Constantinople- the Last Great Siege, 1453

by Roger Crowley

  In 1204 this history of mutual suspicion and violence returned to haunt Constantinople in a catastrophe for which the Greeks have never fully forgiven the Catholic West. In one of the most bizarre events in the history of Christendom, the Fourth Crusade, embarked on Venetian ships and nominally bound for Egypt, was diverted to attack the city. The architect of this operation was Enrico Dandolo, the apparently blind, eighty-year-old Venetian doge, a man of infinite guile, who personally led the expedition. Sweeping up a convenient pretender to the imperial throne, the huge fleet sailed up the Marmara in June 1203; the crusaders themselves were perhaps startled to see Constantinople, a city of great Christian significance, forming on the port bow rather than the shores of Egypt. Having smashed their way through the chain that protected the Golden Horn, the Venetian ships rode up onto the foreshore and attempted to breach the sea walls; when the attack faltered the octogenarian doge leaped down onto the beach with the flag of St Mark in his hand and exhorted the Venetians to show their valour. The walls were stormed and the pretender, Alexios, duly enthroned.

  The following April, after a winter of murky internal intrigue during which the crusaders became increasingly restive, Constantinople was comprehensively sacked. An appalling massacre ensued and huge portions of the city were destroyed by fire: ‘More houses were burned than there are to be found in the three greatest cities of the Kingdom of France,’ declared the French knight Geoffrey de Villehardouin. The city’s great heritage of art was vandalized and St Sophia profaned and ransacked: ‘They brought horses and mules into the Church’, wrote the chronicler Nicetas, ‘the better to carry off the holy vessels and the engraved silver and gold that they had torn from the throne and the pulpit, and the doors, and the furniture wherever it was to be found; and when some of these beasts slipped and fell, they ran them through with their swords, fouling the Church with their blood and ordure.’ The Venetians made off with a great trove of statuary, relics and precious objects to adorn their own church of St Mark, including the four bronze horses that had stood in the Hippodrome since the time of Constantine the Great. Constantinople was left a smoking ruin. ‘Oh city, city, eye of all cities,’ howled the chronicler Nicetas, ‘you have drunk to the dregs the cup of the anger of the Lord.’ It was a typical Byzantine response; but whether the agent of this disaster was human or divine, the consequences were the same: Constantinople was reduced to a shadow of its former greatness. For nearly sixty years the city became the ‘Latin Empire of Constantinople’, ruled by the Count of Flanders and his successors. The Byzantine empire was dismembered into a scattered collection of Frankish states and Italian colonies, whilst a large part of the population fled to Greece. The Byzantines established a kingdom in exile at Nicaea in Anatolia and were relatively successful in barring further Turkish incursions. When they recaptured Constantinople in 1261 they found the city’s infrastructure close to ruin and its dominions shrunk to a few dispersed fragments. As they tried to restore their fortunes and to face new dangers from the West, the Byzantines again turned their back on Islamic Anatolia, and paid an ever-deepening price.

  Anatolia continued to be convulsed by seismic population shifts further east. Two years after the sack of Constantinople, a tribal leader called Temuchin succeeded in uniting the feuding nomads of inner Mongolia into an organized war band and received the title Genghis Khan – the Universal Ruler. The long-haired, sky-worshipping Mongols descended on the Islamic world with terrifying ferocity. As chaos enveloped Persia, a further tidal wave of displaced people streamed west into Anatolia. The continent was a melting pot of ethnic destinies: Greek, Turkish, Iranian, Armenian, Afghani, Georgian. When the Mongols defeated its most coherent principality, that of the Seljuks of Rum, in 1243, Anatolia collapsed into a mosaic of small kingdoms. The wandering Turkish tribes had nowhere further west to migrate; there were no infidel neighbours left to provide legitimate Islamic conquests. Where they met the sea, some acquired fleets and raided Byzantine coastal territories. Others fought amongst themselves. Anatolia was chaotic, fragmented and dangerous – a wild west of raiders, plunderers and religious visionaries, inspired by a combustible mixture of mystical Sufism and orthodox Sunnism. The Turkmen still rode the long horizons in their deep embroidered saddles, seeking plunder and perpetual motion in the gazi tradition but now only one insignificant kingdom, the tribe of Osman, still touched the infidel lands of Byzantium in north-western Anatolia.

