Constantinople: The Last Great Siege, 1453

by Roger Crowley

  A wail of fear arose from the cowering population as the soldiers burst in. Cries were raised to God but it made no difference; they were ‘trapped as in a net’. There was little bloodshed. A few who resisted and perhaps some of the old and infirm were slaughtered but the majority surrendered ‘like sheep’. The Ottoman troops had come for plunder and profit. They ignored the screaming of men, women and children, as each soldier struggled to secure his own prize. Young women were almost torn apart in the race to secure the most valuable slaves. Nuns and noble women, young and old, masters and servants were bound together and dragged out of the church. The women were secured with their own veils, whilst the men were tied up with rope. Working in teams each man would lead his captives to ‘a certain spot, and placing them in safekeeping, returned to take a second and even a third prize’. Within an hour the whole congregation had been bound up. ‘The infinite chains of captives’, recorded Doukas, ‘who like herds of cattle and flocks of sheep poured out of the temple and the temple sanctuary made an extraordinary spectacle!’ A terrible noise of lamentation filled the morning air.

  The soldiers then turned their attention to the fabric of the church. They hacked the icons to pieces, stripping away the valuable metal frames and seized ‘in an instant the precious and holy relics which were kept safe in the sanctuary, the vessels of gold and silver and other valuable materials’. Then rapidly all the other fixtures and fittings followed, things that the Muslims considered both idolatrous affronts to God and rightful booty for soldiers – the chains, candelabra and lamps, the iconostasis, the altar and its coverings, the church furniture, the emperor’s chair – in a short time everything was either seized and carried off or destroyed in situ, leaving the great church ‘ransacked and desolate’, according to Doukas. The great church reverted to a shell. This defining moment of loss for the Greeks gave rise to a legend so typical of their enduring belief in the power of miracles and their yearning for the holy city. At the moment that the soldiers approached the altar, the priests took the holy vessels and approached the sanctuary and – the story goes – the wall opened to admit them, and closed again behind them; and there they will remain safe until an Orthodox emperor restores St Sophia to a church. The basis for this story may lie in the possibility that some of the priests were able to get away through one of the old passages that connected the church to the patriarch’s residence behind, and so escape. And there was one other small, grim consolation. The Ottomans smashed open the tomb of the hated Venetian doge, Enrico Dandolo, who had wrought a similar devastation on the city two hundred and fifty years earlier. They found no treasure but they hurled his bones into the street for the dogs to gnaw.

  All morning Mehmet remained in his camp outside the walls, awaiting reports of the city’s capitulation and its sack. He received a steady stream of news and frightened deputations of citizens. Ambassadors came from the Podesta of Galata with gifts, seeking assurance that the pact of neutrality should remain in place, but he made no categoric reply. Soldiers brought the head of Orhan, but it was the face of Constantine that Mehmet was most anxious to look on. The fate of the emperor and the verification of his death remain confused and apocryphal. For a long time there was no definitive report of his end and it seems that Mehmet may have ordered a search of the battlefield for his body. Later in the day some Janissaries, possibly Serbs, brought a head to the sultan; according to Doukas, the Grand Duke Lucas Notaras was present at this scene and confirmed the identity of his master. The head – or a head – was then fixed on the column of Justinian opposite St Sophia as a proof to the Greeks that their emperor was dead. Later the skin was peeled off, the head stuffed with straw and was progressed with elaborate ceremony around the principal courts of the Muslim world as an emblem of power and conquest.

  How – or even, according to some, if – he died is uncertain. No reliable eyewitness was present at the scene and the truth splinters and fragments into partisan and apocryphal accounts. The Ottoman chroniclers unite in presenting a disparaging but quite specific account, many versions of which were written long after the event and seem to draw on one another: ‘the blind-hearted emperor’ tried to flee when it was obvious that the battle was lost. He was making his way down to the steep streets to the Horn or the Marmara with his retinue to look for a ship when he ran into a band of azaps and Janissaries bent on plunder. ‘A desperate battle ensued. The Emperor’s horse slipped as he was attacking a wounded azap, whereupon the azap pulled himself together, and cut off the Emperor’s head. When they saw this, the rest of the enemy troops lost hope and azaps managed to kill or capture most of them. A great quantity of money and precious stones in the possession of the Emperor’s retinue were also seized.’

