Constantinople: The Last Great Siege, 1453

by Roger Crowley

  For an hour the fighting continued, with the palace regiments making little headway. The defenders never stepped back. ‘We repelled them vigorously,’ reported Leonard, ‘but many of our men were now wounded and pulled back from fighting. However, Giustiniani our commander still stood firm and the other captains remained in their fighting positions.’ There came a moment, imperceptibly at first, when those inside the stockade felt the pressure from the Ottomans ease a fraction. It was the pivotal moment, the instant when a battle turns. Constantine noticed it and urged the defenders on. According to Leonard he called out to his men: ‘Brave soldiers, the enemy’s army is weakening, the crown of victory is ours. God is on our side – keep fighting!’ The Ottomans faltered. The weary defenders found new strength.

  And then two strange moments of fortune swung the battle away from them. Half a mile up the line towards the Blachernae Palace, the Bocchiardi brothers had been successful in repulsing the troops of Karaja Pasha, occasionally making sorties from the Circus Gate, the postern hidden in an angle of the walls. This gate was now to live up to ancient prophecy. Returning from a raid, one of the Italian soldiers failed to close the postern behind him. In the growing light, some of Karaja’s men spotted the open door and burst in. Fifty managed to get access via a flight of stairs up to the wall and to surprise the soldiers on top. Some were cut down, others preferred to jump to their death. Exactly what happened next is unclear; it appears that the intruders were successfully isolated and surrounded before too much further damage could be done, but they managed to tear down the flag of St Mark and the emperor’s standard from some towers and replace them with Ottoman standards.

  Down the line at the stockade Constantine and Giustiniani were unaware of these developments. They were confidently holding the line, when bad luck dealt a more serious blow. Giustiniani was wounded. To some it was the God of the Christians or the Muslims answering or refusing prayers who created this moment. To bookish Greeks it was a moment straight from Homer: a sudden reversal in battle, caused, according to Kritovoulos, by ‘wicked and merciless fortune’, the instant when a serene and merciless goddess, surveying the battle with Olympian detachment, decides to tilt the outcome – and swipes the hero to the dust and turns his heart to jelly.

  There is no clear agreement on what happened, but everyone knew its significance: it caused immediate consternation amongst his Genoese troops. In the light of subsequent events, the accounts become fragmentary and quarrelsome: Giustiniani, ‘dressed in the armour of Achilles’, falls to the ground in a dozen ways. He is hit on the right leg by an arrow; he is struck in the chest by a crossbow bolt; he is stabbed from below in the belly while struggling on the ramparts; a lead shot passes through the back of his arm and penetrates his breastplate; he is struck in the shoulder by a culverin; he is hit from behind by one of his own side by accident – or on purpose. The most probable versions suggest that his upper body armour was punctured by lead shot, a small hole concealing grave internal damage.

  Giustiniani had been fighting continuously since the start of the siege and was undoubtedly exhausted beyond endurance. He had been wounded the day before, and this second wound seems to have broken his spirit. Unable to stand and more seriously injured than any bystander could see, he ordered his men to carry him back to his ship to seek medical attention. They went to the emperor to ask for the key to one of the gates. Constantine was appalled by the danger presented by the withdrawal of his principal commander and begged Giustiniani and his officers to stay until the danger was over, but they would not. Giustiniani entrusted command of the troops to two officers and promised to return after attending to his wound. Reluctantly Constantine handed over the key. The gate was opened and his bodyguard carried him away down to his galley at the Horn. It was a catastrophic decision. The temptation of the open gate was too much for the other Genoese; seeing their commander departing, they streamed through the gate after him.

  Desperately Constantine and his entourage attempted to stem the tide. They forbade any of the Greeks to follow the Italians out of the enclosure, and ordered them to close ranks and step up to fill the empty spaces in the front line. Mehmet seems to have perceived that the defence was slackening, and rallied his troops for another assault. ‘Friends, we have the city!’ he called out. ‘With just a little more effort the city is taken!’