  No one knows the true origins of these people, whom we now call Ottomans. They emerge from among the anonymous wandering Turkmen some time around 1280, a caste of illiterate warriors living amongst tents and wood smoke, who ruled from the saddle and signed with a thumbprint and whose history was subsequently reconstructed by imperial myth-making. Legend tells that Osman was always destined for greatness. One night he fell asleep and had a dream, in which he saw Constantinople, which, ‘situated at the junction of two seas and two continents, seemed like a diamond mounted between two sapphires and two emeralds, and appeared thus to form the precious stone of the ring of a vast dominion which embraced the entire world’. Osman took upon himself the mantle of the gazis, which his tribe was poised to exploit. Luck and quick-wittedness in equal measure were to transform the realm of Osman from a tiny principality to the world power of the dream.

  The domain of Osman, in north-western Anatolia, directly confronted the Byzantine defensive perimeter that guarded Constantinople. Facing unconquered infidel land, it became a magnet for gazis, adventurers and land hungry refugees who wanted to try their luck under his command. Osman ruled as a tribal leader in touch with his people. At the same time the Ottomans had a unique opportunity to study the neighbouring Byzantine state and to imitate its structures. The tribe learned literally ‘on the hoof’, absorbing technologies, protocols and tactics at an extraordinary rate. In 1302 Osman won a first victory over the Byzantines that brought prestige and recruits to his cause. Pushing forward against the crumbling imperial defences, he managed to isolate the city of Bursa; as he lacked the technology for sieges it took a patient seven years of blockade before his son Orhan captured the city in 1326 and secured a capital for his small kingdom. In 1329 Orhan defeated the Emperor Andronikos III at Pelekanos, ending all Byzantine attempts to support its remaining Anatolian cities. They fell in quick succession – Nicaea in 1331, Nicomedia in 1337, Scutari the following year. Muslim warriors were now able to ride their horses to the sea’s edge on their own lands and look out across the Bosphorus at Europe. On the far side they could make out Constantinople: the marching line of its sea walls, the enormous dome of St Sophia, imperial banners fluttering from turrets and palaces.

  As they advanced, the conquerors smoothed the Greek placenames of captured cities to the vowel harmonies of Turkish. Smyrna became Izmir, Nicaea – home of the Nicene Creed – Iznik; Brusa shifted consonants into Bursa. Constantinople, though the Ottomans would continue to refer to it officially by the Arabic name Kostantiniyye, evolved in everyday Turkish into Istanbul by a mutation which is still unclear. The word may be a simple corruption of Constantinople, or it could be derived quite differently. Greek speakers would refer to Constantinople familiarly as polis, the city. A man going there would say he was going ‘eis tin polin’ – ‘into the city’ – which could have been interpreted by Turkish ears as Istanbul.

  The speed of the Ottoman advance seemed as providential as that of the Arabs seven centuries earlier. When the great Arab traveller Ibn Battutah visited Orhan’s principality in 1331 he was impressed by the restless energy of the place: ‘It is said that he has never stayed for a whole month in any one town. He fights with the infidels continually and keeps them under siege.’ The early Ottomans styled themselves as gazis; they wrapped the title of warriors of the Faith around them like the green flag of Islam. Soon they were sultans too. In 1337 Orhan set up an inscription in Bursa, styling himself ‘Sultan, son of the Sultan of the Gazis, Gazi, son of the Gazi, marquis of the horizons, hero of the world’. It was indeed a new heroic age of Mu
slim conquest and it quickened the pulse of militant Islam. ‘The Gazi is the sword of God,’ wrote the chronicler Ahmeti around 1400, ‘he is the protector and refuge of the believers. If he becomes a martyr in the ways of God, do not believe that he has died – he lives in beatitude with Allah, he has eternal life.’ The conquests aroused wild expectations amongst the free-riding nomadic raiders and the dervish mystics in tattered cloaks who travelled with them across the dusty roads of Anatolia. The air was thick with prophecy and heroic song. They remembered the Hadith about conquering Constantinople and the legends of the Red Apple. When the Emperor John Cantacuzenos invited Orhan’s war band across the Dardanelles in the 1350s to help in the interminable civil wars of the Byzantine state, Muslims set foot in Europe for the first time since 718. When an earthquake wrecked the walls of Gallipoli in 1354, the Ottomans promptly declared it to be a sign from God to the Muslims and occupied the town. A steady stream of fighters and holy men followed them into Europe. In 1359 an Islamic army appeared outside the city walls for the first time in 650 years. A note of millennial prophecy creeps into the atmosphere. ‘Why have the Gazis appeared at the last?’ asked Ahmeti. ‘Because the best always comes at the end. Just as the definitive prophet Muhammad came after the others, just as the Koran came down from heaven after the Torah, the Psalms and the Gospels, so also the Gazis appeared in the world at the last.’ The capture of Constantinople must have seemed a dream on the edge of possibility.

