CONSTANTINOPLE
The Last Great Siege
1453
ROGER CROWLEY
For Jan with love, wounded at the sea wall
in pursuit of the siege
Constantinople is a city larger than its renown proclaims. May God in his grace and generosity deign to make it the capital of Islam.
Hasan Ali Al-Harawi, twelfth-century Arab writer
I shall tell the story of the tremendous perils … of Constantinople, which I observed at close quarters with my own eyes.
Leonard of Chios
Table of Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
List of Illustrations
Maps
Note on Sources
Prologue: The Red Apple
Chapter One: The Burning Sea
Chapter Two: Dreaming of Istanbul
Chapter Three: Sultan and Emperor
Chapter Four: Cutting the Throat
Chapter Five: The Dark Church
Chapter Six: The Wall and the Gun
Chapter Seven: Numerous as the Stars
Chapter Eight: The Awful Resurrection Blast
Chapter Nine: A Wind from God
Chapter Ten: Spirals of Blood
Chapter Eleven: Terrible Engines
Chapter Twelve: Omens and Portents
Chapter Thirteen: ‘Remember the Date’
Chapter Fourteen: The Locked Gates
Chapter Fifteen: A Handful of Dust
Chapter Sixteen: The Present Terror of the World
Epilogue: Resting Places
Illustrations
About the Sources
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgements
Credits
Praise
About the Author
Copyright
List of Illustrations
1 Map of Constantinople from Liber insularium Archipelagi by Christoforo Boundelmonti c.1480
2 Portrait of Sultan Mehmet II c.1480, attributed to Shiblizade Ahmet
3 View of the nave of St Sophia
4 The imperial palace of Blachernae, from a nineteenth-century photograph
5 The Theodosian wall
6 The great chain strung across the Golden Horn, from a nineteenth-century photograph
7 Bronze siege gun in the courtyard of the Military Museum, Istanbul (author’s photograph)
8 A Turkish Janissary, late-fifteenth-century, by Gentile Bellini
9 The siege of Constantinople from Le Voyage d’Outremer by Bertrandon de la Broquière c.1455
10 Entry of Mehmet II into Constantinople, 29 May 1453 by Benjamin Constant, 1876
11 St Sophia transformed into a mosque, German School, sixteenth century
12 Portrait of Sultan Mehmet II, c.1480 by Gentile Bellini
13 The Palace of the Despots, Mistra, Greece
Maps
Note on Sources
All references to authors relate to their books listed in the bibliography, and can be found at the end of each chapter.
Prologue: The Red Apple
A red apple invites stones.
Turkish proverb
Early spring. A black kite swings on the Istanbul wind. It turns lazy circles round the Suleymaniye mosque as if tethered to the minarets. From here it can survey a city of fifteen million people, watching the passing of days and centuries through imperturbable eyes.
When some ancestor of this bird circled Constantinople on a cold day in March 1453, the layout of the city would have been familiar, though far less cluttered. The site is remarkable, a rough triangle upturned slightly at its eastern point like an aggressive rhino’s horn and protected on two sides by sea. To the north lies the sheltered deep-water inlet of the Golden Horn; the south side is flanked by the Sea of Marmara that swells westward into the Mediterranean through the bottleneck of the Dardanelles. From the air one can pick out the steady, unbroken line of fortifications that guard these two seaward sides of the triangle and see how the sea currents rip past the tip of the rhino horn at seven knots: the city’s defences are natural as well as man made.
But it is the base of the triangle that is most extraordinary. A complex, triple collar of walls, studded with closely spaced towers and flanked by a formidable ditch, it stretches from the Horn to the Marmara and seals the city from attack. This is the thousand-year-old land wall of Theodosius, the most formidable defence in the medieval world. To the Ottoman Turks of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries it was ‘a bone in the throat of Allah’– a psychological problem that taunted their ambitions and cramped their dreams of conquest. To Western Christendom it was the bulwark against Islam. It kept them secure from the Muslim world and made them complacent.
