Constantinople: The Last Great Siege, 1453

by Roger Crowley

  They are diligent, willingly rise early, and live on little … they are indifferent as to where they sleep, and usually lie on the ground … their horses are good, cost little in food, gallop well and for a long time … their obedience to their superiors is boundless … when the signal is given, those who are to lead march quietly off, followed by the others with the same silence … ten thousand Turks on such an occasion will make less noise than 100 men in the Christian armies … I must own that in my various experiences I have always found the Turks to be frank and loyal, and when it was necessary to show courage, they have never failed to do so.

  Against this background the start of the fifteenth century looked bleak for Constantinople. Siege by the Ottomans had become a recurring feature of life. When the Emperor Manuel broke his oath of vassalage in 1394, Sultan Bayezit subjected the city to a series of assaults, only called off when Bayezit was himself defeated in battle by the Turkic Mongol, Timur – the Tamburlaine of Marlowe’s play – in 1402. Thereafter the emperors sought increasingly desperate help from the west – Manuel even came to England in 1400 – whilst pursuing a policy of diplomatic intrigue and support for pretenders to the Ottoman throne. Sultan Murat II besieged Constantinople in 1422 for encouraging pretenders but the city still held out. The Ottomans had neither the fleet to close off the city nor the technology quickly to storm its massive land walls and Manuel, by now an old man but still one of the most astute of all diplomats, managed to conjure up another claimant to the Ottoman throne to threaten civil war. The siege was lifted, but Constantinople was hanging on by the skin of its teeth. It seemed only a matter of time before the Ottomans came for the city again and in force. It was only the fear of a concerted European crusade that restrained them.

  The tugra, the imperial cipher, of Orhan, the first sultan to take a city by siege

  Source Notes

  2 Dreaming of Istanbul

  1 ‘I have seen that God …’, quoted Lewis, Islam from the Prophet, vol. 2, pp. 207–8

  2 ‘Sedentary people …’, Ibn Khaldun, vol. 2, pp. 257–8

  3 ‘to revive the dying …’, Ibn Khaldun, quoted Lewis, The Legacy of Islam, p. 197

  4 ‘God be praised …’, quoted Lewis, Islam from the Prophet, vol. 2, p. 208

  5 ‘On account of its justice …’, quoted Cahen, p. 213

  6 ‘an accursed race … from our lands’, quoted Armstrong, p. 2

  7 ‘they are indomitable …’, quoted Norwich, vol. 3, p. 102

  8 ‘we must live in common …’, quoted Mango, The Oxford History of Byzantium, p. 128

  9 ‘Constantinople is arrogant …’, quoted Kelly, p. 35

  10 ‘since the beginning …’, quoted Morris, p. 39

  11 ‘so insolent in …’, quoted Norwich, vol. 3, p. 130

  12 ‘they brought horses …’, quoted ibid., vol. 3, p. 179

  13 ‘Oh city …’, quoted Morris, p. 41

  14 ‘situated at the junction …’, quoted Kinross, p. 24

  15 ‘It is said that he …’, quoted Mackintosh-Smith, p. 290

  16 ‘Sultan, son of …’, quoted Wittek, p. 15

  17 ‘The Gazi is …’, quoted ibid., p. 14

  18 ‘Why have the Gazis …’, quoted ibid., p. 14

  19 ‘in such a state …’, Tafur, p. 146

  20 ‘Turkish or heathen …’, Mihailovich, pp. 191–2

  21 ‘They are diligent …’, Brocquière, pp. 362–5

  3 Sultan and Emperor

  1432–1451

  Mehmet Chelebi – Sultan – may God fasten the strap of his authority to the pegs of eternity and reinforce the supports of his power until the predestined day!

  Inscription on the tomb of the mother of Mehmet

  IIConstantine Palaiologos, in Christ true Emperor and Autocrat of the Romans.

  Ceremonial title of Constantine XI, eighty-eighth Emperor of Byzantium

  The man destined to tighten the Muslim noose on the city was born ten years after Murat’s siege. In Turkish legend, 1432 was a year of portents. Horses produced a large number of twins; trees were bowed down with fruit; a long-tailed comet appeared in the noonday sky over Constantinople. On the night of 29 March, Sultan Murat was waiting in the royal palace at Edirne for news of a birth; unable to sleep, he started to read the Koran. He had just reached the Victory suras, the verses that promise triumph over unbelievers, when a messenger brought word of a son. He was called Mehmet, Murat’s father’s name, the Turkish form of Muhammad.

