Constantinople: The Last Great Siege, 1453

by Roger Crowley

  When Constantine heard of the massacre he closed the city gates and detained all the Ottoman subjects within. Among these were a number of Mehmet’s young eunuchs who were on a visit to the city. On the third day of their captivity they petitioned Constantine for release declaring that their master would be angry with them for not returning. They begged either to be freed at once or executed, on the grounds that release later would still result in their death at the sultan’s hand. Constantine relented and let the men go. He sent one more embassy to the sultan with a message of resignation and defiance:

  since you have preferred war to peace and I can call you back to peace neither with oaths or pleas, then follow your own will. I take refuge in God. If He has decreed and decided to hand over this city to you, who can contradict Him or prevent it? If He instills the idea of peace in your mind, I would gladly agree. For the moment, now that you have broken the treaties to which I am bound by oath, let these be dissolved. Henceforth I will keep the city gates closed. I will fight for the inhabitants with all my strength. You may continue in your power until the Righteous Judge passes sentence on each of us.

  It was a clear declaration of Constantine’s resolve. Mehmet simply executed the envoys and sent a curt reply: ‘Either surrender the city or stand ready to do battle.’ An Ottoman detachment was dispatched to ravage the area beyond the city walls and carry off flocks and captives, but Constantine had largely removed the population from the nearby villages into the city, together with the harvested crops. The Ottoman chroniclers record that he also sent bribes to Halil to pursue his quest for peace, but this seems more likely to be the propaganda of the vizier’s enemies. From midsummer the gates of the city were to remain shut and the two sides were effectively at war.

  On Thursday 31 August 1452 Mehmet’s new fortress was complete, a bare four and half months after the first stone was laid. It was huge, ‘not like a fortress’, in the words of Kritovoulos, ‘more like a small town’ and it dominated the sea. The Ottomans called it Bogaz Kesen, the Cutter of the Straits or the Throat Cutter, though in time it would become known as the European castle, Rumeli Hisari. The triangular structure with its four large and thirteen small towers, its curtain walls twenty-two feet thick and fifty feet tall and its towers roofed with lead, represented an astonishing building feat for the time. Mehmet’s ability to co-ordinate and complete extraordinary projects at breakneck speed was continually to dumbfound his opponents in the months ahead.

  A recreation of Rumeli Hisari, the Throat Cutter

  On 28 August Mehmet rode round the top of the Golden Horn with his army and camped outside the city walls, now firmly barred against him. For three days he scrutinized the defences and the terrain in forensic detail, making notes and sketches and analysing potential weaknesses in the fortifications. On 1 September, with autumn coming on, he rode off back to Edirne well satisfied with his summer’s work, and the fleet sailed back to its base at Gallipoli. The Throat Cutter was garrisoned with 400 men under its commander Firuz Bey, who was ordered to detain all ships passing up and down the straits on payment of a toll. To add force to this menace, a number of cannon had been constructed and hauled to the site. Small ordnance was mounted on the battlements but a battery of large guns, ‘like dragons with fiery throats’, was installed on the seashore beneath the castle wall. The guns, which were angled in different directions to command a wide field of fire, were capable of sending huge stone balls weighing 600 pounds whistling low across the surface of the water level with the hulls of passing ships, like stones skimming across a pond. They were matched by other guns at the castle opposite, so that ‘not even a bird could fly from the Mediterranean to the Black Sea’. Henceforth no ship could pass up or down to the Black Sea unexamined, either by day or night. ‘In this manner’, recorded the Ottoman chronicler Sa’d-ud-din, ‘the Padishah, the asylum of the world, blockading that strait, closed the way of the vessels of the enemy, and cauterized the liver of the blind-hearted emperor.’