An imaginative view of the city in the fifteenth century. Galata is on the far right
Looking down on the scene in the spring of 1453 one would also be able to make out the fortified Genoese town of Galata, a tiny Italian city state on the far side of the Horn, and to see exactly where Europe ends. The Bosphorus divides the continents, cutting like a river through low wooded hills to the Black Sea. On the other side lies Asia Minor, Anatolia – in Greek literally the East. The snow-capped peaks of Mount Olympus glitter in the thin light sixty miles away.
Looking back into Europe, the terrain stretches out in gentler, undulating folds towards the Ottoman city of Edirne, 140 miles west. And it is in this landscape that the all-seeing eye would pick out something significant. Down the rough tracks that link the two cities, huge columns of men are marching; white caps and red turbans advance in clustered masses; bows, javelins, matchlocks and shields catch the low sun; squadrons of outriding cavalry kick up the mud as they pass; chain mail ripples and chinks. Behind come the lengthy baggage trains of mules, horses and camels with all the paraphernalia of warfare and the personnel who supply it – miners, cooks, gunsmiths, mullahs, carpenters and booty hunters. And further back something else still. Huge teams of oxen and hundreds of men are hauling guns with immense difficulty over the soft ground. The whole Ottoman army is on the move.
The wider the gaze, the more details of this operation unfold. Like the backdrop of a medieval painting, a fleet of oared ships can be seen moving with laborious sloth against the wind, from the direction of the Dardanelles. High-sided transports are setting sail from the Black Sea with cargoes of wood, grain and cannon balls. From Anatolia, bands of shepherds, holy men, camp followers and vagabonds are slipping down to the Bosphorus out of the plateau, obeying the Ottoman call to arms. This ragged pattern of men and equipment constitutes the co-ordinated movement of an army with a single objective: Constantinople, capital of what little remains in 1453 of the ancient empire of Byzantium.
The medieval peoples about to engage in this struggle were intensely superstitious. They believed in prophecy and looked for omens. Within Constantinople, the ancient monuments and statues were sources of magic. People saw there the future of the world encrypted in the narratives on Roman columns whose original stories had been lost. They read signs in the weather and found the spring of 1453 unsettling. It was unusually wet and cold. Banks of fog hung thickly over the Bosphorus in March. There were earth tremors and unseasonal snow. Within a city taut with expectation it was an ill omen, perhaps even a portent of the world’s end.
The approaching Ottomans also had their superstitions. The object of their offensive was known quite simply as the Red Apple, a symbol of world power. Its capture represented an ardent Islamic desire that stretched back 800 years, almost to the Prophet himself, and it was hedged about with legend, predictions and apocryphal sayings. In the imagina
tion of the advancing army, the apple had a specific location within the city. Outside the mother church of St Sophia on a column 100 feet high stood a huge equestrian statue of the Emperor Justinian in bronze, a monument to the might of the early Byzantine Empire and a symbol of its role as a Christian bulwark against the East. According to the sixth century writer Procopius, it was astonishing.
The horse faces East and is a noble sight. On this horse is a huge statue of the Emperor, dressed like Achilles … his breastplate is in the heroic style; while the helmet covering his head seems to move up and down and it gleams dazzlingly. He looks towards the rising sun, riding, it seems to me towards the Persians. In his left hand he carries a globe, the sculptor signifying by this that all earth and sea are subject to him, though he has neither sword nor spear nor other weapon, except that on the globe stands the cross through which alone he has achieved his kingdom and his mastery of war.
The statue of Justinian
It was in the globe of Justinian surmounted by a cross that the Turks had precisely located the Red Apple and it was this they were coming for: the reputation of the fabulously old Christian empire and the possibility of world power that it seemed to contain.