  The Greek accounts see him generally charging into the fray at the wall with his faithful band of nobles as the front line collapses. In the version of Chalcocondylas ‘the Emperor turned to Cantacuzenos and the few that were with them, and said, “Let us then go forward, men, against these barbarians.” Cantacuzenos, a brave man, was killed, and the Emperor Constantine himself was forced back and was relentlessly pursued, struck on the shoulder and then killed.’ There are many variants of this story that end in a mound of bodies at the St Romanus Gate or near one of the locked posterns; all of them provided the Greek people with enduring legends about the emperor. ‘The Emperor of Constantinople was killed,’ recorded Giacomo Tetaldi with unvarnished simplicity. ‘Some say his head was cut off, others that he died in the crowd pressed against the gate. Both stories could very well be true.’ ‘He was killed and his head was presented to the Lord of the Turks on a lance,’ wrote Benvenuto, the consul of Ancona in the city. The fact that there was no clear identification of the body suggests that Constantine may well have stripped off his imperial regalia at the final onslaught and died like a common soldier. Many of the corpses were decapitated and it would subsequently have been difficult to distinguish the fallen. Apocryphal stories abounded, some that he had escaped by ship, but these may be discounted, others that Mehmet gave his body to the Greeks for burial in one of several locations in the city, but no sure site can be identified. The uncertainty of his ending would become the focus for a growing body of Greek legend, a sense of yearning for lost glory, reflected in songs and lamentations:

  Weep Christians of the East and the West, weep and cry over this great destruction. On Tuesday the 29th day of May in the year 1453, the sons of Hagar took the town of Constantinople … And when Constantine Dragases … heard the news … he seized his lance, strapped on his sword, he mounted his mare, his mare with white feet and struck the Turks, the impious dogs. He killed ten pashas and sixty Janissaries, but his sword broke and his lance broke and he remained alone, alone without any help … and a Turk struck him on the head and poor Constantine fell from his mare; and he lay stretched out on the earth in the dust and the blood. They cut off his head and fixed it on the end of a lance, and they buried his body under a laurel tree.

  The ‘unfortunate emperor’ was forty-nine years old when he died. Whatever the circumstances of his death, it seems clear that he tried to the very end to keep the flame of Byzantium alight. ‘The ruler of Istanbul was brave and asked for no quarter’, declared the chronicler Oruch, in a rare note of begrudging respect from the Ottomans. He had been a redoubtable opponent.

  Later in the day, when the chaos had died down and some semblance of order had been restored, Mehmet made his own triumphant entry into Constantinople. He passed through the Gate of Charisius – that was to become in Turkish, the Edirne gate – on horseback, accompanied on foot by his viziers, beylerbeys, the ulema and commanders and by his crack troops, his bodyguards and foot soldiers, in a show of pageantry that has been amplified by legend. The green banners of Islam and the red banners of the sultan were unfurled as the cavalcade jingled through the archway. After portraits of Kemal Ataturk, it is probably the single most famous image in Turkish history, endlessly memorialized in poems and pictures. In nineteenth-century prints the be
arded Mehmet sits upright on his proudly stepping horse, his face turned to one side. He is flanked by sturdy moustachioed Janissaries carrying matchlocks, spears and battle axes, imams whose white beards symbolize the wisdom of Islam, and behind the waving banners and a thicket of clustered spears stretch deep to the horizon. To the left a black warrior, muscled like a body builder, stands proudly erect as a representative of all the other nations of the Faith welcoming the gazi warriors into the inheritance promised by the Prophet. His scimitar points to a heap of fallen Christians at the sultan’s feet, whose shields are surmounted with crosses – a memory of the crusades and a symbol of the triumph of Islam over Christianity. According to legend, Mehmet stopped and gave thanks to God. Then he turned to congratulate his ‘seventy or eighty thousand Muslim heroes, crying out: “Halt not Conquerors! God be praised! You are the Conquerors of Constantinople!”’ It is the iconic moment at which he assumes the name by which he has always been known in Turkish – Fatih, the Conqueror – and the instant at which the Ottoman Empire comes fully into its own. He was twenty-one years old.