  A group of Janissaries under the command of one of Mehmet’s favourite officers, Cafer Bey, ran forward shouting ‘Allahu Akbar – God is great’. With the cry of the sultan ringing in their ears – ‘Go on my falcons, march on my lions!’ – and remembering the promised reward for raising the flag on the walls, they surged towards the stockade. At the front, carrying the Ottoman flag, was a giant of a man, Hasan of Ulubat, accompanied by thirty companions. Covering his head with his shield, he managed to storm the rampart, throwing back the wavering defenders and establishing himself on top. For a short while he was able to maintain his position, flag in hand, inspiring the onrush of the Janissary corps. It was a defining and thrilling image of Ottoman courage – the Janissary giant finally planting the flag of Islam on the walls of the Christian city – and destined to pass into the nation-making mythology. Before long however, the defenders regrouped and retaliated with a barrage of rocks, arrows and spears. They threw back some of the thirty and then cornered Hasan, finally battering him to his knees and hacking him to pieces – but all around more and more Janissaries were able to establish themselves on the ramparts and to penetrate gaps in the stockade. Like a flood breaching coastal defences thousands of men started to pour into the enclosure, remorselessly pushing back the defenders by weight of numbers. In a short time they were hemmed in towards the inner wall, in front of which a ditch had been excavated to provide earth for the stockade. Some were pushed into it and were trapped. Unable to clamber out, they were massacred.

  Ottoman troops were pouring into the enclosure along a broadening front; many were killed by the defenders bombarding them from the stockade, but the flood was now unstoppable; according to Barbaro there were 30,000 inside within fifteen minutes, uttering ‘such cries that it seemed to be hell itself’. At the same time the flags planted by the few enemy intruders on towers near the Circus Gate were spotted and the cry went up, ‘The city is taken!’ Blind panic seized the defenders. They turned and ran, seeking a way to escape the locked enclosure back into the city. At the same time, Mehmet’s men were starting to climb the inner wall as well and were firing down on them from above.

  There was only possible exit route – the small postern through which Giustiniani had been carried away. All the other gates were locked. A struggling mass of men converged on the gateway, trampling each other in their attempts to get out, ‘so that they made a great mound of living men by the gate which prevented anyone from having passage’. Some fell underfoot and were crushed to death; others were slaughtered by the Ottoman heavy infantry now sweeping down the stockade in orderly formation. The mound of bodies grew and choked off any further chance of escape. All the surviving defenders in the stockade perished in the slaughter. By each of the other gateways – the Charisian, the Fifth Military Gate – lay a similar pile of corpses, the men who had fled there unable to get out of the locked enclosure. And somewhere in this choking, panicking, struggling mêlée, Constantine is glimpsed for the last time, surrounded by his most faithful retinue – Theophilus Palaiologos, John Dalmata, Don Francisco of Toledo – his last moments reported by unreliable witnesses who were almost certainly not present, struggling, resisting defiantly, falling, crushed underfoot, until he vanishes from history into the afterlife of legend.

  A posse of Janissaries clambered over the dead bodies and forced open the Fifth Military Gate. Making their way up the inside of the city walls, some turned left towards the Charisian gate and opened it from the inside; others going right opened the gate of St Romanus. From tower after tower Ottoman flags fluttered in the wind. ‘Then all the rest of the army burst violently into the city … and the Sultan sto
od before the mighty walls, where the great standard was and the horsetail banners, and watched the events.’ It was dawn. The sun was rising. Ottoman soldiers moved among the fallen, beheading the dead and dying. Large birds of prey circled overhead. The defence had collapsed in less than five hours.

  Source Notes

  14 The Locked Gates

  1 ‘There is no certainty …’, Ibn Khaldun, vol. 2, p. 67

  2 ‘the moat has all been filled …’, Kritovoulos, History of Mehmed, p. 62

  3 ‘three thousand …’, Doukas, Fragmenta, p. 283

  4 ‘victory was assured’, Pertusi, La Caduta, vol. 1, p. 42

  5 ‘Christians, kept in his camp …’, Pertusi, La Caduta, vol. 1, p. 30

  6 ‘Greeks, Latins, Germans …’, Leonard, p. 16

  7 ‘with arrows from… blasphemies and curses’, Kritovoulos, Critobuli, p. 66

  8 ‘threw big stones down … dying on one side or the other’, Barbaro, Diary, p. 62