  The tombs of Osman and Orhan at Bursa

  The speed of the Ottoman advance seemed nothing short of miraculous – as if ordained by God. By geography, custom and luck, the Ottomans were best placed to prosper from the disintegration of the Byzantine state. The early sultans, living close to their men and to nature, were attentive to circumstance and possibility in the shifting political environment around them. Where the Byzantines were hidebound by a thousand years of ceremony and tradition, the Ottomans were quick-witted, flexible and open. The laws of Islam required mercy to conquered peoples and the Ottomans ruled their subjects with a light hand that seemed frequently preferable to European feudalism. No attempt was made to convert Christians, who formed the bulk of the population, to Islam – in fact it was largely thought undesirable by a dynasty with a taste for empire. Under sharia law it was not possible to tax Muslims as heavily as infidels, though in any case their burden was not heavy. The peasants of the Balkans welcomed release from the weightier yoke of feudal servitude. At the same time the Ottomans inbuilt dynastic advantages for themselves. Unlike other Turkish principalities, the early sultans never divided the succession of the kingdom; nor did they designate a successor. All sons were groomed to rule but only one could take the throne – a method that seemed brutally designed to ensure the survival of the fittest. Most startling of all for westerners, they paid no attention to succession through marriage. Where the Byzantine Emperors, like all the ruling houses of Europe, went to exhaustive lengths to secure dynastic marriages and legitimate succession through approved bloodlines, the Ottomans hardly bothered. A sultan’s father would naturally be the previous sultan, but his mother might be a concubine or a slave, possibly not a born Muslim, and from one of a dozen subject peoples. This genetic inclusiveness was to provide the Ottomans with extraordinary resources.

  Of all Ottoman innovations none was perhaps more significant than the creation of a regular army. The enthusiastic bands of gazi warriors were too undisciplined to fulfil the now growing ambitions of the Ottoman sultans; besieging well-defended cities required patience, methodology and a particular set of craft skills. Towards the end of the fourteenth century Sultan Murat I formed a new military force, comprised of slaves captured from the Balkan states. A levy of Christian youths was taken at regular intervals, converted to Islam and taught Turkish. Removed from their families, these new recruits owed their loyalty only to the sultan. They were his private force: the ‘slaves of the Gate’. They were organized into infantry units, the Yeni Cheri or Janissaries, and the cavalry, which together comprised the first professional paid army in Europe since the time of the Romans. It was to play a critical role in the development of the Ottoman state. This was a custom drawn straight out of the Ottomans’ own history: the Turks themselves had been enrolled as military slaves at the frontiers of the Islamic world. It had been their passport to advancement. But to Christians watching the process from afar, it evoked rigid horror: with different images of slavery, the prospect of turning captured Christian children against Christians was fiendish and inhuman. It was to form a powerful ingredient in the myth of the Savage Turk.

