Mehmet may well have had similar feelings about Constantine, who in his days as Despot of the Morea had constituted a considerable thorn in the flesh of his father, Murad. Constantine Dragases–although a Palaeologus through and through, he preferred to use this Greek form of his Serbian mother’s name–was now in his middle forties, twice widowed and–since neither of his marriages had proved fruitful–actively seeking a third wife. When he had heard of the death of Murad in 1451 he had had the brilliant idea of marrying one of the Sultan’s widows: Maria, the Christian daughter of old George Brankovich. After fifteen years in the harem she had remained childless, and it was generally believed that the marriage had never been consummated. She was, however, the stepmother of the new young Sultan; what better way could there be of keeping the boy under proper control?
There is little point in speculating on how history might have been changed had Constantine Dragases indeed married Maria Brankovich. Not, probably, very much. It is perhaps just conceivable that she could have succeeded in persuading her stepson to renounce his designs on Constantinople; in such an event the Byzantine Empire might possibly have struggled on for another generation or two. But it could never have recovered its strength. Powerless and penniless, a Christian island alone in a Muslim ocean, its days would still have been numbered, its eventual destruction inevitable. In fact, although her parents gave their delighted blessing to the plan, it foundered on Maria herself. She had sworn an oath, she explained, that if ever she escaped from the infidel she would devote the rest of her life to celibacy, chastity and charitable works. Subsequent events were all too soon to justify her resolution.
Mehmet, meanwhile, was losing no time. At that point on the Bosphorus where the straits were at their narrowest, immediately opposite the castle which his great-grandfather Bayezit I had erected on the Asiatic shore, he decided to build another; the two fortresses together would give him undisputed control of the channel. (It was true that the land on which this new castle was to stand was theoretically Byzantine but, as Mehmet pointed out, he could not help that.) In the early spring of 1452 all the churches and monasteries in the immediate neighbourhood were demolished to provide additional building materials, and on 15 April the construction work began. Nineteen and a half weeks later, on 31 August, the great castle of Rumeli Hisar was complete, looking essentially the same as it does today. The Sultan then mounted three huge cannon on the tower nearest the shore and issued a proclamation that every passing ship, whatever its nationality or provenance, must stop for examination. In late November a Venetian vessel, laden with food and provisions for Constantinople, ignored this instruction. It was blasted out of the water. The crew were executed; the captain, a certain Antonio Rizzo, was impaled on a stake and exposed as a warning to any other commander who might think of following his example.
Early the following year the Turkish fleet began to assemble off the Gallipoli peninsula. It seems to have comprised not less than ten biremes and six triremes,119 fifteen oared galleys, some seventy-five fast longboats, twenty heavy sailing-barges for transport and a number of light sloops and cutters. Even the Sultan’s closest advisers were said to have been astonished by the scale of this vast armada, but their reactions can have been as nothing compared with those of the Byzantines, who saw it a week or two later making its way slowly across the Marmara to drop anchor beneath the walls of their city.
The Ottoman army, meanwhile, was gathering in Thrace. The Greek estimate of 300–400,000 is plainly ridiculous; Turkish sources–presumably fairly reliable–suggest some 80,000 regular troops and up to 20,000 irregulars, or bashi-bazouks. Included in the former category were about 12,000 janissaries. These elite troops of the Sultan had been recruited as children from Christian families throughout the empire, forcibly converted to Islam and subjected to a rigorous military and religious training; some had been additionally trained as sappers and engineers. Legally they were slaves, in that they enjoyed no personal rights outside their regimental life. But they received regular salaries and were anything but servile; as recently as 1451 they had staged a near-mutiny for higher pay, and janissary revolts were to be a regular feature of Ottoman history until well into the nineteenth century.
