In mid-April, Mehmed launched an assault on the broken central section of the wall. At two in the morning, with a blast of percussion and horns, a battalion of heavy infantry charged across the moat. Coming under heavy fire, the attackers attempted to set fire to the gate, but Giustiniani and his Genoese archers put out the flames. The Ottoman spearmen tried to tear down the improvised stockade with grappling hooks fixed onto their javelins, but were quickly cut down.
At dawn, the sultan called off the attack. Giustiniani and his defenders had taken down a great many Ottoman soldiers, but had not suffered a single casualty themselves. Frustrated on land, Mehmed turned his attention to delivering a full-scale naval attack on the city.
The Four Against the Hundred
ON 12 APRIL AT AROUND one in the afternoon, the Turkish fleet was sighted in the Sea of Marmara. Watchers on the sea walls saw an armada of 145 low-slung galleys rowing steadily towards the city. The sultan’s fleet paused ominously for a few hours on the Asian side of the Bosphorus, then skirted around the entrance to the Golden Horn and resumed its northward journey. The fleet came to anchor two miles upstream at a place known as the Double Columns, today the inner-city suburb of Beşiktaş. The Ottoman sailors filled the air with their war cries and the hammering of their drums and cymbals. The commotion could be heard two miles away in the city.
A few tense, watchful days passed on the water as the Italian galleons lined up at the great chain and waited for the inevitable attack. On 18 April, after his setback at the land walls, Mehmed called for the admiral of his fleet, Baltoglu, and ordered him to use his superior numbers to attack the chain, destroy the big Italian ships, and then occupy the Golden Horn. Taking the harbour would deny the Romans an important food source, and force Constantine to defend his northern sea wall, stretching his meagre forces at the land walls even thinner.
The Ottoman fleet set out from the Double Columns, rounded the corner into the Golden Horn in good order and charged at the ships in front of the chain, firing volleys of arrows and fireballs. But the Italian ships had the height advantage: the high decks created an elevated platform from which their battle-hardened seamen could fire down onto the Turkish galleys with arrows, stones and javelins. The overconfident Turks were shocked by the fury of the defence. Then one of the Italian ships swung out a wrecking ball, attached by a rope to the mast. The stone swung back and forth, smashing into Turkish ships, splintering their hulls and sending mangled sailors flying into the undertow of the Bosphorus, where they drowned in the current.
Roman observers on the walls cheered and howled. Mehmed, apoplectic with rage, watched helplessly from the shore. And still the swarm of Turkish boats pressed their attack against the European galleons, again and again. After four hours, the attack was called off, and Baltoglu sailed with his battered fleet back to the Double Columns.
TWO DAYS LATER, another hopeful sign for the beleaguered city: three Genoese galleons were spotted in the Sea of Marmara. These were the ships that had been sent by the pope, laden with weapons and food. The three ships were joined by one more: a large imperial transport ship loaded with corn. The report of the four ships was greeted in the city with cheers.
Mehmed saw the ships too, and resolved that they must not reach the safety of the Golden Horn. His orders to Baltoglu were simple: ‘take these four ships. Sink them if you have to . . . or don’t come back alive’.
That afternoon, observers on the sea walls saw more than a hundred Ottoman galleys bearing down on the four trading ships. The Christian ships were absurdly outnumbered, but still had the advantage of greater height, bulk and momentum. A stiff southerly breeze filled their sails and carried them forward towards the safety of the Golden Horn. Then, just as they began to round Acropolis Point, the wind completely died away. The sails slackened and fell. The four trading ships drifted helplessly towards Mehmed’s army on the Galata shore.
Baltoglu made his move. He ordered his own flagship to row forward at full speed, ramming the prow of his ship into the stern of the imperial transport. The listless Genoese galleons were stuck, dead in the water, as the Ottoman galleys swarmed around them. Desperate Turkish soldiers attempted to grapple onto the tall ships and climb on board, but as they pulled themselves up to the deck walls, Genoese sailors brought their axes down, lopping off heads and hands. Italian crossbowmen fired bolts from the crow’s nest. Great tubs of water were tipped onto the Ottoman galleys. Again the heavy stone wrecking balls were swung out on cranes from the high masts of the Italian ships into the Turkish ships.