  In the city Constantine was gathering his resources against a war that now looked inevitable, and dispatching messengers to the West with increasing urgency. He sent word to his brothers in the Morea, Thomas and Demetrios, asking them to come at once to the city. He made extravagant offers of land to any who would send help: to Hunyadi of Hungary he offered either Selymbria or Mesembria on the Black Sea, to Alfonso of Aragon and Naples the island of Lemnos. He made appeals to the Genoese on Chios, to Dubrovnik, Venice and yet again to the Pope. Practical help was hardly forthcoming but the powers of Christian Europe were reluctantly becoming aware that an ominous shadow was falling over Constantinople. A flurry of diplomatic notes was exchanged. Pope Nicholas had persuaded the Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick III, to send a stern but empty ultimatum to the sultan in March. Alfonso of Naples dispatched a flotilla of ten ships to the Aegean then withdrew them again. The Genoese were troubled by the threat to their colonies at Galata and on the Black Sea but were unable to provide practical help; instead they ordered the Podesta (mayor) of Galata to make the best arrangements he could with Mehmet should the city fall. The Venetian Senate gave similarly equivocal instructions to its commanders in the eastern Mediterranean: they must protect Christians whilst not giving offence to the Turks. They knew that Mehmet threatened their Black Sea trade almost before the Throat Cutter was finished; soon their spies would be sending back detailed sketch maps of the threatening fortress and its guns. The issue was coming closer to home: a vote in the Senate in August to abandon Constantinople to its fate was easily defeated, but resulted in no more decisive counter-action.

  Back in Edirne Mehmet had either predicted, or got wind of, Constantine’s appeal to his brothers in the Morea – and moved rapidly to scotch it. On 1 October 1452 he ordered his elderly general Turahan Bey to march into the Peloponnese and attack Demetrios and Thomas. He ravaged the countryside, striking far into the south and making the release of forces back to Constantinople an impossibility. Meanwhile the supply of grain from the Black Sea was starting to dry up. A new embassy was sent to Venice in the autumn. The Senate’s reply on 16 November was as vague as before, but the Venetians were shortly to have their attention drawn into sharp focus by events further east.

  By November the masters of Italian ships plying the routes between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean found themselves in a quandary as to whether to submit to Mehmet’s custom toll at the Throat Cutter or to ignore it and risk the consequences. The force of the current meant that ships travelling downstream had a fair chance of passing through the checkpoint before they could be blasted out of the water. On 26 November a Venetian captain, Antonio Rizzo, came down the Bosphorus from the Black Sea with a cargo of food for the city. Approaching the castle he decided to take the risk. Ignoring warning shouts from the bank to lower his sails, Rizzo pressed on. A volley of shots sped low across the water and one giant stone ball struck the lightweight hull of his galley, shattering it. The captain and thirty survivors were able to make it to the shore in a small boat where they were promptly captured, bound in chains and marched off to face the Sultan’s displeasure in the town of Didimotkon near Edirne. While they languished in prison, the Venetian ambassador in Constantinople travelled hotfoot to the imperial court to beg for the sailors’ lives. He arrived too late. Mehmet had determined to make an example of the Venetians. Most of the men he beheaded; Rizzo himself was impaled ‘by a stake through his anus’. All the bodies were then left to rot outside the town walls as a warning against disobedience. ‘I saw them a few days later, when I went there,’ the Greek chronicler Doukas recalled. A few of the sailors were returned to Constantinople to ensure the news got back to the city. There was one other survivor: Mehmet took a fancy to the son of Rizzo’s clerk and put the boy in the seraglio.

  This savage demonstration had the desired effect. It drove the populace of Constantinople into instant panic. Meanwhile, despite Constantine’s embassies, there was still no sign of concerted help from the West. Only the Pope could stand above
Europe’s factional mercantile interests, dynastic feuds and wars, and appeal for help in the name of Christendom, but the papacy itself was involved in an intractable and long-running dispute with the Orthodox Church that cast a shadow over all such dealings. It was about to severely blight Constantine’s chances of organizing effective resistance.

