Sea of Faith

by Stephen O'Shea

  The last Christmas of Byzantine Constantinople was celebrated amid much trepidation. News had been filtering back from spies in Edirne of unprecedented activity around the sultan's headquarters. Troops were assembling there from all points of the compass; even such Christian vassals as the Serbs had promised to contribute hefty contingents to bring down the new Rome. The city of Constantine, alone and encircled by the Ottoman Empire, was in desperate need of men to defend itself. All eyes turned to the Marmara and thence to the Aegean—surely the Latin powers of western Christendom would launch great fleets to succor their beleaguered brethren. But as the new year dawned and the cold winds snapped the banners atop the sea walls of the city, no sails appeared. The order was given to melt down the silver monstrances of the churches in order to buy stores and hire mercenaries. Byzantine galleys braved the storm-swept Aegean in search of men. A pitiful few—from Crete and the Dodecanese—answered the call.

  The inaction of the west in this, Constantinople's direst crisis, cannot be put down to mere ignorance. Despite the sirens of optimism during the fifty-year reprieve, many in Constantinople had read the calligraphy on the wall and raced west to sound the alarm. Different wearers of the imperial regalia visited European capitals—one went as far afield as Paris and London—to impress upon their Latin counterparts that a fight to the death was looming. Yet there would be no repeat of Urban's sermon at Clermont, no reopening of Pandora's box: ever since the disaster at Nicopolis in 1396, enthusiasm for adventures in the east had dampened, and a succession of homegrown troubles (the most notorious being the destructive Hundred Years War between England and France) had tied the hands of many monarchs.

  More eloquent than any official plea for assistance was the human tide of scholars quitting Byzantium. The Byzantine Empire had for more than a millennium maintained a level of artistic and intellectual sophistication that towered above the other Christian civilizations of the medieval Mediterranean; with that empire shrunk to the sole city of Constantinople and an autonomous Peloponnesian province, Morea, the learned desperately sought out patrons for their scholarship and gave clear evidence, by their wholesale flight to foreign climes, of the coming collapse. The city-states of Italy, alive with the rediscovery of antiquity that we now term the Renaissance, welcomed the exiles with open arms, dazzled by the newcomers' easy familiarity with the writings of the ancients. In a great irony the Byzantine emigrants would unwittingly have their revenge on Islam, for their highly vaunted role in the elaboration of Renaissance thought would dispatch to oblivion, in western memory, the part played by earlier scholars of Baghdad, Córdoba,, Toledo, and Palermo in safeguarding the heritage of the mare nostrum. Less worth gloating over, however, was the parallel tradition then inaugurated: the tendency of western scholars to admire the Greeks of yesteryear to the detriment of the Greeks of their own day.

  Among those willing to deal with their contemporaries of the fifteenth century, foremost were the popes in Rome—and for good reason. They had their schismatic Orthodox counterparts over a barrel; if the arbiter of western Christendom were to rally help on their behalf, the Greeks would have to undo the split formalized by the events of 1054 and fall into line with the doctrine of papal supremacy. This, at least, was the calculation. In truth, powerful popes such as Innocent III were a thing of the past. Rome had lost much of its influence as the national monarchies of Europe rose to eminence in the later Middle Ages, and in any event many Orthodox churchmen were unwilling to give in to the loathsome Latins. The filioque irritant, the Great Schism, the sack of 1204, the Latin emperors—too many slights, great and small, had been inflicted to be forgiven.

  Although several monarchs of Constantinople had flirted, for political reasons, with reunifying the churches, the large number of vocal dissidents on the Orthodox side made a mockery of successive conclaves that ringingly announced the rift to be at an end. In the cheerless December of 1452 in Constantinople, the populace widely disparaged a ceremony of formal union held under the dome of the Hagia Sophia: if their lives were in danger from the Turks, ran the reasoning, why endanger their souls as well through an opportunistic embrace of the Latin here-siarchs? A great nobleman of the city, Lucas Notaras, was not even sure of the first half of that proposition—after all, the vast majority of Greek Orthodox Christians—in the Balkans, Anatolia, and elsewhere—were living peacefully under Ottoman rule. Notaras is credited with saying of the choice faced by the Greeks: "Better a sultan's turban than a cardinal's hat." This remark might at first seem similar to the quip about swineherds and camel-drivers, but Notaras was not advocating solidarity with his coreligionists as the king of Seville had done four centuries earlier. To the contrary, the sea of faith had seen long periods of convivencia, and no longer was religious allegiance a cause for reflexive alliance. Some Greeks of Constantinople, in other words, saw salvation in Ottoman rule.

