Iron, Fire and Ice

by Ed West

  Late in 1452, Edmund and Jasper Tudor, the king’s half-brothers, were raised from commoners to earls, and Edmund was given the Honor of Richmond, a very prestigious title dating back to the Conquest. This move angered Richard Neville, Earl of Salisbury, who had been granted the profits from this honor for decades with the promise of eventual hereditary right. The Neville family had until this point loyally supported the king; now a crack had appeared.

  Since she had shown herself a capable ruler during the Cade rebellion, Margaret of Anjou took over the role previously carried out by Suffolk advising the king. However, she had so far failed to carry out the most important function of a queen—providing the king with an heir—until the spring of 1453 when it was announced that she was with child.

  And yet more disaster was to befall the realm, for in August that year Henry sunk into a catatonic depression, the king “indispost sodenly was take and smyten wt a ffransy and his wit and reson wt drawen.”8 The reason, as John Paston wrote, was that Henry had received a “sudden and thoughtless fright” upon news from France.

  The war that begun as a medieval conflict of arrows had ended with the modern horrors of cannons and handguns. Body armor and castle walls were made obsolete by gunpowder and large, organized armies led by centralized monarchies. At the Battle of Castillon in July 1453, large French guns completely annihilated the English army—each shot killing six men in one explosive blast—and when reinforcements arrived they suffered the same fate. The English held out for an hour until the Bretons smashed into their right flank, causing further devastation. Their commander John Talbot was trapped under a horse; he was wearing a crimson satin robe and was recognized by an archer, Michel Perunin, who opened up his chest with an axe. Afterwards Talbot was only identified by his teeth. His son was killed with him and English rule in France was over, finally and forever.

  This year often marks the end of the Middle Ages, but not primarily because it was the end of this long war. For several weeks earlier there had come to London the most shocking news possible from the other side of the continent, the greatest catastrophe to ever hit Christendom.

  35

  THE ROCK THAT BESTRIDES THE CONTINENTS

  Some of them don’t think Dothraki should breed with foreigners. They don’t think the blood should be diluted. They are stupid old women. They don’t realize that we have always diluted our blood.

  —DOTHRAKI HIGH PRIESTESS

  The Emperor in Constantinople had first known of the Turks back in the sixth century when ambassadors were sent to the nomads seeking an alliance against Persia. The horsemen had emerged from Altai in central Asia, close to what is now Mongolia, and their language still reflects these deep Asiatic origins, so that the Inuit and Turks have the same word for bear, ayi or ayl.1 Indeed they were first referenced by the far-off Chinese way back in the second century BC, the Turks being just the name of a dominant tribe among many such nomads. “Turk” literally means “strong man” and, as with Mongols and Tartars, the name was applied to numerous groups; the leader of the Hungarians, once also a nomadic group before settling by the Danube, was called “Prince of the Turks,” Tourkias archon by the Byzantines.2

  Along with the Mongols, the Turks became the other great horsemen of the Middle Ages, although their trajectory was very different, driving them first to become an empire across three continents, then the leaders of the Islamic world and later a secular European republic. And the historical allusions obviously sting, as the Turkish military in 2014 banned officers from watching Game of Thrones because it supposedly insulted Turks by basing the nomadic Dothraki on their ancestors.3

  According to historian Roger Crowley, “Like their cousins the Mongols, the Turkic peoples lived in the saddle between the great earth and the greater sky and they worshipped both through intermediary shamans. Restless, mobile and tribal, they lived by herding flocks and raiding their neighbors.”4 They were very effective, for in the words of Ibn Khaldun, nomadic people “have no gates and walls. They always carry weapons. They watch carefully all sides of the road. They take hurried naps only . . . when they are in the saddle. They pay attention to every faint barking and noise. Fortitude has become a character quality of theirs, and courage their nature.”5

  The Turks were riders, and in their saddles they lived on pastirma, thin slices of dried beef which became pastrami in Italian and later English. Another old Turkish word, ordu, or military, became “horde” and also “Urdu,” the language of Pakistan. The horses they bred in the Pamir mountain range on what is now the Afghan/Tajik border possessed great strength, and the Chinese said they were “sired by dragons.” More remarkably these animals were noted for “sweating blood,” this effect caused most likely by parasites which bit at their skin; the Chinese desired these Ferghana horses so much that an army once marched several thousand miles to acquire the famous mounts.