  Like many prophecies, these have a distinctly retrospective feel to them. Mehmet was the third of Murat’s sons; both his half-brothers were substantially older and the boy was never his father’s favourite. His chances of living to become sultan were slim. Perhaps it is significant of the entry Mehmet made into the world that considerable uncertainty surrounds the identity of his mother. Despite the efforts of some Turkish historians to claim her as an ethnic Turk and a Muslim, the strong probability is that she was a western slave, taken in a frontier raid or captured by pirates, possibly Serbian or Macedonian and most likely born a Christian – a parentage that casts a strange light on the paradoxes in Mehmet’s nature. Whatever the genetic cocktail of his origins, Mehmet was to reveal a character quite distinct from that of his father, Murat.

  By the middle of the fifteenth century Ottoman sultans were no longer unlettered tribal chieftains who directed war bands from the saddle. The heady mixture of jihad and booty had given way to something more measured. The sultan still derived immense prestige as the greatest leader of holy war in the lands of Islam, but this was increasingly a tool of dynastic policy. Ottoman rulers now styled themselves the ‘Sultan of Rum’ – a title that suggested a claim to the inheritance of the ancient Christian empire – or ‘Padishah’, a high-flown Persian formula. From the Byzantines they were developing a taste for the ceremonial apparatus of monarchy; their princes were formally educated for high office; their palaces were high-walled; access to the sultan became carefully regulated. Fear of poison, intrigue and assassination were progressively distancing the ruler from his subjects – a process that had followed the murder of Murat I by a Serbian envoy after the first Battle of Kosovo in 1389. The reign of the second Murat was a fulcrum in this process. He still signed himself ‘bey’ – the old title for a Turkish noble – rather than the grander ‘sultan’ and was popular with his people. The Hungarian monk, Brother George, was surprised by the lack of ceremonial surrounding him. ‘On his clothing or on his horse the sultan had no special mark to distinguish him. I watched him at his mother’s funeral, and if he had not been pointed out to me, I could not have recognised him.’ At the same time a distance was starting to be interposed between the sultan and the world around him. ‘He never took anything in public’, noted Bertrandon de la Brocquière, ‘and there are very few persons who can boast of having seen him speak, or having seen him eat or drink.’ It was a process that would lead successive sultans to the hermetic world of the Topkapi Palace with its blank outer walls and elaborate ritual.

  It was the chilly atmosphere of the Ottoman court that shaped Mehmet’s early years. The issue of succession to the throne cast a long shadow over the upbringing of male children. Direct dynastic succession from father to son was critical for the empire’s survival – the harem system was instrumental in ensuring an adequate supply of surviving male children to protect it – but comprised its greatest vulnerability. The throne was a contest between the male heirs. There was no law prioritizing the eldest; the surviving princes simply fought it out at the sultan’s death. The outcome was considered to be God’s will. ‘If He has decreed that you shall have the kingdom after me,’ a later sultan wrote to his son, ‘no man living will be able to prevent it.’ In practice, succession often became a race for the centre – the winner would be the heir who secured the capital, the treasury and the support of the army; it was a method that might either favour the survival of the fittest or lead to civil war. The Ottoman state had nearly collapsed in the early years of the f
ifteenth century in a fratricidal struggle for power in which the Byzantines were deeply implicated. It had become almost state policy in Constantinople to exploit the dynasty’s moment of weakness by supporting rival claimants and pretenders.

  In order both to guard against pre-emptive strikes and to teach their sons the craft of monarchy, the sultans dispatched their male heirs at a very early age to govern provinces under the watchful eye of carefully chosen tutors. Mehmet spent his first years in the palace harem in Edirne but was sent to the regional capital of Amasya in Anatolia at the age of two to begin the early preparation for his education. His oldest half-brother Ahmet, who was twelve years of age, became governor of the city at the same time. Dark forces stalked the heirs to the throne during the next decade. In 1437 Ahmet died suddenly in Amasya. Six years later, when his other half-brother Ali was governor, a gruesome Ottoman version of ‘the Princes in the Tower’ mystery took place in the town. A leading noble, Kara Hizir Pasha, was dispatched to Amasya by unknown persons. He managed to steal into the palace at night and strangle Ali in his bed, as well as both his infant sons. A whole branch of the family was snuffed out in a single night; Mehmet remained the only heir to the throne. Rippling like a black shadow behind these murky events was a long-running power struggle within the Ottoman ruling class for the soul of the state. During his reign Murat had strengthened the Janissary corps of slave-recruited troops and elevated some Christian converts to the status of vizier in an attempt to establish a counter-balance to the power of the traditional Turkish nobility and army. It was a contest that would be played out to its final conclusion before the walls of Constantinople nine years later.

