Constantinople: The Last Great Siege, 1453

by Roger Crowley

  Mehmet crossed the straits to Asia on 25 April for the year’s campaign but was almost immediately struck down with acute stomach pains. After a few days of excruciating torment he died on 3 May 1481, near Gebze, where another would-be world conqueror, Hannibal, had committed suicide by poison. It is an end surrounded in mystery. The likeliest possibility is that Mehmet was also poisoned, by his Persian doctor. Despite numerous Venetian assassination attempts over the years, the finger of suspicion points mostly strongly at his son, Bayezit. Mehmet’s law of fratricide had perhaps tempted the prince to make a pre-emptive – and successful – strike for the throne. Father and son were not close: the pious Bayezit detested Mehmet’s unorthodox religious views – an Italian court gossip quotes Bayezit as saying ‘his father was domineering and did not believe in the Prophet Muhammad’. Thirty years later Bayezit would in turn be poisoned by his son, Selim ‘the Grim’; ‘there are no ties of kinship between princes’ goes the Arab saying. In Italy the news of Mehmet’s death was greeted with particular joy. Cannon fired and bells rang; in Rome there were fireworks and services of thanksgiving. The messenger who brought the news to Venice declared, ‘The great eagle is dead.’ Even the Mamluk sultan in Cairo breathed a sigh of relief.

  Today Fatih – the Conqueror – lies in a mausoleum in the mosque complex and the district of Istanbul that both bear his name. The choice of site was not accidental. It replaced one of the most famous and historical of all Byzantine churches: that of the Holy Apostles, where the city’s founder, Constantine the Great, had been entombed with great ceremony in 337. In death, as in life, Mehmet assumed the imperial inheritance. The original mausoleum was shattered by earthquake and completely rebuilt so that the interior is now as ormolu as a nineteenth-century French drawing room, complete with grandfather clock, baroque ceiling decoration and pendent crystal chandelier, like the resting-place of a Muslim Napoleon. The richly decorated tomb, covered with a green cloth and surmounted by a stylized turban at one end, is as long as a small cannon. People come here to pray, to read the Koran and to take photographs. With the passing of time sainthood has come to Fatih – he has taken on some of the characteristics of a holy man for the Muslim faithful – so that he has a dual identity, sacred and secular. Like Churchill he is both a national brand – the name of a make of lorry, a bridge over the Bosphorus, the instantly recognizable image of a heroic galloping horseman on a commemorative stamp or a school building – and a symbol of piety. The Fatih district is the heartland of traditional and newly self-confident Muslim Istanbul. It is a peaceful spot: in the mosque courtyard, women in headscarves gather to talk under the plane trees after prayers; attendant children run round in circles; wandering salesmen sell sesame rolls, toy cars and helium balloons in the shape of animals. At the doorway of Mehmet’s tomb there is a stone cannon ball placed like a votive offering.

  The fates of the other principal Ottoman actors at the siege reflected the insecurities of serving the sultan. For Halil Pasha, who had consistently opposed the war policy, the end was quick. He was hanged at Edirne in August or September 1453 and replaced by Zaganos Pasha, the Greek renegade who had so actively supported the war. The fate of the old vizier marked a decisive shift in state politics: almost all successive viziers would be of converted slave origin rather than born Turks from the old aristocracy. Of Orban the cannon founder, a key architect of the victory, there is circumstantial evidence that he survived the siege to claim a reward from the sultan: after the capture of Istanbul there was an area called Gunner Verban District, suggesting that the Hungarian mercenary had taken up residence in the city whose walls he had done so much to destroy. And Ayyub, the Prophet’s companion, whose death at the first Arab siege had been so inspirational to the gazis, now rests in his own mosque complex among plane trees in the pleasant backwater of Eyüp at the top of the Golden Horn, a venerated place for pilgrimage and for hundreds of years the coronation mosque of the sultans.

