by David Brewer
The Sultan commanding the Turkish forces was Mehmed II, later to be known as the Conqueror. He had first come to the throne in 1444 when he was perhaps as young as twelve, his father Murad II having abdicated in his favour. But within months his father was recalled to lead the Turks against a threatening army of Hungarians, Poles and Venetians, a command that the boy Mehmed was considered incapable of exercising. Two years later his father returned to the throne, an ignominious demotion for Mehmed. In 1451, on his father’s death, Mehmed again became Sultan, now a young man with something to prove.
There could be no better proof of his abilities than the capture of Constantinople. In the last half-century two of his predecessors, one of them his father, had tried and failed. There were good reasons for bringing Constantinople under Turkish control: as long as Constantinople remained a Christian city it was a possible focus for a new crusade against the Turks, and possession of Constantinople would give the Turks control of all trade between the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. There was a third but less obvious reason: the Turks had formidable land forces but no war fleet, only an assembly of individual corsairs. Constantinople would provide both ship-building facilities and a secure naval base, protected by the narrows of the Dardanelles and the Bosphorus, from which to achieve dominance at sea. Mehmed prepared himself well for this crucial venture. ‘There is nothing’, a contemporary Italian wrote, ‘which he studies with greater pleasure and eagerness than the geography of the world, and the art of warfare. He shows great tenacity in all his undertakings, and bravery under all conditions. Such is the man, and so made, with whom we Christians have to deal.’1
Constantinople by now retained little of its former possessions and wealth. The Byzantine Empire had been reduced to the Despotate of the Morea in the Peloponnese (though this was by now paying tribute to the Sultan), Trebizond on the south-east corner of the Black Sea and Constantinople itself with its immediate surroundings.
This diminished Byzantine Empire was effectively bankrupt. It was unable to collect most of the taxes from distant provinces so could not maintain the fleet and could barely pay its own troops, let alone mercenaries. Constantinople itself was in decay: a visitor in about 1400 wrote, ‘Everywhere throughout the city there are many great palaces, churches and monasteries, but most of them are now in ruin.’ Another visitor in the 1430s recorded that ‘The city is sparsely populated. The inhabitants are not well clad, but sad and poor, showing the hardship of their lot which is however, not so bad as they deserve, for they are a vicious people, steeped in sin.’2 This was the common explanation of disaster as divine punishment, which was to colour much of the thinking about Constantinople’s eventual fall. Even the imperial regalia had been sold off and replaced by cheap substitutes: the former gold and silver goblets were now of pewter or clay, gold embroidered cloth had become gilded leather and the jewels simply glass. Only in some of the churches were treasures still to be found.
The man at the head of this sad relic of former glories was the Emperor Constantine XI. He had experience as an administrator and as army commander when Despot of the Morea from 1443 jointly with his younger brother Thomas. He was widely respected for his integrity and tolerance, though some questioned his decisiveness. The Catholic archbishop of Lésvos, a Genoese known as Leonard of Chíos, was in Constantinople throughout the siege, and says of Constantine, ‘whom I always held in the greatest honour and respect’, that he ‘lacked firmness, and those who neglected to obey his orders were neither chastised nor put to death. That good man, so wickedly mocked by his own subjects, preferred to pretend that he did not see the wrongs that were being done.’3 In 1449, on the death of his father, Constantine left the Peloponnese in the hands of his two brothers Thomas and Dimitrios, and at the age of 44 became the Emperor Constantine XI.
The Turkish threat to his capital soon became clear. At the beginning of winter 1451 Mehmed II, within months of his accession, began preparations for building a castle, Rumeli Hissar, on the European side of the Bosphorus, opposite the fortress of Anadolu Hissar built 40 years earlier on the Asiatic side. Stone and timber were brought in from the east, limekilns to make mortar were set up on the spot, and a huge number of workers was assembled, including 6,000 masons. Work was begun a few months later in March 1452, and completed by August. Now no ship could reach Constantinople from the north without Turkish permission, and in November a Venetian grain ship that tried to do so was sunk by the first cannon shot from the new fortress. Rumeli Hissar was aptly named, by both Turks and Greeks, the Throat-Cutter, blocking supplies to the beleaguered city.
