Mankind

by Pamela D. Toler

  Rumeli Castle, Istanbul, Turkey

  CANNON FIRE BLASTS

  THE WALLS OF CONSTANTINOPLE

  When the first emperor, Constantine, built his capital city, he put total faith in the city’s massive walls. By erecting a triple defense of towers and ditches two hundred feet wide and a hundred feet high, Constantine believed he was providing his descendants on the Byzantine throne a perpetual defense.

  Although many had tried before the Ottomans, no attacking army had yet found a way to crack Constantinople’s ten-story-high fortifications—until Sultan Mehmet II.

  Amassed outside Constantinople, Mehmet had tens of thousands of troops and an array of cannons standing at the ready. He was prepared to use both in a first-of-its-kind coordinated attack that would forever change the art of war. The Turks at Constantinople used cannons—developed in China and perfected in Europe using the metal casting techniques previously used to make church bells—to lethal effect.

  For any people or state in proximity to what was left of the Byzantine Empire in the fifteenth century, the fall of its capital city to Ottoman cannon fire was equivalent to the fall of the World Trade Center Towers after the terrorist attack on September 11, 2001. What was once considered impenetrable became shockingly vulnerable.

  The fall of Constantinople changed the art of war and the design of cities. Before 1453, people flocked to cities to escape an invading force, counting on the walls to protect them. With adequate food, water, and ammunition, the besieged always had the advantage. Mehmet proved that city walls could no longer hold off armies: with cannons in the equation, the advantage moved from the besieged to the besiegers.

  The Turkish Bombard, also known as the Dardanelles Gun, was used by the Ottoman army of Mehmet the Conqueror in 1453 to lay siege to Constantinople. Cast from bronze, it fired stone cannonballs 25” in diameter.

  THE FORTY-EIGHT-YEAR-OLD emperor of Byzantium, Constantine XI, waited inside Constantinople’s walls as the Ottoman troops encircled the city. He had spent his entire adult life trying to hold off the Ottoman advance. He had no difficulty estimating his forces. He simply counted them—one by one. The total was just under eight thousand. Despite the disparity in numbers, the defenders were hopeful. After all, the city’s walls had held off invaders for centuries.

  But they had never experienced mass cannon fire before.

  On March 5, 1453, Mehmet sent an ultimatum demanding the immediate surrender of the city. Relying on the legendary strength of the city’s defenses, the Byzantines refused. Here is how a confident Mehmet described the task ahead to his assembled troops:

  I do not offer you an impregnable wall, but a wide plain fit for cavalry for you to cross with your weapons. And what should I say about our opponents? There are very few of them, and most of these are unarmed and inexperienced in war. For, as I have learned from deserters, they say that there are but two or three men defending a tower, and as many more in the space between towers. Thus it happens that a single man has to fight and defend three or four battlements, and he, too, either altogether unarmed or badly armed.

  The Ottomans fired on the city for the first time on April 6. Even with constant attention, the big cannon could only be fired seven times a day. Every day the Ottomans brought down a section of the walls. The city’s defenders worked night and day to repair the damage. Serbian sappers from the silver mines of Novo Brdo tunneled under the city’s walls. The Byzantines countered by flooding the tunnels and burning the mine supports. Because the chain across the Golden Horn kept the Ottoman fleet from entering, the sultan ordered the ships hauled overland on rollers for eight miles behind the hills and then down into the Horn.

  The Ottomans’ attack was groundbreaking not so much for their use of cannons, but for their ability to maintain a sustained artillery bombardment, day after day for fifty-three days, thanks to Mehmet’s skill in managing a supply chain. His grasp of the logistics of artillery warfare was as revolutionary as his use of cannon. It was no longer enough to feed your troops. Artillery warfare required adequate supplies of hand-carved stone cannonballs and gunpowder and a corps of founders to repair or recast cannon on site. In a siege that lasted almost two months, Mehmet’s guns fired five thousand shots and used fifty-five thousand pounds of gunpowder.

