by Neil Oliver
The first of his fighting men had reached the city days ahead of the artillery train, and the sight of them would have been enough, Mehmet knew, to fill the citizens there with dread. He had put out his call to arms and a force numbering in the hundreds of thousands had rallied to him from all across his empire.
Most of the seasoned warriors had been provided by Mehmet’s sipahis – noblemen raised and trained in the saddle and able to fight with the bow or the lance. They were his shock troops, spiritual descendants of the mounted hordes that had ridden out of the desert long ago, whose horsemanship and skill with weapons was the stuff of legend. While foot soldiers advanced into battle from the centre, cavalrymen formed the curving, encircling wings of the attacking line – riding out to goad and to punish, tormenting the static foe and moving around him like a swarm of bees.
A sipahi occupied a position in Ottoman society that would have been recognisable to any Christian crusader knight, and he fought for honour first and last. Each held land from the sultan and the size of his holding dictated the number of warriors he was obliged to equip and to train at his own expense. These armed and armoured retainers were usually related to him and so they fought out of loyalty to their own blood as well as obligation to the sultan.
Closest of all to Mehmet, though, were his janissaries – several thousand elite infantry soldiers entrusted with his life and with the lives of those dearest to him. Christian-born, they had been captured and enslaved in boyhood and raised as Muslims. Janissaries lived lives made separate and almost holy by their own strangeness. They fought and died as a class apart.
But it was perhaps the seemingly uncountable mass of impassioned amateurs that had flocked to the side of the professional soldiers that inspired real terror in the hearts of any who encountered them. Who after all would stand against such a reckless wave of men and boys armed with little more than the tools of their working lives and driven only by passion and by faith? Certainly not the inhabitants of those few Christian settlements still in existence outwith the walls of the city itself. All but a few of those souls, in towns and villages strung along the coastlines of the Black Sea or the Sea of Marmara, or in the hinterland before the walls, had been harvested unto God by the vanguard of the Turkish force. The only ones left alive were those whose own town walls had proved strong enough to withstand the horde. If they had held out stubbornly enough, the attackers’ interest waned and they moved on to torment more submissive prey.
Mehmet had timed his force’s advance to ensure that the crest of the wave broke and lapped against the Wall of Theodosius on the dawn of Easter Sunday. Mehmet knew that the Christians cowering in their churches and shrines would have felt especially protected by the advent of their holiest week. Whatever else might befall them in the days ahead, surely almighty God and the mother of his son would spare them for their prayers and devotions at that special time? Yet despite all the howled appeals to their most sacred icons and to God above, the ringing of hundreds of bells and the wafting of veritable storms of incense, the Turks had arrived on the doorstep on the very anniversary of their Christ’s resurrection. Instead of salvation, it had been a tented city of wrathful enemies that came in response to their prayers – sprouting out of the soil overnight like a crop of poisonous mushrooms.
The sultan’s sappers had set to work at once, clearing the ground before the wall of every movable obstruction. Buildings and boundaries, trees and scrub – whole orchards and woodlands, in fact – had fallen to their hammers and axes so that the guns, when they arrived, might have a clear field of fire. An eighth of a mile in front of the wall, and parallel to it, they had dug out a great ditch that stretched from the Golden Horn to the Sea of Marmara. The earth and stones from their excavations they had heaped in front, as protection for Mehmet’s precious bombards. A screen of wicker fencing was then strung along the top, so that the activities of the gunners (precious too, but less so than the guns) might be obscured from the defenders’ view.
For a millennium the wall had stretched for four miles across the neck of the peninsula of land that had the city at its apex – and for more than seven hundred of those years one Muslim foe after another had jealously studied its construction. Mehmet and his sappers knew its dimensions and complexities by heart.
Any and all who had business in Constantinople, and who made their way towards it across the plains of Thrace, eventually came face to face with not just one wall, but two – running parallel to one another and trapping between them a lethal killing field. An enemy force that might breach the first would surely be cut down by defenders safe behind the battlements atop the second, armed with crossbows and bombards, spears and boulders, boiling oil and Greek fire.
Even before tackling the outermost wall, attackers had first to find a way across the fosse – the deep moat lined with bricks – a veritable mass grave prepared for the corpses of any men fool enough to confront it; so that taken together, the city’s landward defences amounted to a barrier sixty metres wide and thirty metres high. Both walls were interspersed along their lengths by nearly two hundred towers, giving yet more advantage to armed men keeping watch over the terrain beyond.
All along the length of the walls were the gates – some great and some small. Each had at least one name and some had seen so much of the life of the city that they had earned many. In any event, sultan and citizen alike knew of the Gate of Charisius, which was also the Cemetery Gate; the Reds’ Gate that was also the Third Military Gate; the Gate of Rhegion; the Gate of St Romanus; and the Golden Gate, through which emperors had processed in better times with their trophies of conquest. There was the Gate of the Silver Lake; the Gate of the Spring, the Gate of the Wooden Circus and the Gate of the Boot Makers, and many more besides. All were barred now to Mehmet and his kind, and some or all would have to be breached before he could fulfil his destiny.