  Source Notes

  4 Cutting the Throat

  1 ‘The Bosphorus …’, quoted Freely, p. 269

  2 ‘a mob of venal …’, quoted Babinger, p. 68

  3 ‘Come, Mr Ambassador … since childhood’, Sphrantzes, trans. Philippides, p. 59

  4 ‘and by the angels …’, Doukas, Fragmenta, p. 228

  5 ‘Standing with their arms …’, Tursun Beg, p. 33

  6 ‘the Emperor of …’, Doukas, Fragmenta, pp. 234–5

  7 ‘You stupid Greeks …’, quoted Nicol, The Immortal Emperor, p. 52

  8 ‘path of the vessels …’, Khoja Sa’d-ud-din, p. 11

  9 ‘stone and timber …’, Kritovoulos, Critobuli, p. 19

  10 ‘for the construction …’, Doukas, Fragmenta, pp. 237–8

  11 ‘now you can see …’, ibid., p. 238

  12 ‘as a son would …’, ibid., p. 239

  13 ‘what the city contains …’, ibid., p. 239

  14 ‘Go away and tell …’, ibid., p. 245

  15 ‘well-prepared for …’, Kritovoulos, Critobuli, p. 21

  16 ‘masons, carpenters …’, Mihailovich, p. 89

  17 ‘the distance between …’, Kritovoulos, Critobuli, p. 22

  18 ‘twisting curves …’, ibid., p. 22

  19 ‘gave up all thoughts of relaxation’, Tursun Beg, p. 34

  20 ‘publicly offered …’, Kritovoulos, Critobuli, p. 22

  21 ‘since you have preferred …’, Doukas, Fragmenta, p. 245

  22 ‘not like a fortress …’, Kritovoulos, Critobuli, p. 22

  23 ‘like dragons with …’, Pertusi, La Caduta, vol. 1, p. 311

  24 ‘not even a bird …’, ibid., p. 311

  25 ‘In this manner …’, Khoja Sa’d-ud-din, p. 12

  26 ‘by a stake … I went there’, Doukas, Fragmenta, p. 248

  5 The Dark Church

  NOVEMBER 1452–FEBRUARY 1453

  It is far better for a country to remain under the rule of Islam than be governed by Christians who refuse to acknowledge the rights of the Catholic Church.

  Pope Gregory VII, 1073

  Flee from the papists as you would from a snake and from the flames of a fire.

  St Mark Eugenicus, fifteenth-century Greek Orthodox theologian

  The principal source of Constantine’s difficulties in mustering help from the West and organizing an effective defence of his city could be pinpointed to a dramatic incident one summer’s day nearly 400 years earlier – though its causes were far older even than that.

  On 16 July 1054, at about 3 o’clock in the afternoon, as the clergy were preparing for the afternoon liturgy in St Sophia, three prelates, dressed in full canonical robes, stepped into the church through one of the great west doors and walked purposefully towards the altar, watched by the gathering congregation. The men were cardinals of the Catholic Church sent from Rome by the Pope to settle theological disputes with their brothers in the East and led by one Humbert of Mourmoutiers. They had been in the city for some time, but this afternoon, after lengthy and awkward negotiations, they had lost patience and were coming to take decisive action. Humbert carried in his hands a document whose content was to prove explosive for Christian unity. Advancing into the sanctuary, he placed a bull of excommunication on the great altar, turned smartly on his heels and walked out. As the stiff-necked cardinal clopped back into the brilliant summer light he shook the dust from his feet and proclaimed: ‘Let God look and judge.’ One of the church deacons ran into the street after Humbert waving the bull and beseeching him to take it back. Humbert refused and walked off, leaving the document lying in the dust. Two days later the cardinals took ship back to Rome; violent religious rioting broke out in the streets that was only pacified by pronouncing anathema on the papal delegation; the offending document was publicly burned. This incident was the start of a process known to history as the Great Schism that was to inflict deep wounds on Christendom – the anathemas were not rescinded until 1965, but the scars still remain. And for Constantine in the winter of 1452 they were to pose an intractable problem.