  Amongst the defenders who escaped, fates were many and various. The Greek refugees generally experienced the typical fortunes of exile: destitution in a foreign land and nostalgia for the lost city. Many eked out their lives in Italy – there were 4,000 Greeks in Venice alone by 1478 – or on Crete, which was a bastion of the Orthodox Church, but they were dispersed across the world as far away as London. The descendants of the family of Palaiologos gradually disappeared into the general pool of the lesser aristocracy of Europe. One or two, through homesickness or poverty, returned to Constantinople and threw themselves on the sultan’s mercy. At least one, Andrew, converted to Islam and became a court official under the name Mehmet Pasha. The melancholy Greek reality of the fall is perhaps encapsulated in the experiences of George Sphrantzes and his wife. They ended their days in monasteries on Corfu where Sphrantzes wrote a short, painful chronicle of the events of his life. It starts: ‘I am George Sphrantzes the pitiful First Lord of the Imperial Wardrobe, presently known by my monastic name Gregory. I wrote the following account of the events that occurred during my wretched life. It would have been fine for me not to have been born or to have perished in childhood. Since this did not happen, let it be known that I was born on Tuesday, August 30, 1401.’ In laconic, strangulated tones Sphrantzes recorded the twin tragedies – personal and national – of the Ottoman advance. Both his children were taken into the seraglio; his son was executed there in 1453. Of September 1455 he wrote: ‘My beautiful daughter Thamar died of an infectious disease in the Sultan’s seraglio. Alas for me, her wretched father! She was fourteen years and five months.’ He lived on until 1477, long enough to see the almost complete extinction of Greek freedom under the Turkish occupation. His testament ends with a reaffirmation of the Orthodox position on the filioque – the issue that had caused so much trouble during the siege: ‘I confess with certainty that the Holy Ghost does not issue from the Father and the Son, as the Italians claim, but without separation from the very manifestation of the Father.’

  Among the Italian survivors, fates were similarly diverse. The wounded Giustiniani made it back to Chios where – according to his fellow Genoese, Archbishop Leonard – he died not long afterwards, ‘either from his wound or the shame of his disgrace’, almost universally blamed for the final defeat. He was buried with the epitaph, now lost, that read: ‘Here lies Giovanni Giustiniani, a great man and a noble of Genoa and Chios, who died on 8 August 1453 from a fatal wound, received during the storming of Constantinople and the death of the most gracious Constantine, last emperor and brave leader of the Eastern Christians, at the hands of the Turkish sovereign Mehmet.’ Leonard himself died in Genoa in 1459; Cardinal Isidore of Kiev, who had come to bring union to the Greeks, was made Patriarch of Constantinople in absentia by the Pope on no legitimate authority; he succumbed to senile dementia and died in Rome in 1463.

  For Constantine himself there is no certainty, no burial place. The emperor’s death heralded the emphatic eclipse of the Byzantine world and the onset of the Turkocratia – the Turkish occupation of Greece – that would outlast Byron. Constantine’s unknown fate became the focus of a deep yearning in the Greek soul for the lost glories of Byzantium and in time a rich vein of prophecy attached to his name. He became an Arthurian figure in Greek popular culture, the Once and Future King, sleeping in his tomb beside the Golden Gate, who would one day return through that gate and chase the Turks back east as far as the Red Apple Tree and reclaim the city. The Ottomans feared the talismanic figure of the emperor – Mehmet carefully watched Constantine’s brothers and walled up the Golden Gate for good measure. These legends would ensure the unlucky Constantine a tragic afterlife. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, his legacy would get bound up with a Greek national vision, the Great Idea – the dream of re-incorporating the Greek populations of Byzantium into the Greek state. It provoked a disastrous intervention in Turkish Anatolia that was crushed by Kemal Ataturk in 1922 and the massacre of the Greek population of Smyrna and the subsequent exchange of populations. It was only then that hopes of
rebuilding Byzantium finally died.