  One eyewitness to the bombardment of Constantinople, in describing the cannon fire, wrote, “Sometimes it destroyed a complete portion of wall, sometimes half a portion, sometimes a greater or smaller part of a tower, or a turret, or a parapet, and nowhere was the wall strong enough or sturdy or thick enough to withstand it, or to hold out totally against such a force of the velocity of the stone ball.”

  For seven weeks, the Ottomans bombarded the city but failed to break through the defensive walls. Diaries of the siege read like the accounts of shelling in the First World War: monotony alternating with terror. Besieged and besiegers were equally weary. Rumors flew that a Venetian fleet would soon arrive to relieve the barraged city.

  On May 25, Mehmet offered to raise the siege if Constantine would pay him an annual tribute of one hundred thousand gold bezants or leave the city with a guarantee of safe conduct. Constantine made a counteroffer: he would turn over everything he owned except Constantinople itself. The Ottoman vizier, Çandarli Halil Pasha, who was rumored to take bribes from the Byzantines, argued for the immediate end of the siege. The younger beys argued in favor of continuing. Mehmet sent officials through the camp to test the opinion of the men. The troops were eager. The Ottoman camp spent two days preparing to attack and a third day in prayer.

  The Ottoman Turks capture Constantinople in 1453. Engraving by Matthäus Merian the Elder (1593-1650)

  On the morning of May 29, three hours before dawn, the Ottomans began an all-out attack on the city. Sixty-eight cannons. Five thousand cannonballs. Fifty-five thousand pounds of gunpowder—enough to put a rocket into space. The great cannon blasted a hole through the outer wall that had protected Constantinople for more than a thousand years. The Anatolian infantry poured into the city through the gap. They were slaughtered in the narrow space between the inner and outer walls by the city’s defenders, led by the emperor himself. The resistance was fierce but short-lived. The Byzantines, in turn, were trapped between the city walls when they were hit by a shower of arrows from Ottoman janissaries who had climbed the outer stockade. The Turks were already climbing the inner wall when they saw their flag flying from one of the inner towers; a small group of Turkish soldiers had found a small side gate that had been left open and entered the city without challenge. Constantine XI attempted to rally his forces at the breach and died in the final defense. Within hours, the Ottomans had control of Constantinople. Mehmet had employed gunpowder-fired weapons on an unprecedented scale to take his prize.

  The last relic of the ancient world was dead.

  Western Europeans reacted with a mixture of shock and fear. The news reached Venice first, on June 29, 1453. Constantinople had been home to more than ten thousand Venetian merchants and their families. All the Venetians in Constantinople had been either enslaved or killed. According to an eyewitness, Venetians greeted the news with “great and desperate wailings, cries, and groans, everyone beating the palms of their hands, beating their breasts with their fists, tearing their hair and their faces.”

  From Venice, the news rippled across Europe within a year and became the subject of widespread lamentation. It was felt to be the end of something. It tilted the world onto an unpredictable axis.

  Long-established assumptions and beliefs fell with Constantinople. It was the last remnant of the classical world. It was the buffer against the Islamic world. It was the last Christian foothold in the eastern Mediterranean. It was the best launchpad for the long-cherished hope of recapturing Jerusalem. All these things died in 1453. Christendom was no longer united enough to push back the Turks. The classical world was emphatically dead. The age of the crusades was over. The world of medieval chivalry was being replaced by the era of gunpowder. The Ott
omans were permanently established in Europe. They were moving closer.

  With this realization came the fear that the Turks might conquer the world. Suddenly Europeans could feel the hot breath of Islam on their collars. “The enemy is at our gates!” wrote an Italian. “The axe is at the root. Unless divine help comes, the doom of the Christian name is sealed.” Mehmet was identified with the Antichrist: implacable and unstoppable. “Mehmet will never lay down arms except in victory or total defeat,” wrote Pope Pius II in 1459. “Every victory will be for him a steppingstone to another, until, after subjecting all the princes of the West, he has destroyed the Gospel of Christ and imposed the law of his false prophet upon the whole world.” All his worst fears seemed confirmed when Mehmet landed an invasion force on the coast of Italy in 1481. A titanic two-hundred-year military and ideological contest—the prototype for later contests for supremacy between contrasting world views—had begun.