Fear of siege was etched deep in the memory of the Byzantines. It was the bogeyman that haunted their libraries, their marble chambers and their mosaic churches, but they knew it too well to be surprised. In the 1,123 years up to the spring of 1453 the city had been besieged some twenty-three times. It had fallen just once – not to the Arabs or the Bulgars but to the Christian knights of the Fourth Crusade in one of the most bizarre episodes in Christian history. The land walls had never been breached, though they had been flattened by earthquake in the fifth century. Otherwise they had held firm, so that when the army of Sultan Mehmet finally reined up outside the city on 6 April 1453, the defenders had reasonable hopes of survival.
What led up to this moment and what happened next is the subject of this book. It is a tale of human courage and cruelty, of technical ingenuity, luck, cowardice, prejudice and mystery. It also touches on many other aspects of a world on the cusp of change: the development of guns, the art of siege warfare, naval tactics, the religious beliefs, myths and superstitions of medieval people. But above all it is the story of a place – of sea currents, hills, peninsulas and weather – the way the land rises and falls and how the straits divide two continents so narrowly ‘they almost kiss’, where the city is strong, defended by rocky shores, and the particular features of geology that render it vulnerable to attack. It was the possibilities of this site – what it offered for trade, defence and food – that made Constantinople the key to imperial destinies and brought so many armies to its gate. ‘The seat of the Roman Empire is Constantinople’, wrote George Trapezuntios, ‘and he who is and remains Emperor of the Romans is also the Emperor of the whole earth.’
Modern nationalisms have interpreted the siege of Constantinople as a struggle between the Greek and Turkish peoples, but such simplifications are misleading. Neither side would have readily accepted or even understood these labels, though each used them of the other. The Ottomans, literally the tribe of Osman, called themselves just that, or simply Muslims. ‘Turk’ was a largely pejorative term applied by the nation states of the West, the name ‘Turkey’ unknown to them until borrowed from Europe to create the new Republic in 1923. The Ottoman Empire in 1453 was already a multicultural creation that sucked in the peoples it conquered with little concern for ethnic identity. Its crack troops were Slavs, its leading general Greek, its admiral Bulgarian, its sultan probably half Serbian or Macedonian. Furthermore under the complex code of medieval vassalage, thousands of Christian troops accompanied him down the road from Edirne. They had come to conquer the Greek-speaking inhabitants of Constantinople, whom we now call the Byzantines, a word first used in English in 1853, exactly 400 years after the great siege. They were considered to be heirs to the Roman Empire and referred to themselves accordingly as Romans. In turn they were commanded by an emperor who was half Serbian and a quarter Italian, and much of the defence was undertaken by people from Western Europe whom the Byzantines called ‘Franks’: Venetians, Genoese and Catalans, aided by some ethnic Turks, Cretans – and one Scotsman. If it is difficult to fix simple identities or loyalties to the participants at the siege, there was one dimension of the struggle that all the contemporary chroniclers never forgot – that of faith. The Muslims referred to their adversary as ‘the despicable infidels’, ‘the wretched unbelievers’, ‘the enemies of the Faith’; in response they were called ‘pagans’, ‘heathen infidels’, ‘the faithless Turks’. Constantinople was the front line in a long-distance struggle between Islam and Christianity for the true faith. It was a place where different versions of the truth had confronted each other in war and truce for 800 years and it was here in the spring of 1453 that new and lasting attitudes between the two great monotheisms were to be cemented in one intense moment of history.
Source Notes
Epigraph
‘Constantinople is a city . . .’, quoted Stacton, p. 153
‘I shall tell the story . . .’, Melville Jones, p. 12
Source Notes
Prologue
1 ‘The horse faces East . . .’, Procopius, p. 35
2 ‘The seat of the Roman . . .’, Mansel, p. 1
1 The Burning Sea
629–717
O Christ, ruler and master of the world, to You now I dedicate this subject city, and these sceptres and the might of Rome.
Inscription on the column of Constantine the Great in Constantinople
Islam’s desire for the city is almost as old as Islam itself. The origin of the holy war for Constantinople starts with the Prophet himself in an incident whose literal truth, like so much of the city’s history, cannot be verified.
