Sea of Faith

by Stephen O'Shea

  The meeting point of the Theodosian and Blachernae land walls of Constantinople. The tallest building is the Palace of the Porphyrogenitus.

  The deafening cannonade of early April was relentless. Although Urban's great weapon could be fired only once every three hours or so, dozens of other guns pounded the land walls day and night, for weeks on end. The city did not sleep. Giustiniani ordered work details out into the maelstrom, to shore up the shattered stretches of the outer defenses. Men rushed through the lists between the walls to these breaches, trundling barrels filled with stones to be hoisted atop the makeshift berms that spade-wielding navvies desperately labored to complete before the next salvo struck. Giustiniani seemed to be everywhere at once, from the Marmara to the Horn. Even the Venetians obeyed him. The Genoan herded the volunteers to where they were needed; Phrantzes' census had tallied only able-bodied warriors, but with their life, their honor, and their city in peril, women and youths pitched in as well. Yet they too were few in number—a metropolis of perhaps a half-million in the twelfth century, the capital now counted around fifty thousand souls, the great walls of the city actually enclosing a series of village clusters separated by fields dotted with vestiges of imperial grandeur. The decline of the centuries had never been reversed, and Constantinople had become that most dangerous of things—an idea. Its conquest, to Mehmet, would mean continuity; its loss, to Constantine, extinction.

  To the common soldiery besieging the city, it would mean riches. On repeated occasions in the firestorm of April, thousands of bashi-bazouks rushed headlong to the Lycus-Blachernae fortification once a cloud of dust had settled to reveal a gap, their shrill cries mixing with barked imprecations from the defenders. Each time the attackers were repulsed, their onslaught impeded by the confusion of hundreds of men jostling together to gain access to the same sliver of precious daylight beyond the wall. The Christians brought withering fire to bear on them from atop the undamaged section of the walls; down below, any narrow gap could be plugged with a relatively small number of determined men. In addition, armor had improved immeasurably since the time of the crusades, and the Genoese and Greeks wore light curved breastplates to deflect sword blows and sturdy metal helmets that had nothing in common with the heavy stovepipes donned by knights of an earlier day. The poorly armored irregulars of the Turks were no match for the well-protected Latins and Byzantines, who were equally light on their feet.

  Within the walls, the days passed in a ceaseless round of prayers and invocations. In that exceptionally rainy spring, icons were paraded through the mud from church to monastery, the dull roar of the bombardment a sinister counterpoint to the chanted liturgies. On the morning of April 20, atop the sea walls of the Marmara near the Golden Gate, monks impressed into service as sentinels interrupted the dirge of battle with a clarion of joy. Once again three Genoese sails appeared on the horizon, this time as escort to a huge grain ship dispatched by the pope to provision the besieged, whose lifeline to the Black Sea had been strangled by the strait-cutter. The Ottoman fleet, moored near the Rumeli Hisari, weighed anchor and rowed mightily against the wind to intercept the great galleys. Mehmet, on hearing of the convoy, quit the Lycus Valley, crossed the Horn near Eyup's shrine, and then rode over the hill of the Galata to the Bosporus shore. According to many accounts, his impatience was such that he spurred his mount into the water, shouting instructions to his Bulgarian renegade admiral. The Turks, however, could do nothing against the wind—the tall Italian ships barreled onward, nearing the headland of the city. The ecstatic defenders prepared to lower the chain protecting the Golden Horn.

  Then the wind died. The Bulgarian quickly closed on the becalmed ships, their great sails limp. What followed was a deadly daylong scrum watched by thousands on the nearby shores, as dozens of small Turkish warships surrounded the Genoese flotilla, their sailors hurling grappling hooks and attempting to board. The Latins lashed their ships together, to form a floating fortress. In the hours of hand-to-hand fighting the defenders had the advantage—from the tall decks of their great vessels they occupied the higher ground and could slash down at will at the swarms of Turks desperately hanging on to the hulls. Mehmet watched with mounting dismay as the oars of the small Turkish galleys milling about the fight became entangled and as the shot from their light guns whistled harmlessly above the waterline of the Christian ships. Worst of all, as the sun sank lower over the plain of Thrace, the wind picked up once again. The Genoese sails billowed, the chain was lowered, and two Venetian war galleys rushed out of the Horn to give them cover. Within minutes, all were behind the boom, safe and victorious.

