The death of a sultan always constituted a dangerous moment for the Ottoman state. In accordance with tradition, and to forestall any armed revolt, the news was kept secret. Murat had one other son, a baby called Little Ahmet, who posed no immediate threat to Mehmet’s succession, but the pretender Orhan remained in Constantinople, and Mehmet was hardly popular. News of his father’s death was dispatched in a sealed letter by flying courier. In it Halil advised Mehmet not to tarry; a swift arrival at Edirne was imperative – any delay might provoke insurrection. According to legend, Mehmet immediately had his horse saddled and called to his retainers, ‘Let him who loves me, follow me.’ Accompanied by his household troops he made the crossing at Gallipoli in two days. As he rode across the plain to Edirne he was met by a vast throng of officials, viziers, mullahs, state governors and common people, in a ritual harking back to their tribal past on the Asian steppes. When they were a mile off, the welcoming party dismounted and walked towards their new ruler in dead silence. Half a mile distant, they stopped and broke into wild ululations for the dead sultan. Mehmet and his retinue similarly dismounted and joined in the communal lamentation. The winter landscape echoed with mournful cries. The chief officials bowed before the new sultan then the whole gathering remounted and progressed back to the palace.
The following day the official presentation of the ministers took place. It was an edgy occasion, the moment when the viziers of the old sultan discovered their fate. Mehmet was seated on the throne, flanked by his own trusted advisers. Halil Pasha hung back, waiting to see what Mehmet would do. The boy sultan said, ‘Why do my father’s viziers hang back? Call them forward, and tell Halil to take his usual place.’ Halil was restored to the role of chief vizier. It was a typical move by Mehmet: to maintain a status quo while he kept his deeper plans close to his chest and bided his time.
The new sultan was just seventeen years old, a mixture of confidence and hesitancy, ambition and reserve. His early years had evidently marked Mehmet deeply. He had probably been separated from his mother when very young and had survived in the shadow world of the Ottoman court largely through luck. Even as a young man he emerges as deeply secretive and suspicious of others: self-reliant, haughty, distant from human affection and intensely ambitious – a personality of paradox and complexity. The man whom the Renaissance later presented as a monster of cruelty and perversion was a mass of contradictions. He was astute, brave and highly impulsive – capable of deep deception, tyrannical cruelty and acts of sudden kindness. He was moody and unpredictable, a bisexual who shunned close relationships, never forgave an insult but who came to be loved for his pious foundations. The key traits of his mature character were already in place: the later tyrant who was also a scholar; the obsessive military strategist who loved Persian poetry and gardening; the expert at logistics and practical planning who was so superstitious that he relied on the court astrologer to confirm military decisions; the Islamic warrior who could be generous to his non-Muslim subjects and enjoyed the company of foreigners and unorthodox religious thinkers.
A handful of portraits painted over the course of his life provide probably the first authentic likenesses of an Ottoman sultan. A reasonably consistent face emerges – an aquiline profile, the hawk nose protruding over sensual lips like ‘a parrot’s beak resting on cherries’ in the memorable phrase of an Ottoman poet, complemented by a reddish beard on a thrusting chin. In one stylized miniature, he is delicately holding an uncrushed rose to his nose between jewelled fingers. It is the conventional representation of the sultan as aesthete, the lover of gardens and the author of Persian quatrains, but it is informed by a fixed gaze, as if he were looking at some faraway point where the world vanishes. In other mature portraits he is bull-necked and corpulent and in the famous late portrait by Bellini now hanging in the National Gallery in London he just looks grave and ill. All these pictures contain a note of steady authority, the natural assumption of power by ‘God’s shadow on earth’, that assumes the world sits in his hand too naturally to be called arrogance, but there is a chilly melancholy too that recalls the cold and dangerous childhood years.
