Constantine could read a map as well as Mehmed, and was under no illusions about the coming storm. Like his predecessors, he sent envoys to the Christian monarchs of the west, hoping to prod their consciences into some kind of collective military action against the Muslim Turks, anything to distract Ottoman attention from Constantinople. He appealed to Rome, but support from the pope was contingent on the completion of the act of union.
Then the unionist Patriarch Gregory, tired of constant accusations of heresy, absconded to Rome where he was given papal protection. Constantine was in an awkward bind: to his own people playing down the prospect of any union, while at the same time reaffirming his commitment in his letters to the pope, all the while hoping that the sultan in Edirne wouldn’t force the issue.
WHEN MEHMED SUCCEEDED his father in 1451, Constantine tried to start the relationship on a positive note, sending envoys to Edirne to congratulate the new sultan. Mehmed received them warmly and he swore by Allah, the Prophet, the angels and the archangels that the Ottoman Turks would live at peace with the city and the emperor. Constantine may have taken too much comfort in this vow, because he spoilt this friendly start with a terrible blunder.
Constantinople had given asylum to Prince Orhan, a pretender to the Ottoman throne. Mehmed’s father had agreed to pay Constantinople an annual sum to provide for Orhan’s upkeep and to keep him safely detained within the city. Constantine was hoping to wrangle more gold from the Turks, but he overplayed his hand. He sent ambassadors to Halil with a mischievous demand: double the allowance or Orhan will be released.
This was a game the Romans had played well for centuries: turning the power of an enemy upon itself through deception and blackmail. But the Byzantine mouse had provoked the Ottoman lion once too often. Their only ally in Mehmed’s court, Halil Pasha, was put badly offside. Halil had counselled patience and tolerance of the Romans, but this new demand undermined his advice. Halil’s reply to the ambassadors revealed the depth of his anger:
You stupid Greeks, I am sick of your devious ways. The last Sultan was a lenient and conscious friend to you. The present Sultan is not of the same mind . . . You are fools to think you can frighten us with your fantasies, and that when the ink on our recent treaty is barely dry. We are not children without strength or reason. If you think you can start something, do so. If you want to proclaim Orhan as Sultan in Thrace, go ahead. If you want to bring the Hungarians across the Danube, let them come. If you want to recover the places which you lost long since, try this. But know this: you will make no headway in any of these things. All that you will achieve is to lose what little you still have.
Halil had no choice but to inform Mehmed of the Roman ‘demand’. The sultan made no display of anger, indicating he would consider the matter at a later time. But Constantine’s bluff was called: he won no extra gold, the city’s last remaining friend in the court was alienated, and his enemies’ hand was strengthened. The letter also gave Mehmed a handy excuse to break his earlier promises of peace and goodwill. The breach was not long in coming.
SEAGULLS ARE CIRCLING ABOVE. The late-afternoon shadows are lengthening and our long walk along the walls is just about done. We dodge some traffic to pass through a gate and find ourselves in a Muslim cemetery. It’s an eerie sight, the headstones dusted with a ghostly patina of concrete powder from a nearby building site.
We get lost in some back streets for a few blocks and then we come upon the ruins of the Palace of the Porphyrogenitus, the last building to be constructed in the Blachernae complex. All that remains are some angled slabs of thick, high walls, topped with marbled Byzantine arch windows. Twisted saplings sprout from gaps in the brickwork. The entry portal is stopped up with sheets of corrugated metal.
A steep road leads us down past a school, and the cramped streets open up to the expanse of the Golden Horn. It has taken the better part of a day for us to follow the Theodosian Walls from the Sea of Marmara to here. What would it mean to face an army so large it could form a long, thick line of attack along the entire length of these defences?
The Throat Cutter
IN THE EARLY SPRING of 1452, teams of Ottoman workers and engineers began laying the groundwork for a new fortress on the European side of the Bosphorus, just thirteen kilometres upstream from Constantinople. The sultan had selected the site himself and proposed the design. The Ottomans already possessed a castle known as Anadolu Hisar (‘Anatolian Fortress’) on the Asian side of the Bosphorus; two strongholds on opposite shores would give Mehmed the power to pinch both sides of the narrow strait and control its shipping lanes. The new fortress could also act as a forward base from which to attack Constantinople.
