Constantinople- the Last Great Siege, 1453

by Roger Crowley

  Churches and monasteries were particularly sought out. Those near the land walls – the military church of St George by the Charisian Gate, the Church of St John the Baptist at Petra and the Chora Monastery – were quickly plundered. The miracle-working icon of the Hodegetria was hacked into four pieces and divided among the soldiers for its valuable frame. Crosses were smashed from the roofs of the churches; the tombs of saints were cracked open and searched for treasures; their contents torn to pieces and thrown into the streets. The church treasures – chalices, goblets and ‘holy artefacts and precious and sumptuous robes embroidered with much gold and glittering with precious stones and pearls’ – were carted away and melted down. The altars were torn down and the ‘walls of churches and sanctuaries were ransacked … looking for gold’. ‘The consecrated images of God’s saints’ witnessed scenes of rape, according to Leonard. Entering the convents, nuns were ‘led to the fleet and ravished’; the monks were killed in their cells or ‘hauled out of the churches where they had sought sanctuary, and driven away with insults and dishonour’. The tombs of the emperors were smashed open with iron bars in search of hidden gold. These ‘and ten thousand other terrible things were done’, Kritovoulos mournfully recorded. In a few hours a thousand years of Christian Constantinople largely disappeared.

  In front of this tidal wave, those who could, panicked and ran. Many headed for St Sophia guided by instinct and superstition. They remembered the old prophecy that the enemy would penetrate the city as far as the Column of Constantine, near the great church, when an avenging angel would descend, sword in hand, and inspire the defenders to drive them out of the city ‘and from the West and from Anatolia itself to the place called the Red Apple tree on the borders of Persia’. Inside the church, a large congregation of clergy and laity, men, women and children gathered for the service of matins and to put their faith in God. The massive bronze doors of the church were swung shut and barred. It was eight in the morning.

  The doors of St Sophia

  Elsewhere, some of the outlying areas of the city were able to negotiate wholesale surrender. By the middle of the fifteenth century the population of Constantinople was so shrunk within its outer walls that some parts of the city were separate villages, protected by their own walls and palisades. Some of these – Studion on the Marmara and the fishing village of Petrion near the Horn – voluntarily opened their gates on condition that their houses would be spared the general ransack. The headman in each case was conducted to the sultan to make formal surrender of his village and Mehmet probably detailed a detachment of military police to protect the houses. Such acts of surrender could be held to secure immunity under Islamic laws of war, and a number of churches and monasteries survived intact as a result. Elsewhere, heroic or desperate pockets of resistance continued. Down on the Horn, a group of Cretan sailors barricaded themselves into three towers and refused to surrender. All morning they resisted Ottoman attempts to dislodge them. Many on the sea walls furthest from the land wall also battled on, often ignorant of the true situation until they suddenly found the enemy in their rear. Some threw themselves from the battlements, others surrendered to the enemy unconditionally. Prince Orhan, the pretender to the Ottoman throne, and his small band of Turks had no such options. They fought on, as did the Catalans stationed further along the sea wall near the Bucoleon Palace.

  In the midst of this unfolding destruction, the Ottoman sailors took a fateful decision. When they saw the army within the walls, and fearing that they would miss the chance to plunder, they drove their ships up onto the shore and abandoned them ‘to search for gold, jewels and other riches’. So keen were the sailors to get ashore down on the Horn that they ignored the Italians fleeing over the walls the other way. It was to be a rare stroke of luck.

  The search for booty became obsessive. The Jewish quarter down by the Horn was an early target for plundering, due to its traditional trade in gems, and Italian merchants similarly were eagerly sought out. As the day wore on booty collection became more organized. The first troop to enter a house raised a flag outside to indicate that it had already been stripped; other parties automatically moved on to look elsewhere: ‘and so they put their flags everywhere, even on monasteries and churches’. The men worked in teams, carting off the prisoners and plunder back to the camp or the ships, then returning for more. No corner was left untouched: ‘churches, old vaults and tombs, cloisters, underground chambers and hidden places and crannies and caves and holes. And they searched in all the hidden corners, and if there was anyone or anything hidden there, they dragged it into the light.’ Some even engaged in secondary activity, stealing the unguarded booty deposited back in the camp.

  Meanwhile the struggle for survival went on. During the course of the morning hundreds of individual fates were decided by luck. Cardinal Isidore, the Archbishop of Kiev, with the help of his servants, managed to swap his sumptuous episcopal robes for those of a soldier lying dead in the street. Ottoman troops soon came across the corpse dressed in the bishop’s robes, cut off the head and carried it in triumph through the streets. The elderly Isidore was himself quickly captured but, unrecognized, seemed too wretched to be worth the bother of dragging off into slavery. For a small sum of money he bought his freedom from his captors on the spot and managed to get aboard one of the Italian ships in the harbour. Prince Orhan was less fortunate. Dressed as a soldier and with a fluent command of Greek he sought to make good his escape from the sea walls but was recognized and pursued. Seeing that his situation was hopeless he hurled himself off the battlements. The severed head was taken to Mehmet, who had been anxious to know his fate. Other leading notables were captured alive – Lucas Notaras and his family were taken, probably in their palace, George Sphrantzes and his family likewise. The monk Gennadios, who had led the anti-unionist cause, was captured in his cell. The Catalans fought on until they were all killed or captured, but the Cretans in their towers beside the Golden Horn proved impossible to dislodge. Eventually someone reported their resistance to Mehmet. In a characteristically quixotic gesture, he offered them a truce and the chance to sail away in their ships. After some hesitation they accepted the offer and departed, free men.