  VENETIANS SUFFERED MORE directly from the fall of Constantinople than anyone else in Europe. They had enjoyed special trading privileges in the Byzantine city since 1082, privileges that helped them dominate trade in the eastern Mediterranean and become one of the wealthiest cities in Europe.

  The Venetians sat tight and waited for diplomacy to restore their relationship with Mehmet. Within a year they were trading again in Constantinople, but from then on trading was always more insecure. Merchants in the city and throughout Ottoman lands could be imprisoned or killed at a whim; trading privileges could be withdrawn; taxes could be higher and more arbitrary. The price of commodities traded through the Ottoman world continued to rise. The Venetians were as often at war with the Ottomans as they were at peace.

  With their eyes fixed on the Ottoman threat, the Venetians scarcely noticed a threat that would turn the eastern Mediterranean into a cul-de-sac rather than a trade route: the Portuguese search for a direct sea route to the spice markets of the East.

  For thousands of years, no seaman had dared sail a ship into the open ocean for fear of never getting home. Using compass and portolan charts, Bartolomeu Dias defied history and sailed south along the African coast for six weeks, heading toward the point where mapmakers’ information ended and mariners’ imaginations began.

  In August 1487, Dias embarked with two caravels and a third ship carrying extra food and supplies bound for the mouth of the Congo River. The small fleet was sailing off the southwest coast of Africa when the ships began to have trouble making headway against stiff winds and strong currents. The small fleet had almost reached the point marked on their maps as “unknown” when the tropical storm hit.

  Conflicting currents and violent weather made it dangerous to sail close to the coast. Dias had to make a quick decision. If the ships hugged the coast, they could be dashed on the rocks. If they headed out to sea, they could be lost forever. He made the riskier choice and turned toward the uncharted waters of the open sea. By sailing into the middle of the ocean, Dias moved away from the southerly winds and currents that flowed down Africa’s eastern coast and around the cape coast and toward the wind belt called the “westerlies.” The crew struggled to keep their balance as the ships rolled beneath their feet. The sky turned black. Mountains of water tossed the ships as if they were toys.

  Instead of fighting the storm, Dias had let it carry him south into the middle of the ocean, accidentally discovering the most efficient way for a sailing vessel to round the southern tip of Africa.

  Dias’s ships were blown east as the storm raged for thirteen days. When it was over, two caravels were still afloat, but the store ship was gone. His crew wouldn’t need stores if they’d just cut the trip short and sailed home—if they could find home. Dias studied the noonday sun and his navigational charts and ordered the men to sail east. They sailed east for days without seeing land. Dias decided to go north. Finally on February 3, 1488, the crew saw land on the horizon. Then they realized that the coastline was in the wrong place. They had gone past the southern tip of Africa without realizing it and were now sailing in the Indian Ocean.

  OCEAN GYRE

  The combination of wind and current that pushed Dias around the southern tip of Africa owes much of its force to a phenomenon called an ocean gyre, a circular ocean current formed by the wind patterns and the rotation of the earth. The earth’s rotation, in a pattern called the Coriolis effect, forces ocean currents into a clockwise motion in the northern hemisphere and a counterclockwise motion in the southern hemisphere. Because the continents that border the oceans restrict the flow of the water, the currents close in on themselves, creating a circular flow of water around a calm center.

  There are five major ocean gyres, two in the Atlantic, two in the Pacific, and one in the Indian Ocean. These gyres are responsible for much of the ocean’s surface currents.

  An ocean gyre is a large circular rotating current. This is a map of the five major ocean gyres.

  Once Dias realized he had sailed around the tip of Africa, he dropped anchor and went ashore to put up the first padrão—a large, stone cross bearing Portugal’s coat of arms—on the eastern coast of the continent, 250 miles east of the tip of Africa. He was ready to sail up the coast and across the Indian Ocean, but his men threatened mutiny and demanded to go back. The officers supported them. Dias reluctantly agreed, but only on the condition that the sailors sign a document stating that Dias was not responsible for turning back. As they sailed away, Dias looked sadly back at his padrão; he wrote in his log that he felt as if he were taking “his last leave of a son condemned to exile forever.”