Mehmet was proud of his army and prouder still of his navy, but he took the greatest pride of all in his weaponry. Cannon, in a very primitive form, had already been in use for well over a hundred years; Edward III had employed one at the siege of Calais in 1347, and they had been known in north Italy for a good quarter of a century before that, but in those early days they were powerless against solid masonry. By 1446, as we have seen, they had grown effective enough to demolish the Hexamilion at Corinth; even so, it was not until 1452 that a German engineer named Urban presented himself before the Sultan and offered to build him cannon that would blast the walls of Babylon itself. The first of these had accounted for the Venetian ship off Rumeli Hisar; Mehmet then ordered another, double the size. This was completed in January 1453. It is said to have been nearly twenty-seven feet long, with a barrel two and a half feet in diameter. The bronze was eight inches thick. When it was tested, a ball weighing some 1,340 pounds hurtled through the air for well over a mile before burying itself six feet deep in the ground. Two hundred engineers were sent out to prepare for the journey of this fearsome construction to Constantinople, smoothing the road and reinforcing the bridges, and at the beginning of March it set off, drawn by thirty pairs of oxen, with another 200 men to hold it steady.
The Sultan himself left Adrianople on 23 March. Medieval armies–particularly if they were carrying siege equipment–moved slowly, but on 5 April he pitched his tent before the walls of Constantinople, where the bulk of his huge host had arrived three days before. Determined to lose no time, he at once sent under a flag of truce the message to the Emperor that was required by Islamic law, undertaking that all subjects of the Empire would be spared, with their families and property, if they made immediate and voluntary surrender. If they refused, no mercy would be shown.
As expected, his message remained unanswered. Early in the morning of 6 April his cannon opened fire.
The people of Constantinople too had been at work: repairing and strengthening the defences, clearing out the moats, laying in stores of food, arrows, tools, heavy rocks and anything else that they might need. Meanwhile their Emperor had sent further appeals to the west, but the response had as usual been lukewarm. In February the Venetian Senate had finally agreed to the despatch of two transports, each carrying 400 men, with fifteen galleys as soon as they could be prepared, but this fleet did not leave the lagoon until 20 April. Fortunately for the honour of the Serenissima, the Venetian colony in the city produced a nobler response, undertaking that none of its vessels would return home; in all, the Venetians were able to provide nine merchantmen, including three from their colony of Crete.120
The defenders also included a Genoese contingent. Many of them came, as might have been expected, from the Genoese colony at Galata, the largely foreign quarter of Constantinople lying to the northeast of the Golden Horn; in addition, there was an honourable group from Genoa itself, some 700 young men who had been appalled by the pusillanimity of their government–it had promised Constantine just one ship–and had determined to fight for Christendom. Their leader, Giovanni Giustiniani Longo, was a member of one of the Republic’s leading families and a renowned expert in siege warfare. Allies like these were more than welcome, but though they may have afforded the Emperor some encouragement, they cannot have given him any real hope. His ships in the Golden Horn numbered just twenty-six, a pitiable number in comparison to the Ottoman fleet. Towards the end of March he had ordered his secretary George Sphrantzes–who has left us a full account of the siege–to make a census of all the able-bodied men in the city, including priests and monks, who could be called upon to man the walls. The population of the city had been dramatically reduced by ten separate visitations of the Black Death in the previous century; nonetheless, the final figure was far wo
rse than he could have imagined: 4,983 Greeks and rather less than 2,000 foreigners. To defend fourteen miles of walls against Mehmet’s army of 100,000, he could muster less than 7,000 men.
The land walls in which Byzantium put its trust during that fateful spring of 1453 ran from the shores of the Marmara to the upper reaches of the Golden Horn, forming the western boundary of the city. They were already more than a thousand years old. Known as the Theodosian Walls after the Emperor Theodosius II in whose reign they were built, they were in fact completed in 413 when he was still a child. In terms of medieval siege warfare they were impregnable. Any attacking army had first to negotiate a deep ditch some sixty feet across, much of which could be flooded to a depth of about thirty feet in an emergency. Beyond this was a low crenellated breastwork with a terrace behind it about thirty feet wide; then the outer wall, seven feet thick and nearly thirty feet high, with ninety-six towers at regular intervals along it. Within this wall ran another broad terrace, and then the principal element of the defence, the great inner wall, about sixteen feet thick at the base and rising to a height of forty feet above the city. It too had ninety-six towers, alternating in position with those of the outer bastion. The result was almost certainly the most formidable municipal fortification constructed in the middle ages.