  If the spirit of Constantine resides anywhere it is not in Istanbul, but a thousand miles away in the Peloponnese. Here for a time he had ruled the Morea as despot from the small medieval city of Mistra that for two hundred years witnessed an astonishing late flowering of the Byzantine tradition. It remains a shrine to the Byzantine soul: every lamppost in the modern village beneath the citadel bears the insignia of the double-headed eagle; in the square, the Platia Palaiologou, there is a statue of Constantine defending the faith with drawn sword – image of a man whose image is unknown. He stands in front of a marble plinth that carries a quotation from Doukas; above his head the Byzantine flag, a vivid yellow stamped with black eagles, hangs lifelessly against the blue Greek sky. Medieval Mistra rises up behind, a stacked green hillside of crumbling mansions, churches and halls interspersed with cypress trees. It is a poignant place. Here for a fragile moment, Constantinople rebuilt itself in miniature as a Greek Florence. It painted a brilliant humanist version of the gospels in radiant frescoes, rediscovered the teachings of Aristotle and Plato and dreamed of a golden future before the Ottomans came to snuff it out. In the little cathedral of St Demetrios, no bigger than an English country church, Constantine was possibly crowned; in the church of St Sophia, his wife Theodora lies buried. At the top of the site is the Palace of Despots with the bare Taygetus mountains behind and the Spartan mesa rolling away far below. The building is similar in style to the imperial palace on the walls of Constantinople, and it is easy to imagine the emperor looking out from the socketless windows of his airy hall down over the green plain where Spartan hoplites once trained for Thermopylae and the Byzantines grew oil, wheat, honey and silk. And on 29 May each year, while the Turks celebrate the capture of Istanbul with a military reenactment at the Edirne Gate, Constantine, who died in heresy because of his support for union, is remembered in the small barrel-vaulted village churches of Crete and the great cathedrals of Greek cities.

  In Istanbul itself, little of the Christian city now remains, though one can still walk through the great brass doors of St Sophia, battered open for the last time on 29 May 1453, and pass beneath the mosaic figure of Christ with his hand raised in blessing, into a space as astonishing now as it was in the sixth century. The city itself, contained within the two sides of the triangle made by the Horn and the Marmara, visibly retains the particular shape that determined so many of the key events. Ferries chug up into the mouth of the Bosphorus from the west in the wake of the four Christian ships, past the Acropolis point where the naval battle was fought, before making the identical turn across the wind into the mouth of the Horn, blocked now by a different boom – the bridge over to Galata. At the next stop up the Horn, boats put in at Kasimpasha – the Valley of the Springs – where Mehmet’s ships splashed one by one into the calm water, while on the Bosphorus shore, Rumeli Hisari, the Throat Cutter, still straddles its extraordinary sloping site, and a red Turkish flag flutters brightly from the large tower at the water’s edge that was Halil’s contribution to the project.

  Some of the sea walls of the city, particularly those along the Horn, are mere fragments now, but the great land wall of Theodosius, the third side of the triangle, that confronts the modern visitor arriving from the airport, seems to ride the landscape as confidently as ever. Up close, it shows its fifteen hundred years: sections are battered and crumbling, downright seedy in some places or incongruously restored in others; towers lean at strange angles, split by earthquakes or cannon balls or time; the fosse that caused the Ottoman troops so much trouble is now peacefully occupied by vegetables; the defences have been breached in places by arterial roads and undermined by a new metro system more effectively than the Serbian miners ever did, but despite the pressures of the modern world, the Theodosian wall is almost continuous for its whole length. One can walk it from sea to sea, following the lie of the land down the sloping central section of the Lycus valley where the walls have been ruined by medieval cannon fire, or stand on the ramparts and imagine Ottoman tents and pennants fluttering on the plain below, ‘like a border of tulips’, and galleys sliding noiselessly on the glittering Marmara or the Horn. Almost all the gateways of the siege have survived; the ominous shadow of their weighty arches retains the power to awe, though the Golden Gate itself, approached down an avenue of cannon balls from Orban’s great guns, was long ago bricked up by Mehmet against the prophetic return of Constantine. For the Turks, the most significant is the Edirne Gate, the Byzantine Gate of Charisius, where Mehmet’s formal entry into Istanbul is recorded by a plaque, but the most poignant of all the gateways that figured in the story of the siege stands completely forgotten a little further up towards the Horn.