  9 ‘Advance, my friends …’, Kritovoulos, Critobuli, p. 67

  10 ‘with shouts and fearful yells’, Kritovoulos, History of Mehmed, p. 67

  11 ‘like lions unchained …’, Barbaro, Giornale, p. 52

  12 ‘When they heard …’, Nestor-Iskander, p. 60

  13 ‘killed an incredible number of Turks …’, Barbaro, Giornale, p. 52

  14 ‘We hurled deadly missiles …’, Leonard, p. 60

  15 ‘all brave men’, Barbaro, Giornale, p. 67

  16 ‘They continued to raise …’, Leonard, p. 60

  17 ‘Sometimes the heavy infantry …’, Kritovoulos, Critobuli, p. 67

  18 ‘that the very air …’, Barbaro, Giornale, p. 53

  19 ‘where the city’s defences …’, Leonard, p. 40

  20 ‘they were frightened by nothing … terrible guns’, ibid., p. 40

  21 ‘men who were very …’, Kritovoulos, Critobuli, p. 68

  22 ‘neither hunger …’, ibid., p. 68

  23 ‘the blackness of night …’, Pertusi, La Caduta, vol. 1, p. 158

  24 ‘the bowmen, slingers and …’, Kritovoulos, Critobuli, p. 68

  25 ‘there were so many …’, Melville Jones, p. 7

  26 ‘the rain of arrows … war cry’, Kritovoulos, Critobuli, p. 68

  27 ‘not like Turks …’, Barbaro, Giornale, p. 53

  28 ‘With their great shouting …’, ibid., p. 53

  29 ‘eager and fresh …’, ibid., p. 53

  30 ‘like men intent …’, ibid., p. 53

  31 ‘all his nobles …’, ibid., p. 53

  32 ‘javelins, pikes …’, Kritovoulos, Critobuli, p. 68

  33 ‘fell, struck by …’, Pertusi, La Caduta, vol. 1, p. 160

  34 ‘taunts, those stabbing …’, Kritovoulos, Critobuli, p. 69

  35 ‘It seemed like something …’, Barbaro, Giornale, p. 53

  36 ‘We repelled them …’, Pertusi, La Caduta, vol. 1, p. 161

  37 ‘Brave soldiers …’, Leonard, p. 44

  38 ‘wicked and merciless fortune’, Kritovoulos, Critobuli, p. 68

  39 ‘Friends, we have the city …’, ibid., p. 70

  40 ‘such cries that it seemed …’, Barbaro, Giornale, p. 54

  41 ‘so that they made …’, Melville Jones, p. 50

  42 ‘Then all the rest of …’, Kritovoulos, Critobuli, p. 70

  15 A Handful of Dust

  6 A.M. 29 MAY 1453

  Tell me please how and when the end of this world will be? And how will men

  know that the end is close, at the doors? By what signs will the end be indicated?

  And whither will pass this city, the New Jerusalem? What will happen to the

  holy temples standing here, to the venerated icons, the relics of the Saints, and

  the books? Please inform me.

  Epiphanios, tenth-century Orthodox monk to St Andrew the Fool for Christ

  As the Ottoman troops poured into the city and their flags were seen flying from the towers, panic spread through the civilian population. The cry, ‘The city is lost!’ rang through the streets. People started to run. The Bocchiardi brothers at the walls near the Circus Gate saw soldiers fleeing past their position. They mounted their horses and drove at the enemy, temporarily forcing them back. However, they too soon realized the hopelessness of the situation. Ottoman troops on the ramparts hurled missiles down on them and Paolo was wounded on the head. They realized that they were in imminent danger of being surrounded. Paolo was captured and killed, but his brothers fought their way out and back down to the Horn with their men. At the harbour, the wounded Giustiniani learned that the defence had crumbled, and ‘ordered his trumpeters to sound the signal to recall his men’. For others it was too late. The Venetian bailey, Minotto, and many of the leading Venetians and the sailors who had come from the galleys to fight were surrounded and captured at the Palace of Blachernae, while further up the land wall towards the sea of Marmara, where the defence had remained firm, the soldiers now found themselves attacked from the rear. Many were killed; others, including the commanders, Philippo Contarini and Demetrios Cantacuzenos surrendered and were captured.

