Constantinople: The Last Great Siege, 1453

by Roger Crowley

  Constantine decided on a policy of maximum visibility. His headquarters was a large tent behind the St Romanus gate, from which he rode out on his small Arab mare each day with George Sphrantzes and the Spaniard Don Francisco of Toledo, ‘encouraging the soldiers, inspecting the watches, and searching for those missing from their posts’. He heard Mass in whatever church was closest at the time and ensured that a group of monks and priests was attached to each body of men to hear confession and deliver the last rites in battle. Orders were also issued to conduct services day and night for the salvation of the city, and morning liturgies were concluded by procession of the icons through the streets and along the walls to cheer the troops. The watching Muslims could make out the long beards of the Christians and catch the sound of hymns in the spring air.

  The morale of the defenders was not improved by the weather. There was a series of minor earthquakes and torrential rain. In the heightened atmosphere, portents were seen and old prophecies remembered. ‘Icons sweated in the churches, and the pillars and statues of saints,’ recalled the chronicler Kritovoulos. ‘Men and women were possessed and inspired by visions that did not bode well, and soothsayers foretold many misfortunes.’ Constantine himself was probably more perturbed by the arrival of the guns. He must have known what to expect from his previous experience of Ottoman artillery fire at the Hexamilion in 1446 when his carefully built wall collapsed in five days and a massacre ensued.

  With his logistical skill in co-ordinating equipment, materials and huge numbers of men, Mehmet was now ready to act. His supplies of cannonballs and saltpetre, mining equipment, siege engines and food were collected, counted and ordered; weapons were cleaned, cannon were hauled into position, and the men – cavalry and infantry, archers and lancers, armourers, gunners, raiders and miners – had been assembled and brought to a pitch of expectation. The Ottoman sultans were close enough to a shared tribal past to understand the motivations of men and how to work their enthusiasm into a common purpose. Mehmet knew well how to whip up fervour for holy war. The ulema went among the corps, reciting the old prophecies from the Hadith about the city’s fall and its meaning to Islam. Daily Mehmet prayed in public on a carpet in front of the red and gold tent turned east towards Mecca – and also towards St Sophia. This went hand in hand with the promise of limitless booty if the city had to be taken by force. The lure of the Red Apple was dangled before the expectant gaze of the faithful. It was on these dual promises, so attractive to the tribal raider, of taking plunder whilst fulfilling the will of God, that Mehmet prepared his strike.

  He knew, and his old vizier Halil Pasha knew even better, that speed was now essential. Capturing cities required human sacrifice. The enthusiasm and expectation whipped up for the assault – and the willingness to fill up ditches with trampled corpses – had a limited time frame. Unexpected setbacks could quickly tip morale; among such a condensed body of men, rumour, dissent and disaffection could ripple through the tents like wind over the grasslands, and even the well-organized camps of the Ottomans were prey to typhus if they tarried too late in the summer. There was clearly danger for Mehmet in this venture. He was aware, through his network of Venetian spies, that help from the West would eventually come by land or sea no matter how quarrelsome and divided the Christian powers might be. As he gazed up from the hill at Maltepe at the rise and fall of the land walls with their close-packed towers, their triple defensive system and their history of stubborn resistance, he might have expressed public faith in the valour of his troops, but his ultimate confidence was probably in the potential of the guns.

  Time was the prime co-ordinate for Constantine too. The calculation for the defenders was depressingly simple. There was no possibility of lifting the siege by counter-attack. Their only hope lay in holding on long enough for some relieving force from the West to muscle its way through the blockade. They had resisted the Arabs in 678. They must hold out now.

  If Constantine possessed one trump card it lay in the person of Giovanni Giustiniani. The Genoese had come to the city with a reputation that preceded him as a ‘man experienced in war’. He understood how to appraise and rectify obvious weaknesses in the fortifications, the best use of defensive weapons such as catapults and handguns, and deployment of the limited numbers of men to greatest advantage. He drilled the defenders in effective techniques of siege fighting and contemplated the opportunities for counter-attack from the city’s sally ports. The vicious wars amongst Italian city-states bred generations of such talented specialists, technical mercenaries who studied city defence as both a science and an art. However Giustiniani could never have encountered massive artillery bombardment before. The events about to unfold would test his skill to the limit.

