Constantinople- the Last Great Siege, 1453

by Roger Crowley

  When the giant stone balls struck the walls at an advantageous spot, the effects were devastating: ‘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 enough or thick enough to withstand it, or to hold out totally against such a force or the velocity of the stone ball.’ At first it seemed to the defenders that the whole history of siege warfare was unravelling in front of their eyes; the Theodosian land wall, the product of two thousand years of defensive evolution, a miracle of engineering devised by human ingenuity and protected by divine blessing, started to collapse wherever it was hit by a volley of well-aimed balls. Archbishop Leonard watched the effects on the single wall near the palace: ‘They pulverized the wall with it, and although it was extremely thick and strong, it collapsed under the bombardment of this appalling device.’

  Balls from the superguns that cleared the walls could be propelled a mile into the heart of Constantinople, shattering with devastating force against houses or churches, mowing down civilians or more likely burying themselves in the orchards and fields of the shrunken city. One eyewitness was astonished to see a ball strike a church wall and fall apart like dust. According to others, the ground was shaken for two miles around and even the galleys tied up safely in the harbours within the Golden Horn felt the explosions transmitted through their stout wooden hulls. The sound of gunfire was heard in Asia, five miles away across the Bosphorus. At the same time the trebuchets, with their more looping arc of fire, hurled rocks onto the roofs of houses behind the walls and onto parts of the Imperial Palace.

  The psychological effects of artillery bombardment on the defenders were initially even more severe than its material consequences. The noise and vibration of the massed guns, the clouds of smoke, the shattering impact of stone on stone dismayed seasoned defenders. To the civilian population it was a glimpse of the coming apocalypse and a retribution for sin. It sounded, according to one Ottoman chronicler, ‘like the awful resurrection blast’. People ran out of their houses beating their chests, crossing themselves and shouting ‘Kyrie Eleison! What is going to happen now?’ Women fainted in the streets. The churches were thronged with people ‘voicing petitions and prayers, wailing and exclaiming: “Lord, Lord! We moved far away from You. All that fell upon us and Your holy City was accomplished through righteous and true judgements for our sins.” By the flickering light of their most sacred icons their lips moved in the same unceasing prayer: “Do not betray us in the end to Your enemies; do not destroy Your worthy people; and do not take away Your loving kindness from us and render us weak at this time.”’

  Constantine worked unstintingly to maintain the morale of the city on both a practical and religious level. He toured the walls hourly, stiffening the morale of the commanders and their soldiers. Church bells were rung unceasingly and he exhorted ‘all of the people so that they would not renounce hope nor slacken their resistance against the enemy but place their trust in the Almighty Lord’.

  The defenders tried different strategies to mitigate the shock of the stone balls. A mortar of chalk and brick dust was poured down the wall’s outer face as a toughened coating; in other places bales of wool attached to wooden beams, sheets of leather and precious tapestries were suspended to muffle the velocity of the projectiles. These measures made little difference to the extraordinary force of gunpowder propulsion. The defenders did their best to try to knock out the big guns with their own few cannon, but they were short of saltpetre and the Ottoman guns were screened by their palisades. Worse still it was found that the walls and towers were chronically unsuitable as gun platforms. They were neither wide enough to accommodate the recoil of large explosive charges nor strong enough to withstand the vibrations, which ‘shook the walls, and did more damage to them than to the enemy’. Their largest cannon quickly exploded, enraging the harassed defenders so much that they wanted to put the gun master to death for being in the pay of the sultan, ‘but since there was no clear proof that he deserved this fate, they set him free’. Underneath it all, it was quickly clear that in a new age of warfare the Theodosian walls were structurally inadequate.

  The Greek chroniclers struggled to convey what they saw, or even to find a vocabulary to describe the guns. ‘No ancient name exists for this device’, declared the classically minded Kritovoulos, ‘unless someone refers to it as a battering ram or a propeller. But in common speech everyone now calls it an apparatus.’ Other names proliferated: bombards, skeves, helepoles – ‘takers of cities’ – torments and teleboles. In the pressure of the moment, language was being shaped by a terrifying new reality – the infernal experience of artillery bombardment.

  Mehmet’s strategy was attritional – and impatient. He decided to batter the walls day and night with artillery fire and to launch unpredictable skirmishes to wear down the defenders and to make a major breach for a final assault. ‘The assault continued night and day with no relief from the clashes and explosions, crashing of stones and cannon-balls on the walls,’ reported Melissenos, ‘for the Sultan hoped in this way to take the city easily, since we were few against many, by pounding us to death and exhaustion, and so he allowed us no rest from attack.’ The bombardment, and the struggle for the fosse, continued unabated from 12 to 18 April.

  Despite their initial psychological impact, managing the great cannon was difficult work. Loading and aiming were such laborious operations that the Basilica could only be fired seven times a day, with a preliminary shot before dawn to warn of the day’s firing. The guns could be unpredictable, bad-tempered and deadly to their teams. In the spring rain they proved hard to keep in position, recoiling with the slam of a charging rhino so that they frequently slipped from their cradles into the mud. The possibility of being crushed to death was only exceeded by the risk of being blown to pieces by the shrapnel of disintegrating gun barrels. The Basilica quickly became a cause for concern to Orban; the intense heat of the explosions had started to exploit hairline fractures in the impure metal – evidently casting on this scale was extremely demanding. The Greek chronicler Doukas, who had a keen technical interest in the problem, recalled how, in order to control the problem, the barrel was soaked in warm oil as soon as the ball had been shot to try to prevent cold air penetrating and enlarging the fissures.