Constantinople too made its preparations. The inhabitants of the surrounding area were brought into the city with their grain supplies. The Emperor sent officials to the Aegean islands to buy food and Chíos provided four shiploads of ‘grain, wine, oil, figs, carobs, barley and all sorts of other crops’.4 Eight ships arrived from Crete loaded with malmsey, ‘to give the means of life to the city’.5 Church vessels were melted down into coin to pay troops. The Golden Horn, the narrow inlet running roughly along the north side of the city, was closed off by a boom ‘made of huge round pieces of wood, joined together with large nails of iron and thick iron links’.6
Another element of Constantine’s preparations was an attempt to settle the divisive question of the union of the Greek Orthodox and Catholic Churches. The schism between Catholic west and Orthodox east had rumbled on for centuries. It was nominally about doctrinal issues, such as whether the Holy Spirit proceeded from the Father alone, or from the Father and the Son – the famous filioque controversy. It was really about whether the Orthodox patriarch in Constantinople was or was not subject to the rule of the Pope in Rome. By now the question of the union of the Churches had become political as well as religious: union was the price Constantinople would have to pay for military help from the Catholic powers.
Fourteen years earlier the Byzantine Emperor John VIII Palaiologos, predecessor and elder brother of Constantine, had agreed at a council in Florence to pay this price. However, many Greeks in Constantinople and elsewhere passionately rejected this agreement, while others strongly supported it, and the union had still not been formally ratified by the Orthodox Church. Constantine, tolerant or indecisive according to one’s viewpoint, was reported as saying that others could take the new way of union if they thought it better, though he himself preferred the old way.
But a decision could no longer be delayed. In November 1452, in response to Constantine’s appeal to the Pope for help, the papal emissary Cardinal Isidore of Kiev, a Greek by birth, arrived in Constantinople to seal the union of the churches. He brought with him 200 men to help in the defence of the city, a token of the aid that acceptance of the union might bring. On 12 December, in a solemn service at the great church of Ayía Sophía, Cardinal Isidore read out the promulgation of the union to a packed congregation, from which the future patriarch Yennádhios and eight other staunch anti-unionists were pointedly absent. Isidore then celebrated the union liturgy, including the name of the Pope. But this historic ceremony achieved nothing. No further help came from the Pope or the Catholic powers, and the Greeks were even more bitterly divided. Better the Turkish turban, said entrenched opponents of union, than the cardinal’s hat.
The beleaguered city of Constantinople formed a triangular peninsula. The walls along the Golden Horn faced roughly north, the land walls at right-angles to these faced west, and a longer walled curve ran along the Sea of Marmora. The walls were pierced at intervals of a few hundred yards by strong gates. The whole perimeter was about thirteen miles long. Along the Marmora shore the walls rose almost straight out of the sea, and the Golden Horn was now closed by the boom, so the land walls were the most promising point of attack. First built by the Emperor Theodosius a thousand years before, and since reinforced and extended, they presented a formidable obstacle. Attackers, under continuous fire, would first have to cross a ditch some 60 feet wide, then get over a breastwork, cross an open space, climb the o
uter walls, cross another space and finally scale the inner walls, which were some 40 feet high with towers of about 60 feet. Before the invention of gunpowder these land walls were impregnable. Now they were the Sultan’s main target.
The walls of Constantinople were exceptionally strong, but the Turkish cannon were exceptionally powerful. As well as their smaller cannon – as many as 10,000 by one estimate – there were two huge ones. These had been built by a Hungarian cannon founder called Urban, who had previously offered his services to the Byzantines but they could not pay him enough. The larger of Urban’s cannon astonished all who saw it. Made of bronze and firing stone balls, its barrel was reputedly 26 feet long and its mouth over two feet across. Estimates of the weight of the balls varied wildly, from 150lb to 1,200lb, but given the size of the barrel and the density of stone a weight of around 500lb is likely. This monstrous machine was built and tested at Edirne, and then transported the 150 miles to Constantinople on 30 wagons drawn by 60 oxen and 400 men, accompanied by road-makers and bridge-builders. After a two-month journey it reached the walls of Constantinople at the end of March 1453.