  It was a very public defeat for the Ottoman Alexander. Disgusted, Mehmet berated his admiral and ordered his immediate execution. The unfortunate man's officers bravely intervened, imploring the sultan to show clemency in view of his personal valor throughout the entire engagement. Uncharacteristically, Mehmet relented; he simply condemned the Bulgarian to a bastinado—flogging the soles of the feet to a pulp—and exile as a dispossessed beggar. Justice having been served, the sting of conspicuous humiliation still remained to be assuaged; within days Mehmet had speeded a scheme to restore morale in his camp and to crush it in the Christians'. If the Turkish fleet could not sail into the Golden Horn, then it would ride in, overland.

  A newly installed battery of guns—which, according to some military historians, were placed pointing skyward, at Mehmet's suggestion, and thereby inaugurated the era of the mortar—roared into action on Sunday, April 22, from the hilltop above the Genoese settlement of Galata. The bombardment surprised the sailors moored opposite in the waters before Constantinople, as well as its defenders on the sea battlements. Heretofore the firepower of the Ottomans had been centered on the land walls. As the Greeks and the Venetian, Catalan, and Cretan volunteers cowered in their shelters, a spectacle worthy of the ancients took place on the sudden slopes behind the Latin suburb. A road, paved with greased wooden planks, had been carved up and down the seventy-to-eighty-meter-tall ridge separating the Bosporus from the Golden Horn. Hundreds of men and oxen strained to haul the Ottoman ships over the height, as the cannons shielded their ungainly progress with a punishing barrage. By day's end most of the Ottoman fleet was in the Golden Horn, opposite Eyup, a few kilometers upstream from the Christian fleet huddled near the now-obsolete chain. A Latin plan to launch fireships against the intruders failed—mainly through delay caused by bickering between the Genoese and the Venetians—and by the end of April the Horn was no longer a safe haven. Constantinople was now well and truly surrounded.

  Where, in God's name, was the help from the west? The questioning became sharper. What had been the point of stifling objections and accepting the union of the churches in the past winter, if there was to be no quid pro quo? Rumors had flown of a Venetian and even a papal fleet approaching to raise the siege, but they had proved chimeras of wishful thinking. What the Greeks could not know was that the Latins were being dilatory and disputatious to the last. Well aware of the dangers of backlash on its Ottoman trade, Venice was proceeding cautiously, gathering ships at a snail's pace to launch a rescue mission sometime in the summer. This undertaking was, in the event, better than that of Genoa—which abstained altogether from any grand enterprise—and those of western European monarchs, who had issued hot blasts of air condemning the siege, but nothing more. The remarkable absence of urgency may have stemmed from seeing Constantinople, albeit in a manner different from Mehmet and Constantine, as an idea—or an ideal. To Christendom, it had always been there, like the polestar, inextinguishable and permanent; a Mediterranean world without it was unthinkable.

  What the Latins could not know, or perhaps even imagine, was that by mid-May that sempiternal light was flickering. The ceaseless bombardment of the land walls had pummeled into shapeless rubble much of the breastwork in the Lycus Valley. Mehmet had also summoned tunnelers from Novo Brodo, the silver mines near Kosovo, to join their Serbian brethren opposite the Blachernae. The sappers sought to mine the
fortification there, digging long passageways from their camp to the underpinnings of the wall. Fortunately, for the besieged, a Latin volunteer named Johannes Grant came to the fore at this moment; a German or perhaps a Scot, Grant had a mole's nose for the subterranean darkness, and within days the Serbs had been driven back through flooding, countermining, and vicious hand-to-hand fighting underground.