The pictures are matched by a vivid account of the complex young Mehmet by an Italian, Giacomo de Languschi:
The sovereign, the Grand Turk Mehmet Bey is a youth … well-built, of large rather than medium stature, expert at arms, of aspect more frightening than venerable, laughing seldom, full of circumspection, endowed with great generosity, obstinate in pursuing his plans, bold in all undertakings, as eager for fame as Alexander of Macedon. Daily he has Roman and other historical works read to him. He speaks three languages, Turkish, Greek and Slavic. He is at great pains to learn the geography of Italy … where the seat of the pope is and that of the emperor, and how many kingdoms there are in Europe. He possesses a map of Europe with the countries and provinces. He learns of nothing with greater interest and enthusiasm than the geography of the world and of military affairs; he burns with desire to dominate; he is a shrewd investigator of conditions. It is with such a man that we Christians have to deal … Today, he says, the times have changed, and declares that he will advance from east to West as in former times the Westerners advanced into the Orient. There must, he says, be only one empire, one faith, and one sovereignty in the world.
It was a vivid snapshot of Mehmet’s ambition to reverse the tide of history by carrying Islamic banners into Europe, but at his accession the obsession and intelligence were largely hidden from the West. They saw only a callow and inexperienced youth whose early taste of power had ended in humiliation.
*
Two years before Mehmet’s accession to the throne, Constantinople had also welcomed a new emperor, though in very different circumstances. The man destined to oppose Mehmet in the struggle ahead bore the name of the city’s founder – a fact that superstitious Byzantines would be quick to recall. Constantine XI was the eighth member of the ruling dynasty of Palaiologos to sit on the throne since 1261. The family had usurped power and their rule coincided with the relentless downward spiral of the empire into anarchy and discord. His own background was typically multi-racial. He was Greek speaking but hardly Greek: his mother was Serbian and Constantine adopted her family name of Dragases, his father was half Italian. He described himself, like all Byzantines, as a Roman, and signed himself with the proud and ancient title of his predecessors: ‘Constantine Palaiologos, in Christ true Emperor and Autocrat of the Romans’.
Signature of Constantine as Emperor of the Romans
It was a hollow protocol but typical of the ritual formulae and ceremonial that the Byzantines clung to during their unchecked decline. The empire had a High Admiral, but no fleet, a Commander-in-Chief but few soldiers. Within the Lilliputian world of the court, the nobility jostled and squabbled for absurdly pretentious titles such as Grand Domestic, Grand Chancellor or Lord of the Imperial Wardrobe. Constantine was effectively an emperor without power. His territory had shrunk to the city and its suburbs, a few islands and linked dominions in the Peloponnese, which the Greeks called, rather poetically, the Morea, the Mulberry Leaf: the peninsula was famous for its silk production and its shape reminded them of this food of silk worms.
It is hard to envy Constantine his crown. He inherited bankruptcy, a family with a taste for civil war, a city divided by religious passions and an impoverished and volatile proletariat. The empire was a snake pit of internecine feuding – in 1442 his brother Demetrios marched on the city with Ottoman troops. It lived a half-life as the vassal of the Ottoman emperor who could lay siege to the city at any time. Nor was Constantine’s personal authority particularly secure: a whiff of illegitimacy surrounded his accession to the throne in 1449. He was invested in Mistra in the Peloponnese, a highly unusual protocol for an emperor, and never subsequently crowned in St Sophia. The Byzantines had to ask Murat’s approval of their new emperor but were then too poor to provide him with transport home. Humiliatingly, he had to beg passage to his throne on a Catalan ship.
There are no contemporary illustrations of the city he returned to in March 1449. A slightly earlier Italian map shows Constantinople to be a place of empty spaces, while across the Golden Horn, the Genoese trading colony known as Galata, or Pera, was reported to be thriving and prosperous: ‘a large town, inhabited by Greeks, Jews and Genoese’ according to the traveller Bertrandon de la Brocquière, who declared it to be the handsomest port he had ever seen. The French knight found Constantinople itself fascinating but down at heel. The churches were impressive, particularly St Sophia, where he saw ‘the gridiron on which St Lawrence was broiled, and a large stone in the shape of a washstand, on which they say Abraham gave the angels food when they were going to destroy Sodom and Gomorra’. The great equestrian statue of Justinian, which he mistook for Constantine the Great, was still in place: ‘He holds a sceptre in his left hand, and holds his right extended towards Turkey in Asia and the road to Jerusalem, as if to denote that the whole of that country was under his rule.’ But the truth was obvious – the emperor was scarcely master in his own house.
