Lords of the Horizons

by Jason Goodwin

  So the honour would fall to the Sultan’s men, the janissaries. They advanced now at the double, but in perfect order, their bands so loud that they could be heard across the Bosphorus, Mehmet himself going with them to the fosse. From there he urged them on, as line by line added to the preparations for scaling the walls, and retired neatly.

  Giustiniani – proud, energetic, brilliant Giustiniani – ‘what would I not give,’ the Sultan had exclaimed, ‘to have that man in my service?’ – was shot through the breastplate at close range, and in great pain and fear of death, he insisted – despite the pleas of the Emperor himself, who rushed to his side – on being carried back to his ship. The Genoese saw him go, and fell back too, in utter confusion. ‘The city is ours!’ Mehmet cried, and the janissaries crowded to the walls.

  The outer wall was lost. Greeks pulling back got trapped under the inner wall in a deadly fusillade from the janissaries overhead. The Turks were already clambering onto the inner walls when they saw their flag flying from a tower in the northern sector of the walls – for chance had led to the discovery of a postern gate, left open after a sally; and it was through this little unguarded crack in the walls that fifty Turks broke through, as if ordained.

  The Emperor tried to rally his men streaming back through the gates in the inner wall; but everyone’s thought was to reach his family, and nothing further could be done. Constantine held the approach himself for a few last minutes, but the tide against them was much too strong. The last Emperor of Byzantium flung off his imperial insignia, and with that splendid Castilian nobleman who had called him cousin at his side, plunged into the fray sword in hand, never to be seen again.

  Mehmet rode into the city on the morning of the first day, and called a halt to the plundering in defiance of Islamic law: perhaps it was a reflection of the poverty of the city that nobody seemed to mind, for all the plunder was already taken. At the threshhold of St Sophia he dismounted, and sprinkled a scoop of dirt over his turban as a sign of humility. The scene in Hagia Sophia as Mehmet first entered was fairly bestial – indeed, halfway up one of the finest columns of the cathedral, on the south-east side, very clear-sighted visitors can still see the image of a hand, supposedly left by the Conqueror as he reached out to steady himself while clambering on his white charger up a huge pile of the slain. It is said that even as the priests were being hacked to bits, and the nuns were being ravished on the altar, and the women, children, patricians and plebeians who had crowded in were being trussed up for slavery, a priest in the middle of saying Mass took his chalice and his consecrated host, and at the point of the Turkish scimitars he slipped into the very walls of the church, which sealed him up.* Mehmet is supposed to have rounded on a soldier he saw hacking piously at the marble floors – ‘the gold is thine, the building mine.’ Then he rode to Blachernae, the palace of the emperors, where Constantine, after the holy sacrament two nights before, had stood a moment before going to the last defence of his city. Mehmet spent some time wandering among its empty halls, murmuring the lines of an old Persian poem: ‘An owl hoots in the towers of Afrasiab, / The spider spins his web in the palace of the Caesars.’

  There were hiccups. Lucas Notarias, the highest ranking Byzantine captive, who had once famously declared that better the Sultan’s turban than the bishop’s mitre, was put to the sword with his entire family for refusing to sacrifice his son to the Sultan’s lust; there had been talk of setting him up in office. Conceivably Mehmet was at first discouraged by the devastation of the city, its streets and shops blown out after the looting, its buildings strangely sooty and black, its fields and hedgerows very melancholy as they went to seed, for he continued with work on a great palace at Edirne as if nothing had happened.

  * Not to reopen, of course, until the cross replaced the crescent on the dome. Now it is a museum.

  5

  The Centre

  Mehmet had been obstinate as a boy, and his learning had apparently to be beaten into him. At the age of twelve he had been made Regent of Rumelia while Murad went to fight the Emir of Karamania in his rear. A fearsome Christian coalition army, in defiance of treaties sworn on the Bible and the Koran, burst into the Balkans in 1444. Murad came back, gathered his troops, and went to defeat them decisively at Varna on the Black Sea coast, charging the Christian ranks with a copy of the violated treaty stuck on a lance. Murad promptly abdicated, until two years later Halil had him reinstated in a sort of bloodless coup d’état. Mehmet, whom the janissaries despised, was exiled to Manisa. When Murad died in the winter of 1451,* Mehmet leapt vigorously into the saddle with the cry ‘Let all who love me, follow me!’ but exhortation was not enough, he was not well loved, and Mehmet became the first Sultan to issue an accession donative to the troops.