  For many, the Horn seemed to offer the best chance of escape. During the early morning hundreds of soldiers and civilians streamed down the narrow lanes hoping to clamber aboard the Italian ships in the harbour. The scene at the sea gates was one of confusion and panic. In headlong flight many hurled themselves into crowded rowing boats that capsized and sank, drowning their occupants. The sense of tragedy was magnified by a decision taken by some of the gatekeepers. Seeing their Greek compatriots fleeing to the shore and remembering the prophecy that the enemy could be turned back at the statue of Constantine, they decided that the defenders could be persuaded to turn and drive the enemy out if their exit was barred. Accordingly they threw the keys away from the top of the wall and prevented further escape. As any means of reaching the Italian galleys offshore disappeared, the scene on the foreshore became increasingly pitiful – ‘men, women, monks and nuns crying pitifully, beating their breasts, imploring the ships to come in and rescue them’ – but the situation aboard the galleys was also panic-stricken and the captains were torn on how best to proceed. By the time the Florentine merchant Giacomo Tetaldi reached the shore, two hours after the collapse of the front line, there was nothing for it but to swim or await ‘the fury of the Turks’. Preferring to risk death by drowning, he stripped off his clothes and struck out for the ships and was hauled aboard. He was just in time. Looking back, he saw about forty more soldiers, seized by the Ottomans in the very act of removing their armour to follow him. ‘May God help them,’ he wrote. Some of the distraught figures lining the shore were rescued from across the water by the Podesta of Galata and persuaded to accept the comparative safety of the Genoese colony: ‘not without great danger, I brought back into the town those at the palisade; you never saw such a terrible thing’.

  On board the Italian s
hips there was paralysing indecision. They had heard the defiant clanging of the church bells die away in the early morning, the sound of screaming floating across the water as the Ottoman sailors brought their ships ashore and stormed the walls of the Horn. The Venetians had seen too the pitiful spectacle of the population imploring the captains to bring their craft inshore or drowning in their attempts to reach them, but it was too dangerous to risk approaching the shore; apart from the obvious danger of being captured by the enemy, a sudden stampede by desperate people at the water’s edge could easily risk the safety of a vessel. In addition a large part of the Italian galley crews had been sent to man the walls and ships were alarmingly short-crewed. Yet the behaviour of the Ottoman fleet which had abandoned its vessels to take part in the plunder was a massive stroke of good luck and presented, doubtless only for a short time, the possibility of escape. It was imperative that the galley fleet acted decisively before Ottoman naval discipline was restored.

  The mood of uncertainty was mirrored in Galata. When it was obvious that the city had been taken the people panicked. ‘I always knew that if Constantinople was lost, this place was also lost,’ recorded Angelo Lomellino, the podesta, afterwards. The question was how to react. Mehmet’s attitude to the Genoese, whom he considered to be guilty of collaboration in the defence of the city, was uncertain. The majority of its able-bodied men were indeed fighting across the water, including the podesta’s own nephew. There were only 600 men left in the town. Many were tempted to quit Galata at once. A large number of people boarded a Genoese ship to make their escape, abandoning their homes and possessions; another boat, largely carrying women, was captured by Ottoman ships, but Lomellino decided to set an example and sit tight. He reckoned that if he himself abandoned the city, sack would be inevitable.