  In reality the events of that day were only the culmination of a lengthy process of separation between two forms of worship that had been gathering force for hundreds of years. It was based as much as anything on cultural, political and economic differences. In the East they worshipped in Greek, in the West in Latin; there were different forms of worship, different approaches to church organization and differing views on the role of the Pope. More generally the Byzantines had come to regard their western neighbours as uncouth barbarians; they probably had more in common with the Muslims on their frontier than the Franks across the sea. At the centre of their disagreement, however, were two key issues. The Orthodox were prepared to accept that the Pope had a special place among the patriarchs, but they bridled at the notion articulated by Pope Nicholas I in 865 that his office was endowed with authority ‘over all the earth, that is, over every church’. This they perceived as autocratic arrogance.

  The second issue was doctrinal. The bull of excommunication had accused the Eastern Church of omitting one word from the creed – a matter of supreme importance to the theologically preoccupied citizens of Byzantium. The apparently innocuous word, in Latin filioque, ‘and from the Son’, had immense significance. Whereas the original Nicene creed ran: ‘I believe … in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the Giver of Life, who proceeds from the Father, who with the Father and the Son together is worshipped and together glorified’, the Church in the West had come to add the additional word ‘filioque’ to make the text read ‘who proceeds from the Father and from the Son’. In time the upshouldering Roman church even started to accuse the Orthodox of error for omitting the phrase. The Orthodox, in reply, claimed that the addition was theologically untrue; that the Holy Spirit proceeds only from the Father, and to add the name of the Son was heretical. Such issues were the stuff of riots within Constantinople.

  With time the rift widened, despite efforts to patch it up. The sack of Constantinople in 1204 by ‘Christian’ crusaders, which Pope Innocent III himself declared to be ‘an example of perdition and the works of darkness’, added a wider cultural hatred of all things connected to the West; so did the mercantile power of the Italian city states that grew at Byzantium’s expense as a direct result of the plunder. In 1340 Baalaam of Calabria suggested to Pope Benedict XII that it was not so much ‘a difference of dogma that turns the hearts of the Greeks against you as the hatred of the Latins which has entered into their spirits, in consequence of the many and great evils which the Greeks have suffered from the Latins at various times, and are still suffering day by day’. It was true up to a point. But dogma was always central to the way ordinary people in the city lived their faith, and their tenacity to its tenets, in the face of attempts over the centuries by their own emperors to impose anything they considered contrary, had been a stubborn and persistent pattern in the mosaic of Byzantine history.

  By the fifteenth century the relentless pressure of the Ottoman state was forcing successive emperors westward in a wearying round of pleas for help. When the Emperor John VIII toured Italy and Hungary in the 1420s the Catholic King of Hungary suggested that aid would be more readily forthcoming if the Orthodox united with the Church of Rome and swore loyalty to its Pope and creed. Union had become for the ruling families a potential tool of policy as much as a matter of faith: the threat of a united Christian crusade was used repeatedly to restrain Ottoman aggression against the city. (John’s father Manuel had given typically Byzantine advice to his children on his deathbed: ‘Whenever the Turks begin to be troublesome, send embassies to the West at once, offer to accept union, and protract
negotiations to great length; the Turks so greatly fear such union that they will become reasonable; and still the union will not be accomplished because of the enmity of the Latin nations!’) The advice had proved useful in the past but as the Ottomans grew stronger they tended to exactly the opposite course of action: the move towards union became increasingly a spur to armed intervention. For John VIII however, fear of Ottoman displeasure and the distrust of his people were being outweighed by the frequency with which the enemy was knocking on the gates of the city, and when Pope Eugenius IV proposed a council in Italy to accomplish union of the churches he set sail again in November 1437, leaving his brother Constantine as regent to mind the city.