  Still, no one doubted, in the winter of 1452-53, that before any accommodation was reached, much blood would have to be shed. The last basileus of Byzantium prepared his city for a long siege. By poetic coincidence, he was a Constantine, born of a Helena, as had been the first emperor of Constantinople. A capable ruler in the prime of life, Constantine XI Dragases worked tirelessly to lift spirits in the frightened city. He tried wooing volunteers on the opposite shore of the Golden Horn, in the Genoese trading suburb of Galata (also called Per a), whose neutrality in the coming clash had been declared but whose denizens might not all be immune to a call to bear arms for Christ. The Venetians, installed in Constantinople proper by the southern waters of the Horn, were similarly entreated. All, in any case, were forbidden to leave the city and its environs for the duration.

  On January 26, 1453, sentinels on the Marmara sea walls at last espied the long-awaited sails. Three Genoese galleys under the command of a nobleman from a distinguished family rounded the headland of the city and lowered their anchors in the Golden Horn. Giovanni Giustiniani Longo and his seven hundred heavily armored men had arrived to take up their posts. Although commerce-minded Genoa—like Venice—did not want to provoke the Ottoman sultan by openly siding with the Byzantines and thus risk losing lucrative colonies in the Black and Aegean seas, the city did not discourage its bravest men from rushing to the defense of eastern Christendom on their own initiative. Such a man was Giustiniani Longo, an expert in siege warfare spoiling for a fight. The capital went into raptures—even the antiunion Greeks and the Venetian freres ennemis of the Genoese gave the famous warrior a hero's welcome. Giustiniani asked for, and was immediately granted by the elated basileus, command of the land walls of the city facing the Thracian countryside. Were there any weaknesses in this already formidable defense, the Genoian would detect them and see to their repair.

  The boost to morale came none too soon, for the rumors from Edirne had grown scarcely credible. Engineers were working on the old Roman road linking the Ottoman capital to Constantinople, leveling its grades and reinforcing its paving stones. There was dark talk of Urban the cannon-founder and a hideous new weapon he was constructing. Closer to home, the observers on the land walls could see detachments of the Turkish forces digging ditches and preparing the ground for what promised to be an enormous host of besiegers. From Anatolia came news that a huge Ottoman army was approaching the Asian side of the Bosporus. As the winter wore on, nerves frayed. On February 26, a month after the arrival of the Genoese volunteers, a Venetian galley and six Cretan merchant vessels, almost listing from the weight of their many desperate passengers, stole out of the Golden Horn in the dead of night and sailed through the Dardanelles to safety. The basileus might sputter in anger at having his edict so egregiously flouted, but he could do nothing about it.

  The following month brought a nastier surprise. The mariners of Constantinopie and the merchant seamen of Genoa and Venice all knew that the Turks possessed no navy. For more than a century, the Latins had made their fortune carrying the trade of the Ottoman Empire and, on occasion, ferrying the sultan's armies around the eastern M
editerranean. Yet in late March the unthinkable appeared: an Ottoman fleet of more than one hundred ships glided regally through the Marmara and past the city to dock at a harbor on the Bosporus just downstream from the Rumeli Hisari. Sultan Mehmet was indeed a student of history, and, like Muawiya before him, he had realized that the Christians could not be allowed mastery of the seas if he were to further his conquests. During the previous summer, as all eyes had watched with dread the erection of the Rumeli Hisari, the sultan's shipwrights had worked unnoticed in the port of Gallipoli, the site of the first Ottoman foothold in Europe. Under the guidance of a Bulgarian renegade, ships had been bought, built, or refitted. Although few vessels of this instant fleet rode as high above the waves as the Italian and Catalan galleys, they were still men-of-war, capable of inflicting damage and moving soldiers, horses, and munitions across the Bosporus. Appalled, the basileus ordered the capital's last line of maritime defense to be deployed: a great chain, supported by floating booms, was stretched across the mouth of the Golden Horn from the headland of Constantinople to the point of Galata. The Christian fleet—twenty-six vessels—moored in the Horn was, for the moment, safe behind the immense chain, part of which today lies coiled in a corner of the city's Naval Museum—itself located on the cove where that first astonishing Ottoman fleet dropped anchor.