But the middle ages were past. Over the next eight weeks the Sultan subjected those walls to a bombardment unprecedented in the history of siege warfare. Behind makeshift wooden stockades, the defenders worked ceaselessly to repair the damage, but it was clear that they could not continue to do so indefinitely. Only one of their defences seemed immune from any onslaught that the enemy could launch against it: the great chain which stretched across the entrance to the Golden Horn from a tower just below the Acropolis, on what is now Seraglio Point, to another on the sea walls of Galata. A few days after the siege began the Turkish admiral had led a number of his heaviest ships to ram it, but it had held firm.
It was one of the Sultan’s characteristics that he would suddenly focus all his attention on a single objective, which he would pursue obsessively until it was gained; by the middle of April his mind was fixed on control of the Golden Horn. The method by which he proposed to achieve it seems barely credible to us today: he set his engineers to work on a road running behind Galata, from a point on the Bosphorus shore over the hill near what is now Taksim Square and down to the Golden Horn at Kasımpaa. Iron wheels had been cast, and metal tracks; his carpenters, meanwhile, had been busy fashioning wooden cradles large enough to accommodate the keels of medium-size vessels. On Sunday morning, 22 April, the Genoese colony in Galata watched dumbfounded as some seventy Turkish ships were slowly hauled, by innumerable teams of oxen, over a 200-foot hill and then lowered gently down again into the Horn.
By the beginning of May, the Emperor knew that he could not hold out much longer. One hope only remained: a relief expedition from Venice. Was there a fleet on its way, or not? If so, how big was it, and what was its cargo? Most important of all, how soon would it arrive? On the answers to these questions the whole fate of Constantinople now depended. And so it was that just before midnight on 3 May a Venetian brigantine, flying a Turkish standard and carrying a crew of twelve volunteers all disguised as Turks, slipped out under the boom. On the night of the 23rd it returned, pursued by an Ottoman squadron. Fortunately, Venetian seamanship was still a good deal better than Turkish, and soon after nightfall it succeeded in entering the Horn. The captain immediately sought an audience with the Emperor. For three weeks, he reported, he had cruised through the Aegean; nowhere had he seen a trace of the promised expedition, or indeed of any Venetian shipping. When he realised that it was useless to continue the search, he had called a meeting of the sailors and asked them what they should do. One had advocated sailing home to Venice, arguing that Constantinople was probably already in Turkish hands, but he had been shouted down. To all the rest, their duty was clear; they must report back to the Emperor, as they had promised to do. And so they had returned, knowing full well that they would probably never leave the city alive. Constantine thanked each one personally, his voice choked with tears.
On 26 May the Sultan held a council of war. The siege, he told those around him, had continued long enough. The time had come for the final assault. The following day would be given over to preparations, the day after that to rest and prayer. The attack would begin in the early hours of Tuesday, 29 May. No attempt was made to conceal the plan from the defenders within the city. Some of the Christians in the Turkish camp even shot arrows over the walls with messages informing them of Mehmet’s intentions, but such measures were hardly necessary; the frenzied activity day and night in the Turkish camp told its own story.
On the last Monday of the Empire’s history, the people of Constantinople–including their Emperor–left their houses and gathered for one last collective intercession. As the bells pealed out from the churches, all the most sacred icons and the most precious relics were carried out to join the long, spontaneous procession of Greeks and Italians, Orthodox and Catholic alike, that wound its way through the streets and along the whole length of the walls. By the time it was finished, dusk was falling. From all over the city, as if by instinct, the people were making their way to the Church of the Holy Wisdom. For the past five months the building had been generally avoided by the Greeks, defiled as they believed it to be by the Latin usages that no pious Byzantine could possibly accept. Now, for the first and last time, liturgical differences were forgotten. St Sophia was, as no other church could ever be, the spiritual centre of Byzantium. In this moment of supreme crisis there could be nowhere else to go.