  Mehmet then processed into the heart of the city to inspect the buildings that he had visualized so clearly from afar – past the church of the Holy Apostles and the mighty aqueduct of Valens towards St Sophia. He was probably sobered rather than impressed by what he saw. It resembled a human Pompeii more than the City of Gold. Uncontrolled, the army had forgotten the edict to leave the fabric of the buildings untouched. They had fallen on Constantinople, according to Kritovoulos with a measure of exaggeration, ‘like a fire or a whirlwind … the whole city was deserted and emptied and appeared ravaged and charred as if by fire … the only houses left had been devastated, so ruined that they struck fear in the hearts of all that saw them because of the enormous devastation’. Although he had promised his army three days of looting it had effectively been picked clean in one. In order to prevent even greater destruction he broke his promise and ordered an end to the looting by nightfall on the first day – and it says something for the underlying discipline of his army that the chavushes were able to enforce obedience.

  Mehmet rode on, stopping to inspect particular landmarks along the way. According to legend, as he passed the serpent column of Delphi, he struck it with his mace and broke off the under jaw of one of the heads. Passing the statue of Justinian, he rode up to the front doors of St Sophia and dismounted. Bowing down to the ground, he poured a handful of dust over his turban as an act of humility to God. Then he stepped inside the wrecked church. He seems to have been both amazed and appalled by what he saw. As he walked across the great space and stared up at the dome, he caught sight of a soldier smashing away at the marble pavement. He asked the man why he was demolishing the floor. ‘For the Faith,’ the man replied. Infuriated by this visible defiance of his orders to preserve the buildings, Mehmet struck the man with his sword. He was dragged off half-dead by Mehmet’s attendants. A few Greeks, who were still hiding in the furthest recesses of the building, came out and threw themselves at his feet and some priests re-appeared – possibly those who had miraculously been ‘swallowed up’ by the walls. In one of those unpredictable acts of mercy that characterized the sultan, Mehmet ordered that these men should be allowed to go home under protection. Then he called for an imam to go up into the pulpit and recite the call to prayer, and he himself climbed onto the altar and bowed down and prayed to the victorious God.

  Later, according to the Ottoman historian Tursun Bey, Mehmet, ‘mounting as [Jesus] the spirit of God ascending to the fourth sphere of heaven’, climbed up through the galleries of the church out onto the dome. From here he could look out over the church and the ancient heart of the Christian city. Below, the decay of a once-proud empire was all too apparent. Many of the buildings surrounding the church had collapsed, including most of the raised seating of the Hippodrome and the old Royal Palace. This building, once the centre of imperial power, had long been a ruin, totally wrecked by the crusaders in 1204. As he surveyed the desolate scene, ‘he thought of the impermanence and instability of this world, and its ultimate destruction’, and remembered a couplet of poetry that recalled the obliteration of the Persian Empire by the Arabs in the seventh century:

  The spider is curtain-bearer in the Palace of Chosroes

  The owl sounds the relief in the castle of Afrasiyab.