  Source Notes

  7 Numerous as the Stars

  1 ‘When it marched …’, Pertusi, La Caduta, vol. 1, p. 315

  2 ‘The Turkish Emperor storms …’, Mihailovich, p. 177

  3 ‘heralds to all …’, Doukas, Fragmenta, p. 262

  4 ‘from among craftsmen and peasants’, quoted Imber, The Ottoman Empire, p. 257

  5 ‘When it comes …’, ibid., p. 277

  6 ‘When recruiting for the …’, quoted Goodwin, Lords of the Horizons, p. 66

  7 ‘Everyone who heard …’, Doukas, Fragmenta, p. 262

  8 ‘the promise of the Prophet …’, Khoja Sa’d-ud-din, p. 16

  9 ‘from Tokat, Sivas…’, Chelebi, Le Siège, p. 2

  10 ‘cavalry and foot soldiers…’, Kritovoulos, Critobuli, p. 38

  11 ‘with all his army …’, ibid., p. 39

  12 ‘the ulema, the sheiks …’, Khoja Sa’d-ud-din, p. 17

  13 ‘begged God …’, Doukas, Fragmenta, p. 262

  14 ‘a river that transforms …’, quoted Pertusi, La Caduta, vol. 1, p. xx

  15 ‘According to custom …’, Tursun Beg, p. 34

  16 ‘his army seemed …’, Sphrantzes trans. Carroll, p. 47

  17 ‘There is no prince …’, quoted Goodwin, p. 70

  18 ‘as the halo …’, Pertusi, La Caduta, vol. 1, p. 316

  19 ‘the best of the …’, Kritovoulos, Critobuli, p. 41

  20 ‘A quarter of them …’, Pertusi, La Caduta, vol. 1, p. 176

  21 ‘although they were …’, ibid., p. 5

  22 ‘I can testify …’, ibid., vol. 1, p. 130

  23 ‘We had to ride …’, Mihailovich, p. 91

  24 ‘a river of steel’, quoted Pertusi, La Caduta, vol. 1, p. xx

  25 ‘as numerous as the stars’, quoted ibid., p. xx

  26 ‘Know therefore that …’, Mihailovich, p. 175

  27 ‘at the siege there were …’, Pertusi, La Caduta, vol. 1, pp. 175–6

  28 ‘tailors, pastry-cooks …’, quoted Mijatovich, p. 137

  29 ‘how many able-bodied men …’, Sphrantzes, trans. Carroll, p. 49

  30 ‘The Emperor summoned me… gloom’, ibid., pp. 49–50

  31 ‘In spite of the great size …’, Sphrantzes, trans. Philippides, p. 69

  32 ‘Genoese, Venetians … three thousand’, Leonard, p. 38

  33 ‘the greater part of the Greeks …’, Pertusi, La Caduta, vol. 1, p. 146

  34 ‘skilled in the use of …’, Leonard, p. 38

  35 ‘The true figure remained …’, Sphrantzes, trans. Philippides, p. 70

  36 ‘the principal persons …’, Barbaro, Giornale, pp. 19

  37 ‘an old but sturdy …’, Pertusi, La Caduta, vol. 1, p. 148

  38 ‘at their own …’, ibid., p. 27

  39 ‘John from Germany … able military engineer’, Sphrantzes, trans. Philippides, p. 110

  40 ‘the Greek Theophilus …’ Pertusi, La Caduta, vol. 1, p. 148

  41 ‘the most important …’, Barbaro, Giornale, p. 19

  42 ‘This was always …’, Pertusi, La Caduta, vol. 1, pp. 152–4

  43 ‘with their banners …’, Barbaro, Giornale, pp. 19–20

  44 ‘Nor do We punish …’, The Koran, p. 198

  45 ‘We a
ccept neither …’, Chelebi, Le Siège, p. 3

  46 ‘encouraging the soldiers …’, Doukas, trans. Magoulias, p. 217

  47 ‘Icons sweated …’, Kritovoulos, Critobuli, p. 37

  48 ‘man experienced in war …’, ibid., p. 40

  8 The Awful Resurrection Blast

  6–19 APRIL 1453

  Which tongue can profess or speak of these misfortunes and fears?