When news of the arrival of the sultan’s outriders had reached the city, Emperor Constantine had immediately given the orders to have it sealed tight. All the bridges across the fosse were withdrawn or otherwise destroyed; all gates through the walls were closed, locked and barred.
All of this Mehmet had considered – in dreams as well as in the waking world. He had known too where best to look in search of the realisation of those dreams. The terrain the walls stretched across was not flat, and its undulations meant that some stretches of the defences dropped into low ground and shallow valleys before rising again. On the ridges above such depressions an attacker might find positions that actually looked down on to the top of the wall – even into the interior beyond – so that impregnable though it had always been, still the Wall of Theodosius offered maddening glimpses of hope for anyone seeking to penetrate it, especially someone armed with the sort of weapons Mehmet now posessed.
It was in a lofty position in front of the Gate of St Romanus – one of those entrances made weak by high ground overlooking it – that Mehmet had positioned not only his own tents and those of his bodyguard, but also the greatest of Orban’s bombards, chief of all the city-takers. Either side of it were more guns, made small only by the sheer size of the giant. In time they would come to know the grouping as the bear and her cubs, and the family’s claws were cruel. It was in the hulking shadow of the mother bear that Mehmet was to be found standing when the artillery bombardment began.
The massive barrel had been set in position in the trench dug in front of the wall, on a wooden platform that could be raised and lowered – and thus its angle of attack adjusted – by the judicious use of chocks and wedges. The gunners had poured their black powder into the gaping maw of the thing, followed by a circular wooden block as big around as a tabletop and cut and shaped to fit the barrel precisely. This they had hammered home with iron rods before manhandling the ball itself, a carefully crafted sphere of stone that two large men would have struggled to link arms around. Once the projectile had rolled down into the darkness, into position against the block, the barrel had been braced all around w
ith great timbers buried deep into the earth to help absorb the force of the coming explosion.
All had then retired to a safe distance – all save the man tasked with applying a smouldering taper to the touch hole bored close to the behemoth’s base.
A mile away, in the centre of a square of shining flagstones, John Grant’s lammergeiers had risen into the sky, grasping their trophy between them. That same instant, back at the gun, a tongue of flame had darted into the darkness and ignited the pounds of powder packed inside the barrel. The sound that followed was that of the birth of a new age, and Mehmet, son of Murad, was its father.
A column of flame burst from the end of the gun, followed by a huge and billowing cloud of dark smoke. Out of the midst of that miasma shot the ball itself, and Mehmet watched mesmerised as it drew its monstrous arc across the sky and crashed like the fist of God into part of the wall beside the Gate of St Romanus.
The effect was as of an earthquake, and the ball shattered into a thousand jagged fragments that rained down on to the landscape or splashed into the waters of the Lycus river, which flowed beneath the wall and into the city, the only welcome guest.
But it had been neither a solitary detonation, nor a single flight. All along the line, every single one of the guns had been fired in concert with their giant overlord, and it was this combination of forces that caused the very earth herself to shake and buck until it seemed the entire wall must fall as one under the onslaught. As it was, whole sections of ancient masonry shivered and collapsed. Towers too toppled over like felled trees or dropped into their own foundations like hanged men.
‘Alhamdulillah,’ Mehmet mouthed silently, his breath all but stolen by the force he had just unleashed upon his enemies and the world. All praise and thanks to God.
If Mehmet had lost his voice, then the majority of his followers had not, and while he wondered at the sight of masonry falling and clouds of dust rising, his prayer of thanks was somehow taken up by the host, rising and falling among them like a murmuration of starlings taking to the air.
‘Do you see, majesty?’ shouted Orban, jumping up and down with joy at the destruction wrought by his creations. ‘Do you see that I am as good as my word?’
Mehmet stepped forward and, casting aside all thoughts of propriety, threw his arms around his smith’s neck and kissed him on both sides of his bearded face.
It was Orban’s turn then to be stunned, and he gazed into the young sultan’s face, his own eyes shining with the reflected glow of his master’s pleasure.
‘It is the will of God!’ said Mehmet, finding his breath and his voice at last. ‘His will!’
And back behind the wall, beneath the Blachernae Palace too, the earth shook, and one world was understood to have ended while another had begun. A broken boy, who had seen neither the two-headed bird nor the stabbing tongues of flame from a hundred city-takers, sensed a change in the order of things nonetheless.
The sultan’s guns had sent a wave before them that shocked every heart for a dozen miles around. Underneath the trembling, in spite of it, Prince Constantine felt something else – a different vibration entirely, and older, that troubled him more deeply and preoccupied him much longer than any work of men.
42
John Grant had grown tired of being the centre of attention.
Since his moment in the square, he had felt eyes upon him at all times. For a day or so the novelty had appealed, and he had walked tall, aware of every movement he made and every expression on his face.
It was Lẽna who was first to say he would live to regret having made himself such a spectacle (though privately she had been as moved by the scene as any other who witnessed it), and she was right.
There had been little time for celebrity in the first moments after the birds rose up and away from the soldiers, still vying with one another for ownership of the trophy.