  The first Byzantine-Turkish alliance fell apart when, against renewed Persian counter attacks, the emperor had a sort of nervous breakdown, much to the Turks’ fury; two years later their ambassador rejected another coalition and put ten fingers in his mouth, saying angrily, “as there are now ten fingers in my mouth, so you Romans have used many tongues.6

  In 737, the Arabs defeated the Turks and soon after their leader Sulu was murdered by a rival over a dispute following a game of backgammon, yet their advance into the Middle East continued. The Turks were originally followers of shamanism and brought their druids with them; their emblems were a peregrine and a hawk, tugrul and cagri. However, as the Caliph of Baghdad recruited them into his armies as military slaves, so by the tenth century Islam had taken hold, although for many years they held onto some aspects of their indigenous religion.

  The Seljuk Turks, one branch of the group, first appear in the late tenth century in Transoxania in central Asia, where they were still brigands. They were known to rarely waste an arrow and fought ferociously on horseback and, by 1045, under their leader Tughrul Bey, had established control over the Abbasid Caliphate in Baghdad and Tughrul was proclaimed “Sultan and King of East and West.”7 In 1055, the Turks entered Baghdad, where Tugrul Bey married the caliph’s daughter in a Turkish-style wedding, a clash of cultures which French historian Jean-Paul Roux likened to “marrying an African chief to a Habsburg to the sound of tom-toms.”8

  These nomads swept into Asia Minor in the eleventh century; the Christian kingdoms of the Caucasus mountains appealed to the Byzantines, and, in 1071, Emperor Romanus Diogenes marched east to fight them; the ensuing battle of Mazikert proved a catastrophic defeat for the Christians, the Turks establishing rule over most of today’s Anatolia. Their leader Alp Arslan, whose “moustaches were said to have been so long that they had to be tied behind his back when he went hunting,” made Emperor Romanus kiss the ground before him, and then put his foot on the victim’s neck.9 After being helped to his feet by his conqueror, the Emperor had to hand over four provinces, ten million gold pieces and one of his daughters.

  Afterward, Constantinople fell into dismal decline, and never recovered after the sack of 1204. As well as stealing many of its holiest relics, the crusaders had taken away many of the city’s most skilled craftsmen, too, further hastening its decline. But although horsemen without a civilization to match the Romans, the Turks were far more open to adaptation and adoption than any of their enemies. Greek was spoken at their newly established court at Erdine and numerous Arabic and Farsi words were absorbed into their language (later it imported huge numbers of French words, too). They were also open minded about military matters, and in the fourteenth century developed a more modern form of warfare than the western Europeans, who were “still fighting pre-gunpowder wars, in which heavy cavalry, imprisoned in armour, charged off pretentiously after quarrelling leaders had windbagged away as to who would lead,” in historian Norman Stone’s words.10 As they absorbed so they expanded, overwhelming Anatolia before spreading into Europe, surrounding the increasingly meager remnants of the “Roman Empire.” />
  In the fourteenth century, having conquered most of Greece, the Turks set up the first paid professional army in Europe since the fall of Rome, comprised of young Christian boys who were taken from their families, educated, converted, and turned into Turks. These infantry units were called the “slaves of the Gate,” the Yandi Cheri or Janissaries, and they were loyal only to the sultan. Later sultans such as Mehmet the Conqueror had as bodyguards former Christian boys who had been taken from their homes as children, guarding them as they slept and ready to place themselves in the way of the assassin’s blade.