  However, the possibility that the barrel would shatter like glass continued to trouble Orban, and according to legend nemesis soon overtook the Christian mercenary. Close examination had revealed that the cracks were indeed serious. Orban wished to withdraw the gun and recast it. Mehmet, ever present to watch the performance of his great guns and impatient for success, ordered the firing to continue. Weighing up the risks of a faulty gun against the sultan’s displeasure, Orban reloaded and asked Mehmet to stand back. On lighting the powder charge, the Basilica ‘cracked as it was being fired and split into many pieces, killing and wounding many nearby’ – including Orban. There is however strong evidence to suggest that his demise – devoutly wished for by the Christian chroniclers – never happened in this way, though it seems clear that the great gun ruptured early in the siege. It was quickly strengthened with iron hoops and pressed back into service but soon cracked again – to the intense anger of Mehmet. The supergun was evidently working beyond the tolerances of contemporary metallurgy. Its chief effect had been psychological; it was left to the slightly smaller but still formidable posse of other bombards to do the damage.

  Mehmet’s need to take the city quickly was soon underlined by the arrival of a deputation from the Hungarian, John Hunyadi. Mehmet’s policy had been to ensure that his enemies were divided; to this end he had signed a three-year peace treaty with Hunyadi, then regent of Hungary, to ensure that no land attack from the west should take place during his attempt on Constantinople. Hunyadi’s embassy had now come to the Ottoman court to announce that, since their master had resigned his regency and surrendered power back to his ward King Vladisla
s, the treaty was no longer binding. In consequence he wished to return the truce document and receive his own back. It was conceived by the wily Hungarian as a threat to pressurize the Ottoman cause and had probably been instigated by agents from the Vatican. It raised the spectre of a Hungarian army crossing the Danube to lift the siege and it caused a ripple of uncertainty throughout the camp; the news must have correspondingly strengthened the will of the defenders.

  Unfortunately the visit also gave way to unsubstantiated rumours that the visiting Hungarians had provided valuable assistance to the Ottoman cause. One of the ambassadors at the camp watched the firing of the great cannons with interest. When he saw a shot strike the wall at a certain point and the gunners prepare a second shot at the same point, professional interest overcame him and he openly laughed at their naivety. He advised them to aim their second shot ‘about thirty to thirty-six feet from the first shot, but at the same height’ and to position a third shot between the two ‘so that the shots form a triangular shape. Then you will see that portion of wall collapse’. The immediate effect of this firing strategy was to accelerate the speed at which sections of the wall could be brought down. Very soon the ‘bear and cubs’ were working as co-ordinated teams. Smaller guns would make two outer hits, then one of Orban’s great guns completed the triangle in the now weakened central section: ‘the shot being carried by such devilish force and irresistible impetus that it caused irreparable damage’. The chroniclers attached a weird explanation for this helpful piece of advice: a Serbian prophet had declared that the misfortunes of the Christians would not come to an end until Constantinople fell to the Turks. The story of the Hungarian visit neatly wrapped up repeated preoccupations of the Christians in one narrative: the belief that the Ottomans could only prosper with the superior technological knowledge of Europeans, that the decline of Christendom was responsible for the fall, and the role of religious prophecy.

  Despite the difficulties of aiming and the slow rate of fire, the bombardment continued unabated from 12 April for six days. Now the heaviest fire was concentrated on the Lycus valley and the Romanus Gate. About 120 shots a day could be launched at the city. Inexorably the wall began to crumble. Within the week a section of the outer wall had fallen and two towers and a turret on the inner wall behind. However, after their initial terror at the bombardment, the defenders regained heart under fire: ‘by experiencing the force of the sultan’s war engines daily our soldiers became accustomed to them and displayed neither fear nor cowardice’. Giustiniani worked unceasingly to repair the damage, and quickly devised an effective ad hoc solution to the collapsing outer wall. A makeshift replacement was constructed of stakes, and on this foundation the defenders dumped any material that came to hand. Stones, timber, brushwood, bushes and large quantities of earth were moved into the breach. Screens of skin and hide were stretched over the outer wooden stockade as protection against incendiary arrows, and when the new defensive mound was of sufficient height, barrels filled with earth were placed on top at regular intervals to act as crenellated fighting positions to protect the defenders against volleys of arrows and bullets with which the Ottomans attempted to sweep clean the ramparts. Immense human labour was thrown into this effort; after dark men and women came from the city to work all night, carrying timber, stones and earth to rebuild the defences wherever they had been smashed during the day. This incessant nocturnal labour took its toll on the energy of the increasingly exhausted population, but the resulting earthworks provided a surprisingly effective solution to the devastating impact of the stone balls. Like throwing stones into mud, the balls were smothered and neutralized: they were ‘buried in the soft and yielding earth, and did not make a breach by striking against hard and unyielding materials’.

