Constantinople: The Last Great Siege, 1453

by Roger Crowley

  As the morning of 29 April wore on, however, the nature of the loss was to assume a more ghastly shape. It transpired that not all the missing men had drowned. Some forty had swum free of their sinking craft, and in the darkness and the confusion of battle they made for the enemy shore and were captured. Mehmet now ordered them to be impaled in full view of the city as a punishment and a warning. In horror the survivors watched the preparations from the walls. What they would have seen has been graphically recorded by Jacopo de Campi, a Genoese merchant who spent twenty-five years trading in the Ottoman Empire at this time:

  The Grand Turk [makes] the man he wishes to punish lie down on the ground; a sharp long pole is placed in the rectum; with a big mallet held in both hands the executioner strikes it with all his might, so that the pole, known as a palo, enters the human body, and according to its path, the unfortunate lingers on or dies at once; then he raises the pole and plants it in the ground; thus the unfortunate is left in extremis; he does not live long.

  So ‘the stakes were planted, and they were left to die in full view of the guards on the walls’.

  European writers of the time made great play of the barbarity of this method of execution and took it to be particularly Turkish. Impalement, especially as a means of demoralizing besieged cities, was a widely practised shock tactic that the Ottomans had learned in the Christian Balkans. They themselves later suffered one of the most infamous atrocities of history in this manner: reportedly 25,000 of them died on the stakes of Vlad Dracul on the Danubian plains in 1461. Even Mehmet would be appalled and haunted by the accounts brought back by eyewitnesses of ‘countless stakes planted in the ground, laden not with fruit but with corpses’ and in the centre of this arrangement on a taller stake to mark his status, the body of his onetime admiral Hamza Bey, still wearing his red and purple robes of office.

  On the afternoon of 28 April the bodies of the Italian sailors staked in full view of the walls had their desired effect: ‘the lamentation in the city for these young men was incalculable,’ reported Melissenos, but grief swiftly turned to fury and in an attempt to assuage their loss and their frustration at the failure of the attack they responded with an atrocity of their own. Since the start of the siege the city had been holding about 260 Ottoman prisoners. The following day, presumably on the orders of Constantine, the defenders retaliated in kind. ‘Our men were enraged, and savagely slaughtered the Turks they were holding prisoner on the walls, in full view of their comrades.’ One by one they were brought up to the ramparts and hung ‘in circles’ in front of the watching Ottoman army. ‘In this way’, lamented Archbishop Leonard, ‘by a combination of impiety and cruelty, the war became more brutal.’

  The dangling prisoners and the staked sailors mocked each other over the front line, but in the aftermath of this cycle of violence it was clear that the initiative had shifted back to the besieging force. The inner Ottoman fleet still floated and it was obvious to the defenders that crucial control of the Horn had been lost. The bungled night attack had severely tipped the scales against the city. As they reflected on this, reasons for failure were sought and blame was attributed, particularly amongst the Italians themselves. It was clear that the delay in Coco’s attack had proved fatal. Somehow the enemy had got to know of their plans and were lying in wait: Mehmet had moved more guns up to the inner harbour ready for the raiding party, the light from the Galata Tower had been a signal from someone within the Genoese colony. The recriminations between the Italian factions were about to develop a logic of their own.

