Lords of the Horizons

by Jason Goodwin

  The Byzantines had cleared the moats, repaired the walls, gathered together all the city’s arms. There were still some Catalans about, who organised themselves under their consul, and roped in some Catalan sailors, too. A Castilian nobleman with a claim to imperial descent arrived, calling the Emperor cousin, and a German, doubtless ‘from the Rhine river’ as Mehmet had predicted, calling himself Johannes Grant. There was even a fullblown Turk – the Ottoman pretender, Mehmet’s uncle Orhan, who offered the services of his entire household.

  The Venetians in the city put themselves at the Emperor’s disposal in spite of their Senate’s equivocal orders, ‘for the honour of God and the honour of all Christendom’, as a merchant captain bluffly told the Emperor. Various Genoese, too, made their way to the city; and Giovanni Giustiniani Longo, of one of the republic’s best families, arrived in January with 700 men and a reputation which induced the Emperor to make him putative lord of Lemnos. With more immediate effect he was appointed to command the defence of the whole of Constantinople’s land walls.

  There were land walls and sea walls to this city. Constantinople resembled the head of a dog, pointing east on a triangular peninsula. Over its nose the channel of the Golden Horn meets the Bosphorus; its throat is caressed by the Sea of Marmara; and the land walls erected by Theodosius in the fifth century are slung across as a sort of huge loose collar from ear to chest. The waterside walls were of single thickness: those of the Marmara shore reared up abruptly from the sea, dotted with reefs and shoals, pierced here and there by gates, and opening into two fortified harbours; those of the Golden Horn skirted by a foreshore which had built up over the centuries, covered with godowns, but protected from all possibility of assault by a massive chain – a chain to all chains what Urban’s monster was to cannon – which could be hooked up across the mouth of the Horn to prevent the entry of any ship. From this harbour seven ships, six from Crete, one from Venice, slipped perfidiously away one February night, taking with them 700 Italians. The rest, mainly sailing ships without oars, rode stolidly at anchor, twenty-six equipped for fighting; on the northern side the Peran merchant ships were anchored beneath the walls of the Genoese colony, which remained strictly neutral throughout the siege.

  These walls, the chain, the reefs and the speed of the currents made a seaborne attack unlikely. The massive collar on the landward side defied assault by its very bulk. A little nub of territory like the dog’s ear jutted out from the walls where they climbed steeply uphill from the Golden Horn, and comprised the old suburb of Blachernae, long since incorporated into the city and strengthened by the fortifications of the royal palace which were built up into it. From there the walls ran unbroken to the Marmara side of the peninsula, treble walls, if you counted the crenellated breastwork which ran the whole distance, and divided the 60-foot-wide fosse, or moat – for it could in parts be flooded – from the outer wall, 25 feet high, and studded with square towers. Behind this a clear space of 40 to 60 feet divided the outer from the inner walls, fully 40 feet in height, with 60-foot-high towers, some of them square, some octagonal, but all cunningly staggered to fall between the towers of the outer wall.

  If this monstrous system of defence had any weakness at all, it was generally supposed to be somewhere about the Lycus valley, where the ground dropped about a hundred feet to a little river feeding into the city through a conduit under the walls; and it was here that the Sultan’s tents were spread, the janissaries were grouped, and the great cannon peered with its Cyclopean eye at the Venetian sailors, in their distinctive costumes, parading the battlements at the Emperor’s request to remind the Sultan that Venetians, too, had mobilised for the city’s defence, and meant to stick it out.

  The Ottomans, for their part, dug in against the whole length of the land walls behind a trench and an earthen wall, topped with a palisade. Baltoghlu, a Bulgarian renegade in command of the fleet, was ordered to see that nobody reached the city on the Marmara side, and above all to force a passage through the chain that covered the entrance to the Golden Horn.

  On 6 April the guns roared for the first time, with a noise that made women faint, and brought down a small section of the walls, which the defenders managed to repair overnight. Two small castles still held by the Greeks were bombarded into submission: the survivors, both those who surrendered, and those who were captured in the smoking ruins, were impaled as a warning to the men on the city walls, while a castle on one of the largest islands in the Sea of Marmara was burnt, its garrison put to death, and all the inhabitants of the island rounded up and sold into slavery, which Baltoghlu deemed to be their proper punishment for permitting resistance on their soil.

