Constantinople- the Last Great Siege, 1453

by Roger Crowley

  To ensure that the walls were not neglected in the search for food, Constantine ordered that supplies should be evenly distributed among the dependants of the soldiers. So serious was the situation that with the advice of his ministers he began to requisition church plate and had it melted down for coin to pay the men so that whatever food was available might be purchased. It was probably a controversial move, unlikely to win the favour of the pious Orthodox who saw the sufferings of the city as a consequence of sin and error.

  Deliberations amongst the commanders intensified. The presence of the enemy fleet in the Horn had greatly confused the defence and they were forced to reallocate their troops and commands accordingly. The sea was watched from the walls twenty-four hours a day but nothing stirred on the western horizon. Probably on 3 May a major council was called, involving the commanders, civic dignitaries and churchmen, to discuss the situation. The guns were still pummelling the walls, morale was weakening and there was a feeling that all-out assault was imminent. In an atmosphere charged with foreboding, a move was made to persuade Constantine to leave the city for the Peloponnese where he could regroup, gather new forces and strike again. Giustiniani offered his galleys for the emperor’s escape. The chroniclers give an emotional account of Constantine’s response. He ‘fell silent for a long time and shed tears. He spoke to them as follows: “I praise and thank your counsel and all of you, as all of this is in my interest; it can only be so. But how can I do this and leave the clergy, the churches of God, the empire and all of the people? What will the world think of me, I pray, tell me? No, my lords, no: I will die here with you.” Falling, he bowed to them and cried in grief. The patriarch and all of the people present started to weep in silence.’

  Recovering from this moment, Constantine made a practical suggestion that the Venetians should send out a ship at once to search the eastern Aegean for signs of a rescue fleet. Twelve men volunteered for the hazardous duty of running the Ottoman blockade and a brigantine was accordingly prepared for the task. Towards midnight on 3 May the crew, dressed as Turks, stepped aboard the small boat, which was towed to the boom. Sporting the Ottoman flag, it unfurled its sail and slipped unnoticed through the enemy patrol and headed west down the Marmara under cover of darkness.

  Mehmet continued to bombard the walls despite technical difficulties with the big guns. On 6 May he decided that the time was right for a knock-out blow: ‘he ordered all of the army to march once more on the city and to make war for all day’. News from within the city probably convinced him that morale was collapsing; other reports may have warned him of the slowly gathering momentum of an Italian relief force. He sensed that the weakness of the central section of wall was now at a critical point. He decided to attempt another major attack.

  The big guns opened up on 6 May, supported by smaller cannon in the now familiar pattern of firing, accompanied by ‘cries and the banging of castanets to frighten the people of the city’. Soon another portion of wall fell in. The defenders waited for nightfall to make their repairs but on this occasion the guns continued firing in the dark. It became impossible to repair the gap. The following morning the cannon again plugged away at the base of the wall and brought down a further substantial section. All day the Ottomans kept firing. At about 7 o’clock at night, with the customary din, a massive assault was launched at the breach. Away in the harbour the Christian sailors heard the wild cries and stood to arms, fearing a matching attack by the Ottoman fleet. Thousands of men crossed the ditch and ran for the breach, but numbers were not an advantage in the limited space and they trampled one another in their attempt to force their way in. Giustiniani rushed to meet the intruders and a desperate hand-to-hand struggle took place in the gap.