There are merchants from all nations in this city, but none so powerful as the Venetians, who have a bailey to regulate all their affairs independently of the Emperor and his ministers. The Turks also have an officer to superintend their commerce, who, like the Venetian bailiff, is independent of the Emperor. They have even the privilege, that if one of their slaves should run away and take refuge within the city, on their demanding him, the Emperor is bound to give him up. This prince must be under great subjection to the Turk, since he pays him, I am told, a tribute of ten thousand ducats annually.
De la Brocquière noted everywhere the epitaphs of vanished greatness – none more telling than (apparently) three empty marble plinths in the Hippodrome: ‘here stood once three gilt horses, now at Venice’. It seemed only a matter of time before the Ottomans came for the city again and the people just opened the gates for them. They had received a terrible warning of the alternatives in 1430 when Thessaloniki had refused to submit to Murat. It took the Ottomans just three hours to storm the walls; three days of rape and plunder followed; 7,000 women and children were carried off into slavery.
An Italian map of Constantinople from the early fifteenth century. It portrays a sizeable moat on the left-hand side outside the landwalls. Galata is at the top.
We have little idea what Constantine looks like; his face is almost a blank. He seems to have inherited the strong, regular features and bearing of his father Manuel II, but the empire was too distracted to commission portraits of the new emperor and the gold seal of state that shows a thin hawk-like face is far too schematic to be meaningful. However there is consensus about his personality. Of all the sons of Manuel, Constantine was the most capable and trustworthy, ‘a philanthropist and without malice’, imbued with resoluteness, courage and a deep patriotism. Unlike his quarrelsome and unprincipled brothers, Constantine was straightforward; he seems to have inspired deep loyalty among those around him. He was by all accounts a man of action rather than a skilled administrator or a deep thinker, adept in horsemanship and the arts of war, courageous and enterprising. Above all, he was resolute in the face of setbacks. A strong sense of responsibility for the Byzantine inheritance ran through his character; he spent a lifetime trying to shore it up.
Constantine was twenty-seven years older than Mehmet; he was born in Constantinople in 1405 and from his early youth can have had few illusions about the city’s plight. At seventeen he experienced Murat’s siege of 1422; the following year he was appointed regent while his brother John VIII made one of the many fruitless trips around the states of Christendom to seek support for the Byzantine cause. At his accession in 1449, he was forty-four years old and had twenty years of fighting behind him. The majority of this time had been spent trying to regain full Byzantine control of the Peloponnese, with varying success. By 1430 he had cleared most of the small foreign kingdoms out of the peninsula and during the 1440s, as Despot of Morea, he pushed its boundaries forward into Northern Greece. To Murat he was a constant irritant; a rebellious vassal who needed to be cuffed back into line. Definitive retribution came in 1446 after the failed Crusade of Varna. An Ottoman army swept into the Morea devastating the countryside and enslaving 60,000 Greeks. Constantine was forced to conclude a humiliating truce, making vows of vassalage to the sultan and paying a heavy tribute. Failure had dogged the enterprise of rebuilding Byzantine fortunes in Greece, but his spirit, military skill and straightforwardness contrasted with the behaviour of his three brothers Demetrios, Thomas and Theodore – by turns self-seeking, treacherous, quarrelsome and indecisive, they contrived to hinder his attempts to prop up the remnants of empire. Their mother, Helena, had to insist on Constantine’s claim to the throne: he alone could be entrusted with the inheritance.
