Constantinople: The Last Great Siege, 1453

by Roger Crowley

  The Ottoman troops were readied for battle in the small hours of the morning. In the darkness of his tent, Mehmet performed the ritual ablutions and prayers, and entreated God for the city’s fall. In all likelihood his personal preparations would have included the donning of a talismanic shirt, richly embroidered with verses from the Koran and the names of God, as a magical protection against bad luck. Turbanned and caftanned, with a sword strapped to his waist, and accompanied by his key commanders, he set out on horseback to direct the attack.

  The preparations for a simultaneous assault by land and sea had been carefully made and closely followed. The ships in the Horn and Marmara were in position; troops were massed to make assaults at key locations along the land walls, with the focus being on the Lycus valley. Mehmet decided to commit large numbers of men to the stockade and to deploy his regiments in ascending order of usefulness and skill. He ordered that the first attack should be made by irregulars – the azaps and foreign auxiliaries – unskilled troops recruited for booty or impressed for the campaign under the laws of vassalage. A large number of these seem to have been ‘Christians, kept in his camp by force’, according to Barbaro, ‘Greeks, Latins, Germans, Hungarians – people from all the Christian realms’ according to Leonard – an ill-assorted mix of races and creeds armed in a variety of ways; some with bows, slings or muskets, but the majority simply with scimitars and shields. It was in no sense a disciplined fighting force, but Mehmet’s aim was to use expendable infidels to wear down the enemy before committing more valuable troops to the killing zone. These men were brought up from the north end of the wall, equipped with scaling ladders and readied to attack along the whole front of the Mesoteichion and the stockade in particular. Thousands of them waited in the darkness for the moment to go.

  At one-thirty in the morning horns, drums and cymbals signalled the attack. The cannon opened up and from all directions, from both land and sea, Ottoman forces moved forward. The irregulars were under strict orders to advance at a steady pace and in silence. Within range, they unleashed a volley of fire ‘with arrows from the archers, slingshot from the slingers and iron and lead balls from the cannon and arquebuses’. At a second command, they ran forward across the filled ditch, yelling and hurling themselves at the walls ‘with javelins and pikes and spears’. The defenders were well prepared. As the irregulars attempted to scale the walls, the Christians pushed their ladders away and hurled fire and hot oil down on those scrambling at the foot of the stockade. The darkness and confusion were lit only by pale hand-held flares and the sound of ‘violent yelling and blasphemies and curses’. Giustiniani marshalled his men and the presence of the emperor lent encouragement to the defence. Advantage lay with the defenders who ‘threw big stones down on them from the battlements’ and shot arrows and bullets into their close-packed ranks, ‘so that few escaped alive’. Those coming up behind started to waver and turn back. However, Mehmet had determined to press his irregular troops to the limit. In the rear he stationed a line of chavushes – Mehmet’s military police – as enforcers, armed with clubs and whips to turn them back; and behind them a line of Janissaries with scimitars to cut down any who broke through this cordon and ran for it. Horrible cries rose from the wretched men caught between the hail of missiles in front and the systematic pressure from behind, ‘so that they had a choice of dying on one side or the other’. They turned again to assault the stockade, struggling with furious desperation to raise their ladders against the steady bombardment from above – and were decimated. Despite heavy losses these expendable men served their purpose. For two hours they wore away at the energy of the enemy on the stockade, until Mehmet permitted the remnant to withdraw from the slaughter and limp back behind the lines.

  There was a moment of pause. It was three-thirty in the morning, still dark, the plain lit by flares. On the stockade the men drew breath; there was time to reorganize and make running repairs. Elsewhere up and down the line, the irregulars’ attack had been pressed less vigorously; the strength of the intact walls made progress difficult. It was more a diversionary tactic to ensure that men were tied down along the whole sector and could not be moved to refresh those under pressure in the Mesoteichion. The forces were stretched so thinly that the troops kept in reserve on the central ridge near the Church of the Holy Apostles, a mile away, had been whittled down to a force of 300. Staring out over the plain, the men at the wall vainly hoped that the enemy might withdraw for the night, but it was not to be.

  The moment had come to escalate the conflict. Mehmet rode over to the Anatolian troops on his right flank stationed just beyond the St Romanus Gate. These men were heavy infantry, well equipped with chain armour, experienced, disciplined – and fired by a strong Muslim zeal for the cause. He addressed them in the colloquial, paternal tones a twenty-one-year-old sultan could rightly adopt with his tribe: ‘Advance, my friends and children! Now is the moment to prove yourselves worthy men!’ They advanced down the edge of the valley, wheeled to face the stockade and pressed forward in a tightly packed mass, calling out the name of Allah ‘with shouts and fearful yells’. They came on, said Nicolo Barbaro, ‘like lions unchained against the walls’. The purposeful advance threw the defenders into alarm. Throughout the city church bells clanged, summoning every man back to his post. Many of the population came running up to the walls to help. Others redoubled their cycle of prayer in the churches. Three miles away, outside St Sophia, the clergy offered their own support; ‘When they heard the bells, they took the divine icons, went out before the church, stood, prayed, and blessed with crosses the entire city; in tears did they recite: “Bring us to life again, Lord God, and help us lest we perish in the end.”’

