Constantinople: The Last Great Siege, 1453

by Roger Crowley

  St Sophia in cross-section

  The Byzantines lived their spiritual life with an intensity hardly matched in the history of Christendom. The stability of the empire was at times threatened by the number of army officers who retired to monasteries and theological issues were debated on the streets with a passion that led to riots. ‘The city is full of workmen and slaves who are all theologians,’ reported one irritated visitor. ‘If you ask a man to change money he will tell you how the Son differs from the Father. If you ask the price of a loaf he will argue that the Son is less than the Father. If you want to know if the bath is ready you are told that the Son was made out of nothing.’ Was Christ one or many? Was the Holy Spirit descended just from the Father or from the Father and the Son? Were icons idolatrous or holy? These were not idle questions: salvation or damnation hung on the answers. Issues of orthodoxy and heresy were as explosive as civil wars in the life of the empire and they undermined its unity just as effectively.

  The world of Byzantine Christianity was also strangely fatalistic. Everything was ordained by God, and misfortune on any scale, from the loss of a purse to a major siege, was considered to be the result of personal or collective sin. The emperor was appointed at God’s bidding, but if he were overthrown in a palace coup – hacked to death by plotters or stabbed in his bath or strangled or dragged along behind horses or just blinded and sent into exile (for imperial fortunes were notoriously unstable) – this was God’s will too and betokened some hidden sin. And because fortune was foretold, the Byzantines were superstitiously obsessed with prophecy. It was common for insecure emperors to open and read the Bible at random to get clues to their fate; divination was a major preoccupation, often railed against by the clergy, but too deeply ingrained to be expunged from the Greek soul. It took some bizarre forms. An Arab visitor in the ninth century witnessed a curious use of horses to report on the progress of a distant army campaign: ‘They are introduced into the church where bridles have been suspended. If the horse takes the bridle in its mouth, the people say: “We have gained a victory in the land of Islam.” [Sometimes] the horse approaches, smells at the bridle, comes back and does not draw near any more to the bridle.’ In the latter case, the people presumably departed in gloomy expectation of defeat.

  The perils of high office: the Emperor Romanus Augustus Argyrus drowned in his bath, 1034

  For long centuries the image of Byzantium and its capital city, brilliant as the sun, exercised a gravitational pull on the world beyond its frontiers. It projected a dazzling image of wealth and longevity. Its currency, the bezant, surmounted by the head of its emperors, was the gold standard of the Middle East. The prestige of the Roman Empire attached to its name; in the Muslim world it was known simply as Rum, Rome, and like Rome it attracted the desire and envy of the nomadic semi-barbarous peoples beyond its gates. From the Balkans and the plains of Hungary, from the Russian forests and the Asian steppes turbulent waves of tribal wanderers battered at its defences: the Huns and the Goths, the Slavs and the Gepids, the Tartar Avars, the Turkic Bulgars and the wild Pechenegs all wandered across the Byzantine world.

  The empire at its height ringed the Mediterranean from Italy to Tunis, but expanded and contracted continuously under the pressure of these neighbours like an enormous map forever curling at the edges. Year after year imperial armies and fleets departed from the great harbours on the Marmara shore, banners flying and trumpets sounding, to regain a province or secure a frontier. Byzantium was an empire forever at war and Constantinople, because of its position at the crossroads, was repeatedly pressurized from both Europe and Asia. The Arabs were merely the most determined in a long succession of armies camped along the land walls in the first five hundred years of its existence. The Persians and the Avars came in 626, the Bulgars repeatedly in the eighth, ninth, and tenth centuries, Prince Igor the Russian in 941. Siege was a state of mind for the Greek people and their oldest myth: after the Bible, people knew Homer’s tale of Troy. It made them both practical and superstitious. The maintenance of the city walls was a constant civic duty; granaries were kept stocked and cisterns filled, but psychic defences were also held to be of supreme importance by the Orthodox faithful. The Virgin was the protector of the city; her icons were paraded along the walls at times of crisis and were considered to have saved the city during the siege of 717. They provided a confidence to equal the Koran.