  That small but important victory could not, however, dispel the gathering gloom. The time of illusions had come to an end. Earlier in May a dozen valorous sailors of the city, disguised as Turks and flying a tricked-up Ottoman banner for the occasion, had brazenly sailed past Mehmet's ships and made for the Dardanelles—they had volunteered to find out if any Latin war fleet was tacking across the Aegean to put an end to the misery of the siege. They spent two weeks looking, questioning the inhabitants of various island colonies, scanning the horizon; loyal to the end, they returned to the city they now knew to be doomed and informed Constantine that no help was on the way. His advisers begged him to flee while there was still time and to set up a government-in-exile, perhaps in the Peloponnese. Constantine demurred. He would not be basileus anywhere but in the city that bore his name.

  On the Turkish side, there was no cause for complacency. The Ottomans had been encamped in the mud before the great walls for nearly two months yet had won no decisive victory. The exploit of the Golden Horn, however heartening, had not brought about the capitulation of the city. Assaults had been checked, siege towers had had no effect, their army had suffered grievously. Halil Pasha argued for lifting the siege, before the blow to Ottoman prestige became too devastating. Constantinople was supremely useful as a hostage, a pawn to be deployed in wringing concessions from the Christian powers; it would be dangerous as a lightning rod for Christian resistance to the sultan's empire. Mehmet listened to his father's confidant one last time, but again rejected his advice. He and the other pashas decided to gamble on a massive assault.

  In Constantinople's final week of existence as a Christian capital, the elements combined to give it an eerie send-off. We know this from several eyewitness accounts, including those by penned by George Phrantzes, Nicolo Barbaro—a level-headed Venetian surgeon—and several other chroniclers, Turkish and western. Already aware of the divine disfavor that the unusually wretched spring suggested, the last of the Byzantines watched in dismay on the night of May 24, 1453, as the full moon above them disappeared. A lunar eclipse plunged the city into blackness for three full hours, the only bright light in the sky coming from the flash of the cannonade beyond the walls. Stricken by this awful sight, the people of Constantinople gathered the next morning to form a procession behind the city's holiest icon of the Virgin Mary, hoping she would perform a miracle and save them. As they moved through the streets, rain began to fall. The icon slipped and fell into the mud; no hand seemed able to lift it back into place. The sky then opened with a deafening crash and a hailstorm of titanic ferocity whipped earthward, scattering the terrified worshipers and causing torrents of water to run through the streets and nearly carry off the children. The procession was over, the miracle left unperformed.

  Further portents followed, without precedent in living memory. The next day, the seven hills and the desolate remnants of imperial Constantinople were blanketed with impenetrable fog, unheard of for that time of year. When it lifted the following evening, the great dome of the Hagia Sophia came alive with some strange incandescence, a purplish-pink glow that shimmered and threw off an unearthly light. To this day the phenomenon has never been adequately explained. Even Mehmet, far away beyond the walls, saw the uncanny spectacle; his Sufis told him not to worry, that it was a sign the city was about to be possessed by the light of Islam—"the light of Heaven and Earth . . . not that which shines through glass or gleams in the morning star or glows in the firebrand," as the inscription on the dome now reads.

  The following day, May 28, dawned utterly silent: no storm, no fog, no strange light—and no bombardment. Giustiniani Longo's watchmen peered over the battlements and saw the Turkish armies moving closer to the wall. The great attack was imminent. Processions formed within the city, the church bells rang, icons were lifted skyward. Constantine addressed a large gathering of defenders near the walls. The basileus gave them four reasons to fight to the death—for one's faith, one's country, one's family, and one's sovereign. On the morrow the people of Constantinople would have not one but all of those reasons to show their courage.

  That evening, the last great Christian service in the Hagia Sophia took place. Everyone came—Greek, Latin, noble, merchant, commoner, slave, man, woman, child. The sanctity of union between Latin and Orthodox churches was no longer a shibboleth—all prayed as one for deliverance, their eyes glistening in the light thrown off from the mosaics. As darkness fell, Constantine and Phrantzes left the great church and rode along the Mese, the main artery of the old capital, until they reached the land walls. At the Blachernae, the basileus bade farewell to his staff and servants, asking them to forgive him any injustice he had ever done them. He went out onto a terrace and looked out over the sea of campfires in the Thracian plain. He took his leave of Phrantzes—for the last time—strapped on his armor, and headed to the Lycus to see if everyone was at the ready.

