by David Jacobs
At one-thirty on Tuesday morning, a terrifying chorus of battle cries arose from outside the walls, and the bells of Constantinople started ringing again. All the men and many of the women rushed directly to the walls to try to stop the attackers. The old people and young children and their mothers who had gone home now returned to the churches, where they again prayed for a miracle even as they heard clanging bells, gunfire, screams, and the sounds of battle.
Thousands upon thousands of Turkish fighters - mostly the European mercenaries - armed with swords, bows and arrows, and even slingshots, scaled the walls and pounded on the gates. Encouraging them on from behind were Mehmet II’s police, who were prepared to kill anyone who hesitated. Few from the front lines penetrated the defense, but they continued to try for two hours. Then the sultan sent word to withdraw. They had not entered the city, but they had done their job according to Mehmet II’s plans. His plan had not been to break the defense but to exhaust the defenders, and in this, they had been successful.
Within minutes, the siege began again. This time, an army of Anatolian Turks stormed the walls. Even though they fought almost until dawn, they were no more successful than the mercenaries. But just when it seemed the Greeks had repulsed this second wave, a Turkish cannon struck the wall at a vulnerable spot, and the wall tumbled. Only 300 men rushed through the gap, however, because the defenders quickly closed in on them and used the victims’ bodies to fill the gap in the wall.
The sultan had hoped that the Anatolians would succeed, but he had not counted on it. Giving the Christians no more than a few minutes of relief, Mehmet, who had offered a reward to the first soldier through the walls, ordered the Janissaries – his own elite troops – to move forward. After an hour, the Janissaries themselves began to weaken, but the long night’s fighting took an even greater toll on the Christians. Giustiniani was wounded and removed to the inner city. Many of his men, thinking they had lost the battle, followed and left the gate of the inner wall open. The Turks widened the gaps in the walls and pounded down the walls so more and more of them could pour through. Now the Christians had indeed lost the battle.
Having pleaded in vain against Giustiniani’s leaving his post, Emperor Constantine XI now surveyed the chaos and saw Turks everywhere. The Christian warriors, who had defended the city so nobly for so many hours, were climbing over one another to flee from the invaders. Looking around at the hills of his capital, the emperor saw the Ottoman flag flapping from a tower. He removed his royal insignia from his clothing and flung himself into the hordes of infidels and to his death.
The people still were packed into Hagia Sophia. They knew what was happening. They heard the Turks straining against the gates. They heard the metal gates crashing to the ground. They watched the infidels storm through the sacred portals. Trapped and surrounded, the horrified Christians huddled in a mass toward the center of the church. The Turks murdered all of them - the very old, the very young, and the crippled. Groups of invaders moved toward the noblemen and toward the prettiest girls, argued over possession, and tore their victims to pieces. They ripped clothing from the prisoners and used the pieces of cloth to tie the prisoners together so they could drag them back to the soldiers’ quarters, where they would divide them for sale as slaves. Priests still praying at the altar prayed on until the Turks stopped them by a blow on the skull or a sword through the throat.
Late Tuesday afternoon, Mehmet II entered the old church. Noticing one of his men hacking away part of the building, he scolded him - looting was acceptable, but looting did not mean destroying. A few remaining citizens and priests came out from hiding places and begged for mercy. The sultan spared them and sent them home protected by his personal guards. Then he gestured to his ulema - a Muslim holy man - who approached the altar. “There is no God but Allah,” proclaimed the ulema, “and Mohammed is His Prophet!” Mehmet II repeated the proclamation and knelt to say his prayers.
At that moment, the church called Hagia Sophia ceased to exist. The grandest edifice in all Christendom was now a mosque, a Muslim house of worship. The Christian city of Constantinople ceased to exist, too.
But soon, the new Muslim city - Istanbul - would restore life to the remains of Constantinople. It would rise importantly, overlooking the waters in the middle of the world. It still stands there, behind the Golden Horn, which has been the site of a great city since history’s earliest days.