  The fall of Constantinople changed all that. Everyone – the Venetians, the Genoese, the Ragusans – rushed to offer their congratulations and, where appropriate, agreed to raise the amount of tribute they already paid. The Knights of Rhodes were congratulatory, too, even though they could not pay tribute, they said, without reference to the Pope. Mehmet basked in the prestige he gained in the Islamic world, as well, making quite sure of it by sending Constantine’s supposed head on a tour of Islamic potentates. It is conceivable that Mehmet was discouraged by the city’s dilapidation; but he had an eye for pattern, and the lineaments were strong beneath the soot and rubble.

  Constantinople remained the finest city in the world. Christians had torn themselves and the city apart in their efforts to possess it: crusaders, pretenders, ambitious Serb princes, Bulgar khans with long and bitter memories who drank from their enemies’ gilded skulls. In a thousand years Constantinople had suffered twenty-nine assaults. It had repulsed twenty-one of them. The King of Naples coveted it still; and as the last of the Byzantine dynasty were dying, Charles II of Anjou bought up their claims and titles and made, in that faded purple, a feint into Italy which disturbed even the Sultan.

  It was as if some tilt of geography or politics had always destined this to be the first city of the world. The Byzantines had thought it the navel of the world. The Venetians toyed with the idea of moving Venice there, lock, stock and barrel, after they captured it in 1204; but perhaps their own city on the Veneto was so stuffed with looted treasures from Byzantium that the business of shipping it all back seemed too much trouble. In 1503, fifty years after the Ottoman conquest, Andrea Gritti – who learned his merchanting in Istanbul and later became a doge – wrote that ‘its climate, its two seas protecting it on both sides, the beauty of its neighbouring lands, give this city what is thought to be the most beautiful and the most favoured site not only in all of Asia but in all the world’, a site, Busbecq noted a century later, ‘created by nature to be the capital of the world’.* Another Venetian, Benedetto Ramberti, wrung his hands over the beauty of it all. ‘The situation of Constantinople is not only beyond description, but it can hardly be grasped in thought because of its loveliness,’ he said; and the Roman traveller della Valle, who came in the seventeenth century, described the cascade of buildings with their huge spreading eaves, the big shuttered verandas under the eaves, their shade, the snow-white buildings and green cypresses as a ‘sight so beautiful that I do not think there is any city to be found that looks better than this from the outside’. Years later, seeking an image of absolute loveliness to decorate the dome of an Albanian mosque or to brighten the walls of a Greek merchant’s house, it was to the eye of empire that people instinctively turned, the kiosks and cypresses of the Golden Horn that people painted, the domes of Istanbul. The poet Nabi wrote: ‘Because its beauty is so rare a sight / The sea has clasped it in an embrace.’ ‘What a city!’ wrote Tursun Bey:* ‘For an aspre you may be rowed from Asia into Europe.’

  Asia came to Europe, the church became a mosque; and Turkish women asked to wear the Byzantine veil in place of the linen hood, with holes for eyes. Mehmed’s world-conquering ambitions were crystallised in the new imperial capital. When he rode to Hagia Sophia and the Imam
called the faithful there to prayer it was enough, in the rough conquistadorial spirit of the faith, to consecrate the edifice as a mosque. But a hunt was made among the captive Greeks for the fierce old theologian Gennadius the Scholar, the most implacable opponent of the Roman church. They found him in Edirne, in the house of a merchant who had bought him in a job lot, at a knockdown price, at the postconquest sales, and was now bemusedly according him the courtesy due to his evident dignity and learning. Mehmet invested Gennadius with the robes and honour of the patriarchal office, and he was consecrated by the Archbishop of Heraclea; while thirty-six churches including the Church of the Holy Apostles, whose plan the Venetians had copied at St Mark’s, were preserved for his ministers in the city alone.* The Chief Rabbi was called to the city from Jerusalem. The Armenian Patriarch was roped in from Bursa. The Sultan’s share of captives were released and resettled, and everywhere the Sultan went in the coming years, when laying siege to cities in Greece and the Balkans, he dispatched his share of the captives to populate his capital.