  The threat of the Turkish fleet, however, seemed trivial in comparison to what was approaching by land. In the first week of April the Ottoman armies and their allies appeared within sight of the walls. Scholarly consensus holds that they numbered approximately eighty thousand troops, to which could be added twenty thousand bashi-baiouks, irregular soldiers and adventurers of diverse origins with nothing to lose but their lives. As this flood of malevolent humanity came ever closer to the city over the plain of Thrace, the basileus Constantine asked George Phrantzes, his secretary and one of the most reliable sources for the events of these months, to make a census of the forces at his disposition. The tally was dispiriting: a mere 4,900 Greeks and 2,000 Latins were available to man the perimeter land and sea walls that ran for twenty kilometers around the capital. They were outnumbered more than ten to one. Sensibly, Constantine ordered Phrantzes to keep the figures to himself.

  To Giustiniani and his commanders in the front line of the defenses, the size of the attacking force was not necessarily a problem, given the stoutness of the walls. What worried the Genoese on the ramparts, rather, was what they saw being laboriously hauled over the improved road from Edirne. Urban the Hungarian had been busy over the winter. A stupefyingly big cannon, pulled by sixty oxen and kept lashed to its carriage by a trained corps of two hundred men, lumbered toward its emplacement opposite the land walls. Eight meters long, it was more than twice the size of the monster at Rumeli Hisari.

  Mehmet at last arrived and ordered Constantine to surrender his city peacefully or be responsible for its siege, capture, and sack. To drive home the point, the Ottomans captured two small Byzantine forts outside the walls and impaled their defenders. Constantine, unmoved, turned Mehmet down.

  On April 6, 1453, Urban's cannon thundered into action. A missile weighing more than half a ton screamed across the ditches and moats separating the armies and crashed with a telluric thud into the fortifications. Brick and mortar were pulverized, tumbling earthward in a nimbus of debris. The reprieve was over.

  The besieged city, originally founded as Byzantium in the seventh century B.C.E., had been coveted long before the advent of Mehmet II but had proved remarkably resistant to attack. Shaped somewhat like a pudgy thumb stretched outward from the landmass of Europe, the prominence that would become Constantinople is bounded by watery moats on two sides: the Sea of Marmara to the south, and the Golden Horn to the north. The latter is an inlet seven kilometers long fed by streams known as the Sweet Waters of Europe—their Asian counterparts flow near the Anadolu Hisari. A grand sickle of placid blue-gray, the Golden Horn offers secure moorings no matter how wild the weather and, as every visitor past and present has realized, unexpected scenes of maritime beauty from the slopes of the city's seven steep hills.

  However arresting its seaside situation, the might of Constantinople is best appreciated along what was, paradoxically, the scene of its downfall: the six-kilometer-long line of fortifications that ran from the Marmara to the Horn, closing off the roughly triangular form into which the capital grew and, more important, protecting the city on its vulnerable landward side against invaders from Thrace. For more than a thousand years these land walls had held fast—the crusaders of 1204 gained access near the sea walls of the Golden Horn—and they still stand defiant in the midst of what is now Europe's most populous megalopolis. Despite a skein of choked roadways, the eyesore of immense marshaling yards, and a huge mausoleum for a modern-day Turkish prime minister, the cyclopean construction dominates the rolling cityscape, its watchtowers rising five or six stories tall, its bands of rust-red brick relieving the stolid mass of stone put in place by an army of slave laborers in the fourth century C.E. for Emperor Theodosius II. The Theodosian wall on view today is the tallest and the innermost of what were three lines of walls, their gradations in height punctuated by 192 towers, deep moats, labyrinthine passageways, postern gates, and subterranean aqueducts. Given this superb stone buckler, the decision made by Constantine XI and Giustiniani Longo to defy the disparity in numbers between attacker and defender seems a reasonable risk to have run. Besides, every Greek then alive knew that surrender would mean the end of a world.

  By the Marmara, near where the land walls meet the sea, a grand reminder of that vanished world still stretches up into the sky. The Golden Gate was the archway through which great leaders of eastern Christendom—Heraclius, Basil the Bulgar-Slayer, Alexius Comnenus—passed after triumph in the field or acclamation as basileus by their armies. Today, its glittering cover of gold plate is long gone and the archway itself is bricked up—so as not to tempt fate, according to the lore of the vanquished, and leave the city open to a Byzantine restoration led by some as-yet-unrevealed Greek mahdi. In point of fact, the Golden Gate was similarly blocked in Giustiniani's day, not only because there had been no Byzantine triumphs to celebrate for centuries, but, quite simply, as a defensive measure. The magnificent structure was incorporated into the land walls, and the maze of courtyards and towers that had sprung up about it made it the linchpin of the fortifications.