News of Ottoman activity on the Bosphorus was received in Constantinople with alarm and dismay. The emperor sent an envoy to Mehmed with a polite letter, pointing out that the construction of the new fortress was taking place on Roman territory in violation of their treaty.
Mehmed’s reply to the envoys was a blunt statement of political realities:
What Constantinople contains is its own. Beyond the moat it has no dominion, owns nothing. If I want to build a fortress at the sacred mouth, it can’t forbid me. Go away and tell your Emperor this: ‘The Sultan who rules is not like his predecessors. What they couldn’t achieve, he can do easily and at once. The things they did not wish to do, he certainly does.’
Mehmed dismissed the envoy with a threat: ‘The next man to come here on a mission like this will be flayed alive.’
Mehmed could hardly have made his intentions clearer. Constantine sent another desperate appeal to Venice for help. The Venetians received the letter with some discomfort, wary of damaging their commercial interests with the Ottoman Turks. But the members of the governing council of the Serene Republic couldn’t quite bring themselves to openly abandon their Christian brothers and sisters. Their response was sympathetic but noncommittal.
Meanwhile, construction of the new stronghold proceeded rapidly. Mehmed rode out each morning to supervise the work. His three viziers were each given responsibility for the construction of one of the three main towers; in doing so, they competed for his favour. Roman observers standing on the roof of the Hagia Sophia could only look on in helpless wonder at the fortress walls rising in the distance.
Roman farmers in the surrounding countryside were powerless to stop Mehmed’s soldiers raiding their fields for grain. The farmers sent urgent requests to the palace for military support against these outrageous acts of theft. Constantine sadly had to refuse; he knew Mehmed was trying to goad him into sending his feeble forces outside the city walls, where Mehmed’s soldiers could crush them. Instead the emperor offered to send food to Mehmed’s workers if they agreed to leave his fields alone. Mehmed ignored this offer, and encouraged his workers to let their animals graze in the fields. Inevitably, a skirmish broke out between the sorely provoked farmers and the Turkish workers. Mehmed then gave his soldiers orders to slaughter the locals.
Rumeli Hisar, the Throat Cutter.
Creative Commons/Dennis Jarvis
In response, Constantine ordered the gates of the city be closed, and the few remaining Turks within the city were detained. The Turkish prisoners begged to be allowed to return to the Ottoman lines; otherwise, they said, Mehmed would execute them as traitors. Constantine relented and let the men go. Mehmed would not trade for their lives so there was little point in keeping them.
Constantine was now compelled to acknowledge the hard truth of the situation. He drafted a message of defiance for Mehmed:
Since you have preferred war to peace and I can call you back to peace neither with oaths or pleas, then follow your own will. I take refuge in God. If He has decreed and decided to hand over this city to you, who can contradict Him or prevent it? If He instils the idea of peace in your mind, I would gladly agree.
For the moment, now that you have broken the treaties to which I am bound by oath, let these be dissolved. Henceforth I will keep the city gates closed. I will fight fo
r the inhabitants with all my strength.
Mehmed received the message and had the envoys executed, just as he had promised. His reply to Constantine was blunt: ‘Either surrender the city, or stand and do battle.’
THE NEW FORTRESS was completed after an astonishingly short four months on 31 August 1452. Its position on the narrowest point of the strait earned it the nickname of Bogaz Kezen, the Throat Cutter. It’s still there today, an oddly medieval castle on the Bosphorus shore with round stone towers and parapet walls that run steeply down to a point on the water’s edge.
Mehmed was intrigued by the possibilities of a relatively new weapon of war, the cannon. He ordered three heavy bronze cannons to be placed close to the shore of the Throat Cutter. Each of these wide-barrelled guns was able to thrust a heavy stone ball across the strait, low enough to shatter the hull of any passing ship. More cannons were mounted on the Asian shore, so that ships could be strafed from both sides. Mehmed gave the fortress commander an order that all ships travelling up and down the strait were to be stopped and a toll was to be extracted.
IN LATE NOVEMBER, a Venetian trading galley sailed out of the Black Sea with a cargo of food destined for Constantinople. The galley slipped into the fast-moving Bosphorus Strait and soon came within range of the Throat Cutter. The captain, Antonio Rizzo, impulsively decided to race his ship past the fortress, in the hope that he could pass before the Ottoman guards could rouse themselves to open fire. But the Turks were alert and ready for such a test. The sound of cannon fire boomed out from the shore and a massive stone ball whistled across the surface of the water and smashed into the hull of Rizzo’s galley, splintering its timbers. As the shattered ship broke apart in the water, Rizzo and thirty of his crew escaped into a small boat and rowed to shore. The Venetians were picked up by Ottoman soldiers, imprisoned and then hideously executed. Rizzo was impaled on a spike, his body left to rot in the street, unburied.
After that, there were no more ships prepared to test the Throat Cutter. Mehmed declared Constantinople was now under blockade.
Pope Nicholas was horrified by the news of the sultan’s new fortress. The kingdoms of France, Germany and Spain were slowly becoming roused to the fact that Constantinople now faced an existential threat, but their rulers were too weakened or distracted by their own internal struggles, or were so far away they couldn’t bring themselves to care.
CHAPTER TEN
A Thing Not of This World
The empire in 1453, at the final siege of Constantinople.
The Book of Animals
MORNING IN SULTANAHMET: shopkeepers are sweeping the footpaths, dragging out postcard stands. Two rug-sellers are sitting on milk crates in the lane between their shops, smoking and sipping at small glasses of apple tea. Joe and I are walking up a narrow street towards the Arasta Bazaar. Joe points to a toy house, like a kennel, next to the stoop of an apartment block. The resident of this little hand-painted house is a smug-looking black-and-white cat, poking its head out to enjoy the winter sunshine.
Cats are everywhere in Istanbul. Their presence seems to take the edge off life in the big city. Each night, from the window of our room, Joe and I have been observing the shopfront of the carpet seller across the street. In his display window is a cardboard box containing a fluffy white cat with her litter of four kittens that hop about and skitter up the fabric of the rug behind them.
Joe keeps a tally of the cats we pass on our walk. He sees them perched on a stone windowsill, sitting on an ancient stairway, yawning at a tram stop, chasing a leaf in front of Topkapi Palace. In Istanbul, a cat will happily leap onto your table and then curl asleep on your lap before your food arrives.
Richard Fidler
Cats are admired in Islamic tradition because they practise ritual cleanliness. The Prophet himself is said to have outlawed the persecution and the killing of cats. One story has it that Muhammad chose to cut off a sleeve of his gown to go to prayer, rather than wake the cat that was sleeping on it.
In the Middle Ages, an Egyptian scholar named Al-Damiri compiled a wonderful encyclopaedia called the Book of Animals, which painstakingly listed all the creatures mentioned in the Qur’an in alphabetical order. Alongside each animal he placed Arab and Persian folktales that related to it. The origin of the cat, he wrote, could be traced back to Noah’s Ark. The animals on board the ark were complaining about the mice. So God caused the lion to sneeze, and out popped the first cat.
Cats dogged Joe and me throughout our lunch that day. Our platters of food arrived, and with them came two cats, nagging us for scraps. Three more appeared and all five of them formed a circle of intimidation around Joe, who was greatly amused by the ring of fluffy brazenness around him. One of the cats, a smoky grey kitten with searching black eyes, defected to my side of the table and squeaked out a plaintive noise. I laughed in such a way that could only mean, No kofte for you, kitty-kat. I turned back to my meal and the little beast leapt up and clouted me on the hand.
Islam is more ambivalent about dogs; they’re regarded as unclean and the term ‘dog’ is commonly used as an insult. But there are stories in the Qur’an of protective and loyal canines, and again, the Prophet is reported to have said that when a man or woman gives water to a thirsty dog, God will reward that person and he or she will enter paradise.
Rum Papa
THE LATIN CHURCH of Rome was, in those final months, a widely detested institution in Constantinople. Rum Papa – ‘the Roman Pope’ – was a name commonly given to dogs in the city. In the eyes of Orthodox hardliners, the Latin church was an abomination, a perversion of Christianity. Its followers were worse than Muslims.
And yet, as the outlook continued to darken at the end of 1452, Emperor Constantine XI still clung to the hope that the pope might somehow persuade the princes of the west to gather up their armies and come to the rescue of their hard-pressed fellow Christians in Constantinople. The emperor fired off a series of letters to Rome, alerting Pope Nicholas to the imminent destruction of his city. But the papacy no longer had the power to compel or inspire the kings of Europe into another crusade. Nicholas tried to conceal his weakness and use the crisis to extract a narrow political advantage: he told Constantine he really couldn’t do anything to help until the Orthodox church formally agreed to accept his spiritual leadership.
The eastern and western churches had been drifting further apart for centuries. They were like an unhappy couple who had lost sight of whatever it was that had brought them together in the first place. The façade of unity had collapsed back in 1054, when a delegation of papal legates dressed in full ceremonial finery had marched into the Hagia Sophia during High Mass, and slapped a formal bull of excommunication on the altar, in front of the open-mouthed worshippers. The excommunication led to anti-Catholic riots in the city. The patriarch retaliated by burning the document in a public bonfire and by excommunicating the papal officials from his church. Despite its dubious legality, this incident had created an enduring rift, a terrible schism between the two churches. As time passed, Rome insisted the schism could only be repaired if the Orthodox church submitted to the authority of the pope.
THE PROSPECT OF submission to the western church was galling and distressing, but for Constantine XI it was a necessary hypocrisy. He sent ambassadors to patch up their remaining differences. Some progress had been made, and there was a degree of goodwill among some of the emperor’s bishops, but there was still much bad blood among the flock and within the monasteries. The sack of Constantinople by the Latin Crusaders had implanted a lingering bitterness within the Orthodox faithful. And they were still divided on so many things: on the nature of the Holy Trinity, on whether priests could marry, and on whether the bread they consumed in the Eucharist should be leavened or unleavened. Too many people in Constantinople said they would never accept the Latin church, no matter what the emperor and his bishops said.
The leading voice in Constantinople against the union was a charismatic monk named Gennadius, who was unmoved by
those who argued that the union was an unfortunate but necessary business. Submission to the pope, he insisted, would not save the city, but damn it for all time. The Latin church was a heresy and the pope was the anti-Christ; the surrender of the one true church would be so repugnant to God, it would certainly trigger the End of Days, the destruction of the city and the entire world. What did one city matter, he said, when the fate of the world and the immortal soul were at stake?
Many Orthodox Christians preferred the idea of living under a tolerant Muslim ruler to submitting to a Catholic pope. Grand Duke Lucas Notaras distilled this defiance into a popular slogan: ‘Better the Sultan’s turban than the Pope’s cap!’ But eventually, even he was forced to accept the political realities of the situation, and he agreed help his emperor find some middle ground between the chilly demands of Rome and the heated sentiment of Constantinople.
Pope Nicholas was well aware of the narrowness of the path Constantine had to travel. But his reply to the emperor’s desperate plea was pompous and bloody-minded:
If you, with your nobles and the people of Constantinople, accept the decree of union, you will find Us and Our venerable brothers, the cardinals of the Holy Roman Church, ever eager to support your honour and your empire. But if you and your people refuse to accept the decree, you will force Us to take such measures as are necessary for your salvation and Our honour.
Nicholas set the bar high: he insisted the union of the churches would have to be proclaimed in the Hagia Sophia before he could call upon a new Crusade to save the city. Constantine wearily gave his assent, and the pope authorised Cardinal Isidore of Kiev to close the deal and perform the ceremony. When Isidore arrived in the city, he presented Constantine with a gift of two hundred archers for the city’s defence, and a chest of gold to pay for the repair of the land walls. This act of goodwill momentarily boosted public support for the union.
Ghost Empire Page 34