  Ali had been Murat’s favourite son: his death affected the sultan deeply – though at the same time it is not impossible that Murat himself ordered the executions on discovering a plot by the prince. However, he realized that there was now no choice but to recall the young Mehmet to Edirne and to take his education in hand. At that moment the eleven-year-old represented the only future for the Ottoman dynasty. Murat was horrified when he saw the boy again. He was already headstrong, wilful and almost uneducable. Mehmet had openly defied his previous tutors, refusing to be chastised or to learn the Koran. Murat called in the celebrated mullah, Ahmet Gurani, with orders to thrash the young prince into submission. Cane in hand, the mullah went to see the prince. ‘Your father’, he said, ‘has sent me to instruct you, but also to chastise you in case you do not obey.’ Mehmet laughed aloud at the threat, at which the mullah delivered such a beating that Mehmet swiftly buckled down to study. Under this formidable tutor, Mehmet began to absorb the Koran, then a widening circle of knowledge. The boy revealed an extraordinary intelligence coupled with an iron will to succeed. He developed fluency in languages – by all accounts he knew Turkish, Persian and Arabic, as well as spoken Greek, a Slavic dialect and some Latin – and became fascinated by history and geography, science, practical engineering and literature. A remarkable personality was starting to emerge.

  The 1440s marked a new period of crisis for the Ottomans. The empire was threatened in Anatolia by an uprising by one of its Turkmen vassals, the Bey of Karaman, while a new Hungarian-led crusade was being prepared in the West. Murat appeared to have defused the Christian threat with a ten-year truce and departed to Anatolia to deal with the troublesome Bey. Before he went he took the surprising step of abdicating from the throne. He was fearful of civil war within the state and wanted to confirm Mehmet in power before he himself died; world-weariness too may have been a factor. The burdens of office hung heavily on an Ottoman sultan and Murat may have been depressed by the murder of his favourite son Ali. At the age of twelve Mehmet was confirmed as sultan at Edirne under the guidance of the trustworthy Chief Vizier Halil. Coins were minted in his name and he was mentioned in weekly prayers, according to prerogative.

  The experiment was a disaster. Tempted by the opportunity presented by a callow young sultan, the Pope immediately absolved the Hungarian king Ladislas of his oath of truce and the crusader army rumbled forward. In September it crossed the Danube; a Venetian fleet was dispatched to the Dardanelles to block Murat’s return. The atmosphere in Edirne became turbulent. In 1444 an inspirational religious fanatic of a heretical Shia sect had appeared in the city. Crowds flocked to the Persian missionary who promised reconciliation between Islam and Christianity, and Mehmet himself, attracted by his teachings, welcomed the man into the palace. The religious authorities were shocked and Halil himself was alarmed by the popular enthusiasm for the heretic. An attempt was made to arrest him. When the missionary sought sanctuary in the palace, Mehmet had to be persuaded to give the man up. He was eventually hauled off to the public prayer site and burned alive; his followers were massacred. The Byzantines also decided to profit from this confusion. A pretender to the Ottoman throne, Prince Orhan, whom they were holding in the city, was released to foment a revolt. Uprisings ensued against the Ottomans in the European provinces. There was panic in Edirne; a large portion of the town was burned down and Turkish Muslims started to flee back to Anatolia. Mehmet’s reign was unravelling in chaos.

  Murat meanwhile had negotiated a truce with the Bey of Karaman and hurried back to confront the threat. Finding the Dardanelles blocked by Venetian ships, he was ferried across the Bosphorus with his army by their rivals, the Genoese, at the handsome fee of a ducat a head and advanced to meet the crusader army at Varna on the Black Sea on 10 November 1444. The outcome was a crushing victory for the Ottomans. Ladislas’s skull was mounted on a lance and sent to the old Ottoman city of Bursa as a triumphal token of Muslim supremacy. It was a significant moment in the holy war between Christianity and Islam. After 350 years the defeat at Varna extinguished the appetite in the West for crusading; never again would Christendom unite to try to drive the Muslims out of Europe. It confirmed the Ottoman presence in the Balkans and left Constantinople emphatically isolated as an enclave within the Islamic world, reducing the likelihood of western help in the event of Ottoman attack. Worse still, Murat held the Byzantines responsible for much of the chaos of 1444, an opinion that would soon shape Ottoman strategy.