  Source Notes

  10 Spirals of Blood

  1 ‘Warfare is deception’, Lewis, Islam from the Prophet, vol.1, p. 212

  2 ‘the ambitions of the Sultan …’, Leonard, p. 18

  3 ‘This unhoped-for result …’, Kritovoulos, Critobuli, p. 55

  4 ‘They prayed to their …’, Barbaro, Giornale, pp. 23–4

  5 ‘This event caused despair …’, Tursun Bey, quoted Inalcik, Speculum 35, p. 411

  6 ‘This event has caused us …’, Pertusi, La Caduta, vol. 1, p. 301

  7 ‘I have been accused …’, ibid., pp. 301–2

  8 ‘about ten thousand horse’, Barbaro, Diary, p. 34

  9 ‘groaned from the depths …’, Sphrantzes, trans. Carroll, p. 56

  10 ‘if you could not take them …’, Barbaro, Giornale, p. 25

  11 ‘You know, it was visible …’, ibid., p. 25

  12 ‘with a golden rod …’, Doukas, Fragmenta, p. 214

  13 ‘the one who was most …’, Melville Jones, p. 4

  14 ‘as the ripe fruit falls …’, quoted Mijatovich, p. 161

  15 ‘Lord Jesus Christ …’, quoted Nicol, The Immortal Emperor, pp. 127–8

  16 ‘This was the start …’, Pertusi, La Caduta, vol. 1, p. 16

  17 ‘For such a big stretch …’, ibid., p. 16

  18 ‘with only ten thousand men’, Barbaro, Diary, p. 36

  19 ‘These repairs were made …’, ibid., p. 36

  20 ‘their huge cannon …’, Pertusi, La Caduta, vol. 1, p. 17

  21 ‘could not be seen …’, ibid., p. 17

  22 ‘our merciful Lord …’, ibid., p. 16

  23 ‘Be certain that if I knew …’, Doukas, trans. Magoulias, p. 258

  24 ‘by the recollections …’, Leonard, p. 28

  25 ‘The people of Galata …’, Pertusi, La Caduta, vol. 1, pp. 134–6

  26 ‘And having girdled them …’, Kritovoulos, Critobuli, p. 56

  27 ‘Some raised the sails …’, ibid., p. 56

  28 ‘It was an extraordinary sight …’, ibid., p. 56

  29 ‘of fifteen banks of oars …’, Barbaro, Giornale, p. 28

  30 ‘It was a marvellous achievement …’, Sphrantzes, trans. Carroll, p. 56

  31 ‘Now that the wall …’, Kritovoulos, Critobuli, p. 57

  32 ‘When those in our fleet …’, Pertusi, La Caduta, vol. 1, p. 19

  33 ‘to burn the enemy fleet …’, Barbaro, Giornale, p. 29

  34 ‘a man of action not words’, Sphrantzes, trans. Philippides, p. 111

  35 ‘From the twenty-fourth … perfidious Turks’, Barbaro, Giornale, p. 30

  36 ‘to win honour …’, ibid., p. 31

  37 ‘And this fusta could not have stayed …’, ibid., p. 31

  38 ‘There was so much smoke …’, ibid., p. 32

  39 ‘A terrible and ferocious …’, ibid., p. 33

  40 ‘Throughout the Turkish camp …’, ibid., p. 33

  41 ‘Giacomo Coco …’, Barbaro, Giornale, pp. 31–2

  42 ‘The Grand Turk (makes) …’, quoted Babinger, p. 429

  43 ‘the stakes were planted …’, Melville Jones, p. 5

  44 ‘countless stakes planted …’, Doukas, trans. Magoulias, p. 260

  45 ‘the lamentation in the city …’, Sphrantzes, trans. Carroll, p. 31

  46 ‘Our men were enraged …’, Pertusi, La Caduta, vol. 1, p. 144

  47 ‘In this way …’, ibid., p. 144

  11 Terrible Engines

  28 APRIL–25 MAY 1453

  There is a need for machines for conducting a siege: different types and forms of tortoises … portable wooden towers … different forms of ladders … different tools for digging through different types of walls … machines for mounting walls without ladders.

  Tenth-century manual on siege craft

  ‘Alas, most blessed Father, what a terrible disaster, that Neptune’s fury should drown them in one blow!’ Recriminations for the failure of the night attack were bitter and immediate. The Venetians had lost eighty or ninety of their close companions in the disaster and they knew whom they held responsible: ‘This betrayal was committed by the cursed Genoese of Pera, rebels against the Christian faith,’ declared Nicolo Barbaro, ‘to show themselves friendly to the Turkish Sultan.’ The Venetians claimed that someone from Galata had gone to the sultan’s camp with news of the plan. They named names: it was the podesta himself who had sent men to the sultan, or it was a ma
n called Faiuzo. The Genoese replied that the Venetians had been entirely responsible for the debacle; Coco was ‘so greedy for honour and glory’ that he had ignored instructions and brought disaster on the whole expedition. Furthermore they accused the Venetian sailors of secretly loading their ships and making ready to escape from the city.