Once the giant stone missiles began raining down, the emperor had called for horses and departed for the palace and the wall, accompanied by Giustiniani and his closest aides. The rest of the newly arrived force had struggled across the city any way they could. Wagons and carts had been gathered from all around – gratefully accepted from those who offered or taken forcibly from those less willing. The weapons and the rest of the equipment they had brought with them were ferried to where they were needed, at the land walls, with all possible haste.
Once begun, the bombardment continued relentlessly, like a man-made volcanic eruption. The ground shook, a foul reek of burned gunpowder filled the air and hot rocks fell from the sky like judgement.
Underneath it all was another sound – that of hundreds, thousands of voices crying out together in fear and sadness.
There had been portents of disaster after all. The days and weeks ahead of the Turks’ arrival had been laden with evil signs. Before the guns began their hellish shuddering chorus, the earth herself had flexed her aching back and sent tremors that rippled beneath the city, toppling statues, breaking windows and sending cracks and fissures through walls.
Even spring had found reasons to disappoint the citizens of Constantinople; while they might have expected clear skies and warmer air by now, banks of fog draped themselves thickly across the Bosphorus, and snow had fallen.
For all that John Grant had been filled with a new and unfamiliar clarity – a powerful sense of having arrived in the right place, and at precisely the right time – he was aware too of an all-pervading feeling of dread wrapped around the city. A population in need of a clear view of heaven had felt a shadow fall instead. Desperate for a breath of clean, fresh air, they were trapped inside a cooking pot, and now the lid was being lowered upon it. He stole glances at Lẽna, and her expression, as she took in their surroundings, told him she laboured under the sensation too.
More than anything else, he was troubled by the guns. He had in fact been in the presence of such contraptions more than once, and found little to fear. With Badr at his side he had heard and felt the blast of them right enough, and witnessed at first hand the erratic impact of cannonballs. The Moor had hardly rated the technology, and dismissed those guns he had seen as little more than noise-makers.
‘They are more trouble than they are worth,’ he had said. ‘So heavy they can scarcely be moved … so clumsy they cannot be aimed in any meaningful way. If you ask me, they pose more of a danger to those poor souls tasked with serving them than they do to any enemy.’
John Grant had agreed, and harboured infinitely more respect for bowmen like Angus Armstrong, or any warrior skilled with sword and knife. But these new bombards of Mehmet and his Ottomans were altogether different. Never before had he even heard talk of anything like the weapons now trained upon Constantinople. He had been taught that castles and cities surrounded by stone were impervious to assault, and knew as well as any soldier that a few good men shielded by high stone walls had little to fear from hundreds, even thousands of enemies thrown against such defences.
But now he knew different. Now he had seen stone balls pass through buildings like darts through paper. Worse, he had with his own eyes witnessed the fall of whole sections of the city’s legendary wall.
He had thought he would have time in this place. He had travelled knowingly into the heart of a war, but had been confident he had little to fear. He trusted his skills and his senses. He had Badr’s daughter to find and had believed the sanctuary of the Great City would protect her well enough, at least until he could track her down and make himself known to her. Now he realised with a jolt that time might be of the essence.
It was not the push that told him so – rather it was his own two eyes.
Many of the Genoan men-at-arms had spent time in the city before, and they set the pace towards the walls, sometimes marching and sometimes jogging along a route that kept the safe anchorage of the Golden Horn always to their east and on their right-hand side.
The sound of tolling bells, from church buildings all across the city, was constant, and John Grant wond
ered why a population pressed by a besieging army was more inclined to pray than to rise up in arms.
‘Less time on their knees and more on their hind legs with swords in their hands,’ he said to Lẽna. ‘Badr said that God loved a fighter – and I believe him.’
All around was evidence of sad decline. For all that John Grant had been told about this place, what struck him most forcibly was a sense of despair. There were great buildings here and there, evidence of past glory, but even those had the cast of age and neglect upon them. Wide-open spaces were as common as anything built, and from among the vegetation sprouted ruins, stubborn shards of what had once been.
The Genoan commanders said Giustiniani would meet them again at the Blachernae Palace, home of the emperor and the headquarters of the defensive efforts. By the time they arrived in its shadow, Constantinople was plainly a city at war. Time would tell when and if the citizens would choose to attend to the present need and take action, or remain absorbed in their appeals to the almighty.
The palace had already suffered the attentions of the guns, but the sight of the building, freshly wounded or not, was enough to stun John Grant into silence. Never before, in all his travels, had he felt so dwarfed and humbled by the works of men as he did now. The stonework of Blachernae was so finely wrought it looked more like something grown out of the earth itself than fashioned by mortals.
He was pulled back from his wondering by the sound of a man’s voice.
‘You there – have you come to fight or to sightsee?’
He turned to see a man of advanced years, yet heavily armoured and with an unsheathed sword in his hand. He was backed by half a dozen more soldiers, similarly attired.
‘To fight,’ said John Grant.
‘The woman,’ said the soldier, gesturing towards Lẽna with the point of his sword. ‘For the love of God – what is she doing here?’