  At the same time, barely two hundred meters away, Mehmet and his generals rode up and down the line of attack, encouraging their men, telling them that God expected nothing less than victory. Glory was within reach, if not in this life then in the next—all those who died a martyr's death in the approaching moment of battle would instantly savor the joys of paradise.

  Midnight tolled. On the battlements the Christians fingered their crosses and amulets; in the fields below, a deep groundswell of prayer rose heavenward, as tens of thousands prostrated themselves.

  In the end, men turned to God in their hour of fear. Constantinople may have been an idea, an ideal, or even just a feather in the cap of a great man bent on conquest, but to all it also remained the citadel of the sea of faith.

  In the very early hours of Tuesday, May 29, 1453, the night was shattered. On every side of Constantinople a volcano of bedlam erupted. Hundreds of cannons spat their fire, kettledrums sounded, horns blared, fifes whistled, horses and mules shrieked in terror, cries and curses rent the air. On the Horn, ships throwing incendiary devices neared the walls; on the Marmara, guns boomed from indistinct shapes out at sea. And before the whole length of the land walls, a great wave surged forward, torches aloft, voices raised, oblivious to the can-nonballs whistling overhead and crashing into the ancient stone. The defenders saw that no place was to be spared attack, that Mehmet had thrown the full force of his armies against them, that few Christians could be spared to join their comrades where the fighting would be fiercest—at the Lycus-Blachernae.

  There, in the crumbling mess left by six weeks of bombardment, the main event occurred. All else, however deadly, was distraction. From their vantage point atop the walls of the Lycus, Constantine and Giustiniani watched a huge cohort of bashi-bazouks come screaming out of the darkness, a wild rabble of warriors clambering up the makeshift slopes of the outer defenses. The Latins and Greeks were there to meet them, in a hellish melee of sword and halberd. From the walls, arquebuses popped, arrows sang, crossbolts let fly. The Turks fell by the hundreds, littering the earthen slope. More appeared, to meet the same wall of death, then more still. The hours passed; the fighting knew no letup. At a sign a new mass of men hurtled forward—the Anatolian regular troops, more disciplined than the bashi-bazouks. The same clutch of desperate defenders, a thousand at the very most, held off this fresh, raging sea of constant, murderous assault as the missiles from Mehmet's cannons tore through the mass of humanity to bring down more of the fortifications. The fight became centered on the rubble of the middle walls, where a horrific game of king of the castle was played out in the darkness as each side tried to hold the summits. Not for nothing do playgrounds seem to be the ornament of choice for old battlefields.

&n
bsp; The Janissaries came on, exhorted by Mehmet, "Go on my falcons, march on my lions!" Magnificent physical specimens—the biggest and strongest males from the Balkans—they moved quickly and silently up to the walls, their flowing white uniforms in the predawn light making them seem like an army of gigantic wraiths. Legend has the largest of them all, an Anatolian colossus named Hasan, scaling the wall and taking out dozens of Christians single-handedly before finally being overwhelmed, Gulliver-like, by the force of numbers. Yet collective discipline, not individual heroics, made the Janissaries so fearsome: before the Lycus walls they crashed like breakers on the shore, each bloodied wave retiring in good order to let a new onslaught rush forward. The Christians, exhausted from fighting for hours without respite, were faced with a continuous battering from fresh and ferocious soldiery. The defenders wavered, backing down into the moat before the last, inner wall.

  Atop that wall, a missile pierced the armor of Giustiniani Longo, mortally wounding him. Knowing his end to be at hand, the Genoan had his men lift him into a stretcher to be carried to a ship waiting in the Golden Horn. The basileus pleaded with him to remain at his post, so as not to demoralize the increasingly desperate defenders. Giustiniani refused. As the cortege set off, the Genoese in the moat saw it and lost heart. They ran back into the city, leaving their Greek comrades to be massacred by the swarming Janissaries.