For three hours the battle raged, filling the water with blood, the dead and the drowning wounded. Eventually, through all the killing, ‘blaspheming, scolding, threatening and groaning’, the relentless Turkish attack began to wear down the four Italian ships. Mehmed, watching from the shore, rode his horse into the water, shouting hysterical instructions to his men.
Then, at last, a fresh southerly wind picked up, and the luck of the defenders changed again. The big sails billowed out and the four ships pushed through their attackers and into the safety of the Golden Horn. Cheering broke out along the city walls. Mehmed, watching in disbelief, screamed and cursed at his sailors, tearing at his clothes in fury. Again, his fleet was humiliated. He rode away from the shore in silence.
THE NEXT DAY Mehmed summoned Baltoglu. Still bleeding from a wound to his eye, Baltoglu was exposed to the full force of Mehmed’s rage and frustration.
‘You are a fool and a coward,’ he spat. ‘How is it possible that this great fleet I have placed into your command has been defeated by a pathetically small clutch of merchant galleons?’
Baltoglu offered no answer.
Mehmed rose from his chair and declared he would cut off Baltoglu’s head with his own sword. The admiral’s officers rushed forward to intervene, begging Mehmed to be merciful. Baltoglu pointed to the wound in his eye as proof that he had fought hard and honourably. Mehmed relented, but he stripped Baltoglu of his high office and private possessions, and ordered that he receive a hundred lashes in front of his men.
Land Ships
AFTER TWO UNEXPECTED defeats, Mehmed’s navy had not only failed to intimidate the city, it had boosted the defenders’ confidence that they might, somehow, survive this siege after all.
The key, Mehmed realised, was the great chain. If he could somehow get his ships past the chain and into the Golden Horn, then Constantine would be forced to stretch his tiny forces even further to defend the northern sea wall. Mehmed rode up from his base on the Bosphorus shore into the forested hill behind it. He studied the landscape to the rear of the walled settlement of Galata, and then rode down to the north shore of the Golden Horn. Returning to the Double Columns, Mehmed summoned his advisors and proposed a radical plan, a masterstroke that would shift the initiative back to him. The sultan said that if he couldn’t attack the chain head-on, he would bypass it.
Teams of workers were sent to clear a path behind the Double Columns. They laid down a track of rollers, made from tree trunks greased with fat, running from the shore of the Bosphorus, up the hill and back down to the Golden Horn, to a point on the water’s edge known as the Valley of the Springs, well behind the great chain.
The track was laid within a couple of days, and on Sunday 22 April, a crew of Ottoman sailors waded into the Bosphorus and guided a small galley into a wheeled cradle. The cradle was dragged ashore by teams of oxen, supported by workers and crewmen, straining on ropes and pulleys. Then the creaking galley was slowly hauled onto the greased rollers, and pushed all the way up the hill, and then carefully eased back down the slope to the Valley of the Springs, where the ship splashed into the waters of the Golden Horn. Mehmed now had his first ship behind the chain.
The first galley was followed by another, and another. The exciting and weird spectacle of ‘ships being carried over land instead of sea’ inspired an Ottoman crew to climb aboard their galley and playfully assume their positions on deck. The sails were hoisted, the oarsmen took their
positions, and on command, they began to row in the air, amid laughter and whoops of joy. Roman soldiers on the sea walls looked on helplessly.
The defenders now realised the Golden Horn was no longer a sanctuary. By the end of the day, sixty-seven Ottoman ships were behind the chain. Mehmed ordered several guns to be mounted on the shoreline to protect them.
Constantine’s hopes were now fixed on Venice sending a fleet to break the blockade. Minotto, the chief Venetian official in the city, had sent an appeal three months earlier, but there was still no sign of a relief fleet. Just before midnight on 3 May, a Venetian ship, disguising itself as a Turkish vessel, slipped out of the Golden Horn. It returned twenty days later with crushing news: they had scouted the Dardanelles and the Aegean and seen no sign of a Venetian fleet. The men had nonetheless decided to return to Constantinople to report the news, even though it meant they would probably share the city’s doom. Constantine tearfully thanked each one of the crew for their service.