  Mehmet’s big cannons could be fired only seven times a day; they slipped in the mud and rolled from their carriages; but with constant attention they kept up their work of demolition for six weeks. After initial setbacks on the Golden Horn, where ten Christian ships guarded the boom and actually made a sally upon Baltoghlu’s fleet, Ottoman cannon placed on Pera Point sank one galley with a single shot, and the ships bustled away from the boom, further up the Horn, for safety.

  The defenders worked round the clock, soldiers, civilians, women, to repair the damage done to the outer walls, stockading it in ruinous parts with planks and sacks of earth, using barrels as crenellations, everywhere heaving bales of wool over the walls, and draping them in sheets of leather, to muffle the effects of the cannonballs. A night assault in which the rush of janissaries, archers and javelin-throwers was lit by flares, whipped up by the crash of cymbals and the beat of drums, was repulsed in four hours’ hand-to-hand fighting in which the Christians did not lose a single man, so stout was their armour.

  A convoy of three papal galleys hired from Genoa, with a Byzantine transport laden with Sicilian corn, took advantage of a fair southerly wind, and the preoccupation of the Turks with the boom across the Horn, to run in towards the city across the Sea of Marmara. The defenders spotted them at the same time as the Turks themselves, and everyone was in a position to view the engagement that soon ensued. By afternoon the high-built Christian ships were gaining against the whole of the Turkish fleet, shouldering the low galleys aside as they made the most of a full wind which had carried them almost round the point, to the mouth of the Horn, when it suddenly dropped. Their sails flapped; one of the weird eddies of the Bosphorus began to drag them, slowly but surely, away from the walls of Constantinople, and towards the Pera shore, where the Sultan himself – now urging his horse into the water, now bellowing instructions to his admiral, now encouraging, now cursing – seemed ready to take the ships on personally.

  Still the struggle continued, the sea so thick with Turkish vessels that its course was sometimes hard to gauge. By mid-afternoon the stricken ships had collected a positive infestation of Turkish vessels, clinging to their sides with grappling irons and hooks, aiming to carry them by assault or fire. One Genoese ship was surrounded by five triremes, another by thirty longboats, the third by forty troopships; but the lumbering Byzantine galleass, made more for corn than war, seemed to concentrate the Turks’ efforts. Baltoghlu himself ran his ship into the prow of the big transport, and around her the fighting seemed fiercest, wave after wave of boarders steadily repulsed, the Byzantine weapon of Greek fire – the equivalent of napalm – used to deadly effect, the Turkish galleys forever entangling their oars, or losing them to missiles dropped from overhead by the much higher Christian vessels. The Genoese wore excellent armour, and had provided themselves with great tuns of water to extinguish fires, and by late afternoon, perceiving the especial danger to the Byzantine transport, which was less well armed, and running low on weapons, the Genoese commanders managed somehow to form a sort of floating, four-towered fortress by lashing their ships together. They were still fighting when evening came, but the hearts of the Byzantines on the walls sank as they saw yet more Turkish ships move in to take their place against the heaving, splintered, drifting knot of Christian ships. Even the Sultan seemed to regain some of
his calm as the end approached.

  Just as the sun began to set, the wind regathered from the north – and the sails of the Christian ships billowed out, the ties were slipped, and one by one they crashed again through the mêlée of galleys, and at last into the safety of the boom.

  One of the sheikhs wrote immediately to Mehmet, warning him that the humiliation of defeat was already encouraging people to say that he lacked authority and judgement. Baltoghlu was publicly condemned as a traitor, a coward and a fool, and was saved from execution only by the testimony of his officers, who bore witness to his resolution and bravery, so that he was merely bastinadoed, stripped of all his offices, deprived of all his worldly goods, and sent, half-blinded by a stone hurled from one of his own ships, to obscure exile. Mehmet had now to achieve some bold success: it was his bad luck not to be present when a large chunk of wall collapsed, over which, the defenders thought, a general assault ordered immediately would surely have succeeded; but it was his forethought which made possible a miraculous stroke against the city, from which it was doomed never to recover.