  Far more problematic for Constantine's Genoan commander was the other extremity of the wall, by the Golden Horn. This was the quarter of the Blacher-nae, the imperial residence ever since a basileus of the crusading era had quit the old palace in the crowded precincts of the Hippodrome to seek more salubrious surroundings in a distant corner of the city. The wall of the Blachernae was several meters thick but was unprotected by a bulwark of further walls beyond it. This new wall, much of it constructed by Manuel Comnenus, the vanquished at Myriokephalon in the twelfth century, met the fourth-century Theodosian fortification at an awkward right angle, a weak link in the linear march of tower and moat across the countryside. And that countryside was not without its natural traps—about two kilometers from the perpendicular junction of the old and the new ran the stream of the Lycus, a watercourse leading into the city that, despite its insignificance, had carved a dangerous valley into which the walls had to descend. By sighting cannons on the lips of this valley, near the modern-day mausoleum and opposite, Turkish gunners could fire directly down into the defensive positions. There, on the heights of the Lycus, Urban's masterpiece was placed, and the sultan pitched his tent.

  Thus, the stretch of wall from the Lycus to the Blachernae is where the fate of Constantinople was played out. Few places are more momentous for historical memory and more ostentatiously neglected. Perhaps the continuing existence of the wall, although crumbling in places and cannibalized in others for Gypsy housing, is testament enough. At the Edirnekapi (Adrianople Gate) pedestrian threshhold, a large stone plaque was affixed in 1953 to celebrate Mehmet's feat of arms five hundred years ear
lier. The plaque is now a grime-covered affair under which, on a recent visit, amiable vagrants offered to share what appeared to be raki or vodka straight out of the bottle. The neighboring Blachernae is a ruin, the yawning well of its underground dungeons a reminder that the civilization destined to disappear was not entirely benign. A small playground adorns an anonymous courtyard of the palace. Nearby, at the right-angle turn of the walls, a brother Byzantine residence—the Palace of the Porphyrogenitus—has better weathered the insults of time, the white marble and red brick of its three-story facade displaying the intricate geometry of master craftsmanship. Although inside an empty husk, the Porphyrogenitus—Tekfursarayi, in Turkish, or "Palace of the Sovereign"—has an ample and evocative forecourt, rare in the warren of its run-down neighborhood; on the day of the merry derelicts at the Edirnekapi, a television crew had assembled at the Porphyrogenitus to tape a tryst for an episode of a Turkish soap opera. Aside from these present-day incongruities, this stretch of the wall is graced by several cypress-ringed cemeteries—Turkish, Greek, Armenian—that pay indirect homage, through their dignity, to the importance of the site.

  Another evocative marker of the momentous events of 1453 lies a short way upstream from the Blachernae on a curve of the Golden Horn. According to the lore of the victors, on arriving from Edirne that year Mehmet's men miraculously discovered there the remains of one Eyup Ensari, a friend of the Prophet and a standard-bearer of Islam who had met his death in old age at Muawiya's failed siege of Constantinople. Fired by faith, Mehmet built the Companion a worthy tomb—now a graceful mosque surrounded by the mausoleums of Ottoman grandees—and thus guaranteed the success of his venture. The lore, like that concerning the Golden Gate, may be somewhat fanciful—a shrine was known to be there in Byzantine times—but that detail in no way diminishes the cult surrounding the Eyup Sultan Mosque, which is now the holiest spot of Turkish Islam, or the role Mehmet played in bringing it to prominence. In addition, the young sultan, in his devotional magnanimity to Eyup, may have unknowingly tipped the scale in his favor. Eyup is the Turkish form of Ayyub, or Job, a name regularly linked to Islam's greatest triumphs in the eastern Mediterranean. From Dar Ayyub, the grave of Job, Khalid ibn al Walid had dashed to victory at Yarmuk; and at Hattin Saladin, the son of a Job and the founder of the Ayyubids, had crushed the Latins of Outremer. In that spring of 1453, Mehmet could hardly have picked a better patron saint than the Job of the Turks.