  A furious row broke out, ‘each side accusing the other of intending to escape’. All the deeper enmities between the Italians bubbled to the surface. The Venetians declared that they had unloaded their ships again at the command of the emperor and suggested that the Genoese should likewise ‘put the rudders and sails from your ships in a safe place in Constantinople’. The Genoese retorted that they had no intention of abandoning the city; unlike the Venetians, they had wives, families and property in Galata ‘which we are preparing to defend to the last drop of our blood’ and refused to put ‘our noble city, an ornament to Genoa, into your power’. The deep ambiguity of the position of the Genoese at Galata laid them open to charges of deception and treachery from every direction. They traded with both sides yet their natural sympathies lay with their fellow Christians and they had compromised their overt neutrality by allowing the chain to be fixed within their walls.

  It is probable that Constantine had to intervene personally in the quarrel between the suspicious Italians, but the Horn itself remained a zone of unresolved tension. Haunted by the fear of night attacks or a pincer movement between the two arms of the Ottoman fleet, the one inside the Horn at the Springs and the other outside at the Columns, it was impossible for the Christian fleet to relax. Day and night they stood to arms, straining their senses for the sound of approaching fire ships. At the Springs the Ottoman guns remained primed against a second assault but their ships did not move. The Venetians reorganized themselves after the loss of Coco. A new commander, Dolfin Dolfin, was appointed to his galley and consideration was given to other strategies for destroying the Ottoman ships in the Horn. Evidently another ship-borne assault was considered too risky after the failure of 28 April so the decision was taken to use long-range means to discomfort the enemy.

  On 3 May two fairly large cannon were placed by one of the water gates onto the Horn directly opposite the Ottoman fleet at a distance of about 700 yards across the water and proceeded to bombard the ships. Initial results were promising. Some of the fustae were sunk and ‘many of their men were being killed by our bombardment’, according to Barbaro, but the Ottomans took swift measures to counter this threat. They moved their ships back out of range and replied with three large cannon of their own ‘and caused considerable damage’. The two sets of guns blasted away at each other day and night for ten days across the strait but neither could knock the other out, ‘because our cannon were behind the walls, and theirs were protected by good embankments, and the bombardment was carried out across a distance of half a mile’. In this way the contest petered away into a stalemate, but the pressure in the Horn remained and on 5 May Mehmet responded with an artillery initiative of his own.

  His restless mind had evidently been considering for some time how to bombard the ships at the boom, given that the walls of Galata lay within the line of fire. The solution was to create a cannon with a more looping trajectory that could fire from behind the Genoese town. He accordingly put his gun founders to work devising a primitive mortar, ‘that could fire the stone very high, so that when it came down it would hit the ships right in the middle and sink them’. The new cannon had duly been made and was now ready. From a hill behind Galata it opened fire on the ships at the boom. The trajectory was complicated by the walls of the town within the line of fire but this was probably a positive advantage to Mehmet: it also allowed him to put psychological pressure on the suspect Genoese. As the first shots from the mortar hurtled over their roofs, the townspeople must have felt the Ottoman noose tightening on their enclave. The third shot of the day ‘came from the top of the hill with a crash’ and hit not an enemy vessel but the deck of a neutral Genoese merchant ship ‘of three hundred botte, which was loaded with silk, wax and other merchandise worth twelve thousand ducats, and immediately it went straight to the bottom, so that neither the masthead nor the hull of the ship were visible, and a number of men on the ship were drowned’. At once all the vessels guarding the boom moved into the lee of Galata’s city walls. The bombardment went on, the range was shortened slightly and balls started to hit the walls and houses of the town itself. Men on the galleys and ships continued to be killed by the stone bullets, ‘some shots killing four men’, but the walls afforded sufficient protection to prevent any more ships being sunk. For the first time the Genoese found themselves under direct bombardment and although only one person was killed, ‘a woman of excellent reputation, who was standing in the middle of a group of thirty people’, the declaration of intent was clear.