The early Greeks called the north wind Boreas. He lived, according to their lore, in the hills of the land called Thrace, an extension of the Balkan Peninsula. Violent and vengeful, he periodically departed from his home to vent his anger in distant places, but he always came back to Thrace. It was an angular, rugged country, unfertile, and desert-like in some places. There were extremes of hot and cold, although even a heat wave could be interrupted - but not necessarily relieved – by fierce and unpredictable gusts of wind. The seas around the land and the rivers running through it were wildly turbulent, crashing constantly against the shores. Little grew there. Goats ran wild on weather-stripped hillsides.
The only kind of people living in Boreas’s kingdom were those who could tolerate the oppressive wind. They had been in Thrace probably since the Stone Age, and they ran with the goats. Their skin was olive-tan, and they tattooed almost every inch of it. According to the Greeks, their tribes were small and savage, resembling packs of wolves. Their religion involved gods who demanded frequent sacrifice of human flesh. Their language was similar to that of the Illyrians, another Balkan people who painted themselves; the Greeks regarded them as uncivilized, scarcely above the animals.
It was because of the geography of the peninsula that the Greeks became involved with the Thracians. Nature had carved a small inlet at the tip of Thrace that invited civilization to their shores. Even though they did not know it, the inlet at the end of their land was a strategically situated gateway to every part of the known world.
It is often difficult to separate early Greek history - concerned with exploration and the search for sites for cities - from mythology. The legends of the Mycenaean Greeks reflect this. These legends included the stories of the Trojan Wars, the voyages of the Argonauts, and the rise and fall of Thebes, Argos, and Troy. Assuming that the stories on which the Iliad and the Odyssey were based were to some extent true, Mycenaean navigators traveled as far north as the Black Sea well before the twelfth century B.C. One indication is that this difficult body of water already had a name by the time recorded history of the region began. The Mycenaeans, strong believers in the power of wishful thinking, called it the Euxine, or “Hospitable,” Sea. Perhaps they hoped by calling a treacherous sea hospitable, they would attract the attention of the gods, who would make it so.
The more certain history of the lands and seas south of the Euxine begins with the Ionian and Dorian Greeks in the seventh century B.C. Around 685 B.C., a group of settlers from the Dorian city-state of Megara arrived in the Sea of Marmara to establish a colony. From this base, Megara hoped to exploit the riches of the Euxine area: silver, copper, timber, rare species of cattle, grains not available in the Mediterranean region, and a substantial variety of fish.
It was clear to the Megarians that the best location for their settlement was the land beside the Bosporus. From the shores of the strait, the Euxine was accessible; it was possible to control shipping into and out of the sea, and the Megarians could see and deal with vessels approaching through the Marmara from the south. Less clear, however, was the question of which side of the Bosporus was better for a colony. Both the Thracian and Anatolian sides offered something of value. They chose Anatolia, where they built the city of Chalcedon.
The Megarians probably selected Anatolia because the current around it was gentler than that of the Thracian site, the land was more level for building, and there were no barbaric Thracians to trouble them. Nevertheless, the site did not prove to be a good choice, and their riches never materialized. Ships from the Ionian city-state of Miletus negotiated the Bosporus i
nto the Black Sea and established colonies, and the Megarians were unable to collect tolls or taxes. If there were a battle, the Milesians would probably win because the Megarian hold on the strait was not strong enough.
Around 658 B.C., another wave of Megarian colonizers arrived in the Bosporus. Criticizing their predecessors, they nicknamed Chalcedon The City of the Blind. They reasoned that only blind men would not have seen the advantages of the Thracian side of the strait.