JOE AND I DECIDED TO WALK the same path as Mehmed’s land ships and up the same hill, which is now part of Istanbul’s Beyoglu district. On the map it looked like a pleasant stroll. On the ground it’s an exhausting, sweaty hike up a chain of steep, cobblestoned streets.
We get off at a tram stop on the Bosphorus shore, at the point where the Double Columns once stood, then trudge up a very steep incline towards Taksim Square. Five minutes in, I’m peeling off my coat and breathing heavily.
‘I guess you’re pretty old, Dad,’ Joe says, smiling.
‘Just middle-aged. Shut your mouth.’
‘Ottoman soldiers managed to get up this hill and they did it carrying a ship. Do you think you could manage a ship?’
‘I thought I told you to shut up.’
‘Can I get a cold drink?’
‘No,’ I wheeze, spitefully.
‘You told me you were never a smoker. Are you sure you were never a smoker, Dad?’
From a window just above us, an old woman hears us; she leans out and gestures for me to give her a cigarette.
Khym and I find it galling that our kids recognise no such way-station as ‘middle-aged’ on the great journey of life. They lump us into the same age bracket as their grandparents, which is simply ‘old’. They’ve seen pictures of Khym and me as newlyweds, in our twenties, and it amuses them we are no longer quite so lithe and fresh-faced. It’s as though we weren’t paying attention one day and stupidly left our youth on a bus.
Joe is getting older too. At fourteen he’s accelerating rapidly out of boyhood into adolescence, a process I watch, like most fathers, with pride but also with a tinge of grief. I know I’m losing a part of him to adolescence soon. His properly proportioned fourteen-year old physiognomy is starting to elongate and become absurdly gangly, an untidy tangle of knees and elbows. When he reclines on the couch in front of the TV he resembles a heap of discarded chicken wings. His feet – almost as big as mine – are too big. The sweet choirboy voicemail message he recorded on his phone in January sounds nothing like the honking baritone of December. I can’t quite gather him up and hold him like I could when he was little. Now I embrace him awkwardly, like a brother or a friend.
We get to the top of the hill and find our way into Taksim Square. There are no signs at all of the anti-government protests that had filled the square a week previously. I scan the skyline for the Galata Tower but we’re too far back from the water to see it.
‘Hey, Joe,’ I sputter, ‘how about we get a cab back to Sultanahmet?’
‘Sure, Dad,’ he grins. ‘If that’s what you need to do.’
Tunnels and Towers
WHILE MEHMED’S FORCES were fighting on land and sea, his sappers had been burrowing underground from the Ottoman base. Shielded from view by ramparts of earth, they dug a long tunnel from their camp towards the St Romanus Gate. The sappers were experienced silver miners from Germany. They dug by torchlight, inserting timber frames at each stage to hold up the earthworks. Their orders were to burrow under the walls, then set fire to the props and watch the wall collapse into the hole.
By 16 May, the sappers had dug a half-mile long tunnel right up to the outer wall, but their work was detected by sentries who were astonished to hear the sounds of digging and muffled voices coming from beneath their feet.
The emperor and Lucas Notaras were notified at once. A military engineer was found among Giustiniani’s mercenaries, a Scotsman named John Grant, who oversaw the digging of a deep mine, leading crossways into the Turkish tunnel. The defenders burrowed their way into the Turkish mine and set fire to the timbers, sending the earthworks crashing down on the heads of the sappers inside. Thereafter the defenders kept large drums of water near the walls; a tremor on the water’s surface would indicate excavation work below.
ON THE MORNING OF 19 MAY, the defenders awoke to a shocking and terrible sight: in the course of a single night, the sultan’s men had built an enormous siege tower right on the edge of the ditch, just ten metres from the outer wall. The tower was a veritable skyscraper of timber scaffolding, looming higher than the walls. The defenders were at a loss to explain how it had been constructed so quickly, and put in place so stealthily. The emperor and his court were alerted and they came up to the ramparts to see the behemoth for themselves. Just as startlingly, they saw the Turks had ingeniously constructed a protected pathway behind the tower, covered with animal hides, which led back to their camp. This allowed soldiers to rush back and forth to the tower in safety.