  At the same time the bitter struggle continued for control of the moat. By day Ottoman troops attempted to fill it in with any material to hand: soil, timber, rubble, even – according to one account – their own tents, were dragged up into no man’s land under a protecting volley of fire, and tipped into the trench. At night the defenders mounted counter-offensives from their sally ports to clear the fosse out again and restore it to its original depth. The skirmishing in front of the walls was bitter, and at close range. Sometimes the attackers used nets to try to retrieve precious cannon balls that had rolled back into the fosse; at others soldiers would advance to test weakened sections of the wall and to ensure the overstretched defenders could never relax. With hooked sticks they attempted to drag down the earth barrels from the top.

  At close range these encounters favoured the better-armoured and protected defenders, but even the Greek and Italian eyewitnesses were impressed by their enemy’s courage under fire. ‘The Turks fought bravely at close quarters,’ remembered Leonard, ‘so they all died.’ Raked by fire from the walls from longbows, crossbows and arquebuses, the carnage was terrible. Having found their cannon unusable for firing heavy balls, the defenders had reinvented their artillery pieces as huge shotguns. A cannon would be packed with five or ten lead balls, the size of walnuts. Fired at close range the effect of these bullets was appalling: they had ‘immense power in penetrating and perforating, so that if one hit a soldier in armour, it went straight through both his shield and body, then through another behind who was in the line of fire, and then another, until the force of the powder was dissipated. With one shot two or three men could be killed at the same time.’

  Hit by this withering fire, the Ottoman casualties were terrible and their desire to retrieve their dead provided the defenders with another shooting gallery. The Venetian surgeon Nicolo Barbaro was startled by what he saw:

  And when one or two of them were killed, at once other Turks came and carried off the dead ones, hoisting them over their shoulders as one would a pig, without caring how near they came to the city walls. But our men who were on the ramparts shot at them with guns and crossbows, aiming at the Turk who was carrying away his dead comrade, and both of them would fall to the ground dead, and then other Turks came and took them away, not fearing death in the slightest, but preferring to let ten of themselves be killed rather than suffer the shame of leaving a single Turkish corpse in front of the city walls.

  Despite the defenders’ best efforts, remorseless bombardment provided sufficient cover for a section of the fosse in the Lycus valley to be filled in. On April 18 Mehmet judged that the damage to the wall and attritional skirmishing had been sufficient to launch a concerted attack. It had been a fine spring day; as evening fell, the call to prayer rose with peaceful certainty over the Ottoman camp and within the walls the Orthodox retired to the churches to hold vigils, light candles and to pray to the Mother of God. Two hours after sunset, under a soft spring moon, Mehmet ordered forward a substantial detachment of his crack troops. To the rhythmic thudding of camel-skin drums, the braying of pipes and the clashing of cymbals – all the psychological warfare of the Ottoman military band – amplified by flares, shouts and battle cries, Mehmet started to roll forward ‘the heavy infantry and the bowmen and the javelin-men and all the imperial foot-guards’. He directed them at a vulnerable spot in the Lycus valley where a section of wall had collapsed. The citizens were panic-stricken, experiencing the hair-raising sound of a full-throated Ottoman assault for the first time. ‘I cannot describe the cries with which they came at the walls,’ Barbaro later recalled with a shudder.

  Constantine was deeply alarmed. He feared a general assault along the whole line and knew that his men were unprepared. He ordered the church bells to be rung; terrified people ran into the streets and soldiers scrambled back to their stations. Under a heavy covering fire of cannon, guns and bows the Ottomans crossed the fosse. Withering volleys made it impossible to stand on the improvised earth ramparts so that the Janissaries were able to reach the walls with ladders and battering rams. They worked to strip the ramparts of their protective crenellations and further expose the defenders to blanket fire. At the same time attempts were made to burn the wooden stockade, but these
failed and the narrowness of the gap in the wall and the sloping terrain hampered the onrush of the attackers. In the darkness pandemonium broke out, a confused hubbub of sounds, according to Nestor-Iskander:

  the clatter of cannons and arquebuses, the roar of the bells, the cracking of arms – like lightning flashing from both weapons – as the crying and sobbing of the people (the women and children of the city) made one believe that the sky and the earth had joined the earth and they both trembled; one could not hear another man’s words. Weeping and screaming, the cries and sobs of the people, the roar of the cannons, and the pealing of bells combined into one din resembling great thunder. Again, rising from many fires and the explosions of cannons and arquebuses, the smoke thickened on both sides and covered the city. The armies were unable to see one another and did not know against whom they fought.

  Slashing and hacking at each other in the narrow spaces of the defile under the bright moon, advantage rested with the defenders who were well armoured and stoutly marshalled by Giustiniani. Slowly the momentum of the attackers died: ‘slashed to pieces, they exhausted themselves on the walls’. After four hours an abrupt quietness descended on the ramparts, broken only by the moans of men dying in the ditch. The Ottomans retreated to camp, ‘without even thought for their dead’, and the defenders, after six days of continuous defence, ‘collapsed from the struggle as if dead’.