The emperor probably joined the procession himself and when it was over he called together the leading nobles and commanders from all the factions within the city to make a last appeal for unity and courage. His speech was the mirror image of Mehmet’s. It was witnessed by Archbishop Leonard and recorded in his own way. Constantine addressed each group in turn, appealing to their own interests and beliefs. First he spoke to his own people, the Greek residents of the city. He praised them for their stout defence of their home for the past fifty-three days and entreated them not to be afraid of the wild shouts of the untrained mob of ‘evil Turks’: their strength lay ‘in God’s protection’ but also in their superior armour. He reminded them of how Mehmet had started the war by breaking a treaty, building a fortress on the Bosphorus, ‘pretending peace’. In an appeal to home, religion and the future of Greece, he reminded them that Mehmet intended to capture ‘the city of Constantine the Great, your homeland, the support of Christian fugitives and the protection of all the Greeks, and to profane the sacred temples of God by turning them into stables for his horses’.
Turning first to the Genoese then the Venetians, he praised them for their courage and commitment to the city: ‘You have decorated this city with great and noble men as if it were your own. Now raise your lofty souls for this struggle.’ Finally he addressed all the fighting men as a body, begged them to be utterly obedient to orders, and concluded with an appeal for earthly or heavenly glory almost identical to that of Mehmet: ‘Know that today is your day of glory, on which, if you shed even one drop of blood, you will prepare for yourself a martyr’s crown and immortal glory.’ These sentiments had their desired effect on the audience. All present were encouraged by Constantine’s words and swore to stand firm in the face of the coming onslaught, that ‘with God’s help we may hope to gain the victory’. It seems that they all resolved to put aside their personal grievances and problems and to join together for the common cause. Then they departed to take up their posts.
In reality Constantine and Giustiniani knew how thinly their forces were now stretched. After seven weeks of attritional fighting it is likely that the original 8,000 men had dwindled to about 4,000, to guard a total perimeter of twelve miles. Mehmet was probably right when he had told his men that in places there were ‘only two or three men defending each tower, and the same number again on the ramparts between the towers’. The length of the Golden Horn, some three miles, which might be subject to attack by the Ottoman ships at the Springs and by troops advancing over the pontoon bridge, was guarded by a detachment of 500 skilled crossbowmen and archers. Beyond the chain, right round the sea walls, another five miles, only a single skilled archer, crossbowman or gunner was assigned to each tower, backed up by an untrained band of citizens and monks. Particular parts of the sea walls were allotted to different groups – Cretan sailors held some towers, a small band of Catalans another. The Ottoman pretender Orhan, the sultan’s uncle, held a stretch of wall overlooking the Marmara. His band was certain to fight to the death if it came to a final struggle. For them, surrender would not be an option. In general however, it was reckoned that the sea wall was well protected by the Marmara currents and that all the men who could possibly be spared must be sent to the central section of the land wall. It was obvious to everyone that the most concerted assault must come in the Lycus valley, between the Romanus and the Charisian gates, where the guns had destroyed sections of the outer wall. The last day was given to making all possible repairs to the stockade and to assigning troops to its defence. Giustiniani was in charge of the central section with 400 Italians and the bulk of the Byzantine troops – some 2,000 men in all. Constantine also set up his headquarters in this section to ensure full support.
By mid-afternoon the defenders could see the troops gathering beyond their walls. It was a fine afternoon. The sun was sinking in the west. Out on the plain the Ottoman army started to deploy into regimental formations, turning and wheeling, drawing up its battle standards, filling the horizon from coast to coast. In the vanguard, men continued to work to fill in the ditches, the cannon were advanced as close as possible, and the inexorable accumulation of scaling equipment continued unchecked. Within the Horn the eighty ships of the Ottoman fleet that had been transported overland prepared to float the pontoon bridge up close to the land walls; and beyond the chain, the larger fleet under Hamza Pasha encircled the city, sailing past the point of the Acropolis and round the Marmara shore. Each ship was loaded with soldiers, stone-throwing equipment and long ladders as high as the walls themselves. The men on the ramparts settled down to wait, for there was still time to spare.