Coin of Constantine
In subsequent Byzantine legend bad luck clung to Constantine like a curse – his well-meaning imperial venture in the Morea had been courageous but ill-starred. He had fought on alone after the catastrophe at Varna, when the Venetian fleet sailed home and the Genoese failed to send their promised aid, but this persistence had visited considerable suffering on the Greek people. His personal life was similarly unlucky. His first wife died childless in 1429; his second in 1442. During the late 1440s he made repeated attempts to forge a dynastic marriage that would shore up the fortunes of his crown and create the possibility of a natural successor. They all failed to come to fruition in the increasingly fraught political atmosphere on the eve of Mehmet’s succession.
In February 1451 Mehmet settled into the royal palace at Edirne. His first act was startling and decisive. When he died, Murat had left behind an infant son by another wife – Little Ahmet. A few days later, while the mother was paying an official visit to the throne room to express her grief at his father’s death, Mehmet dispatched a minion, Ali Bey, to the women’s quarters to drown Little Ahmet in the bath. The next day he executed Ali Bey for the crime, then married the distraught mother off to one of his nobles. It was an act of ruthless intelligence that carried the struggle for power in the Ottoman court to its logical conclusion: only one could rule, and to avoid the fractious possibilities of civil war, only one could survive – to the Ottomans this seemed preferable to the endless struggles that sapped the lifeblood of Byzantium. Instantly Mehmet had clarified the practice of Ottoman succession, which he was later to codify as a law of fratricide: ‘whichever of my sons inherits the sultan’s throne, it behooves him to kill his brother in the interest of the world order. Most of the jurists have approved this procedure. Let action be taken accordingly.’ Henceforth execution was to stalk the succession as a dreadful certainty. It would reach its apogee with the sultanate of Mehmet III in 1595, when nineteen coffins containing the bodies of his brothers were carried out of the palace. Despite this, the fratricide law failed to prevent civil wars: with it came preemptive acts of rebellion by frightened sons, a consequence that would return to haunt Mehmet. In Constantinople the circumstances surrounding Little Ahmet’s death should have provided a key to Mehmet’s character: it appears they did not.
Source Notes
3 Sultan and Emperor
1 ‘Mehmet Chelebi …’, quoted Babinger, p. 59
2 ‘On his clothing …’, quoted ibid., p. 418
3 ‘He never took anything …’, Brocquière, p. 351
4 ‘If He has decreed …’, quoted Inalcik, p. 59
5 ‘Your father has sent me …’, quoted Babinger, p. 24
6 ‘my earnest desire …’, Granville Brown, A History of Ottoman Poetry, vol.
7 ‘The Turks through such …’, Mihailovich, p. 171
8 ‘The treaties that …’, Doukas, Fragmenta, p. 228
9 ‘He left as a bequest …’, Khoja Sa’d-ud-din, p. 41
10 ‘Why do my father’s viziers …’, Doukas, Fragmenta, p. 227
11 ‘a parrot’s beak …’, quoted Babinger, p. 424
12 ‘The sovereign, the Grand Turk …’, quoted ib
id., p. 112
13 ‘a large town … now at Venice’, Brocquière, pp. 335–41
14 ‘a philanthropist and without malice’, Nestor-Iskander, p. 67
15 ‘Whichever of my …’, quoted Babinger, p. 47
4 Cutting the Throat
FEBRUARY 1451–NOVEMBER 1452
The Bosphorus with one key opens and closes two worlds, two seas.
Pierre Gilles, sixteenth-century French scholar
Throughout the West news of Murat’s death was greeted with relief. In Venice, Rome, Genoa and Paris they were all too ready to accept the opinion set out in a letter from the Italian Francesco Filelfo to King Charles of France a month later, that the young Mehmet was young, inexperienced and simple minded. They would probably have been less interested in his conclusion – that the time was ripe for a decisive military operation to drive the Ottomans, ‘a mob of venal corrupt slaves’, out of Europe for good. Any immediate appetite for crusading had been firmly scotched by the bloody debacle at Varna in 1444 and the potentates of Europe welcomed the prospect of the callow, and so far disastrous, Mehmet ascending the throne.
Constantinople: The Last Great Siege, 1453 Page 6