The tower was constructed with heavy timber beams and protected by a skin of camel hides to shield the men within from crossbow bolts. The lower half was filled with earth to absorb artillery fire.
Inside the protected tower, the Turks were digging up earth and using it to fill in a section of the ditch, which would allow their soldiers and siege towers to move right up to the walls. There seemed to be nothing the defenders could do to stop the earthworks, so they looked on helplessly all day, as the tower inched closer to the outer wall. Barbaro noted that the Turks ‘shot a great number of arrows into the city from the place where the tower was, firing them, it seemed, from sheer high spirits, while our men were all very sad and fearful’.
That night, in desperation, the defenders prepared barrels of gunpowder, lit the fuses and rolled them towards the tower. There was a pause, followed by a sequence of explosions, sending men, timber and earth flying up into the air. The wooden frame of the tower caught fire and completely collapsed. Up on the walls, the defenders poured boiling pitch onto the wounded survivors. Once more, the Turks had to withdraw.
AS THE MONTH OF MAY came to a close, both defenders and attackers were exhausted and dispirited. Giustiniani and his men on the walls were stuck in an endless daily routine: pushing back the enemy by day, patching up the shattered brickwork by night. Some men deserted their posts and returned to their families in the city. Soldiers began to openly curse the emperor’s name.
Mehmed sent an envoy into the city under a banner of truce to make the offer required of him by Islamic protocol. Constantine received the envoy and heard his message: ‘Surrender now,’ the envoy advised, ‘and you will be saved from slavery.’
Constantine tried to make a siege seem more trouble for Mehmed than it was worth: ‘I am prepared to pay tribute,’ he told the envoy, ‘but I will not surrender the city. To defend it, every one of us is prepared to die.’
Constantine could not surrender and Mehmed would not withdraw. Holy men in both camps read and reread their respective books of prophecies and looked to the skies for signs that God was pleased or angered with their work. They were not long in coming.
View from a tower on the inner wall.
Richard Fidler
Big Black Drops
ON THE NIGHT OF 22 MAY, a peculiar moon rose in the sky. A full moon had been expected, but on this night it was shrouded by a partial eclipse, which left the city darkened and troubled. Ominously, the eclipse transfigured the moon into a crescent, the symbol of Islam, t
he same crescent the Romans could see on the banners of the sultan’s army. Priests in the city unhappily recalled a prophecy that predicted that Constantinople would not fall until the full moon should give a sign.
That night the Turks held a celebration, but within Constantinople, morale was sinking. To lift the city’s spirits, the emperor decreed that the city’s most precious icon, the Virgin Hodegetria, should be paraded through the city the following day.
The Hodegetria, ‘She Who Shows the Way’, was Constantinople’s most powerful talisman, an image of the infant Jesus held tenderly by his mother, the Virgin Mary. The Hodegetria was believed to be impregnated with all kinds of miraculous powers. Priests dabbed at the icon with swabs of cotton wool, hoping to soak up a drop of the holy oil that was thought to seep out from it. But it was the identity of the painter that made this icon so incalculably precious: the artist was believed to be Luke the Evangelist himself, the author of the third gospel. If St Luke was the painter, it was reasoned, then the portrait of the infant Christ must have been taken from life.
Late the next morning, the solemn procession of the Hodegetria filed out of the monastery. Black-robed priests led a train of clerics in a deep, sonorous chant. The icon bearers hoisted the Hodegetria high so the crowd could all see the Virgin. The procession made its way through the streets, and then . . . the icon slipped from its bearers and fell face-down onto the ground with a splat. Bystanders rushed to rescue it, but no amount of straining, it seemed, could lift it from the mud.
Eventually the icon was hoisted up, and the badly rattled priests staggered forward again. Then, at noon a violent thunderstorm suddenly broke over Constantinople. A Russian observer recorded that ‘the air suddenly thickened and, in a moaning way, it hovered above the city. Then, big black drops of rain, as large as the eye of a buffalo, began to fall’. The storm flash-flooded the streets, and the marchers were lashed with rain and hail. The procession broke up in distress and confusion. The Orthodox faithful retreated to their homes, gripped by a palpable sense of doom.
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