Hindsight made criticism easy for the later settlers, but the tip of Thrace was definitely a better location for a city than the tip of Anatolia. It was true that the winds and currents around the Thracian peninsula were strong, but they could be used to pull vessels into the inlet or push them out. Behind the inlet, a series of hills provided ideal vantage points to survey all navigation in the Marmara and also protection from most storms. From the inlet, the actual gateway into and out of the Bosporus from the Marmara could be reached more quickly than from the port of Chalcedon. Given its location and its values for commercial shipping and for military control of the waters, it is no wonder that the inlet presently would be named The Golden Horn - golden for its worth, horn for its distinctive ram’s-horn shape.
Little is known about the arrival of the second fleet of settlers. It does not seem likely, however, that the tattooed natives of Thrace welcomed them. There are some indications that the Thracians made it so difficult for the settlers that the Megarians, Milesians, and even smaller groups of settlers from elsewhere shared the wall-building chores.
For a century, the Greeks had little opportunity to test the value of their site because they spent most of their time building walls. Even though the walls grew higher and stronger, the Thracians still managed to climb over them. They had become expert raiders and looters; at times, they even boarded the ships in the Golden Horn and carried off the cargoes. Late in the seventh century, however, some of the settlers called a truce and arranged a peace talk. The colonists met with a Thracian prince and began negotiations that probably followed an elaborate ceremony because both the Thracians and Greeks enjoyed those rites.
They reached an agreement more easily than anyone had expected. The Greeks would establish a real city behind the Golden Horn, and the Thracians would be welcome to participate in the municipal government. The city would be named for a god with whom both Greeks and Thracians were familiar. His name was Byzas, son of Poseidon, god of the sea. Thus was the city of Byzantium born and named. The Thracians returned to their homes in the hills, and the Greeks began to plan a city within the walls.
Unfortunately, not long after the ceremony, some Thracians descended on Byzantium and wrecked and looted the city, ending the short-lived truce. Once again, much of the settlers’ time was spent building walls, strengthening walls, and rebuilding walls that the enemy had damaged.
There was one benefit that resulted from this situation. Because conventional building techniques were inadequate to erect walls of sufficient size and strength to repel the determined Thracians, the Byzantine Greeks became extremely skillful wall builders. They cut their stones to fit squarely into one another, with no visible joints. Rising above the walls were seven towers extending in a row from the Thracian Gate in the south to the Golden Horn. For purposes of communication, the builders deliberately placed these seven towers according to an acoustical plan that made a sound such as a struck gong echo successively from one tower to the next.
Gradually, as it became more difficult for the Thracians to break through the walls, citizens within the city could begin to concentrate on other things. But the constant uncertainty of what might happen made it difficult for Byzantium to retain a stable population. Rivalries divided the people according to their cities of origin, and some citizens recognized no home city. As leaders formed governments, citizens tended to ignore them, causing them to soon dissolve. The Town Council, composed of what passed for the nobility (or whoever was richest at the moment), had a constant turnover of membership. The People’s Assembly, representing the populace, seldom had more than token power.
The culture of Byzantium was basically Greek, but the city produced no important figures in science, art, music, literature, or drama. There were large numbers of charlatans, swindlers, fortune tellers, and magicians, and they tended to prosper. Although the government sponsored an annual torch race, the Bosphoria, which achieved some widespread fame, it was the ceremony and not the quality of the event that distinguished it. Additionally, when Thracian tribes raided crops or stole cattle, it quickly discouraged farmers and herders who came to try to develop the surrounding countryside. Thus, even with its splendid location, Byzantium remained until 500 B.C. a well-built, well-protected city having little purpose for its strength and containing little that was worth defending.
In the meantime, a formidable foe was beginning to consider the worth of the Bosporus. Darius I, the Persian king, was master of the largest realm on earth.
Around 512 B.C., Darius I had secured much of Thrace. Soon after the turn of the century, he was at war with Athens. While plotting his strategy, King Darius became aware of what the Megarians had seen two centuries before. Whoever controlled the Bosporus also controlled the Black Sea, which was the northern perimeter of the known civilized world. Therefore, in 497 B.C., while he planned to lead an army across the Mediterranean to mainland Greece, he sent General Otanes to capture Byzantium and Chalcedon. Most of the citizens of the twin cities on the Bosporus never had seen an armada like the one that was approaching their shores. As news of the impending invasion spread, the citizens decided to flee the area.