  None of the besieging armies that camped outside the land walls could break down these physical and psychological defences. The technology to storm the fortifications, the naval resources to blockade the sea and the patience to starve the citizens were not available to any would-be conqueror. The empire, though frequently stretched to breaking point, showed remarkable resilience. The infrastructure of the city, the strength of the empire’s institutions and the lucky coincidence of outstanding leaders at moments of crisis made the eastern Roman Empire seem to both its citizens and its enemies likely to continue for ever.

  Yet the experience of the Arab sieges marked the city deeply. People recognized in Islam an irreducible counterforce, something qualitatively different to other foes; their own prophecies about the Saracens – as the Arabs came to be known in Christendom – articulated their forebodings about the future of the world. One writer declared them to be the Fourth Beast of the Apocalypse that ‘will be the fourth kingdom on the earth, that will be most disastrous of all kingdoms, that will transform the entire earth into a desert’. And towards the end of the eleventh century, a second blow fell upon Byzantium at the hands of Islam. It happened so suddenly that no one at the time quite grasped its significance.

  Source Notes

  1 The Burning Sea

  1 ‘O Christ, ruler …’, quoted Sherrard, p. 11

  2 ‘In the name of Allah …’, quoted Akbar, p. 45

  3 ‘Tell him that …’, quoted ibid., p. 44

  4 ‘to wage the holy war by sea’, Ibn Khaldun, vol. 2, p. 40

  5 ‘like a flash …’, Anna Comnena, p. 402

  6 ‘burned the ships …’, quoted Tsangadas, p. 112

  7 ‘having lost many fighting …’, quoted ibid., p. 112

  8 ‘the Roman Empire was guarded by God’, Theophanes Confessor, p. 676

  9 ‘It is said that they even …’, ibid., p. 546

  10 ‘brought the sea water …’, ibid., p. 550

  11 ‘to announce God’s mighty deeds’, ibid., p. 550

  12 ‘God and the all-holy Virgin …’, ibid., p. 546

  13 ‘In the jihad …’, quoted Wintle, p. 245

  14 ‘the place that’s the vast …’, Ovid, Tristia, 1. 10

  15 ‘more numerous than …’, quoted Sherrard, p. 12

  16 ‘the city of the world’s desire’, quoted Mansel, p. 3

  17 ‘O what a splendid city …’, quoted Sherrard, p. 12

  18 ‘During this time …’, quoted ibid., p. 51

  19 ‘It seems not to rest …’, quoted ibid., p. 27

  20 ‘the golden stream … a drift of snow’, quoted Norwich, vol. 1, p. 202

  21 ‘We knew not whether …’, quoted Clark, p. 17

  22 ‘The city is full …’, quoted ibid., p. 14

  23 ‘They are introduced …’, quoted Sherrard, p. 74

  24 ‘will be the fourth kingdom …’, quoted Wheatcroft, p. 54

  2 Dreaming of Istanbul

  1071–1422

  I have seen that God caused the sun of empire to shine in the mansion of the Turks, and turned the heavenly spheres around their dominion, and named them Turk, and gave them sovereignty, and made them kings of the age, and placed the reins of the people of the time in their hands.

  Al-Kashgari

  It was the emergence of the Turks that reawakened the slumbering spirit of jihad. They had first appeared on the Byzantine horizon as early as the sixth century when they sent ambassadors to Constantinople to seek alliance against the Persian Empire. To the Byzantines they were just one of an endless succession of peoples beating a path to the great c
ity; their homeland was beyond the Black Sea and stretched as far as China. They were pagan steppe dwellers of the rolling grasslands of Central Asia, from whose epicentre shock waves of nomadic raiders poured out at periodic intervals to ravage the settled peoples beyond. They have left us their word ordu – ‘horde’– as a memory of this process, like a faint hoof print in the sand.