The service was in progress when the Emperor arrived to take communion with his subjects. Much later, when all but the few permanent candles had been put out and the great church was in darkness, he slipped back in and spent some time alone in prayer. Then he returned to the walls. He had no sleep that night, for Mehmet did not wait for dawn to launch his assault. At half past one in the morning he gave the signal. Suddenly, the silence of the night was shattered, the blasts of trumpets and the hammering of drums combining with the bloodcurdling Turkish war cries to produce a clamour fit to waken the dead. At the same time the bells of all the churches in Constantinople began to peal, a sign to the whole city that the final battle had begun.
The attacks came in wave after wave: first the irregular bashibazouks–untrained and with little staying power, but readily expendable and ideal for demoralising the defenders and making them easier victims for the more sophisticated fighters that would follow them; then the regiments of Anatolian Turks, fully trained and superbly disciplined, pious Muslims to a man and determined to win eternal rewards in paradise by being the first to enter the greatest city in Christendom; finally the janissaries, advancing across the plain at the double, their ranks unbroken and dead straight despite all the missiles that the defenders could hurl against them. Soon after dawn, a bolt struck Giovanni Giustiniani Longo and smashed through his chest. Confusion spread through the ranks of the Genoese, many of whom fled, but by now it hardly mattered. Within an hour the Turks had made a breach in the wall and were streaming into the city. The Emperor, seeing that all was lost, plunged into the fray where the fighting was thickest. He was never seen again.
By now it was morning, with the waning moon high in the sky. The hours that followed were horrible indeed. By noon the streets of Constantinople were running red with blood. Houses were ransacked, women and children raped and impaled, churches razed, icons wrenched from their golden frames, books ripped from their silver bindings. In the Church of the Holy Wisdom, matins were already in progress when the berserk conquerors were heard approaching. The poorer and more unattractive of the congregation were massacred on the spot, the remainder lashed together and led off to the Turkish camps for their captors to use as they liked. The officiating priests continued with the Mass for as long as possible before being slaughtered where they stood, at the high altar; there are among the Orthod
ox faithful those who still believe that at the last moment one or two of them gathered up the most precious of the sacred vessels and mysteriously disappeared with them into the southern wall of the sanctuary. There they will remain until the day Constantinople becomes once again a Christian city, when they will resume the liturgy at the point at which it was interrupted.
The Sultan had promised his men the three days of looting to which by Islamic tradition they were entitled, but the orgy of violence had been on such a scale that there were no protests when he brought it to a close on the same day as it had begun. He himself waited until the worst excesses were over before entering the city. Then, in the late afternoon, he rode slowly down the principal thoroughfare, the Mese, to St Sophia. Dismounting outside the central doors, he stooped and picked up a handful of earth which, in a gesture of humility, he sprinkled over his turban; only then did he enter the building. At his command the senior imam mounted the pulpit and proclaimed the name of Allah, the All-Merciful and Compassionate: there was no God but God, and Mohammed was his Prophet. That was the moment. Cross gave way to Crescent; St Sophia became a mosque; the Byzantine Empire was supplanted by the Ottoman; Constantinople became Istanbul. At twenty-one, Mehmet II had achieved his highest ambition.
The news of the fall of Constantinople, and with it the Byzantine Empire, was received with horror throughout Christendom. As the refugees spread westward they carried the epic story with them, and the story doubtless lost nothing in the telling. But western Europe, for all its deep and genuine dismay, was not profoundly changed. The two states most immediately affected, Venice and Genoa, lost no time in making the best terms they could with the Sultan.
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