  This notion of ‘the Turk’ was seized on early in the West. It was largely a European construct, a term matched to Western identities that was hardly used by the Ottomans. They considered it derogatory. Instead, they chose titles that were neither ethnic nor territorial and reflected both their nomadic heritage, unconfined by fixed territories, and its multi-ethnic composition. Identity was primarily religious: the Ottoman sultans came to describe themselves in increasingly ornate terms as Lords of Islam, their empire as the Refuge of the Faith or the Defended Lands, their people as either Muslims or Ottomans. The Ottoman make-up was a unique assemblage of different elements and peoples: Turkish tribalism, Sunni Islam, Persian court practices, Byzantine administration, taxation and ceremonial, and a high-flown court language that combined Turkish structure with Arabic and Persian vocabulary. It had an identity all of its own.

  The rising arc of the Ottomans was mirrored by a corresponding and unhalted decline in the fortunes of Byzantium. The factors that went to make the years after 1300 ‘the calamitous century’ in Europe played out in the eastern empire too. Fragmentation, civil war, population decline and impoverishment stalked Constantinople. There were telling symbolic moments. In 1284, the Emperor Andronikos II took the suicidal decision to abolish the imperial navy. The workless sailors defected to the Ottomans and helped them build a fleet. Sometime around 1325 the emperors of the House of Palaiologos adopted the double-headed eagle as their emblem; it did not, as has sometimes been supposed, represent a mighty empire that looked both east and west, but rather symbolized a division of authority between two quarrelsome emperors of the same family. The eagle was prophetic. The years 1341 to 1371 were racked by a ruinous sequence of civil wars, invasion of imperial territory by both the Ottomans and the powerful Serbian state, religious controversy and plague. Constantinople was the first European city to experience the Black Death: rats that scurried up the gangplanks in the Black Sea port of Kaffa jumped ship there in 1347. The population shrank to little more than 100,000. A series of earthquakes devastated Constantinople – the dome of St Sophia collapsed in 1346 – and the city ‘of pure gold’ became increasingly destitute and forlorn, its inhabitants prone to religious pessimism. Travellers to the city remarked on the melancholy appearance of the place. Ibn Battutah saw, not a city, but thirteen villages separated by fields. When the Spaniard Pero Tafur visited he found even the emperor’s palace ‘in such a state that both it and the city show well the evils which the people have suffered and still endure … the city is sparsely populated … the inhabitants are not well clad, but sad and poor, showing the hardship of their lot’, before adding with true Christian charity, ‘which is, however, not as bad as they deserve, for they are a vicious people, steeped in sin’. The city was shrinking inside its walls like an old man in the clothes of his youth, and its emperors were paupers in their own house. At the coronation of the Emperor John VI Cantacuzenos in 1347, observers noticed that the crown jewels were made of glass, the banqueting plates of clay and pewter. The golden dishes had been sold to pay for civil war; the jewels pawned to the Venetians – they were in the treasury of St Mark’s.

  The double-headed eagle of the house of Palaiologos

  In this confusion, the Ottoman advance into Europe continued unchecked. In 1362 they virtually encircled Constantinople from the rear when they took the city of Adrianople – Edirne in Turkish – 140 miles to the west, and move
d their imperial capital into Europe. When they shattered the Serbs in battle in 1371 the Emperor John was isolated from all Christian support and had little option but to become a vassal of the sultans, contributing troops on demand and seeking permission for imperial appointments. The advance of the Ottomans seemed unstoppable: by the end of the fourteenth century their terrain stretched from the Danube to the Euphrates. ‘Turkish or heathen expansion is like the sea,’ wrote the Serbian, Michael ‘the Janissary’, ‘it never has peace but always rolls … until you smash a snake’s head it is always worse.’ The Pope issued a bull proclaiming crusade against the Ottomans in 1366, and in vain threatened excommunication against the trading states of Italy and the Adriatic for supplying them with arms. The next fifty years were to see three crusades against the infidel, all led by the Hungarians, the most threatened state in Eastern Europe. They were to be the swan song of a united Christendom. Each one ended in punishing defeat, the causes of which were not hard to find. Europe was divided, poverty stricken, wracked by its own internal disputes, weakened by the Black Death. The armies themselves were lumbering, quarrelsome, ill disciplined and tactically inept, in comparison with the mobile and well organized Ottomans, unified around a common cause. The few Europeans who saw them up close could not but profess a sneaking admiration for ‘Ottoman order’. The French traveller Bertrandon de la Brocquière observed in the 1430s: