Isabella: The Warrior Queen

by Kirstin Downey

  In 1437 Mehmed’s oldest brother died. In 1443 his second brother was murdered by an adviser, who also killed that prince’s two sons. The adviser was quickly executed “without revealing the motive for his crime,”6 which led to suspicions that the assassination had been designed to clear the way for the succession of Mehmed, now age eleven. Sultan Murad began preparing this son to rule in his place. Together Murad and Mehmed worked on extending their dominions throughout western Greece.

  In 1450, the year before Isabella was born, the Turkish sultan and his son were forced to deal with a tenacious insurrection by the Albanians, led by their former ally, the Albanian captive Skanderbeg. He had converted back to Christianity and renounced Islam. Then he successfully fended off the Turkish attack, becoming a hero in western Europe. Murad and Mehmed were forced to retreat, returning home to their palace at Edirne Sarayi.

  The Spaniards in particular rallied to Skanderbeg’s assistance, recognizing his effort as the first successful opposition in eastern Europe to the growing dominance of the Turks. King Alfonso of Aragon and Naples, uncle to Ferdinand and the cousin of Isabella’s father, gave Skanderbeg both financial and military support, as did Pope Calixtus III, Rodrigo Borgia’s uncle, which allowed Skanderbeg to hold the line against the Ottoman expansion for more than a decade.

  The disappointing reversal in Albania set Sultan Murad back on his heels, and in February 1451 he suddenly died of apoplexy. Mehmed, who was then eighteen, was acclaimed as sultan. He went straight to his father’s harem, where the women consoled him on his father’s death. While Mehmed stood speaking with his father’s highest-ranking wife, Halima Hatun, one of his men strangled her infant son in his bath, thus eliminating a potential future rival for the throne. Mehmed felt no shame about that act—soon, in fact, he made it a specific legal requirement for a sultan to kill his brothers. “It is fitting for the order of the world that he shall kill his brothers,” Mehmed stated in an imperial edict.7

  He was even more brutal to his enemies, becoming a practitioner of many barbaric cruelties, which contributed to his infamy. The Genoese merchant Jacopo de Campi, for example, described the hideous tortures Mehmed devised. One means of death was to place the victim on the ground and insert a sharp pole into his rectum, then pound it into the victim’s interior with a mallet. He ordered people’s hands cut off, or their nose, or their feet. Often he ordered their eyes gouged from their heads. “In short,” Jacopo wrote, “if ever a ruler has been feared and dreaded, ruthless and cruel, this one is a second Nero and far worse.”8

  Certainly Mehmed was no ordinary man; even his appearance was singular. He had bright, piercing eyes and a long hooked nose. His face was heavily bearded and his head habitually crowned with a voluminous turban. He was “well-formed” and slightly above average in height, wrote a Venetian envoy who saw him. “He is skilled in the use of weapons. His appearance inspires fear rather than respect. He laughs rarely.… There is nothing he studies with greater pleasure and eagerness than the geography of the world, and the art of warfare; he burns with the desire to rule.”9

  As soon as Mehmed became sultan, he set himself an ambitious goal—the conquest of Constantinople, the heart of the Byzantine Empire, the inheritor of the mantle of Rome. For decades Ottoman sultans had chipped away at the surrounding countryside, so that by 1452, Constantinople was an island in a sea of Turkish dominion. But its defenses had been constructed for the ages—it had stood as a bastion against attacks from the east for a thousand years. It was securely located on a triangular peninsula bounded on the south by the Sea of Marmara and on the north by a body of water known as the Golden Horn. A triple defense wall protected the third side and enclosed its seven hills. It was viewed as virtually impregnable.

  Mehmed began by building a fortress eight miles north of Constantinople. At first he seemed to be doing it in a friendly way, and local residents even provided him with construction materials to speed the work along. But soon he attacked villagers and dragged them into slavery. Next he assembled a fleet of more than one hundred assault vessels and mobilized more than eighty thousand troops for the attack.

  Constantinople had been under intense military and economic pressure for decades, and by 1452, its population was only about 45,000. Emperor Constantine XI, the city’s ruler, sent envoys to the courts of western Europe begging for aid, but most rulers were too enmeshed in their own troubles to send assistance. A group of Genoese arrived to help, as did a group of Spaniards, including some Catalans from Barcelona and a Castilian nobleman named Don Francisco de Toledo. Ultimately, however, only about seven thousand able-bodied defenders, most of them Greek, manned the walls. They were greatly outnumbered at sea as well, having only about one-fifth the number of fighting ships as the Turks.

  Mehmed told Constantine and the local officials that if they delivered the city to him peaceably, they could continue to live there. But they believed that reinforcements from Venice were on the way and refused to surrender. Mehmed launched an intense bombardment of the city on April 6, 1453. He promised his men that when they conquered Constantinople, they would be given three days to sack it, which was the established Muslim practice. “Religious law required him to grant three days of pillage,” wrote Turkish historian Halil Inalcik. “The city had been taken by force and therefore… movable property was the lawful booty of the soldiers and the population could be legally enslaved.”10

  A problem for the Ottomans, however, was that a great many people in their ranks were not Muslim and had mixed allegiances. There were many Christians among the Turkish soldiers, and they frequently betrayed Ottoman interests by slipping the Christian forces inside information on Mehmed’s plans, which allowed them to shore up their defenses at vulnerable attack points. “They communicated to our side through letters (or epistles) projected by artillery or bows, fastened to arrows; and with such cunning they secretly dispatched them to our side,” wrote a Florentine merchant, Giacomo Tetaldi, who fought in defense of Constantinople and managed to escape by swimming to safety.11

  Constantinople’s defenders fought stoutly, but over the next six weeks, the city’s defenses were slowly and surely worn down. The inhabitants, despairing of deliverance, marched in religious processions, singing hymns and praying to Christ and the Virgin to protect them from the Turks.

  On the last day, a crowd of men, women, children, nuns, and monks “sought refuge” in Hagia Sophia, “encouraged by superstitious belief that when the Turks reached the Column of Constantine, an angel would come down from heaven, hand a sword to a poor man sitting by the column and say, ‘Take this sword and avenge the people of God.’ ” Instead, however, the Turks broke down the doors of the church with axes and dragged the congregants off to slavery. The statues of the saints were smashed; church vessels were seized. “Scenes of unimaginable horror ensued,” historian Franz Babinger writes.12

  The final Muslim assault was led by Janissary warriors, young Christian men who had been taken captive in early childhood, converted to Islam, and trained for battle. Emperor Constantine, with Don Francisco of Toledo close beside him, were fighting valiantly together when they were last seen alive. Soon a crucifix topped with a Janissary cap “was paraded around in mockery.”13

  The Turkish soldiers killed four thousand in the siege and enslaved almost the entire population of the city. They plundered the churches, the imperial palace, and the homes of the rich, and they did considerable damage to much of the city’s fabled architecture. Within days the majestic Hagia Sophia basilica was converted into a mosque. Its storied mosaics were plastered over because Islamic law prohibited representational images. Its holy relics, highly venerated and viewed as sacred objects by the faithful, were discarded, desecrated, or ridiculed; unique and rare classical manuscripts were torn apart for the value of their bindings and thrown into the garbage.

  Mehmed entered Constantinople in glory on May 29, 1453, and was said to have cried when he saw the damage to the buildings. “What a city have we given
over to plunder and destruction,” he reportedly said.14

  But his self-recrimination, if it actually happened, was short-lived. In a ceremony held inside Hagia Sophia during the noon prayer that Friday, a special turban was placed on Mehmed’s head, and he held aloft a naked sword. He shouted, “Praise be to God, the Lord of all the World,” and then, according to a chronicler, the “victorious Muslims lifted up their hands and uttered a shout of joy.”15

  Soon stories circulated around western Europe of what had happened to the women of Constantinople. Many of them, including very young girls and nuns, were indisputably raped, sometimes gang-raped, and sexually tortured.

  Other stories may have been apocryphal but had particular implications for European queens and princesses. According to one story making the rounds, the daughter of the Byzantine emperor was taken by Sultan Mehmed for his personal use. In some versions of the tale, she resisted his sexual advances and was murdered; in other versions, she was raped on the altar of Hagia Sophia. In another variant, Mehmed tried to forcibly convert her to Islam, and when she refused, she was stripped naked and decapitated.16 It was widely believed in western Europe that royal princesses could expect this kind of treatment if their countries were ever to fall to the Muslims.

  It is certainly true that from among the captives, royal or not, Mehmed selected some for his personal pleasure. Two nephews of Emperor Constantine went into Mehmed’s service, and at least one of them was believed to have become his lover. Constantine’s chief of staff, George Sphrantzes, survived and was released after eighteen months of captivity, but his son was killed and his daughter placed in Mehmed’s harem. In September 1455, Sphrantzes wrote, “my beautiful daughter Thamar died of an infectious disease in the sultan’s seraglio.”17 Some rulers of nearby realms voluntarily sent their daughters to Mehmed as wives or concubines, hoping to win his favor and avoid his wrath. He accepted more than a few, and they too went to live in his harem, under the watchful eyes of eunuchs, and disappeared from recorded history.

  Mehmed renamed the city Istanbul and departed on the night of June 24, 1453, with a long train of Greek girls and women trailing behind him as his plunder. Jewish families were transported to the city from the conquered city of Salonika to repopulate the empty homes in Istanbul.

  The victory filled Mehmed with enthusiasm for additional adventuring. He became “so insolent after the capture of Constantinople,” wrote the Genoese official Angelo Lomellino, after meeting with Mehmed in person, “that he sees himself soon becoming master of the whole world, and swears publicly that before two years have passed he intends to reach Rome.”18

  Indeed, according to Turkish historian Halil Inalcik, Mehmed began styling himself “Sovereign of the Two Seas,” which referred to the Black Sea and the Mediterranean Sea, making his intentions crystal clear.19

  Western Europeans were horrified at the news of what had happened in Constantinople. Pope Nicholas V called Mehmed the “son of Satan” and tried to organize a coordinated response to reclaim the city, but he died before he could get the effort under way. He was replaced by the Spaniard Afonso Borgia, who became Pope Calixtus III in 1455. Calixtus, uncle of Rodrigo, also took the Islamic threat seriously and wrote to the young King Ladislaus Posthumos of Bohemia and Hungary pledging his support and calling for the Turks to be expelled not just from Constantinople but also from all Europe.

  Mehmed allowed himself time for carnal pleasures in these years of his reign; his Jewish and Christian captives were the particular object of his attentions. He had four hundred women in his harem. “Mehmed spent many nights in debauchery,” wrote Mustafa Ali, “with lovely-eyed, fairylike slave girls, and his days drinking with pages who looked like angels.”20

  In 1454 and 1455 he launched assaults into Serbia and Hungary, pincer moves designed to expand his realm and to advance his campaign into western Europe. He soon took the town of Novo Brdo, where he ordered the officials decapitated. He shared the seventy-four girls in the town with his men, and took 320 boys as Janissary recruits. At the major city of Belgrade, however, the Turks were repulsed, thanks to military support and reinforcements sent by Pope Calixtus. Mehmed was wounded but undaunted.

  The next year, 1456, when Isabella was five, Mehmed’s forces attacked Athens and Corinth and captured both cities. These conquests resonated painfully on the Iberian peninsula because the Spaniards believed themselves to be the inheritors of Greek culture.

  Pope Calixtus, the Borgia from Valencia, died in 1458. The next pope, Pius II, tried to stop Mehmed’s advance but proved ineffectual. By the end of 1459, when Isabella was eight, all of Serbia had fallen under Mehmed’s control. About 200,000 Serbs were enslaved by the Turks. Soon he attacked the city of Gardiki, in Thessaly, killing all six thousand inhabitants, including women and children. He had accepted the surrender without struggle of the Genoese colony of Amasra, on the Black Sea coast, where he enslaved two-thirds of the population.