  Here the wall takes its sudden right-angle turn, and hidden nearby behind a patch of wasteland and directly abutting the shell of the Constantine’s Palace, there is an unremarkable bricked-in arch, typical of the patchwork of alterations and repairs over the centuries. This is said by some to be the prophetic Circus Gate, the small postern left open in the final attack that first allowed Ottoman soldiers onto the walls. Or it might be somewhere else. Facts about the great siege shade easily into myths.

  There is one other powerful protagonist of the spring of 1453 still to be discovered within the modern city – the cannon themselves. They lie scattered across Istanbul, snoozing beside walls and in museum courtyards – primitive hooped tubes largely unaffected by five hundred years of weather – sometimes accompanied by the perfectly spherical granite or marble balls that they fired. Of Orban’s supergun there is now no trace – it was probably melted down in the Ottoman gun foundry at Tophane, followed sometime later by the giant equestrian statue of Justinian. Mehmet took the statue down on the advice of his astrologers, but it appears to have lain in the square for a long time before being finally hauled off to the smelting house. The French scholar Pierre Gilles saw some portions of it there in the sixteenth century. ‘Among the fragments were the leg of Justinian, which exceeded my height, and his nose, which was over nine inches long. I dared not publicly measure the horse’s legs as they lay on the ground but privately measured one of the hoofs and found it to be nine inches in height.’ It was a last glimpse of the great emperor – and of the outsized grandeur of Byzantium – before the furnace consumed them.

  The blocked-up arch of the Circus Gate

  Source Notes

  Epilogue: Resting Places

  1 ‘It was fortunate for . . .’, quoted Babinger, p. 408

  2 ‘a short, thick neck . . .’, quoted ibid., p. 424

  3 ‘men who have seen him . . .’, quoted ibid., p. 424

  4 ‘his father was domineering . . .’, quoted ibid., p. 411

  5 ‘There are no ties . . .’, quoted ibid., p. 405

  6 ‘The great eagle is dead’, quoted Babinger, p. 408

  7 ‘I am George Sphrantzes . . .’, Sphrantzes, trans. Philippides, p. 21

  8 ‘my beautiful daughter Thamar …’, ibid., p. 75

  9 ‘I confess with certainty …’, ibid., p. 91

  10 ‘either from his wound …’, Pertusi, La Caduta, vol. 1, p. 162

  11 ‘Here lies Giovanni Giustiniani …’, quoted Setton, p. 429

  12 ‘like a border of tulips’, Chelebi, Le Siège, p. 2

  13 ‘Among the fragments …’, Gilles, p. 130

  1 A late-fifteenth-century map of the triangular city, showing St Sophia and the ruined hippodrome on the right, with the main roads leading from the land walls on the left. The Imperial Palace is in the tip of the triangle top left. Above the Golden Horn is the Genoese town of Pera or Galata. Anatolia, marked Turquia, is beyond the straits on the far right.

  2 Mehmet the aesthete and scholar: a semi-stylised Ottoman miniature of the sultan in his later years

  3 ‘We knew not whether we were in heaven or on earth’: the great nave of St Sophia, the most miraculous building of late antiquity

  4 A nineteenth-century photograph of the Imperial Palace of Blachernae, Con
stantine’s headquarters during the siege, which is set into the single-layered land wall near the Golden Horn

  5 A section of the triple land wall showing first the line of inner towers, then the lower outer towers shattered by cannon fire. In the centre is the moat, now largely filled in but once bricklined and ten feet deep, that cost the Ottomans so much trouble during the siege. Having crossed it, would-be attackers had to rush the open terrace under heavy fire before they could tackle the outer wall.