Late in the afternoon the people of the city, seeking religious solace, converged for the first time in five months on the mother church of St Sophia. The dark church, which had been so conspicuously boycotted by the Orthodox faithful, was filled with people, anxious, penitent and fervent, and for the first time since the summer of 1064, in the ultimate moment of need, it seems that Catholic and Orthodox worshipped together in the city, and the 400-year-old schism and the bitterness of the crusades were put aside in a final service of intercession. The huge space of Justinian’s 1,000-year-old church glittered with the mysterious light of candles, and reverberated with the rising and falling notes of the liturgy. Constantine took part in the service. He occupied the imperial chair at the right side of the altar and partook of the sacraments with great fervour, and ‘fell to the ground, and begged God’s loving kindness and forgiveness for their transgressions’. Then he took leave of the clergy and the people, bowed in all directions – and left the church. ‘Immediately’, according to the fervent Nestor-Iskander, ‘all clerics and people present cried out; the women and children wailed and moaned; their voices, I believe, reached to heaven.’ All the commanders returned to their posts. Some of the civilian population remained in the church to take part in an all night vigil. Others went to hide. People let themselves down into the echoing darkness of the great underground cisterns, to float in small boats among the columns. Above ground, Justinian still rode on his bronze horse, pointing defiantly to the east.
As evening fell, the Ottomans went to break their fast in a shared meal and to prepare themselves for the night. The pre-battle meal was a further opportunity to build group solidarity and a sense of sacrifice among the soldiers gathered around the communal cooking pots. Fires and candles were lit, if anything larger than on the previous two nights. Again the criers swept through accompanied by pipes and horns, reinforcing the twin messages of prosperous life and joyful death: ‘Children of Muhammad, be of good heart, for tomorrow we shall have so many Christians in our hands that we will sell them, two slaves for a ducat, and will have such riches that we will all be of gold, and from the beards of the Greeks we will make leads for our dogs, and their families will be our slaves. So be of good heart and be ready to die cheerfully for the love of our Muhammad.’ A mood of fervent joy passed through the camp as the excited prayers of the soldiers slowly rose to a crescendo like the breaking of a mighty wave. The lights and the rhythmical cries froze the blood of the waiting Christians. A massive bombardment opened up in the dark, so heavy ‘that to us it seemed to be a very inferno’. And at midnight silence and darkness fell on the Ottoman camp. The men went in good order to their posts ‘with all their weapons and a great mountain of arrows’. Pumped up by the adrenalin of the coming battle, dreaming of martyrdom and gold, they waited in total silence for the final signal to attack.
There was nothing left to be done. Both sides understood the climactic significance of the coming day. Both had made their spiritual preparations. According to Barbaro, who of course gave the final say in the outcome to the Christian god, ‘and when each side had prayed to his god for victory, they to theirs and we to ours, our Father in Heaven decided with his Mother who should be successful in this battle that would be so fierce, which would be concluded next day’. According to Sa’d-ud-din, the Ottoman troops, ‘from dusk till dawn, intent on battle … united
the greatest of meritorious works … passing the night in prayer’.
There is an afterword to this day. One of the chronicles of George Sphrantzes sees Constantine riding through the dark streets of the city on his Arab mare and returning late at night to the Blachernae Palace. He called his servants and household to him and begged them for forgiveness, and thus absolved, according to Sphrantzes ‘the Emperor mounted his horse and we left the palace and began to make the circuit of the walls in order to rouse the sentries to keep watch alertly and not lapse into sleep’. Having checked that all was well, and that the gates were securely locked, at first cockcrow they climbed the tower at the Caligaria Gate, which commanded a wide view over the plain and the Golden Horn, to witness the enemy preparations in the dark. They could hear the wheeled siege towers creaking invisibly towards the ramparts, long ladders being dragged over the pounded ground and the activity of many soldiers filling in the ditches beneath the shattered walls. To the south, on the glimmering Bosphorus and the Marmara the outlines of the larger galleys could be discerned as distant, ghostly shapes moving into position beyond the bulking dome of St Sophia, while within the Horn the smaller fustae worked to float the pontoon bridge over the straits and to manoeuvre close to the walls. It is a haunting, introspective moment and an enduring image of the long-suffering Constantine – the noble emperor and his faithful friend standing on the outer tower listening to the ominous preparations for the final attack, the world dark and still before the moment of final destiny. For fifty-three days their tiny force had confounded the might of the Ottoman army; they had faced down the heaviest bombardment in the Middle Ages from the largest cannon ever built – an estimated 5,000 shots and 55,000 pounds of gunpowder; they had resisted three full-scale assaults and dozens of skirmishes, killed unknown thousands of Ottoman soldiers, destroyed underground mines and siege towers, fought sea battles, conducted sorties and peace negotiations, and worked ceaselessly to erode the enemy’s morale – and they had come closer to success than they probably knew.