  On the return voyage, Dias saw the point where Africa ended, which they had passed blindly in the storm. He named the promontory the Cape of Storms. empire that would bring an end to Arab control of the Indian Ocean.

  THE COMPASS

  At its most basic, the compass is a floating magnet.

  All magnets have two poles, one north and one south. If you put two magnets together, they will either attract each other or repel each other, depending on how you line up the north and south poles.

  The earth is the largest magnet of all. The center of the earth is a ball of iron, created when the earth was formed. As the earth spins on its axis, molten iron swirls around the core, creating an electric current and a magnetic field strong enough to affect all the other magnets on earth, including the magnetized needle in a compass.

  When a compass needle points north, it points to “magnetic north,” not “true north.” This is because the magnet at earth’s core is not perfectly lined up with the North and South Poles. The difference between true north and magnetic north is measured in degrees and varies depending where you are.

  Dias and his caravels arrived back in Lisbon in December 1488. They had been gone for more than sixteen months and added fourteen hundred new miles to the map of Africa. King John the Perfect was pleased with the new charts of the African coast, but he didn’t like the name Dias had given to the cape at the end of Africa. He used a king’s prerogative to rename it the Cape of Good Hope.

  It was nine years before a new Portuguese king was ready to try again, spurred on by competition with Spain. In 1497, King Manuel appointed Vasco da Gama the leader of a new expedition to follow Dias’s route around the Cape of Good Hope, and then go across the Indian Ocean to Calicut. One hundred seventy men signed up for a three-year journey; four ships were outfitted with twenty brass guns each, as well as crossbows, javelins, pikes, and spears in case there was any trouble with the Muslims who controlled the trade at Calicut.

  Da Gama was a clever navigator. He decided to avoid the coastal storms that almost wrecked Dias’s ships. Instead of hugging the coast, he sailed west from the Cape Verde Islands and then south into the open sea, taking advantage of the circular trade winds that blew there. He returned to land just north of the Cape of Good Hope on November 4.

  Arab and Hindu traders and mariners were well familiar with Africa’s eastern coast, but it was new to da Gama and his men. As they worked their way up the coast
, da Gama soon decided his main task was to find an experienced pilot to guide them across the Indian Ocean to Calicut. At the port of Milinda, in what is now Kenya, da Gama hired a famous Arab navigator, Ahmad ibn Mtjid, known as the Lion of the Sea in Fury.

  In one of the great ironies of history, the great Arab navigator ibn Majid brought da Gama’s ships safely across the Indian Ocean to Calicut, laying the foundation for the Portuguese trading

  Meanwhile, the Atlantic Ocean continued to fire the imaginations of other ambitious Europeans seeking a new route to the same Eastern riches. By setting sail for the western horizon, Europe’s best seamen were in for a monumental surprise. Not a route to India, but a vast new world lay in their sights. Would a crew of European adventurers have more success against the mighty Aztec warriors than the Vikings had against the Innu defenders of Newfoundland? At this juncture the odds seemed to be against them.

  CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS WASN’T the first would-be explorer to propose sailing west to Asia. As early as 1474, Florentine mathematician and geographer Paolo dal Pozzo Toscanelli wrote to King Alfonso of Portugal, suggesting it would be easier to reach the gold of the Indies by sailing west across the Atlantic. He included a nautical map of the sea and the lands around it to help make his point.

  Ten years after Toscanelli, Columbus tried to convince King John of Portugal to fund his scheme, claiming that China, and its fabulous wealth, lay only 1,100 leagues (roughly 3,300 miles) away. King John submitted the idea to a committee of mapmakers, astronomers, and geographers, who said (correctly) that Asia must be farther away than Columbus thought. No expedition could be fitted with enough supplies to survive the voyage across an empty sea.