  By 1461, around the time Isabella was moved to her brother Enrique’s court, only one Byzantine leader was still holding out against Mehmed: David Comnenus, ruler of the city of Trebizond, also on the Black Sea coast. Mehmed warned David that if he did not surrender, he would be annihilated. David accepted Mehmed’s terms and went into exile in Thrace, the area northwest of Constantinople. But two years later, Mehmed ordered him executed, along with six of his seven sons and a nephew. His youngest son, George, age three, was spared, as was his daughter Anna. George was given to a Turkish family and raised as a Muslim. When he grew up, he ran away and reverted to Christianity, dropping from sight. His disappearance marked the end of the fabled Comnenian dynasty. His sister Anna ended her days in Mehmed’s harem.21

  Mehmed had now added the entire Black Sea coast of Anatolia to his realm. In the spring of 1462, he set off against Wallachia. His father’s former hostage, Vlad, raised in the Turkish court, beaten and abused, had been sent back to rule, but he turned against the Ottomans and formed an alliance with the Christian ruler of Hungary. Vlad fought Mehmed ferociously, earning himself the name Vlad the Impaler, the prototype for the character that came to be known as Count Dracula. He is estimated to have killed tens of thousands of people, partly in efforts to repel the Turks. He was finally assassinated.

  Mehmed rested for a while in Istanbul in 1465, when Isabella was fourteen. But in 1466 he was back on the road, this time attacking Albania once more. The Albanian leader Skanderbeg, the forced convert who had reverted to Christianity and gone on to attack the Turks, was growing old and tired. He traveled to Rome to beg for financial support and arms to fight the Turks, but the only help he got was from Ferdinand’s cousin, the king of Naples. Support was dwindling even more: western Europeans had become numbed to news of defeats by the Turks.

  In January 1469, when Isabella was almost eighteen and preparing to marry Ferdinand, a terrifying report came from the east: tens of thousands of Turks had struck into the center of Austria, near Vienna, killing more than twenty thousand people. The Sultan Mehmed was at that time preparing a naval assault, but no one knew his intended destination. Word went out that he had outfitted 250 sailing vessels, including 120 galleys, and at least eighty thousand soldiers. He repeated the preparations he had undertaken in his attack on Constantinople: meticulous planning and a fearsome concentration of military might. He was said to be planning a “campaign against Europe” and intended to attack by sea. That meant that every kingdom with a southern Mediterranean coastline was a potential target.22

  In June 1470 his vast armada set sail and headed for Negroponte, the second-largest Greek island, located off the peninsula’s eastern coast. It was the place known in antiquity as Euboea or Euripus. Mehmed crushingly defeated the defenders of the city of Chalcis, which allowed him to seize the entire island. The day after its capture, he gave orders that all prisoners with beards should be brought to him. They were told to kneel in a circle, with their hands bound. Hundreds were beheaded. Women and girls were parceled out to the victors. Then the Tur
ks renamed the island Egriboz. They controlled it for the next four hundred years.

  In July the Ottoman army moved westward onto the Greek mainland, passing through Thebes on July 28, Athens on July 29, and many other cities thereafter. Many Greeks were taken into slavery; the entire town of Havsa was depopulated. The sultan ordered settlers from other places to be relocated there.

  In 1471, when Isabella was twenty, Mehmed gave himself a year of rest and recuperation before returning to the warpath. That Christmas Pope Sixtus IV sent out five cardinals to raise the alarm about the oncoming Turks, and to encourage western Europe’s defense. It was as part of this mission that Rodrigo Borgia went to Spain, to make sure residents there knew the magnitude of the threat Christians were facing. In Princess Isabella he found a willing listener.

  By 1474, when Isabella was twenty-three and preparing to take the throne, Mehmed was forty-two and suffering from gout. He had grown obese and was riddled with disease. But he continued plotting conquests from his palace. By now Skanderbeg had died, and in his absence the Albanian principalities were visibly weakening. In May 1474 more than 80,000 Ottoman troops surrounded the town of Scutari, also known as Shkodra, on the Adriatic coast, across from the Italian peninsula’s boot heel. Mehmed’s troops battered the 6,000 inhabitants, only about 2,000 of whom were active defenders. Eyewitnesses said that as the Ottomans attacked the walls of Scutari, they shouted, “Rome! Rome!,” making it clear that they saw the town as just one more step toward that goal.23

  At Scutari, the Albanians managed to hold back the Ottomans once more, narrowly surviving drought and starvation behind the castle walls. But in 1479 their luck ran out. The Turks came back one more time, and this time the Venetian rulers negotiated a truce with the Ottomans and departed, making it clear that the Albanian population had no choice but to surrender. Many dispossessed Albanians fled, making homes in exile for themselves in Italy and Spain.