  In the first wave, a Janissary called Murat led the assault, slashing fiercely at Giustiniani, who was only saved from death by a Greek jumping down from the wall and cutting off his assailant’s legs with an axe. A second wave was led by one Omar Bey, the standard bearer of the European army – and was met by a substantial contingent of Greeks commanded by their officer Rhangabes. In the slashing, hacking confusion, the two leaders squared up to each other in single combat in front of their men. Omar ‘bared his sword, he attacked him and with fury did they slash at each other. Rhangabes stepped on a rock, grasped his sword with two hands, struck him on the shoulder, and cut him into two, for he had great strength in his arms.’ Infuriated at the death of their commander, the Ottoman troops encircled Rhangabes and cut him down. Like a scene from the Iliad, the two sides surged forward to try to seize the body. The Greeks were desperate to gain control of the corpse and piled out of the gates, ‘but they were unable and suffered many losses’. The Ottomans cut the mutilated body to pieces and drove the Greek soldiers back into the city. For three hours the battle raged on but the defenders successfully held the line. As the fighting died down, the cannon started to open up again to prevent the breach being filled and the Ottomans launched a second diversionary raid, trying to set fire to the gate near the palace. This was again defeated. In the darkness Giustiniani and the exhausted defenders worked to rebuild the makeshift defences. Because of the firing at the wall, they were forced to build their protective barrier of earth and timber slightly inside its original line. The wall was holding – but only just. And inside the city ‘there was great mourning and dread among the Greeks over Rhangabes, because he was a great warrior, was courageous, and was beloved of the Emperor’.

  For the defenders the continuous cycles of bombardment, attack and repair began to blur. Like diaries of trench warfare, the chroniclers’ accounts become repetitive and monotonous. ‘On the eleventh of May’, records Barbaro, ‘on this day nothing happened either on land or at sea except a considerable bombardment of the walls from the landward side, and nothing else worth mentioning happened … on the thirteenth of May there came some Turks to the walls, skirmishing, but nothing significant happened during the whole day and night, except for continuous bombardment of the unfortunate walls.’ Nestor-Iskander starts to lose track of time; events jump out of sequence, converge and repeat. Both soldiers and civilians were growing weary of fighting, repairing, burying corpses and counting the enemy dead. The Ottomans, with their scrupulous concern for the hygiene of their camp, carried their casualties away and burned the bodies daily but the ditches were still choked with rotting corpses. The slaughter risked contaminating water supplies: ‘the blood remained in the rivers and putrefied in the streams, giving off a great stench’. Within the city the people turned increasingly to the churches and the miracle-working power of their icons, preoccupied by sin and the theological explanation for events. ‘Thus one could see throughout the entire city all the people and the women who came in miraculous procession to the churches of God with tears, praising and giving thanks to God and to the most pure Mother of God.’ In the Ottoman camp the hours of the day were marked out by the call to prayer; dervishes went among the troops enjoining the faithful to hold fast and remember the prophecies of the Hadith: ‘In the jihad against Constantinople, one third of Muslims will allow themselves to be defeated, which Allah cannot forgive; one third will be killed in battle, making them wondrous martyrs; and one third will be victorious.’

  As losses continued to mount, Constantine and his commanders hunted anxiously for resources to fill the gaps, but the difficulty of getting all the defenders to co-operate continued to frustrate their best efforts. The Grand Duke Lucas Notaras quarrelled with Giustiniani, while the Venetians largely operated as an independent force. The only supply of untapped manpower and weapons remained on the galleys, and an appeal was made to the Venetian community accordingly. On 8 May the Venetian Council of the Twelve met and voted to unload the arms stored on the three Venetian great galleys, to transfer the men to the walls and then sink the galleys in the arsenal. It was a desperate measure designed to ensure the full-hearted involvement of the sailors in the fate of the city but it provoked another furious backlash. As the unloading was about to begin, the cr
ews leaped to bar the gangways with drawn swords, declaring: ‘Let us see who will take the cargoes from these galleys! … we know that once we have unloaded these galleys and sunk them in the arsenal, at once the Greeks will keep us in their city by plain force as their own slaves, while we are now free either to go or to stay.’ Fearing the destruction of their one means of safety, the captains and crews sealed their ships and sat tight. All day bombardment of the land walls continued with unbridled ferocity. The urgency of the situation forced the council to meet again the following day and amend its plans. This time the captain of the two long galleys, Gabriel Trevisano, agreed to disarm his ships and take his 400 men to join the defence at the St Romanus Gate. It took four days to persuade the men to co-operate and to move the equipment. By the time they arrived on 13 May it was almost too late.