  All the while his troops laboured in the summer heat to repair the ravages of centuries of neglect, repairing cisterns and aqueducts, rodding drains, laying paving stones. Motion returned to the fossilised city: ships loading in the roadsteads, lighters bustling about the harbour, processions winding through the streets, the sound of hammers as the streets of the artisans came alive. Greeks sniffed the wind. Kritovolos compared Mehmet to Alexander the Great, and George of Trebizond wrote him a letter: ‘No one doubts you are Emperor of the Romans. Whoever holds by right the centre of the Empire is emperor and the centre of the Roman Empire is Constantinople.’

  Constantinople was the spot where the long trajectory of the gazi’s fortunes fell to earth. Its conquest blew off the beys, just as they had feared; for Mehmet used it to build the edifice of Ottoman power, in which craggy individualists had no place. As the empire began to push against tougher enemies than before, unity was needed if conquest was to proceed at the old rate.

  Mehmet followed up the conquest of Constantinople with the subjection of the whole Greek-speaking world. From Trebizond to the Peloponnese, he wound up all the Byzantine despots, rivals, and dependants. Kritovolos was a judge on the island of Imbros, the only Byzantine not to run away; he explained the new situation to the papal fleet when it cruised past, was given the governorship of the island, and eventually wrote a convincing history based on Greek and Turkish sources, in which the Sultan was the hero and the Greeks, for all their tragic loss, were urged to reconcile themselves. George Amouritzes negotiated the surrender of Trebizond, by which the Trapuzuntine Emperor David agreed to take his family to exile in Istanbul, and all the men of the city were enslaved.* The old Byzantine Emperor’s brothers, the Peloponnesian despots Thomas and Demetrius, betrayed their cause by their faithlessness and opportunism, squabbling when Mehmet urged brotherly love, and making war when he urged peace, so that in 1460 he crossed the Gulf of Corinth and finished them off, while the cities of the Peloponnese fell to him one by one. Thomas died in Rome, and his sons never prospered: one married a Roman courtesan and died poor in the city, while the other returned rather hopelessly to Constantinople, dying as a pensioner of the state, and perhaps a Muslim, too. His uncle Demetrius died in Edirne in 1470, last of the Paleologi. Only Thomas’s daughter Zoe got away: she married the Russian Grand Duke Ivan III in 1472, taking with her the old Caesaro-papist claims, and the double-headed eagle of Byzantium.

  In 1456 Mehmet stormed up the Danube with his battle-hardened army of veterans, heroes of Constantinople and Sofia. His objective was an island at the confluence of the Sava and the Danube, the key to all Central Europe, named by the Ottomans Dar-ne-jihad, ‘Battlefield of Holy War’, and known to us as Belgrade, the White City. At the first news of his approach Janos Hunyadi, the military champion of Hungary, dashed across country to the island citadel with a welcome addition of musketeers, squeaking in just days before the siege commenced. Hunyades cleared the houses round the ramparts for a clear field of fire, and strung up a few Belgrade citizens who had been seen to be friendly with the enemy; but Mehmet’s cannon did its work and on 13 August the janissaries advanced through a smoking breach in the walls, trampling over the corpses which lay piled up in the moat.

  There was no resistance as they fanned out through the deserted streets and crooked lanes which ran up towards the citadel. Cautiously at first, then more boldly, they pressed through the alleyways, chalking houses for looting later – when a clarion call from the citadel brought the defenders out of their holes. They rose from the ground like the sheeted dead – bounding out of cellars, springing down from rooftops – to fall upon the divided columns of Turkish soldiers. Taken completely by surprise, the janissaries fell back on their fellows streaming through the breach. The defenders chased after them, clearing the trenches with their slashing pikes, and the Turks fled in tumultuous disarray. Not even the exhortations of their Sultan, who must have seen better than they how close to victory his army was, and how easily they could turn the tables on the outnumbered defenders if they would only stand and fight; not even the furious bellowing of the aga of the janissaries, or the skirling of the janissary bands urging attack, could stem the rout. The Sultan cut down his generals with his own hand, and at his furious reproach the aga, handling his reins at the Sultan’s right, did the decent thing and plunged into the fray, where he was soon cut down.