  Immediately after Varna, and despite the early failure of Mehmet’s sultanship, Murat again retired to Anatolia. Halil Pasha remained first vizier, but Mehmet was more influenced by the two men who acted as his governors: the chief eunuch Shihabettin Pasha, lord of the European provinces, and a forceful Christian renegade, Zaganos Pasha. Both these men favoured advancing the plan for taking Constantinople, in the knowledge that the city still held the pretender Orhan; capturing it would stabilize Mehmet’s rule and bring the young sultan immense personal kudos. It is clear that even at an early age Mehmet was magnetically attracted to the project of capturing the Christian city and making himself heir to the Roman Empire. In a poem he wrote that ‘my earnest desire is to crush the Infidels’, yet Mehmet’s longing for the city was as much imperial as it was religious, and derived in part from a source that was surprisingly non-Islamic. He was deeply interested in the exploits of Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar. Alexander had been transformed into an Islamic hero by medieval Persian and Turkish epics. Mehmet would have known of Alexander from his early years; he had the Greek biography of the World Conqueror by the Roman writer Arrian read to him daily in the palace. From these influences he conceived for himself twin identities – as the Muslim Alexander whose conquests would reach to the ends of the earth, and as a gazi warrior leading jihad against the infidel. He would reverse the flow of world history: Alexander swept east; he in his turn would bring glory to the East and to Islam by conquering the West. It was a heady vision, fuelled by his personal advisers, who saw that their own careers might be made on the wave of conquest.

  The precocious Mehmet, supported by his tutors, started to plan a new assault on Constantinople as early as 1445. He was thirteen years old. Halil Pasha was thoroughly alarmed. He disapproved of the young sultan’s plan; after the debacle of 1444, he feared such a move would end in further disaste
r. Despite its formidable resources, the Ottoman Empire had all but collapsed within living memory under civil war, and Halil retained the deep fear of many, that a concerted attempt on Constantinople could provoke a massive Christian response from the West. He had personal motives too: he was concerned for the erosion of his own power and that of the traditional Muslim-Turkish nobility at the expense of the warmongering Christian converts. He decided to engineer Mehmet’s deposition by instigating a Janissary revolt and petitioning Murat to return to Edirne to take control again. He was welcomed back with wild enthusiasm; the haughty, aloof young sultan was not popular with either the people or the Janissaries. Mehmet retired to Manisa with his advisers. It was a humiliating rebuff that he would never forgive or forget; one day it would cost Halil his life.

  Mehmet remained in the shadows for the rest of Murat’s life, though he continued to regard himself as sultan. He accompanied his father to the second Battle of Kosovo in 1448, where the Hungarians made one final bid to break Ottoman power. It was Mehmet’s baptism of fire. The outcome, despite huge Ottoman losses, was as decisive as Varna and further served to cement the legend of Ottoman invincibility. A gloomy pessimism started to pervade the West. ‘The Turks through such organisation are far ahead’, wrote Michael the Janissary. ‘If you pursue him, he will flee; but if he pursues you, you will not escape … the Tartars have several times won victories over the Turks, but the Christians never, and especially in pitched battle, most of all because they let the Turks encircle them and approach from the flank.’

  Murat’s final years were spent in Edirne. The sultan seems to have lost the appetite for further military adventure, preferring the stability of peace to the uncertainties of war. As long as he lived, Constantinople breathed in uneasy peace; when he died in February 1451 he was mourned by friend and foe alike. ‘The treaties that he had sworn sacredly with the Christians’, declared the Greek chronicler Doukas, ‘he always kept intact. His anger was short-lived. He was averse to warfare and keen on peace, and for this reason the Father of Peace rewarded him with a peaceful death, rather than being dispatched by the sword.’ The Greek chronicler would have been less generous had he known the recommendation Murat left to his successor. Byzantine meddlings in the 1440s had convinced him that the Ottoman state could never be secure as long as Constantinople remained a Christian enclave. ‘He left as a bequest to his illustrious successor’, said the Ottoman chronicler Sa’d-ud-din, ‘the erection of the standards of the jihad for the capture of that city, by the addition of which … he might protect the prosperity of the people of Islam and break the back of the wretched misbelievers.’