachernae was a small portal known as the kerkoporta, or the Gate of the Wooden Circus. The defence of the walls above the gate was led by the Bocchiardi brothers from Genoa. The brothers were unlikely to have been aware of a prophecy uttered nearly eight hundred years earlier, in the Apocalypse of Pseudo-Methodius, which predicted the city would meet its doom from the Muslims at this very gate: Woe to you, city of Byzantium, because Ishmael overtakes you. For every horse of Ishmael will pass through. And the first among them will pitch his tent before you, and will break down the Gate of the Wooden Circus.

  The brothers had been using the kerkoporta to slip out and launch surprise attacks on the Ottoman flank. But on this critical morning, someone had forgotten to bar the gate. A group of Turkish soldiers pressed against it and crashed through. Fifty of the sultan’s men rushed into the enclosure between the walls and began to climb the stairs up to the battlements. The defenders, seeing the Ottoman troops rush in, turned to fire down on the enemy charging up the stone steps. The invaders were isolated and killed, but in the melee, one Ottoman soldier fought his way up a tower, where he tore down the standards of the emperor and of the Lion of St Mark, and replaced them with the Ottoman banner. In the hazy dawn light, the first crescent flag of Islam could be seen fluttering on the walls.

  FURTHER DOWN the line, a second critical blow was struck. Giustiniani, strained and exhausted beyond belief, was shot, either by a crossbow bolt, or by a lead ball fired from a culverin. Accounts differ, but the terrible pain finally broke his spirit.

  Giustiniani’s men rushed to him. Bleeding badly, he asked them to carry him down to his ship. One of his Genoese then dashed to the emperor to ask him for the key to a gate on the inner wall. Constantine, alerted to the danger, was horrified, and begged his commander not to leave. Giustiniani feebly promised to return once his wound was treated, and so the emperor ruefully handed over the key. Giustiniani’s bodyguard carried him out the gate into the city. The other Genoese fighters, observing their fallen leader leaving his post, broke and ran to the open gate, following their comrades down to their ship on the Golden Horn. Constantine and his dwindling band of Romans were now alone on the wall.

  THE EMPEROR ordered his men to spread out further and fill the gaps left by the departing Italians. Mehmed, watching from below, could see that something was up, that the line of defence was buckling.

  ‘Friends!’ he cried, wil
d with excitement, ‘we have the city! Just one more effort and the city is ours!’

  Another wave of Janissaries charged forward. Mehmed was offering a prize to the first man to break through the stockade, and a giant warrior named Hasan was set on claiming it. Hasan charged up the stockade with the Ottoman flag in one hand, as he covered his head with his shield. He clambered to the top, pushed aside the confused defenders, and stood atop the stockade, defiantly flying the flag of Islam over the city walls.

  The Janissaries, thrilled by the spectacle, rushed forward and found more gaps in the Roman line. The Roman defenders recovered, pounded Hasan with heavy rocks, and then hacked him to death with swords and spears.

  But the line had broken. Dozens, and then hundreds, of Janissaries pressed forward, invading the narrow space between the walls. A group of Roman soldiers suddenly found themselves pushed back into a ditch against the inner wall, where they were slaughtered. More Janissaries now raced up to the battlements atop the high inner wall, where they could see the Ottoman flag now over the kerkoporta.

  A great roar of victory went up along the line: The city is ours! The city is ours!

  THE EMPEROR DASHED back and forth, desperately trying to rally his fleeing soldiers, but the frantic Romans fell over each other in a panic, fighting to get out the small gate with the enemy almost on top of them. The crush of Roman soldiers blocked up the doorway, trapping the rest inside the killing zone. The horn blasts, cheers and screams were deafening now. Constantine, seeing that his city was lost, resolved not to flee, but to die at the walls.

  THERE ARE NO eyewitness accounts of the emperor’s last stand, only a mess of contradictory secondhand reports. One account records that the emperor tore off his imperial insignia, drew his sword, ran into the melee and was never seen again. Another less heroic account reports that Constantine and his colleagues were cut down by the wave of advancing Janissaries, who mistook him for a common soldier. Either way, Constantine’s long struggle was over.