  Byzantium suffered the repeated depredations of these Turkic nomads long before it knew the name. The earliest Turks to impact on settled Greek speakers were probably the Huns, who surged across the Christian world in the fourth century; they were followed in turn by the Bulgars, each successive wave inexplicable as a plague of locusts devastating the land. The Byzantines attributed these visitations to God’s punishment for Christian sin. Like their cousins the Mongols, the Turkic peoples lived in the saddle between the great earth and the greater sky and they worshipped both through intermediary shamans. Restless, mobile and tribal, they lived by herding flocks and raiding their neighbours. Booty was a raison d’etre, cities their enemy. Their use of the composite bow and the mobile tactics of horse warfare gave them a military superiority over settled peoples that the Arab historian Ibn Khaldun saw as the key process of history. ‘Sedentary people have become used to laziness and ease,’ he wrote. ‘They find full assurance of safety in the walls that surround them, and the fortifications that protect them. The Bedouins have no gates and walls. They always carry weapons. They watch carefully all sides of the road. They take hurried naps only … when they are in the saddle. They pay attention to every faint barking and noise. Fortitude has become a character quality of theirs, and courage their nature.’ It was a theme that would soon re-echo in both the Christian and the Islamic worlds.

  Repeated convulsions in the heart of Asia continued to propel these Turkish tribes westward; by the ninth century they were in touch with the Muslim populations of Iran and Iraq. The Caliph of Baghdad recognized their fighting qualities and recruited them into his armies as military slaves; by the end of the tenth century Islam was firmly established among the Turks on the frontier zone, yet they maintained their racial identity and language and were soon to usurp power from their masters. By the middle of the eleventh century a Turkish dynasty, the Seljuks, had emerged as sultans in Baghdad, and by its end the Islamic world, from Central Asia to Egypt, was largely ruled by Turks.

  The speed of their rise in the Islamic world, far from being resented, came to be widely held as a providential miracle, brought about by God ‘to revive the dying breath of Islam and restore the unity of Muslims’. It coincided with the presence of an unorthodox Shia dynasty in Egypt, so that the Turkish Seljuks, who had chosen to conform to the orthodox Sunni tradition, were able to gain legitimacy as true gazis – warriors of the Faith waging jihad against the infidel and unorthodox Islam. The spirit of militant Islam suited the Turkish fighting spirit perfectly; the desire for plunder was legitimized by pious service to Allah. Under Turkish influence, Islam regained the zeal of the early Arab conquests and reopened holy war against its Christian foes on a significant scale. Though Saladin himself was a Kurd, he and his successors led armies whose ethos was Turkish. ‘God be praised,’ wrote Al-Rawandi in the thirteenth century, ‘the support of Islam is strong … In the lands of the Arabs, the Persians, the Romans and the Russians, the sword is in the hands of the Turks and the fear of their swords is rooted in men’s hearts.’

  It was not long before the war that had smouldered quietly for centuries between Christians and Muslims along the southern frontiers of Anatolia flared back into life under this new impetus. The Seljuks in Baghdad were troubled by unruly nomadic tribesmen – the Turkmen – whose desire for plunder was a discordant note in the Islamic heartlands. They encouraged these tribal fighters to turn their energy west on Byzantium – the kingdom of Rum. By the middle of the eleventh century marauding gazi warriors were raiding Christian Anatolia in the name of holy war so frequently that it became essential for the emperor in Constantinople to take decisive action.

  In March 1071, the Emperor Romanus IV Diogenes set out personally to the east to repair this situation. In August he met, not the Turkmen, but a Seljuk army led by its brilliant commander Sultan Alp Arslan, ‘the heroic lion’, at Manzikert in eastern Anatolia. It was a curious affair. The sultan was unwilling to fight. His key objective was not war against Christians but the destruction of the detested Shiite regime in Egypt. He proposed a truce, which Romanus refused. The ensuing battle was a shattering Muslim victory, decided by classic nomad ambush tactics and the defection of Byzantine mercenary troops. Romanus survived to kiss the ground in front of the conquering sultan, who planted a foot on his bent neck in a symbolic show of triumph and submission. It was to prove a tipping point in world history – and a disaster for Constantinople.