  Although Mehmet had concentrated his fire on the area of the St Romanus Gate, some guns continued to blast away at a spot near the palace where the Theodosian wall formed its awkward junction with the single wall. By 12 May the guns had demolished a section of outer wall and Mehmet decided to make a concentrated night attack on this spot. Towards midnight a huge force advanced on the breach. The defenders were taken by surprise and forced back from the wall by a force commanded by Mustapha, the standard-bearer of the Anatolian army. Further reinforcements rushed from other sections of the wall but the Ottomans continued to push them back and began to mount scaling ladders against the wall. Terror broke out in the narrow streets around the palace. The townspeople ran fleeing from the wall and many ‘believed that night that the city was lost’.

  At this moment, according to Nestor-Iskander, a grim council of war was taking place three miles away in the porch of St Sophia. It had become unavoidable to confront the gravity of the situation. The defenders were being relentlessly thinned out day after day: ‘if it continues on, all of us will perish and they will take the city’. Confronted with this reality, Constantine was laying a series of blunt options before his commanders: they could either sally out of the city at night and try to defeat the Ottomans in surprise attack or they could sit tight and await the inevitable, hoping for rescue by the Hungarians or the Italians. Lucas Notaras was suggesting that they should continue to hold out while others were again begging Constantine to leave the city, when word arrived that ‘the Turks were already ascending the wall and overpowering the townspeople’.

  Constantine galloped towards the palace. In the darkness he met citizens and soldiers fleeing from the breach. In vain he tried to turn them back but the situation was deteriorating by the minute. Ottoman cavalry had started to penetrate the city and the fighting was now taking place inside the walls. The arrival of Constantine and his bodyguard managed to rally the Greek soldiers: ‘the Emperor arrived, cried out to his own men, and made them stronger’. With the help of Giustiniani he forced the intruders back, trapped them in the maze of narrow streets and divided their forces in two. Cornered, the Ottomans counter-attacked fiercely, trying to get at the emperor. Unscathed and excited by the chase Constantine drove some of them back as far as the breach – and would have galloped after them ‘but the nobles of the imperial suite and his German guards stopped him and prevailed on him to ride back’. The Ottoman troops who could not escape were massacred in the dark lanes. Next morning the townspeople dragged the corpses up to the walls and hurled them into the ditch for their comrades to collect. The city had survived but each attack was lengthening the odds of survival.

  This was to be Mehmet’s last major assault on the palace section of wall. Despite its failure he must have felt that success was within his grasp. He seems now to have decided to concentrate all his firepower on the weakest stretch of all – the St Romanus Gate. On 14 May, when he learned that the Christians had disarmed some of their galleys and withdrawn the majority of their fleet into a small harbour back from the boom, he concluded that his ships in the Horn were relatively safe from attack. He then moved his guns from Galata Hill round to the land walls. At first he stationed them to bombard the wall near the palace; when this proved ineffectual he moved them again to St Romanus. Increasingly the guns were concentrated at one spot rather than being spread out along a broad front. The bombardments became ever more furious: ‘Day and night these cannon did not stop firing at our poor walls, battering large portions of wall to the ground, and we in the city worked day and night to effect good repairs where the walls were smashed, with barrels and brushwood and earth and whatever else was necessary to do this.’ It was here that the fresh men from the long galleys under Trevisano were stationed with ‘good cannon and good guns and a large number of crossbows and other equipment’.

  At the same time Mehmet ensured that the ships defending the boom were kept under constant pressure. On 16 May at the twenty-second hour some brigantines were seen to detach themselves from the main Ottoman fleet out in the straits and head at full speed for the boom. The watching sailors assumed them to be Christian conscripts escaping from the fleet ‘and we Christians who were at the chain waited them with great pleasure’. As they drew near however, they loosed shots at the defenders. At once the Italians launched their own brigantines to see them off and the intruders turned to escape. The Christian ships nearly caught them before ‘they hurriedly started rowing and escaped back to their fleet’. The following day the Ottomans tested the boom again with five fast fustae. They were seen off with a hail of ‘more than seventy shots’.