  The Anatolians crossed the ditch at a run, moving forward in a tightly packed mass of compressed steel. They were riddled by fire from crossbows and cannon that ‘killed an incredible number of Turks’. Still they came on, shielding themselves from the hail of rocks and missiles, trying to force themselves up onto the stockade. ‘We hurled deadly missiles down on them’, said Archbishop Leonard, ‘and fired crossbows into their massed ranks.’ By sheer force of numbers the Anatolians managed to prop ladders against the stockade. These were hurled down again and the attackers were crushed by rocks and burned by hot pitch. For a short while the Ottomans drew back, but quickly pressed forward again. Behind the stockade the defenders were amazed and appalled by the spirit of their foe, who seemed motivated by a force beyond the limits of the human. There was evidently no need for extra motivation; this group were ‘all brave men’, recorded Barbaro. ‘They continued to raise their shouts to the skies and they unfurled their standards all the more eagerly. O you would have marvelled at these beasts! Their army was being destroyed, but with limitless bravery they kept trying to get to the fosse.’ The Anatolians were hindered by their numbers and their own dead as successive waves surged forward. Men trampled and scrabbled over each other in a human pyramid as they tried to reach the top of the stockade. Some managed to get there, slashing and hacking wildly at their opponents. Hand to hand fighting developed on the earth platform, man pressed against man. With limited space to move, it was as much physical pressure as armed combat that determined whether the Anatolians forced their enemy backwards or were hurled down onto the scrabbling, shouting, cursing pile of dead and dying men, discarded weapons, helmets, turbans and shields.

  The situation shifted from moment to moment. ‘Sometimes the heavy infantry clambered over the walls and stockades, pressing their way forcefully forward without wavering. At other times they were violently repulsed and driven back.’ Mehmet himself galloped forward, urging them on with shouts and cries, sometimes throwing fresh waves of men into the narrow gap as those in front wavered and died. He ordered the match to be put to the big cannon. Volleys of stone shot sprayed the walls, peppering the defenders and felling the Anatolians from behind. Everything was dark and confused in the predawn of the summer morning, the extraordinary noise of the battle so deafening ‘that the v
ery air seemed to split apart’ with the visceral thump of the kettledrums, the braying of pipes, the crash of cymbals, the clang of church bells, the thock of arrows whipping through the night air, the amplified subterranean roar of the Ottoman cannon vibrating the ground, the flat crack of handguns. Swords clattered harshly against shields, more softly as blades severed windpipes, arrowheads puckered into chests, lead bullets shattered ribs, rocks crushed skulls – and behind these sounds the more terrible hubbub of human voices: prayers and battle cries, shouts of encouragement, curses, howls, sobs and the softer moan of those approaching death. Smoke and dust drifted across the front line. Islamic banners were held hopefully aloft in the dark. Bearded faces, helmets and armour were lit by smoking handheld flares; for brief seconds the gun crews became a frozen tableau backlit by the vivid flash of the cannon; smaller tongues of flame from the handguns sparked sharply in the darkness; buckets of Greek fire arced downwards over the walls like golden rain.

  An hour before dawn one of the big cannon landed a direct hit on the stockade and smashed a hole. Clouds of dust and cannon smoke obscured the front line, but the Anatolians, quickest to react, pressed forward into the breach. Before the defence could react, 300 had swept inside. For the first time the Ottomans had penetrated the enclosure. Chaos reigned inside. The defenders desperately regrouped and faced the Anatolians in the narrow space between the two walls. The gap was evidently not large enough to permit a larger flood of men to surge in and the attackers soon found themselves surrounded and cornered. Systematically the Greeks and Italians hacked them to pieces. None survived. Cheered by this local victory the defenders drove the Anatolians back from the stockade. Discouraged, the Ottoman troops faltered for the first time and were pulled back. It was half past five. The defenders had been fighting, unrested, for four hours.

  By this stage of the morning little substantive progress had been made elsewhere by Ottoman troops. Within the Horn, Zaganos Pasha had succeeded in getting the pontoon bridge in position overnight and moving a good number of troops onto the shore near the end of the land walls. At the same time he brought the light galleys up close so that archers and musketeers could rake the walls with fire. He advanced ladders and wooden towers to these walls and tried to get his infantry to storm the ramparts. The attempt failed. Halil’s seaborne landing on the Marmara had been equally unsuccessful. The currents made steadying the ships difficult and the dominant position of the sea walls, which looked straight over the water, provided no foreshore on which to establish a bridgehead. Although the ramparts were very lightly manned and in part were entrusted solely to monks, the intruders were easily repulsed or captured and beheaded. South of the Mesoteichion, Ishak Pasha maintained some pressure on the defenders but his best Anatolian troops had been diverted to tackle the stockade. A more serious attempt was made by Karaja Pasha’s men in the area of the Blachernae Palace – one of the places Mehmet had targeted for easy access into the city. It was ‘where the city’s defences were tottering’ because of the state of the wall, but the defence was managed by the three Genoese Bocchiardi brothers who were skilful professional soldiers. According to Archbishop Leonard ‘they were frightened by nothing – neither the walls collapsing under fire nor the explosions of the cannon … day and night they showed the greatest vigilance with their crossbows and terrible guns’. At times they made sallies from the Circus Gate postern to disrupt enemy activity. Karaja’s men could make no progress. The lion of St Mark still fluttered over the dark palace.