  A deputation from the city made its way to the sultan’s camp to complain about this attack. The vizier protested with a straight face that they thought the ship belonged to the enemy and blandly assured them that ‘whatever they were owed they would be repaid’ when the city was finally captured. ‘With this act of aggression did the Turks repay the friendship which the people of Galata had shown them,’ Doukas proclaimed sarcastically, referring to the intelligence that had undone Coco’s attack. Meanwhile stone balls continued to loop down over the Horn in an arced trajectory. By 14 May, according to Barbaro, the Ottomans had fired ‘two hundred and twelve stone balls, and they all weighed at least two hundred pounds each’. The Christian fleet remained pinned down and useless. Well before that date it was clear that the Christians had surrendered effective control of the Horn, and the pressing need to provide more men and materials on the land walls further deepened the divisions amongst the sailors. With the pressure easing, Mehmet ordered a pontoon bridge to be constructed across the Horn just above the city walls to shorten his lines of communication and to allow men and guns to be moved about at will.

  At the land walls Mehmet also set about tightening the screw. His tactics became attritional and increasingly psychological. Now that the defenders had to be spread even more thinly, he decided to wear them down with incessant gunfire. In late April he moved some of the big guns to the central section of wall near the St Romanus Gate, ‘because in that place the wall was lower and weaker’, though attention was still also being directed to the single wall in the palace area. Day and night the guns blasted away; occasional skirmishes were mounted at irregular moments to test the resolve of the defence, then suspended for days at a time to lull the defenders into a false sense of security.

  Towards the end of April a substantial bombardment brought down about thirty feet from the top of the wall. After dark Giustiniani’s men set to once again, walling up the breach with an earth bank, but the following morning the cannon renewed their attack. However, towards mid-day the chamber of one of the big guns cracked, probably because of flaws in the barrel, although the Russian Nestor-Iskander claims that it had been hit by one of the defenders’ own cannon. Infuriated by this setback, Mehmet called for an impromptu attack. A charge was made at the wall that took the defenders by surprise. A huge firefight ensued. Bells were rung in the city and people rushed to the ramparts. With the ‘clatter and flashing of weapons, it seemed to all that the city had been uprooted from its foundation’. The charging Ottoman troops were mown down and trampled underfoot by those coming up behind in their frenzy to reach the walls. To the Russian Nestor-Iskander it was a ghoulish prospect: ‘as if on the steppes, the Turks walked over the broken human corpses crammed to the top and fought on, for their dead resembled a bridge or a stairway to the city’. With huge difficulty the attack was eventually repulsed, although it took until nightfall. Corpses were left piled in the ditches; ‘from near the breach to the valleys they were filled with blood’. Exhausted by the effort, soldiers and townspeople retired to sleep, leaving the wounded groaning outside the walls. The following day the monks again started their lugubrious task of burying the Christian dead
and counting the number of their fallen enemy. Constantine, now strained by the attritional fighting, was visibly upset by the casualties.

  In effect exhaustion, hunger and despair were beginning to take their toll on the defenders. By early May food supplies were running short; it was now more difficult to trade with the Genoese at Galata and dangerous to row out into the Horn to fish. During quiet spells soldiers at the wall took to deserting their posts in search of food for their families. The Ottomans became aware of this and made surprise raids to drag down the barrels of earth on the ramparts with hooked sticks; they could even openly approach the walls and retrieve cannon balls with nets. Recriminations mounted. The Genoese archbishop, Leonard, accused the Greeks who had left their posts of being afraid. They replied, ‘What is the defence to me, if my family’s in need?’ Others, he considered, ‘were full of hatred for the Latins’. There were complaints of hoarding, cowardice, profiteering and obstruction. Rifts started to open up across the fault lines of nationality, language and creed. Giustiniani and Notaras competed for military resources. Leonard railed against ‘what certain people did – drinkers of human blood – who hoarded food or raised its price’. Under the stress of the siege, the fragile Christian coalition was falling apart. Leonard blamed Constantine for failing to control the situation: ‘The Emperor lacked severity, and those who did not obey were neither punished with words nor the sword’. These rifts probably made their way back to Mehmet outside the wall. ‘The forces defending the city fell into disunity,’ recorded the Ottoman chronicler, Tursun Bey, of these days.