  To the western world the prospect of little Balkan boys kidnapped by the monstrous, exotic Turks to be raised as brutalized soldiers was appalling. And yet there was much to admire in these people, even hostile European observers could see, in their tolerance, appreciation for art and beauty, their willingness to absorb foreign cultures. They adapted and adopted so much that over time the people changed too, developing today’s Mediterranean appearance due to the large number of conquered peoples adopting Turkish culture. Modern genetic studies of the Turks place them much closer to southern Europeans ancestrally than to the original central Asian Turks.

  Sultan Murad I took Gallopoli in 1353, a foothold into Europe that they would maintain for six centuries (the British Empire, famously, could not dislodge them from there in 1915). Soon Constantinople found itself surrounded, and it did not help that after its Emperor Cantacuzene left to become a monk, there was thirty-five years of characteristic bloody internecine fighting, with various members of the royal family deposed, imprisoned, or worse.

  In 1365, Murad made Adrianopole (now Erdine), northwest of Constantinople, his new capital, and six years later he defeated the Serbs and Bulgars, cementing control over the Balkans. The French then led one last desperate attempt at holy war, which ended in disaster, although the Turks had bigger problems with the Mongols.

  Although Genghis Khan caused a huge amount of death, he was nothing on Tamerlane, also called Timur, who ruled much of China, Russia, the Middle East, and India (“Mughal,” the name for later Indian rulers, from which we get mogul, is a corruption of Mongol). When, in 1401, Tamerlane marched through what is now northern Iraq, sacking Baghdad, he ordered his men to produce two enemy skulls each or lose their own, and vast numbers of women were taken as slaves. More pyramids of heads were created as he swept through Asia Minor and emptied its cities, defeating the Turks in 1402 and taking the sultan prisoner, where he was kept as a captive in the back of a wagon so that he might watch the Mongols as they devastated his land. The experience killed him.

  Later Tamerlane felt so guilty about the bloodshed he’d caused that he promised to atone by launching a new, this time holy, war, in the hope that this might cause God to forgive his earlier bloodshed. Luckily, he died soon after, having raised a huge army for the conquest of China, but the Mongol leader is still believed to have killed a higher proportion of the world’s population than anyone else in history.

  Despite this the Turkish advance continued, and Constantinople was near surrounded. And then came the year 1432, one of omens in Turkish legend: “Horses produced a large number of twins; trees were bowed down with fruit; a long-tailed comet appeared in the noonday sky over Constantinople.”11 On the night of March 20, Sultan Murat was in the palace at the capital in Edirne. His wife, a captured slave most likely from Serbia, was in labor and, unable to sleep, he read the Koran and was just reaching the “Victory suras,” the parts that told the story of the promised triumph over the unbelievers, when news came of a son, his third. Seeing it as a sign Murat called him Mehmet, the Turkish for Mohammed, and he was indeed to be a forceful leader—the day after becoming sultan Mehmet had his young half-brother murdered in the bath.

  The Turks had taken a tribute from Constantinople for some time, but the new Emperor Constantine XI withheld it. He hoped for Western help, but after a century of plague, famine, and war, the Latin Christians had lost interest in crusade; although the Pope was open to aiding the Byzantines, the Western Church still insisted on their recognizing Roman supremacy and to the Orthodox Christians this was unthinkable. And the walls of Constantinople were increasingly a relic from another era, before the new fire weapons.

  Although gunpowder had followed traders, armies, and plague along the silk road in the fourteenth century, its use had been limited. Big guns were difficult to cast because, as iron was poured to make them, any tiny cracks were liable to expand when they were in use and so cause the gun to explode.12 However, a Hungarian called Urban had approached Mehmet II with the offer of two new guns cast using improved technology and capable of firing cannonballs of 1,000lb (450kg), four times the size of the largest French projectile. Over three months they were dragged by sixty horses and three hundred ships from Edirne to the banks of the Bosphorus facing Constantinople, a distance of 130 miles; Mehmet had amassed an army of two hundred thousand troops, while the Queen of Cities had only nine thousand men defending it. Even Mehmet’s own private entourage featured as many as thirty thousad people, with sixty just to make cakes.