  In the midst of these deliberations the captain of the Venetian fleet, Aluvixe Diedo, accompanied by his armourer and the surgeon Nicolo Barbaro, put ashore to consult with the podesta on what to do: should the Genoese and Venetian ships jointly confront the Ottomans, openly declaring a state of war between the Italian Republics and the sultan, or should they make good their escape? Lomellino begged them to wait while he sent an ambassador to Mehmet, but for the Venetian captains time was pressing. They had delayed as long as possible to collect those survivors who could swim away from the stricken city and they dared wait no longer, given the difficulty of preparing their ships for sea. Diedo and his companions in Galata could see the galleys getting ready to depart in the bay below them and were hurrying back through the streets to rejoin their ships, when they discovered, to their horror, that Lomellino had barred the gates to prevent a mass exodus. ‘We were in a terrible situation,’ Barbaro recalled. ‘We were shut in their town, the galleys suddenly began to raise their sails, spreading them and drawing in their oars, ready to leave without their captain.’ They could see their ships preparing to sail away and it was certain that Mehmet would not deal kindly with the captain of the enemy fleet. Desperately they implored the podesta to let them go. Finally he permitted the gates to be opened. Just in time they made it to the foreshore and were taken back on board. The galleys slowly kedged their way up to the chain, which still barred the mouth of the bay. Two men leaped down into the water with axes and hacked away at one of the wooden floating sections of the boom until it gave way. One by one the ships hauled themselves out into the Bosphorus, while Ottoman commanders watched from the shore in impotent fury. The flotilla of ships rounded the point of Galata and formed up in the now empty Ottoman harbour at the Double Columns. There they waited in the hope of taking their shipmates and other survivors on board but by midday it was clear that all had been killed or captured and they could wait no longer. For a second time fate smiled on Christian ships. The south wind which had propelled the Genoese ships up the straits so helpfully in late April was now blowing a powerful twelve knots from the north. Without this stroke of luck, Barbaro acknowledged, ‘all of us would have been captured’.

  And so, ‘at midday with the help of the Lord God, Master Aluvixe Diedo, the captain of the Tana fleet, set sail on his galley’, and with him a small flotilla of ships and galleys from Venice and Crete. One of the great galleys from Trebizond, which had lost 164 of its crew, had great difficulty hoisting its sails, but there was no one to oppose them and they surged down the Marmara, past the corpses of Christians and Muslims floating out to sea, ‘like melons along a canal’, and away towards the Dardanelles with a mixture of relief at their good fortune and regret for the memory of their lost shipmates, ‘some of whom had been drowned, some dead in the bombardment or killed in the battle in other ways’, including Trevisano himself. They carried 400 survivors rescued in the final chaotic hours, as well as a surprising number of Byzantine nobles who had already boarded before the city fell. Seven ships from Genoa also got away, among them the galley carrying the wounded Giustiniani. Even as they did so Hamza Bey managed to regroup the Ottoman fleet, which swept round into the mouth of the Horn and captured fifteen ships, belonging to the emperor, Ancona and the Genoese, which were still lying there, some too overcrowded with refugees to sail. Other pitiful groups of figures stood on the foreshore, wailing and beseeching the departing galleys. Ottoman marines simply rounded them up and herded them onto their own vessels.

  It is three miles from the land walls to the heart of the city. By dawn determined bands of Janissaries were already forcing their way down the central thoroughfare from the St Romanus Gate, intent on St Sophia. Alongside the legend of the Red Apple there was a belief, widely circulated in the Ottoman camp, that the crypt of St Sophia, so visible on the distant skyline during the weeks of fruitless siege, contained an enormous treasure of gold, silver and precious stones. The Janissaries clattered through the destitute squares and deserted highways – past the Forum of the Ox and the Forum of Theodosius and down the Mese, the Middle Way that led into the heart of the city. Others came through the Charisian Gate further north past the Church of the Holy Apostles, which remained unsacked: it seems that Mehmet had placed a guard on the church to limit the wholesale devastation of the city’s monuments. There was little resistance. When they reached the Forum of Constantine where the founder of the city gazed down from his imperial column, no angel turned them back with a fiery sword. At the same time sailors from the Horn and Marmara fleets were storming through the bazaars and churches at the tip of the peninsula. By seven in the morning both groups had reached the centre of the city and poured into the forum of the Augusteum. Here stood the greatest remaining trophies of Byzantium’s imperial splendour – Justinian still riding towards the rising sun, the Milion, the milepost from which all distances in the empire were measured; beyond it on one side lay the Hippodrome and some of Constantine the Great’s original plunder – ornaments that linked the city to an even more ancient past: the strange triple-headed brass serpent column from the temple of Apollo at Delphi, a commemorative token for a Greek victory against the Persians at the battle of Plataea in 479 bc, and even older, the Egyptian column of the Pharaoh Tutmose III. The perfectly preserved hieroglyphs on its polished granite surface were already three thousand years old when Ottoman troops looked up at them for the first time. On the other side stood St Sophia itself, the Great Church, rising ‘to the very heavens’.

  Inside, the service of matins had begun and the nine massive brass-fronted wooden doors, surmounted by their protective crosses, were barred shut. The huge congregation prayed for a miracle to save them from the enemy at the gate. The women had taken their usual places in the gallery, the men downstairs. The priests were at the altar conducting the service. Some people hid themselves in the furthest recesses of the great structure, climbing up into the service passages and onto the roof. When the Janissaries surged into the inner courtyard and found the doors barred, they started to batter down the central one, the imperial gate, reserved for the entrance of the emperor and his entourage. Under repeated axe blows, the four-inch thick door shuddered and crashed open and the Otto
man troops poured into the great building. Above them the mosaic figure of Christ in blue and gold watched impassively, his right hand raised in blessing, and in his left a book inscribed with the words ‘Peace be with you, I am the light of the world.’