  Within the city, confusion spread with extraordinary speed. The collapse at the front line was so dramatic and unexpected that many were taken by surprise. While some of those who had escaped from the land walls were fleeing towards the Horn in the hope of getting on board the ships, others were running towards the front line. Alerted by the sound of battle, some of the civilians were making their way up to the walls to offer help to the troops when they met the first marauding bands of Ottoman soldiers pressing into the city, who ‘attacked them with great anger and fury’ and cut them down. It was a mixture of fear and hatred that sparked the initial slaughter in the city. Suddenly finding themselves in the maze of narrow streets, the Ottoman soldiers were confused and apprehensive. They expected to meet a large and determined army; it was impossible to believe that the 2,000 routed in the stockade comprised the total military resources of the city. At the same time weeks of suffering and the taunts hurled over the battlements by the Greeks had marked the conflict with a bitterness that made them savage. Now the city would pay for failing to accept negotiated surrender. They killed initially ‘to create universal terror’; for a short while ‘everyone they found they dispatched at the point of a scimitar, women and men, old and young, of any condition’. This ruthlessness was probably intensified by pockets of spirited resistance from the populace who ‘threw bricks and paving stones at them from above … and threw fire upon them’. The streets became slippery with blood.

  The flags of the sultan fluttering from the high towers on the land walls spread the word quickly down the Ottoman line. Along the Golden Horn the Ottoman fleet redoubled its attacks and as defenders slipped away, the sailors forced open the sea gates one after another. Soon the Plateia Gate, close to the Venetian quarter, was opened and detachments of men started to penetrate the heart of the city. Further round the coast, the word reached Hamza Bey and the Marmara fleet. Eager to join in the opportunity for plunder, the sailors brought their ships back inshore and threw ladders up against the walls.

  For a short while indiscriminate slaughter continued to rage: ‘The whole city was filled with men killing or being killed, fleeing or pursuing,’ according to Chalcocondylas. In the panic everyone now consulted his own best interests. While the Italians made for the Horn and the safety of the ships, the Greeks fled home to protect their wives and children. Some were captured on the way; others got home to find ‘their wives and children abducted and their possessions plundered’. Yet others, on reaching home, ‘were themselves bound and fettered with their closest friends and wives’. Many who reached home before the intruders, realizing the likely outcome of surrender, decided to die in defence of their families. People hid themselves away in cellars and cisterns or wandered about the city in dazed confusion waiting to be captured or killed. A pathetic scene took place at the church of Theodosia down near the Golden Horn. It was the sa
int’s feast day, kept with adoration and zeal down hundreds of years of worship to a faithfully preserved ritual. The facade was adorned with early summer roses. Within, the customary all-night vigil had taken place at the saint’s sepulchre, the lighted candles glimmering in the short summer night. In the early morning, a procession of men and women were wending their way towards the church, blindly trusting in the miraculous power of prayer. They were carrying the customary gifts, ‘beautifully embellished and adorned candles and incense’, when they were intercepted by soldiers and carried off; the whole congregation was taken prisoner; the church, which was rich with the offerings of worshippers, was stripped. Theodosia’s bones were thrown to the dogs. Elsewhere women awoke in their beds to the sight of intruders bursting through the door.

  As the morning wore on and the Ottomans realized the truth – that there no longer was any organized resistance – the principles of slaughter became more discriminating. The Ottoman soldiers acted, according to Sa’d-ud-din, in accordance with the precept, ‘Slaughter their aged and capture their youth.’ The emphasis shifted to taking live prisoners as booty. The hunt began for valuable slaves – young women, beautiful children – with the irregular troops of many ‘nations, customs and languages’, including Christians, being in the forefront, ‘plundering, destroying, robbing, murdering, insulting, seizing and enslaving men, women, children, old and young, priests and monks – people of every age and rank’. The accounts of the atrocities were largely written by Christians, more coyly by Ottoman chroniclers, but there is no doubt that the morning unfolded in scenes of terror. They have left a series of vivid snapshots, sights ‘terrible and pitiful and beyond all tragedies’, according to Kritovoulos, the generally pro-Ottoman Greek writer. Women were ‘dragged violently from their bed chambers’. Children were snatched from their parents; old men and women who were unable to flee their houses were ‘slaughtered mercilessly’, along with ‘the weak-minded, the old, the lepers and the infirm’. ‘The newborn babies were hurled into the squares.’ Women and boys were raped, then ill-assorted groups of captives were tied together by their captors, ‘dragging them out savagely, driving them, tearing at them, manhandling them, herding them off disgracefully and shamefully into the crossroads, insulting them and doing terrible things’. Those who survived, particularly the ‘young and modest women, nobly born and wealthy, who were used to staying in their homes’ were traumatized beyond life itself. Rather than undergo this fate, some of the girls and married women preferred to throw themselves into wells. Among the pillagers fights broke out over the most beautiful girls, which were sometimes fought to the death.