  For the Byzantines the Battle of Manzikert was ‘the Terrible Day’, a defeat of seismic proportions that was to haunt their future. The effects were catastrophic, though not immediately understood in Constantinople itself. The Turkmen poured into Anatolia unopposed; where they had previously raided and retired again, they now stayed, pushing further and further west into the lion’s head of Anatolia. After the hot deserts of Iran and Iraq, the high rolling plateau was a landscape that suited these nomads from central Asia with their yurts and two-humped camels. With them came both the structure of Orthodox Sunni religion and more fervent Islamic strands: Sufis, dervishes, wandering holy men who preached both jihad and a mystical reverence for saints that appealed to the Christian peoples. Within twenty years of Manzikert the Turks had reached the Mediterranean coasts. They were largely unresisted by a mixed Christian population, some of whom converted to Islam, while others were only too glad to be rid of taxation and persecution from Constantinople. Islam held Christians to be ‘People of the Book’; as such they were afforded protection under the law and freedom of worship. Schismatic Christian sects even gave Turkish rule a positive welcome: ‘On account of its justice and good government, they prefer to live under its administration,’ wrote Michael the Syrian. ‘The Turks, having no idea of the sacred mysteries … were in no way accustomed to inquire into professions of faith or to persecute anyone on their account, in contrast to the Greeks,’ he went on, ‘a wicked and heretical people.’ Internal quarrels in the Byzantine state encouraged the Turks; they were soon invited to help in the civil wars that were fragmenting Byzantium. The conquest of Asia Minor happened so easily and with so little resistance that by the time another Byzantine army was defeated in 1176, the possibility of driving back the incomers had gone for ever. Manzikert was irreversible. By the 1220s Western writers were already referring to Anatolia as Turchia. Byzantium had lost its resources of food and manpower for good. And at almost the same moment a matching catastrophe overwhelmed Constantinople from a more unexpected quarter – the Christian West.

  The matter of the crusades had been conceived as a project to check the militant advance of Turkish Islam. It was against the Seljuks, ‘an accursed race, a race utterly alienated from God’, that Pope Urban II preached his fateful sermon at Clermont in 1095 ‘to exterminate this vile race from our lands’ and set in motion 350 years of crusader warfare. Despite the support of their Christian brothers in the West, this enterprise was to prove a lasting torment for the Byzantines. From 1096 onwards they were visited by successive waves of marauding knights, who expected support, sustenance and thanks from their Orthodox brethren as they blundered south across the empire towards Jerusalem. Contact brought mutual incomprehension and distrust. Each side had the opportunity closely to observe differences in customs and forms of worship. The Greeks came to see their heavily mailed Western brethren as little more than uncouth barbarian adventurers; their mission a hypocritical exercise in imperial conquest disguised as piety: ‘they are indomitable in pride, cruel in character … and inspired by an inveterate hatred of the Empire,’ complained Nicetas Chroniates. In truth the Byzantines often preferred their settled Muslim neighbours, proximity with whom had bred a certa
in familiarity and respect over the centuries following the initial burst of holy war: ‘we must live in common as brothers, although we differ in customs, manners and religion,’ a patriarch in Constantinople once wrote to a caliph in Baghdad. The crusaders, for their part, saw the Byzantines as depraved heretics who were dangerously oriental in outlook. Seljuk and Turkish soldiers regularly fought for the Byzantines; the crusaders were also appalled to discover that the city dedicated to the Virgin contained a mosque. ‘Constantinople is arrogant in her wealth, treacherous in her practices, corrupt in her faith,’ declared the crusader, Odo de Deuil. More ominously, the wealth of Constantinople and its fabulous treasury of gem-studded relics left the crusaders open-mouthed. An oblique note of jealousy crept into the reports sent back to the small towns of Normandy and the Rhine: ‘since the beginning of the world’, wrote the Marshal of Champagne, ‘never was so much riches seen collected in a single city’. It was a vivid temptation.

  Military, political and commercial pressure from the west had been building on the Byzantine Empire for a long time, but by the end of the twelfth century it had taken on a very visible shape in Constantinople. A large Italian trading community had been established in the city – the Venetians and Genoese were accorded special privileges and benefited accordingly. The profiteering, materialistic Italians were not popular: the Genoese had their own colony at Galata, a walled town across the Horn; the Venetian colony was considered ‘so insolent in its wealth and prosperity as to hold the imperial power in scorn’. Waves of xenophobia swept the populace; in 1171 Galata was attacked and destroyed by the Greeks. In 1183 the entire Italian community was massacred under the eye of the Byzantine general Andronikos ‘the Terrible’.