  It is a melancholy image. Mehmet had achieved everything he had dreamed of; at the end of an enormous day when he had confirmed the Ottoman Empire as the great superpower of the age, he had already stared over the edge of its own decline. He rode back through the wrecked city. Long lines of captives were being herded into makeshift tents outside the fosse. Almost the whole population of 50,000 had been led away to the ships and the camp; maybe 4,000 had been killed in the day’s fighting. Separated from their families, children could be heard calling out for their mothers, men for their wives, all ‘dumbfounded by such a catastrophe’. In the Ottoman camp there were fires and festivities, singing and dancing to pipes and drums. Horses were dressed in the robes of priests and the crucifix was mockingly paraded through the Ottoman camp, topped with a Turkish cap. Booty was traded, precious stones bought and sold. Men were said to become rich overnight ‘by buying jewels for a few pence’, ‘gold and silver were traded for the price of tin’.

  If the day had unfolded in pitiful scenes and terrible instances of massacre, there was nothing particular to Islam in this behaviour. It was the expected reaction of any medieval army that had taken a city by storm. The history of Byzantium could produce many similar incidents that were only incidentally conducted on religious grounds. It was no worse that the Byzantine sack of the Saracen city of Candia on Crete in 961, when Nicephorus Phocas – a man nicknamed ‘the white death of the Saracens’ – lost control of his army for three days of appalling carnage; no worse than the crusader sack of Constantinople in 1204 itself, and more disciplined than an irrational outburst of xenophobia that had preceded it in 1183, when the Byzantines butchered nearly every Latin in the city, ‘women and children, the old and infirm, even the sick from the hospitals’. But when night fell on the Bosphorus and on the city on 29 May 1453, and slanted in through the windows of the dome of St Sophia and obliterated the mosaic portraits of emperors and angels, the porphyry columns, the onyx and marble floors, the smashed furniture and the pools of dried blood, it carried Byzantium away with it too, once and for all.

  The ruined palace of Hormisdas on the Marmara shore

  Source Notes

  15 A Handful of Dust

  1 ‘Tell me please …’, Sherrard, p. 102

  2 ‘ordered his trumpeters …’, Doukas, Fragmenta, p. 296

  3 ‘attacked them …’, Kritovoulos, Critobuli, p. 71

  4 ‘to create universal terror …’, ibid., p. 71

  5 ‘everyone they found…’, Barbaro, Giornale, p. 55

  6 ‘threw bricks and …’, Nestor-Iskander, p. 89

  7 ‘The whole city was filled …’, Melville Jones, p. 51

  8 ‘their wives and children … friends and wives’, Doukas, Fragmenta, p. 295

  9 ‘beautifully embellished …’, Doukas, trans. Magoulias, p. 228

  10 ‘slaughter their aged …’, Khoja Sa’d-ud-din, p. 29

  11 ‘nations, customs and languages’, Melville Jones, p. 123

  12 ‘plundering, destroying …’, Kritovoulos, Critobuli, p. 71

  13 ‘terrible and pitiful … their bed chambers’, ibid., pp. 71–2

  14 ‘Slaughtered mercilessly … and the infirm’, Leonard, p. 66

  15 ‘The newborn babies …’, Doukas, Fragmenta, p. 295

  16 ‘dragging them out …’, Kritovoulos, Critobuli, p. 72

  17 ‘young and modest …’, ibid., p 72

  18 ‘holy artifacts and …’, ibid.,, p. 73

  19 ‘walls of churches …’, ibid., p. 73

  20 ‘The consecrated images …’, Melville Jones, p. 38

  21 ‘led to the fleet …’, Barbaro, Diary, p. 67


  22 ‘hauled out of the … things were done’, Kritovoulos, Critobuli, p. 73

  23 ‘and from the West …’, Doukas, Fragmenta, p. 292

  24 ‘to search for gold …’, Pertusi, La Caduta, vol. 1, p. 34

  25 ‘and so they put …’, Barbaro, Diary, p. 67

  26 ‘churches, old vaults …’, Kritovoulos, Critobuli, p. 74

  27 ‘men, women, monks …’, Doukas, Fragmenta, p. 296

  28 ‘the fury of… help them’, Pertusi, La Caduta, vol. 1, pp. 185–6

  29 ‘not without great danger …’, ibid., p. 44

  30 ‘I always knew that …’, ibid., p. 44