  For Hunyades, Belgrade restored a reputation tarnished after an earlier débâcle at Varna; and to cap it all he died there twenty days after the siege was lifted, weaving the indomitable legends of the city and the warrior together. The Turks would hush their babies’ crying by mentioning his name, and eighty years after his death they broke through to Alba Iulia in Transylvania where he lay buried, and chipped at his effigy with a kind of respectful hatred, solicitous of his memory, and damaging to his nose.

  Mehmet failed to take Belgrade, and failed to take Rhodes; but he scoured the Black Sea and the Genoese were booted out of their colonies there: Kaffa, the Little Constantinople, fell in 1475, and fifteen hundred young Genoese nobles were enrolled in the janissary regiments. In the year 1456 he rested his troops; but he spent the summer reading the classical geographer Ptolemy, whose concentric vision of the world matched his own. The Venetians from their rooftops watched the glow of burning villages as the Ottomans swept to the banks of the Piave. In 1480 Mehmet’s general Ahmed the Broken-Mouthed, Grand Vizier and conqueror of the Crimea, landed unopposed on the southern shores of Italy, and seized Otranto, then considered the key to Italy, with terrifying slaughter, and it was only Mehmet’s death that called him back.

  * On New Year’s Day 855, by Islamic reckoning.

  * A year under house arrest in the capital of the world, though, changed his tone. ‘What I enjoy is the country, not the city,’ he later wrote. ‘Especially a city which is almost falling to pieces… ’

  * Turkish historian under Mehmet’s successor, Bayezit II.

  * Six years later the Serbian church, with its own patriarch in Pec, was suppressed in the name of Greek unity.

  * In 1463 the Comneni were put to death in the Castle of the Seven Towers: the Empress Helena buried them ‘little by little’ with her own hands. She donned a hair shirt and died in a thatched hut nearby.

  6

  The Palace

  Every storm must have its eye, where the winds sound without a breeze, and in whose still, flat air you can feel the whole of its sullen energy. For Islam itself, the centre was the Kaaba of Mecca, the weird stone cube which Adam, some people thought, had erected precisely beneath an identical building in heaven and which others supposed to have been raised by God before he built Mecca round it and, encircling the city with holy ground, proceeded to the creation of the world. The whole building was covered in a thick black cloth, embroidered with verses of the Koran, and in its south-eastern corner was set the Black Stone, God’s eye on earth, which bestowed blessings on anyone who touched it – and which pilg
rims kissed seven times as they proceeded widdershins around the Kaaba itself.

  For the common man, the centre was perhaps a tree. ‘Cursed be the man who injures a fruit-bearing tree,’ the Prophet said, and the idea of the tree – the shaman’s tree, the tree of the Old Religion – was firmly rooted in Ottoman life. Osman’s earliest dream was of a tree of destiny, which grew from his breast and whose leaves pointed at Christendom like spears. A tree grew gnarled and bent in the dusty square of every imperial town and village, where the men could sit to exchange the gossip of the day; so at the centre of the Hippodrome, in the middle of Constantinople, in the heart of the empire, stood a tree known as the Janissary Tree. From it, centuries later, in their days of arrogance and praetorian power, the janissaries liked to administer rough justice, and form their mutinous assemblies: ‘a tree,’ said a visitor in 1810, ‘the enormous branches of which are often so thickly hung with strangled men that it is a sickening sight to look on’.

  Within the political geography of the empire, too, an absolute stillness reigned at the very centre of the whole design – the ‘more than Pythagorean silence’, as Cantemir called it, ‘of the Othman inner court’, the dwelling place of the Sultan. Out on the frontier the Ottoman world might spin at a fantastic rate, gathering in treasure, and men, and countries, in ever widening circles, its bands a-screech, its troops rushing forward with horrible cries; to the clash of arms, and the groans of the dying, the boom of cannon and slither of rubble; but at the centre you would detect hardly any movement at all.