  The failure of the irregulars and the Anatolian divisions after four hours of fierce fighting seems to have enraged Mehmet. More than that: it made him anxious. He had only one body of fresh troops left – his own palace regiments, the 5,000 crack professional troops of his own bodyguard: ‘men who were very well-armed, bold and courageous, who were far more experienced and brave than the others. These were the army’s crack troops: heavy infantry, archers and lancers, and with them the brigade called the Janissaries.’ He decided to commit them to the battle at once before the defenders had time to regroup. Everything depended on this manoeuvre; if they failed to break the line within another few hours the momentum would be lost, the exhausted troops would have to be withdrawn and the siege effectively lifted.

  Within the enclosure there was no time to pause. Casualties had been heavier during the second wave of attacks, and the tiredness of the men increased accordingly. However, the spirit of resistance remained firm; according to Kritovoulos they were deterred by nothing: ‘neither hunger pressing on them, nor the lack of sleep, nor unremitting and continuous fighting, nor wounds and slaughter, nor the death of their relatives in front of their eyes, nor any other frightful spectacle could make them give in or weaken their eagerness and sense of purpose’. In fact they had no option but to stand and fight; they could not be replaced – there were no other troops – but the Italians were fighting under the command of Giustiniani and the Greeks in the presence of their emperor, figures as motivating as the sultan was to the Ottoman army.

  Mehmet knew he must strike again before the attack faltered. Now, if ever, his paid soldiers needed to earn their keep. Riding forward on his horse, he urged his troops to prove themselves as heroes. Clear orders were issued and Mehmet himself personally led the men at a steady pace to the edge of the ditch. It was still an hour to sunrise but the stars were fading and ‘the blackness of night was drawing towards dawn’. They stopped at the ditch. There he ordered ‘the bowmen, slingers and rifle men to stand at a distance and shoot to the right at those defending the stockade and battered outer wall’. A firestorm swept towards the walls: ‘there were so many culverins and arrows being fired, that it was impossible to see the sky’. The defenders were forced to duck beneath the stockade under ‘the rain of arrows and other projectiles falling like snowflakes’. At another signal the infantry advanced ‘with a loud and terrifying war cry’ ‘not like Turks but like lions’. They pressed towards the stockade propelled on a huge wall of sound, the ultimate psychological battle weapon of Ottoman armies, so loud that it could be heard on the Asian shore, five miles from their camp. The sound of drums and pipes, the shouts and exhortations of their officers, the thunderous roll of the cannon, and the piercing cries of the men themselves calculated both to liberate their own adrenalin and to shatter the nerve of the enemy – all had their desired effect. ‘With their great shouting they took away our courage and spread fear throughout the city,’ recorded Barbaro. The attack was simultaneous along the whole four-mile front of the land wall, like the crash of a breaking wave. Again the church bells rang in warning and the noncombatants hastened to their prayers.

  The heavy infantry and Janissaries were ‘eager and fresh for battle’. They were fighting in the presence of their sultan both for honour and for the prize of being first onto the ramparts. They advanced on the stockade without any wavering or hesitancy, ‘like men intent on entering the city’ who knew their business. They ripped down the barrels and wooden turrets with hooked sticks, tore at the framework of the stockade, propped ladders against the rampart, and raising their shields over their heads attempted to force their way up beneath a withering bombardment of rocks and missiles. Their officers stood behind yelling instructions, and the sultan himself wheeled back and forth on his horse shouting and encouraging.

  From the opposite side the weary Greeks and Italians joined battle. Giustiniani and his men, and Constantine, accompanied by ‘all his nobles and his principal knights and his bravest men’, pressed forward to the barricades with ‘javelins, pikes, long spears and other fighting weapons’. The first wave of palace troops ‘fell, struck by stones, so that many died’, but others stepped up to replace them. There was no wavering. It was soon a hand-to-hand, face-to-face struggle for control of the rampart with each side fighting with total belief – for honour, God and great rewards on one side, for God and survival on the other. In the pressed close-up combat it was the terrible sound of shouting voices that filled the air – ‘taunts, those
stabbing with their spears, others being stabbed at, killers and being killed, those doing all kinds of terrible things in anger and fury’. Behind, the cannon fired their huge shot and smoke drifted across the battlefield, alternately concealing and revealing the combatants to each other. ‘It seemed’, said Barbaro, ‘like something from another world.’