  Nestor-Iskander

  The big guns took a long time to arrive, lurching along the muddy tracks from Edirne on their solid-wheeled carts through the spring rain. They could be heard far ahead. The ox teams floundered and bellowed; the men shouted; the grating axles emitted a continuous, single-note music like an eerie transmission from the stars.

  When they did reach the front line, each cannon took an age to unload on hoists, site and aim. By 6 April only some of the light guns were probably in place. They fired their first shots at the walls with apparently little effect. Soon after the start of the siege an enthusiastic but ragged assault by irregular troops was made against the weak section of the wall in the Lycus valley. Giustiniani’s men sallied out from the ramparts and put the intruders to flight, ‘killing some and wounding a few’. Order in the Ottoman camp was only restored by a substantial counter-attack that forced the defenders back behind the walls. The initial failure probably convinced the sultan to await a full deployment of artillery, rather than risk further damage to morale.

  In the interim he instigated the other set procedures of an Ottoman siege. Hidden in bunkers behind the earth ramparts sappers commenced discreet mining operations in the central sector; their aim was to tunnel the 250 yards to the wall, which could then be collapsed from underneath. Orders were also given to start trying to fill in the great fosse at suitable points by ‘bringing up stones and timbers and mounds of earth and amassing every other kind of material’, against the day when a concerted assault of the walls should be undertaken. This was dangerous, even deadly, work for the troops. The fosse was only forty yards from the defended wall and provided an unprotected sector that could be raked from the ramparts unless deterred by heavy counter-fire. Each sphere of operation where a toehold could be established or a line moved forward was to be bitterly contested. Giustiniani studied the terrain and set about disrupting their efforts. Sorties were made and ambushes laid in the dark when defenders would ‘burst out of the city gates to attack those outside the walls. Leaping out of the fosse, they would sometimes be beaten back; at other times they would take Turkish captives’ who could then be tortured for intelligence. These fierce skirmishes for the ditch were effective, but it quickly became clear to the defenders that the ratio of losses was unacceptable. The death of each skilled fighter was significant, no matter how many Turks were killed in the process, so the decision was taken early on to fight mainly from the ramparts, ‘some firing crossbow bolts, others plain arrows’. The war for the fosse was to be one of the bitter inner struggles of the siege.

  In the days after 7 April while he awaited the arrival of his heavy guns, the impatient sultan turned his attention to other matters. As the Ottoman army had swept up through Thrace it had taken the Greek villages in its path, but a few isolated strongholds still held out. These Mehmet had bypassed, leaving detachments to watch them. Probably on 8 April he set out with a sizeable force and some guns to eradicate the fortress of Therapia, which stood on a hilltop overlooking the Bosphorus beyond the Throat Cutter. It resisted for two days until the cannons destroyed its fortifications and killed most of the defenders. The rest ‘when they could not hold out any longer, surrendered and said he could do with them as he wanted. And he impaled these forty men.’ A similar castle at Studius on the Sea of Marmara was quickly demolished by gunfire. This time the thirty-six unfortunate survivors were impaled outside the city walls.

  A few days later Baltaoglu, Mehmet’s admiral, took a portion of the fleet to seize the Princes’ Islands in the Sea of Marmara, the traditional retreat of the imperial family in times of trouble. On the largest island, Prinkipo, there was a solid fortress, manned by ‘thirty heavily-armed men and some of the local people’, that refused to surrender. When gunfire failed to reduce them to submission, Baltaoglu’s men piled huge quantities of brushwood against the walls and set fire to it. With the help of pitch and brimstone and a stiff wind the flames licked the turrets so that the castle itself was soon alight. Those who were not burned alive surrendered unconditionally. The soldiers were killed on the spot and the villagers sold into slavery.