This scene is accurate in geographical and factual detail; the guards on the highest ramparts of the city could hear the Ottoman troops manoeuvring in the darkness below the walls and would have commanded a wide view over both land and sea, but we have no idea if Constantine and Sphrantzes were actually there. The account is possibly an invention, concocted a hundred years later by a priest with a reputation for forgery. What we do know is that at some point on 28 May Constantine and his minister parted, and that Sphrantzes had a presentiment of this day and its meaning. The two men were lifelong friends. Sphrantzes had served his master with a faithfulness conspicuously absent among those who surrounded the emperor in the quarrelsome final years of the Byzantine Empire. Twenty-three years earlier, he had saved Constantine’s life at the siege of Patras. He had been wounded and captured for his pains, and had languished in leg irons in a verminous dungeon for a month before being released. He had undertaken endless diplomatic missions for his master over a thirty-year period, including a fruitless three-year embassy round the Black Sea in search of a wife for the emperor. In return Constantine made Sphrantzes governor of Patras, had been the best man at his wedding and the godfather of his children. Sphrantzes had more at stake than many during the siege: he had his family with him in the city. Whenever the two men parted on 28 May it must have been with foreboding on Sphrantzes’ part. Two years earlier to the day he had had a premonition while away from Constantinople: ‘On the same night of May 28 [1451] I had a dream: it seemed to me that I was back in the City; as I made a motion to prostrate myself and kiss the Emperor’s feet, he stopped me, raised me, and kissed my eyes. Then I woke up and told those sleeping by me: “I just had this dream. Remember the date.”’
Source Notes
13 ‘Remember the Date’
1 ‘These tribulations are …’, quoted Inalcik, The Ottoman Empire: The Classical Age, p. 56
2 ‘a great rug to be …’, Mihailovich, p. 145
3 ‘they did nothing apart from …’, Barbaro, Giornale, p. 49
4 ‘the provincial governors and generals …’, Kritovoulos, Critobuli, p. 59
5 ‘fashioned out of gold and silver …’, ibid., p. 61
6 ‘once we have started …’, ibid., p. 62
7 ‘to be silent …’, ibid., p. 63
8 ‘You know how many …’, Melville Jones, pp. 48–9
9 ‘But if I see …’, ibid., p. 49
10 ‘by the four thousand …’, Leonard, p. 54
11 ‘Once the city of …’, quoted Babinger, p. 355
12 ‘O, if you had heard …’, Pertusi, La Caduta, vol. 1, pp. 156–8
13 ‘and all us Christians …’, Barbaro, Giornale, p. 49
14 ‘for the advantage of …’, ibid., p. 21
15 ‘right away his resolution …’, Nestor-Iskander, p. 75
16 ‘treated him all night …’, ibid., p. 77
17 ‘it was a thing …’, Barbaro, Diary, p. 60
18 ‘The Prophet said …’, quoted Babinger, p. 85
19 ‘Gardens watered by …’, The Koran, p. 44
20 ‘You well know …’, Pertusi, La Caduta, vol. 1, p. 302
21 ‘God has promised you …’, The Koran, p. 361
22 ‘that all who call themselves …’, Barbaro, Giornale, p. 50
23 ‘evil Turks… for his horses’, Leonard, p. 56
24 ‘You have decorated … immortal glory’, ibid., p. 58
25 ‘with God’s help …’, Melville Jones, p. 35
26 ‘only two or three …’, Kritovoulos, Critobuli, pp. 61–2
27 ‘fell to the ground … reached to heaven’, Nestor-Iskander, p. 87
28 ‘Children of Muhammad …’, Barbaro, Giornale, p. 49
29 ‘that to us it seemed …’, Barbaro, Diary, p. 56
30 ‘with all their weapons …’, Barbaro, Giornale, p. 49
31 ‘and when each side …’, Pertusi, La Caduta, vol. 1, p. 29
32 ‘from dusk till dawn …’, Khoja Sa’d-ud-din, p. 27
33 ‘the Emperor mounted …’, Sphrantzes, trans. Carroll, p. 74
34 ‘On the same night …’, Sphrantzes, trans. Philippides, p. 61
14 The Locked Gates
1.30 A.M. 29 MAY 1453
There is no certainty of victory in war, even when the equipment and numerical strength that cause victory exist. Victory and superiority in war come from luck and chance.