For a while in 497 B.C., the Persian troops relaxed in the empty cities. The self-exiled citizens converged on the northern coast of Thrace, and after fighting the Thracians as usual, started building a new city that they named Mesembria.
Almost from the start, Darius I’s wars against the Athenians went badly. In 490 B.C., while preparing for the forthcoming Battle of Marathon (which would be disastrous for the Persians), Darius I sent for the army of General Otanes. Before they left the twin cities on the Bosporus, however, the Persian troops removed anything of value that they could carry, destroyed what they could not carry, and set the rest on fire. They virtually leveled Chalcedon. For the most part, Byzantium’s walls remained in place, but there was nothing left to protect.
Even though Byzantium no longer had much value, in 477 B.C., the Spartan warrior Pausanias led an armada into the Golden Horn and took possession of the city. He had ambitious plans for the city. He intended to use it as a tool to gain power over all of Greece.
A few years earlier, Pausanias had tasted power and wanted more. In 480 B.C., a cousin of his had inherited the leadership of Sparta, but because he was far away fighting the Persians, he appointed Pausanias as guardian of the throne. When his cousin returned, he placed Pausanias in command of all the allied forces of Peloponnesus and Athens - probably in excess of 100,000 men. Pausanias hurried to force a confrontation with the Persians in Boeotia, winning decisively and with a minimum of losses. As a reward for this victory, he received 10 percent of the spoils, including one-tenth of the recaptured territory. Then, early in 477 B.C., Pausanias led an allied Greek fleet and drove the Persians out of the islands east of the Greek mainland. It was during this Aegean campaign that he decided to head north and secure the city of Byzantium.
Having occupied the Thracian city, Pausanias began to put his plan into action. First he returned some Persian prisoners to their homeland with a letter asking for help to form a Spartan-Persian confederacy, which would include all of Greece, provided he could be the ruler of the Greek regions. To seal the bargain, he proposed to marry a Persian princess. Persia naturally was eager to accept this opportunity to regain much of its dwindling empire.
He now began to call himself King Pausanias. When word of Pausanias’s plans reached Sparta, his cousin made him return to Sparta. During his trial, he denied everything. Acquitted for lack of evidence, he returned to Byzantium to
continue his plans. But rumors persisted, and Greek allies of the Spartans began to clamor for Pausanias’s removal. Again Sparta recalled him, and again they did not convict him. The leaders could not prevent him from carrying on his conspiracy because Byzantium belonged to him according to the spoils agreement and because he was a member of the royal family with powerful friends and influence.
The plans of Pausanias and the Persians never materialized. They had adopted the foolish practice of executing all messengers bearing communications between them in case they had read the notes en route. It was inevitable that the messengers themselves would begin to grow suspicious. One such messenger, carrying a note from Pausanias, wondered why none of his colleagues had returned from such missions. When he opened the message and read it, he learned about the nature of the plans as well as the order for his own execution.
Pausanias was in Sparta when the messenger arrived there to turn in the note to the Spartan authorities, who immediately ordered the traitor’s arrest. Somehow Pausanias escaped and sought refuge in the Temple of Athene Chalcioecus. Although it was Greek tradition not to arrest anyone in a holy place, the Spartan leaders had the entrances blocked with stone because they had no intention of letting Pausanias go free. Pausanias’s own mother ceremoniously laid the first stone at the door, condemning her son for treason. Several weeks later, they removed the stones to prevent the traitor’s body from contaminating the sanctuary. The timing was perfect: Pausanias was still alive, though barely. Emaciated from starvation, he staggered out of the temple, fell over, and died.
The treachery of Pausanias had important consequences for the politics and geography of the time. Directly or indirectly, it stimulated the rise of the Athenian confederacy, and it was responsible for the rebirth of the city of Byzantium.