  At the outset of the siege, Mehmet had begun to prepare a road running round the back of the Genoese colony at Pera, over the hill from the Bosphorus to the Valley of the Springs on the northern shore of the Golden Horn. With the failure of the fleet uppermost in his mind, Mehmet ordered the work to be speeded up; cannon played harder on the boom, workmen carried on their tasks by firelight, and the black smoke which drifted across the Bosphorus concealed all his activity until it was too late.

  When the stratagem was finally revealed, a sort of groan went up from the watchers on the walls above the Horn. Over the hill on the opposite shore came the first of the Ottoman ships, a small fusta, or longboat, its oars meticulously sweeping the thin air in time to the beat, its sails spread; while to the wail of fifes, the screech of metal wheels, the creak of the massive cradles, the cracking of whips and lowing of oxen, seventy ships followed her down the hill and splashed into the waters of the Horn.

  The city’s flank was turned. A squabble between the Venetians, who had proposed a lightning assault on the Turkish fleet by night, and the Genoese, who heard of it and insisted on joining in, postponed the attack until all secrecy had been lost, and it was rebuffed by a well-prepared barrage which sank two Christian ships and cost her ninety sailors – some of whom, swimming ashore, were beheaded in full view of the defenders, who beheaded 260 Turkish prisoners on the walls in reply. The Italians’ rivalry became so intense that the Emperor summoned the Venetian and Genoese leaders, and told them that ‘the war outside our gates is enough for us’.

  A huge tower was erected overnight, and inched forward across the fosse while men underneath worked to fill it up; although the defenders managed to fire the tower and clean out the ditch again, the towers mushroomed around their walls. More invisibly, a detachment of Serbs from the silver mines of Nrvo Brdo began to tunnel beneath the walls in various places, their activities countered by the imperturbable Johannes Grant, who flooded the tunnels and fired their props. The mining stopped when several Serbs were caught and tortured to reveal the positions of a number of tunnels around the walls, at least one of which, its entrance cunningly concealed by one of those wooden towers, might never have been found otherwise; and the headless bodies were hoicked over the walls.

  A tiny brigantine came dodging in across the boom: at first the defenders took her for the vanguard of the relieving fleet once promised from the West, but she was only a ship that had sailed out, disguised as a Turkish vessel, twenty days before, to look for help: and she had found none. Her captain had then asked the crew what they wished to do, and one dissenter was silenced by the others, who told him that their duty was to return to the Emperor, and give him the news. Constantine wept as he thanked them.

  But Mehmet, of course, seven weeks already into his siege, could not know the news the Venetian brigantine had brought; indeed, there were rumours that a Venetian fleet was already in Chios. An embassy from Hungary informed him that the three-year armistice he had signed was no longer to be considered binding after a change of regent there. In seven weeks not a wall had been crossed, and if the defenders were weak and tired – so weak and tired that the Emperor himself actually fainted during an interview in which his ministers urged him to escape, and organise resistance from outside the doomed city – the troops were growing restive, and Mehmet’s prestige was in decline. He had been clever to engineer the swoop of the fleet into the Golden Horn; but the boom was still in place; no landing had been effected; Constantinople remained unseized. It was the very nightmare which Greek Halil had predicted months before.

  On 25 May, Mehmet offered to raise the siege if the Byzantines would pay him 100,000 gold bezants as annual tribute, or if they preferred, leave with all the baggage they could carry under a guarantee of safe conduct. To the Byzantines the sum was too great; the guarantee, it was felt, too slender, and the Emperor offered instead to hand over everything he owned, barring Constantinople itself. It was all he did own, as it happened, and the Sultan replied that the choice between surrender, death, or conversion to Islam now lay with the Byzantines. In a council the Grand Vizier Halil Pasha demanded an end to the siege, on the grounds of the risk its continuation carried for the young Sultan and his empire. But Zaganos Pasha, and many of the younger beys, argued him down, as Mehmet wished. He told Zaganos to go among the troops and gauge their mood: and Zaganos returned shortly with the news that everyone wanted an immediate all-out attack.