Ibn Khaldun, fourteenth-century Arab historian
By nightfall on Monday 28 May, the great guns had been firing at the land walls for forty-seven days. Over time Mehmet had come to concentrate his batteries in three places: to the north between the Blachernae Palace and the Charisian Gate, in the central section around the Lycus River, and to the south towards the Marmara at the Third Military Gate. Severe damage had been inflicted at all these points, so that when he addressed his commanders before the battle he could claim, with convenient exaggeration, that ‘the moat has all been filled up and the land wall at three points has been so broken down that not only heavy and light infantry like yourselves, but even the horses and heavily armed cavalry can easily penetrate it’. In fact it had been clear to both sides for some time that a concerted attack would be focused on only one spot, the middle section, the Mesoteichion, the shallow valley between the gates of St Romanus and Charisius. This was the Achilles heel of the defensive system and it was here that Mehmet had expended his greatest firepower.
By the eve of the total assault, there were nine substantial holes in the outer wall, some about thirty yards long and mostly in the valley, which had been replaced piecemeal by Giustiniani’s stockade. It was a ramshackle structure that patched up the defences whenever a stretch of wall gave way. Baulks of timber lashed together provided its basic framework, along with hardcore from the fallen wall augmented by any other materials readily to hand: brushwood, branches, bundles of reeds and loose stones, all in-filled with earth, which had the advantage of absorbing the shock of the cann
on balls more effectively than any stone structure. In time it was evidently nearly as high as the original wall, and wide enough to provide a good fighting platform. The defenders were protected from enemy fire by barrels and wicker containers full of earth that served as battlements, and whose removal was always the initial objective of Ottoman attacks. Since 21 April the maintenance of the stockade had been the city’s highest priority. Both soldiers and civilians worked unceasingly to mend and extend it. Men, women and children, monks and nuns had all contributed, lugging stones, timber, cartloads of earth, branches and vine cuttings up to the front line in an exhausting and apparently unceasing cycle of destruction and repair. They had worked under cannon fire and attack, by day and by night, rain and sun to plug gaps wherever they appeared. The stockade represented the collective energy of the population and under Giustiniani’s direction it had repaid their efforts, repulsing every attempt on the city and demoralizing the enemy.
It was behind this stockade that the pick of the available fighting troops took up their positions late on the sunny afternoon of 28 May. According to Doukas, here were ‘three thousand Latins and Romans’ – the remainder of the 700 crack Italian troops who had come with Giustiniani, sailors from the Venetian galleys plus the bulk of the Byzantine troops. In all probability the figure was nearer 2,000. They were well armoured and helmeted in chainmail and plate, and equipped with a variety of weapons: crossbows, rifles, small cannon, long bows, swords and maces – all the equipment for mowing down their attackers at a distance and fighting them hand to hand at the barricades. In addition a large number of rocks had been brought up to the front line by civilians, as well as inflammatory materials – barrels of Greek fire and pitchers of tar. The troops entered the enclosure through the gates in the inner wall and spread out down the length of the stockade to fill the Mesoteichion for 1,000 yards. The enclosure was only twenty yards deep, backed by the higher inner wall and a scooped out ditch at its foot where earth had been removed to fortify the stockade. There was just room for horsemen to gallop up and down the line behind the men pressed to the stockade. In the whole stretch there were only four entry points through the inner walls: two posterns by the gates of St Romanus and Charisius to left and right on the brow of the hills, the forbidding Fifth Military Gate that led only into the enclosure halfway up the northern slope, and another postern at an unidentified point that had been created by Giustiniani to make entry into the city more convenient. It was obvious to everyone that the battle would be won or lost at the stockade; there could be no retreat from this station. A decision was therefore taken that the posterns back into the city should be locked behind the defenders once they had entered the enclosure and the keys entrusted to their commanders. They would do or die with their backs to the inner wall and their leaders with them. As night fell they settled down to wait. A heavy shower of rain fell in the dark but the Ottoman troops continued to advance siege equipment outside. Later Giustiniani entered the enclosure, then Constantine and his inner retinue of nobles: the Spaniard Don Francisco of Toledo, his cousin Theophilus Palaiologos and his faithful military companion John Dalmata. They waited on the stockade and the wall for the first signs of an attack. Though perhaps few would have shared the optimism of the Podesta of Galata who declared that ‘victory was assured’, they were not without confidence in their ability to weather one final storm.
Constantinople: The Last Great Siege, 1453 Page 26