The size of the Sultan’s army was as impressive as the size and destructive power of his artillery. At the lowest estimate it totalled 200,000, made up of 60,000 fighting men, plus 140,000 others described as ‘thieves, plunderers, hawkers, workmen and other camp followers’.7 A large part of them was drawn up along the land walls, and others were north of the Golden Horn behind the walled Genoese quarter of Galata, under the command of the Sultan’s second vizier Zagan. Of the fighting men, 15,000 were elite janissaries, and the rest were cavalrymen – though here they fought mostly on foot – archers with longbows or crossbows, and ordinary foot soldiers, of whom many were conscripts.
To manufacture and supply to this vast army the materials of war, let alone its food, was a triumph of logistics. It was reckoned that one Turkish battery fired, in a ten-day period, nineteen tons of stone cannon balls, and that the Turkish artillery as a whole used 1,000lb of gunpowder a day throughout the 55-day siege. Arrows were fired in great numbers: one eyewitness recorded that after the fall of the city 100 camel loads of arrows were collected from the area round the walls. A camel could easily carry 2,000 arrows, so at least 200,000 arrows would have been collected. Equipment was also needed: tools for digging mines under the walls, and scaling ladders, of which 2,000 were used in the final assault. The Sultan also had a fleet of some 250 ships, some built specifically for the attack on Constantinople, which at the beginning of the siege were assembled at an anchorage called The Columns, about two miles north of Constantinople on the European side of the Bosphorus. In short, the Turkish military organisation was highly efficient on an enormous scale, as Leonard of Chíos conceded: ‘A Scipio, a Hannibal, or any of our modern generals would have been amazed at the discipline which they showed in arranging their weapons, and the promptness and evidence of forward planning which their manoeuvres showed.’8
The defenders of Constantinople were at a disadvantage in almost every way. Their fighting force was made up of about 6,000 Byzantine Greeks and 3,000 Italians, so 9,000 troops faced at least 60,000 attackers. Those in the city believed they were outnumbered by as much as twenty to one: as one of them said, ‘We are the ant in the mouth of the bear.’9 Most of the Greeks were ordinary citizens, given spears, bows, swords and shields to use as best they could. The leading Greek commanders were Loukás Notarás, who was the Emperor’s commander-in-chief, known as the mégas dhoúkas, three members of the Kantakuzenos family that had provided the Emperor John VI a century ago, and two of the present ruling Palaiologos family. The most prominent of the Italians was Giovanni Giustiniani, a captain of Genoese soldiers who reached Constantinople in January 1453 with 400 men, entered the service of the Emperor, and was appointed commander of all the land walls. Also in Constantinople at the beginning of the year were five Venetian galleys, whose captains were persuaded, with some difficulty, to stay and help the defence of the city. Other Italian defenders came from Galata, the walled Genoese commercial quarter on the north shore of the Golden Horn, though many Genoese in Galata were thought to favour the Turks as their probable future masters. There were also contingents of Catalans and, surprisingly, of Turks under the exiled Turkish Prince Orhan. These foreign troops, from Italy and elsewhere, were in effect mercenaries and the Emperor now had to pay them – a further drain on his meagre resources.
The defenders were outclassed in weapons as well as in numbers. Their cannon could not be fired often because powder and shot were short. Of the two largest, one burst when it was first fired and the other could not be used because its vibration damaged the walls on which it stood. Another Byzantine weapon was so-called Greek fire, probably a substance like petrol expelled from a siphon and ignited, similar to today’s napalm, but this was too complicated and risky to be used often or to great effect. Otherwise the defence relied on their guns and the arrows from longbows and crossbows, and there were not enough even of these. In the final assault the besieged could repel the enemy scaling the walls only by rolling heavy stones down on them.