  A third and final assault on the boom was mounted before daybreak on 21 May, this time by the whole fleet. They came rowing hard towards the chain ‘with a great sounding of their tambourines and castanets in an attempt to frighten us’, then stopped, eyeing up the strength of their opponents. The ships at the boom were armed and ready and a major sea battle seemed about to unfold when suddenly the alarm was heard from within the city signalling a general attack. At this, all the ships in the Horn rushed to action stations and the Ottoman fleet appeared to have second thoughts. It turned about and sailed back to the Double Columns, so that ‘two hours after sunrise there was complete calm on both sides, as if no attack by sea had taken place’. It was the last attempt on the boom. In all likelihood the morale in the Ottoman fleet, largely manned by Christian rowers, was now too low to mount a serious challenge to the Christian ships, but these manoeuvres ensured that the defenders could never relax.

  Elsewhere the Muslims were ominously busy. On 19 May Ottoman engineers finished the construction of a pontoon bridge ready to swing across the Horn just beyond the walls. It was another extraordinary feat of improvisation. The pontoons comprised a thousand large barrels, doubtless obtained from the wine-drinking Christians at Galata, tied together in pairs lengthways and planked on top to provide a carriageway wide enough for five soldiers to walk abreast and solid enough to support a cart. The aim was to shorten communications round the top of the Horn between the two wings of his army. Barbaro suggests that Mehmet was preparing the pontoon bridge in readiness for a general attack when he might want to move his men quickly, but that it was only floated into its final position across the Horn at the end of the siege, for ‘if the bridge had been stretched across the Horn before the all-out attack, a single shot from a cannon would have broken it’. All these preparations could be seen from the city walls. They provided the defenders with an ominous sense of the huge resources of manpower and materials that Mehmet could bring to the siege, but it was engineering work that they could not yet see that was soon to throw the Christians into deeper panic.

  By the middle of May Mehmet had stretched the defences of the city to the limit but they had still not cracked. He had employed the resources of his army and navy to the full, in assault, bombardment and blockade, three of the key techniques of medieval siege warfare. There remained one classic strategy as yet largely untried – mining.

  Within the Ottoman vassal states in Serbia lay Novo Brdo, the most important city in the interior of the Balkans, famed throughout Europe for the wealth of its silver mines. The Sla
v troops conscripted for the campaign included a band of skilled miners from the city, probably Saxon immigrants, ‘masters in the art of digging and cutting away mountains, to whose tools marble was as wax and the black mountains as piles of dust’. They had made an early attempt at mining under the walls in the central section, but this had been abandoned because the ground was unsuitable. In mid-May, as other methods failed and the siege dragged on into its second month, another initiative was started, this time near the single wall of the palace. Mining, although laborious, was one of the most successful techniques for bringing down walls, and had been profitably employed by Muslim armies for hundreds of years. By the end of the twelfth century Saladin’s successors had learned to capture the great crusader castles within six weeks through a combination of bombardment and mining.

  Sometime in mid-May the Saxon silver miners, hidden by palisades and bunkers, started to dig the 250 yards to the wall from behind the Ottoman trenches. It was skilled, exhausting work and nightmarishly difficult. Lit by smoking torches, the miners excavated narrow subterranean tunnels, propping them with timber supports as they went. Attempts to undermine the walls in earlier Ottoman sieges had proved unsuccessful, and it was the received wisdom of old men in the city that mining would inevitably fail because the ground beneath the walls was mostly solid rock. In the dead of night on 16 May the defenders were aghast to discover the falsity of this notion. By chance soldiers on the ramparts heard the clink of pickaxes and the sound of muffled voices coming from the ground inside the wall. The mine had evidently passed under the ramparts and was intended to provide a secret point of entry into the city. Notaras and Constantine were quickly notified. A panicky conference was called and a search was made throughout the city for men with mining experience to confront this new threat. The man chosen to organize the defence against attack from underground was something of a curiosity: ‘John Grant, a German, a skilful soldier, highly trained in military matters’, had come to the siege in the company of Giustiniani. He was in fact a Scotsman who had apparently worked in Germany. It is impossible to guess at the sequence of events that had brought him to Constantinople. He was evidently a highly skilled professional soldier, siege specialist and engineer and for a brief moment he occupied a central role in one of the strangest sub-plots in the story of the struggle.