  Constantinople had always been protected by the Virgin Mary, its people believed, and the last of the Romans would need all the divine help they could muster. As the Venetian Senate was told by a representative in 1452: “Constantinople is completely surrounded by the troops and ships of Sultan Mehmet.”13

  In the summer of that year Mehmet was constructing a castle on the Bosporus with the aim of closing access to the Black Sea. The Ottomans called it Throat Cutter and it was armed with large bombs which could blast at any passing ship, further tightening the noose. On November 26, a Venetian merchant galley bringing supplies to the city from the Black Sea was sunk by Throat Cutter; its sailors made it to land where they were taken to the sultan and its courageous Captain Antonio Rizzo was impaled on a stake, along with forty of his crew, in full view of the city.

  Inside Constantinople the people prepared for the worst. Its considerable Latin population, mostly Venetians, would support them until the bitter end, despite their difficult history; indeed, the Venetian flag of St Mark and the double-headed eagle of Rome flew side-by-side from the Blachernae Palace as the invaders surrounded them.

  After the Turks had paraded the bodies of more captured blockade-runners, “the lamentation in the city for these young men was incalculable,” reported Makarois Melissenos, a Greek bishop who collected many eyewitness accounts of the siege, but grief soon turned to anger.14 The following day, 260 Ottoman prisoners were “savagely slaughtered” in full view of their compatriots.

  The Byzantines had always been pious people, and morale was further damaged by unseasonable weather in May 1453, with wildly unusual storms occurring for that time of year. The most likely cause was an eruption of the volcanic island of Kuawe, 1,200 miles east of Australia, months earlier, producing “eight cubic miles of molten rock [that] were blasted into the stratosphere with a force two million times that of the Hiroshima bomb.”15 It dimmed the planet, blighting harvests across the Northern Hemisphere, at a time when the known world continued to get colder and colder. South of the Yangtze River, in southern China on the edge of the tropics, there was forty days of snow. Tree-ring records from England show dismal summers, just as the king was slipping into madness. In Constantinople that spring, the city was hit by rain, hail, fog, and snow, with strange, lurid sunsets and strange optical effects.

  For a nearly-defeated people who for so long had survived only because of the blessing of the Virgin, it looked like a vision of Armageddon. Then on May 26, perhaps also because of the volcanic eruption, the city’s Hagia Sophia cathedral was lit up with strange ribbons of fire.16

  On the morning of May 29, 1453, Mehmet performed ritual prayers and donned the talismanic shirt, embroidered with the names of God and verses from the Koran. The sultan set off on horseback, wearing his turban and caftan, with a sword at his waist, and surrounded by his commanders.

  The Turks attacked from land and sea. After the guns
bombarded the walls, the first assaults would be made by irregulars and foreign auxiliaries, the least important of the troops, many of whom had been forced into battle or were there for the booty. Many were Christians, kept there by force, according to Nicolo Barbaro, a Venetian witness to events. “Greeks, Latins, Germans, Hungarians—people from all the Christian realms,” according to Leonard,17 another man who saw it.

  People living in a besieged city always knew their fate would be grim if the men outside could not be stopped. When the Turks broke through the walls people were dragged from their chambers, and children were snatched from their parents; the old “slaughtered mercilessly,” along with “the weak-minded . . . the lepers and the infirm” while “the newborn babies were hurled into the squares.” Assorted groups of captives were tied together by their captors, “dragging them out savagely, driving them, tearing at them, manhandling them, herding them off disgracefully and shamefully into the crossroads, insulting them and doing terrible things.”18 Many women threw themselves into wells rather than endure the nightmare, a course that is discussed in King’s Landing when a similar fate awaits them. The Turks were not especially cruel, after all, this was just the fate that awaited all cities at the mercy of enemy armies.