  For two nights the Turkish armies worked by flares to fill up the fosse, to the skirl of fifes and trumpets. At midnight on Sunday, the lights went out, and silence fell on the camp. Monday was spent in prayer and preparation, while the Sultan toured the camp, encouraging his men. There would be the three days of looting, as enjoined by Koranic law upon warriors of the faith who took a city by the sword after it had refused the customary demand to surrender. Mehmet swore by eternal God and His Prophet and by the four thousand prophets and by the souls of his father and his children, that the treasure would be fairly shared out. The city was not impregnable – did not the Tradition declare: ‘They shall conquer Qostantinya, glory be to the prince and to the army that shall achieve it’? The enemy now were exhausted and few, he said, and low on ammunition and food; while the Italians would not die for a country not their own. His officers must be brave, and maintain order, for tomorrow he would send wave upon wave of gazis to the attack. He told the commanders to rest in their tents, and he outlined the plan of battle to his generals. Then he ate, and went to bed.

  All the while as Mehmet carefully marshalled his army round the walls, and Constantine, as carefully, disposed his meagre troops within them, the assembled talismans of the city’s fortunes, those which had escaped the sack of 1204, united in proclaiming the city’s desolation. Icons were observed to weep and the holy picture of the Mother of God, carried in procession, slipped into the mud where it defied every effort to raise it again. Sudden storms blew in off the sea. The gutters ran blood red. God removed Himself from the city which was, perhaps even more than Rome, dedicated to His image: He stole away under cover of a thick and unseasonal fog which enveloped the entire peninsula in early March. When the fog lifted, everyone saw light play fitfully around the dome of the Church of the Holy Wisdom, so that the citizens were disturbed, and Mehmet sought reassurances from holy men. From the walls, the defenders saw lights which never were explained, bobbing about in the dark distance beyond the Turkish camp. They did not prove to be the campfires of a Hungarian army. On 23 May the full moon suffered a partial eclipse and shone like a crescent in the night sky.

  On the eve of the planned assault, a sweeter, sadder miracle occurred within the old Church of the Holy Wisdom, where for months, by the terms of Constantine’s last appeal for western help, clergy devoted to the Latin rite had held sway, so that no Greek of conscience had been able to bring himself to enter its defiled portals. In the evening, after the Emperor had thanked
the Italians, and reminded the Greeks of their duty to Emperor, family, faith and country, a service was held, and everyone came, Catalan and Orthodox Greek, schismatic bishops and the unionist cardinal, Catholic and Orthodox priests, and all the people who were not at the walls received communion from whoever chose to administer it, and made confession, to whoever was ready to hear it.

  But this impromptu and emotional reunion of the churches could do nothing to deflect the city’s fate. Three hours before dawn, three pashas at the head of 50,000 men apiece led separate attacks, met by a thin line of defenders. All the bells of the city were rung, and even nuns came to the walls with stones and water, while many people made their way back to the Church of Holy Wisdom, praying for the fulfilment of an old prophecy. For it had been said that though an infidel army would enter the city and reach the church itself, there an angel would appear and beat them back.

  Mehmet flung his irregulars first against the walls, a horde of Turks, Slavs, Hungarians, Kurds, Yuruks, Germans, even Italians and Greeks, who were urged on with whips and maces while the janissaries closed ranks behind them, to cut down anyone who tried to run away. For two hours they obeyed the Sultan’s promise to wear the defenders down, before they were retired in favour of professional Anatolian infantry, each of them eager to be the first believer onto the walls. Like the irregulars, they suffered from crowding – so many could be flung from toppling ladders at once, or maimed by a single stone dropped from above; and even when a breach was suddenly opened in the stockade by a roar from the great cannon, the Anatolians pouring in were surrounded by Byzantine troops with the Emperor at their head, and beaten back in that confined space with terrible slaughter.