On 7 April Mehmed moved the bulk of his army to within a quarter of a mile of the land walls, spreading his troops along their whole six-mile length. The rest of his army was north of the Golden Horn, and his ships were at The Columns, two miles north of the city. The siege now began in earnest. We are fortunate to have a number of accounts of it by eyewitnesses or by contemporaries. One of the eyewitness accounts is by the Greek Georgios Sphrantzís, the protovestiários or grand chamberlain to Constantine, and his personal friend. Other accounts are by Venetian, Genoese or Florentine participants. Each has, of course, his own agenda. Some oppose the union of the Churches, others support it and ascribe Constantinople’s troubles to its failure to accept the union genuinely and totally. Venetians and Genoese distrust each other, and the Italians tend to belittle the Greeks. One of the most useful eyewitnesses is Nicolo Barbaro, ship’s doctor on one of the Venetian galleys that stayed to help the defence. His account is in the form of a diary with dates, and gives us the exact sequence of events.
With the start of the Turkish bombardment Constantine completed the disposition of the defenders. On the land walls Constantine with the best Greek troops and Giustiniani with his Genoese soldiers defended the vulnerable Gate of St Romanus in the centre, with other Greek contingents at the northern and southern ends of these walls. Constantine’s senior commander, Loukás Notarás, was an abrasive character who quarrelled both with his compatriot Sphrantzís and with his Genoese colleague Giustiniani. Notarás was stationed at the western end of the walls along the Golden Horn. The Pope’s emissary Cardinal Isidore, the Catalans and the Turks were placed along the Sea of Marmora. Otherwise the defence was in the hands of a dozen Italian commanders, Venetian or Genoese, and their men. The Greeks were full of animosity towards the Latins, according to Leonard of Chíos, because the glory of saving the city had been given to them. Both the Sultan and the Emperor believed that the defence of Constantinople depended on the Latins, not the Greeks.
By the middle of April the Turks had begun bombarding the city’s land walls, and continued every day for the next seven weeks. A Hungarian advised them on technique. ‘If you really want to knock the walls down easily,’ he said, ‘aim to hit another part of the wall five or six fathoms [ten or twelve yards] away from your first shot, and then fire at this in the same way. When you have hit the two outer points fair and square, then fire a third shot so that the three points of impact form a triangle, and then you will see a wall like this one come tumbling down.’10 But, as sections of wall were brought down, the defenders repaired them with earth and brushwood, some loose and some in barrels. These makeshift repairs in one way strengthened the walls because impact was now absorbed rather than spread. Turkish sorties against damaged parts of the walls were repulsed.
Mehmed now looked for a way to bring his ships into play. The first use of them had been a total failure. On 20 April
four Genoese galleys sailed up the Sea of Marmora bringing help to Constantinople, but before they reached the city the wind dropped and they were becalmed. They were then attacked by 145 smaller Turkish ships from The Columns, and as Barbaro recorded, ‘the Dardanelles were covered with armed boats, and the water could hardly be seen.’11 At the end of a two- to three-hour battle the Turks had failed to board or sink any of the Genoese galleys, but had lost many of their own ships with 115 men killed. By next morning, 21 April, the Genoese ships were safely inside the Golden Horn.
On the very next day, 22 April, the Sultan struck back. It was characteristic of him to try to expunge the humiliation of a defeat at once. Since the boom and the ships stationed along it prevented his ships from getting into the Golden Horn from the sea, Mehmed brought them in by the fantastic expedient of dragging them overland. The route ran some three miles from their anchorage at The Columns, over a 200-foot ridge, behind the walls of Genoese Galata and into the sea a mile inside the boom. The ships were hauled onto greased rollers, then dragged by teams of men and oxen, with sails unfurled to gain some extra momentum from the prevailing northerly wind. By the end of the day 70 or 80 Turkish ships were afloat on the waters of the Golden Horn. ‘A marvellous achievement,’ thought Constantine’s friend Sphrantzís, ‘and a superb stratagem of naval tactics’.12
The defending fleet now planned an immediate response of its own, an attack on these Turkish ships on the night of 24 April. But according to Barbaro the Genoese in Galata treacherously persuaded the Venetian captain of the enterprise to wait, offering their help if he would delay, meanwhile sending an emissary to warn the Sultan. When the attack was finally made on 28 April the Turks had positioned cannon beside their fleet, and with their second shot sank the leading Venetian galley. It went down, says Barbaro, in less time than it takes to say ten paternosters, with the loss of the captain, three mates, eleven crossbowmen and all seventy-two oarsmen. The attack was soon abandoned.