  By 11 April Mehmet was back at his red and gold tent and the full complement of guns had been assembled. Mehmet grouped them into fourteen or fifteen batteries along the walls at key points considered to be vulnerable. One of Orban’s great guns, ‘a terrible cannon’, was stationed at the single Blachernae wall near the Horn, ‘which was protected by neither a ditch nor an outer wall’. Another was positioned near the right-angle join between the two walls, and a third at the Gate of the Spring further south. Others were trained on critical points along the vulnerable Lycus valley. Orban’s supergun, which the Greeks called the Basilica – ‘the royal gun’ – was positioned in front of the sultan’s tent, from where he could critically appraise its performance, to threaten the St Romanus Gate, ‘the weakest gate in all the city’. Each large cannon was supported by a posse of smaller ones in a battery that the Ottoman gunners affectionately named ‘the bear with its cubs’. They fired stone balls that ranged from 200 pounds up to a colossal 1,500 pounds, in the case of Orban’s monster gun. In the estimate of one observer, the two largest cannons fired ‘a shot that reached the knee and a shot that reached the girdle’ respectively. Another declared the largest shot to measure ‘eleven of my palms in circumference’. Though eyewitnesses spoke of ‘innumerable engines of war’, Mehmet probably had about sixty-nine cannon in total, a huge artillery force by the standards of the day, that were supported at various points by other, more antique technologies for hurling stones, such as the trebuchet, a counterweighted traction catapult. The trebuchet had been enormously influential in the Muslim capture of crusader castles three hundred years earlier. Now it looked merely like a device from another age.

  Installing and readying the cannon for action was a laborious process. The barrels were freestanding and did not have integral gun carriages. They were simply strapped to sturdy wagons for transportation. On arrival a massive block and tackle system had to be erected to lower the barrel into position on a sloping wooden platform constructed on the protected side of the Ottoman front line and guarded from enemy fire by a wooden palisade and a hinged door which could be swung open at the moment of firing.

  The logistical support behind this operation was immense. Great quantities of black stone balls had been mined and shaped on the northern coast of the Black Sea and transported by merchant ships. On 12 April such a consignment arrived at the Double Columns with ‘stone balls for cannon, hurdles and timber, and other munitions for their camp.’ Substantial quantities of saltpetre also had to be requisitioned if the guns were to fire for any length of time. The roadway that Mehmet had ordered his general Zaganos Pasha to build round the top of the Horn to the harbour was presumably to facilitate the movement of such supplies. Transporting the guns themselves required large wooden carts and substantial teams of men and oxen. The founders who worked with Orban at Edirne were also their gun crews. They moved, positioned, loaded and fired their handmade charges – and repaired them on site. For although Orban’s superguns had been manufactured 150 miles away, the Ottomans brought sufficient resources to the siege to remake existing cannons in the camp, and even to forge and cast new ones, creating a whole secondary sphere of activity. Quantities of iron, copper and tin would have to be brought to the siege, domed charcoal pits dug and brick-lined foundries constructed. A separate zone of the military encampment must have been transformed into an ad hoc industrial workshop, from whence smoke billowed and blacksmiths’ hammers rang in the spring air.

  Prepari
ng the big cannon needed time and attention to detail. Gunpowder was loaded into the barrel of the gun, backed by a wooden wad that was pounded tight by iron bars, or a sheepskin one, to ensure that ‘whatever happened, it could not be forced out by any means except by the explosion of the gunpowder’. The stone ball was then manhandled round to the front of the cannon and eased down the barrel. It was designed to be a good fit in the chamber but an exact match of ball to calibre was frequently not achieved. Aim was reckoned by ‘certain techniques and calculations about the target’– in practice this meant trial and error – and the angle of the cannon adjusted accordingly by chocking its platform up with wooden wedges. The guns were further wedged into place with great beams of timber weighted down with stones that acted as shock absorbers, ‘lest by the force of its charge and by the violent recoil in its position, it should be displaced and shoot wide of the target’. Priming powder was poured into the touchhole and all was ready. On 12 April lighted tapers were put to the touchholes of the sultan’s guns along a four-mile sector and the world’s first concerted artillery bombardment exploded into life.

  If there is any single moment in the history of warfare at which an authentic sense of awe at the exponential power of gunpowder could be palpably felt, it is here in the accounts of the firing of the great guns in the spring of 1453. The taper ignited the powder:

  And when it had caught fire, faster than you can say it, there was first a terrifying roar and a violent shaking of the ground beneath and for a great distance around, and a din such as has never been heard. Then with a monstrous thundering and an awful explosion and a flame that illuminated everything round about and scorched it, the wooden wad was forced out by the hot blast of dry air and propelled the stone ball powerfully out. Projected with incredible force and power, the stone struck the wall, which it immediately shook and demolished, and it was itself shattered into many fragments and the pieces were hurled everywhere, dealing death to those standing nearby.