In the year 629, Heraclius, ‘Autocrat of the Romans’ and twenty-eighth Emperor of Byzantium, was making a pilgrimage on foot to Jerusalem. It was the crowning moment of his life. He had shattered the Persians in a series of remarkable victories and wrested back Christendom’s most sacred relic, the True Cross, which he was triumphantly restoring to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. According to Islamic tradition, when he had reached the city he received a letter. It said simply: ‘In the name of Allah the most Beneficent, the most Merciful: this letter is from Muhammad, the slave of Allah, and His Apostle, to Heraclius, the ruler of Byzantines. Peace be upon the followers of guidance. I invite you to surrender to Allah. Embrace Islam and Allah will bestow on you a double reward. But if you reject this invitation you will be misguiding your people.’ Heraclius had no idea who the writer of this letter might have been, but he is reported to have made inquiries and to have treated its contents with some respect. A similar letter sent to the ‘King of Kings’ in Persia was torn up. Muhammad’s reply to this news was blunt: ‘Tell him that my religion and my sovereignty will reach limits which the kingdom of Chosroes never attained.’ For Chosroes it was too late – he had been slowly shot to death with arrows the year before – but the apocryphal letter foreshadowed an extraordinary blow about to fall on Christian Byzantium and its capital, Constantinople, that would undo all the emperor ever achieved.
Heraclius rides in triumph with the true cross
In the previous ten years Muhammad had succeeded in unifying the feuding tribes of the Arabian Peninsula around the simple message of Islam. Motivated by the word of God and disciplined by communal prayer, bands of nomadic raiders were transformed into an organized fighting force, whose hunger was now projected outwards beyond the desert’s rim into a world sharply divided by faith into two distinct zones. On the one side lay the Dar al-Islam, the House of Islam; on the other, the realms still to be converted, the Dar al-Harb, the House of War. By the 630s Muslim armies started to appear on the margins of the Byzantine frontier, where the settled land gives way to desert, like ghosts out of a sandstorm. The Arabs were agile, resourceful and hardy. They totally surprised the lumbering mercenary armies in S
yria. They attacked then retreated into the desert, lured their opponents out of their strongholds into the barren wilderness, surrounded and massacred them. They traversed the harsh empty quarters, killing their camels as they went and drinking the water from their stomachs – to emerge again unexpectedly behind their enemy. They besieged cities and learned how to take them. Damascus fell, then Jerusalem itself; Egypt surrendered in 641, Armenia in 653; within twenty years the Persian Empire had collapsed and converted to Islam. The velocity of conquest was staggering, the ability to adapt extraordinary. Driven by the word of God and divine conquest, the people of the desert constructed navies ‘to wage the holy war by sea’ in the dockyards of Egypt and Palestine with the help of native Christians and took Cyprus in 648, then defeated a Byzantine fleet at the Battle of the Masts in 655. Finally in 669, within forty years of Muhammad’s death, the Caliph Muawiyyah dispatched a huge amphibious force to strike a knockout blow at Constantinople itself. On the following wind of victory, he had every anticipation of success.
To Muawiyyah it was to be the culmination of an ambitious long-term plan, conceived and executed with great care and thoroughness. In 669 Arab armies occupied the Asian shore opposite the city. The following year a fleet of 400 ships sailed through the Dardanelles and secured a base on the peninsula of Cyzicus on the south side of the Sea of Marmara. Supplies were stockpiled, dry dock and maintenance facilities created to support a campaign that would last as long as was necessary. Crossing the straits west of the city, Muslims set foot on the shores of Europe for the first time. Here they seized a harbour from which to conduct the siege and mounted large-scale raids around the hinterland of the city. Within Constantinople itself, the defenders sheltered behind their massive walls, while their fleet, docked in the Golden Horn, prepared to launch counter-attacks against the enemy.
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