Constantinople: The Last Great Siege, 1453

by Roger Crowley

  Despite numerous attempts, such impassioned words failed to provoke practical action, just as the project to save Constantinople itself had failed. The powers of Europe were too jealous, too disunited – and in some senses too secular – ever to combine in the name of Christendom again: it was even rumoured that the Venetians had been complicit in the landing at Otranto. However it did reinvigorate deep European fears about Islam. It would be another two hundred years before the advance of the Ottomans into Europe was definitely halted, in 1683, at the gates of Vienna; in the interval Christianity and Islam would wage a long-running war, both hot and cold, that would linger long in the racial memory and that formed a long link in the chain of events between the two faiths. The fall of Constantinople had awakened in Islam and Europe deep memories of the crusades. The Ottoman peril was seen as the continuation of the perceived assault of Islam on the Christian world; the word ‘Turk’ replaced the word ‘Saracen’ as the generic term for a Muslim – and with it came all the connotations of a cruel and implacable opponent. Both sides saw themselves engaged in a struggle for survival against a foe intent on destroying the world. It was the prototype of global ideological conflict. The Ottomans kept the spirit of jihad alive, now linked to their sense of imperial mission. Within the Muslim heartlands the belief in the superiority of Islam was rejuvenated. The legend of the Red Apple had enormous currency; after Rome it attached successively to Budapest, then Vienna. Beyond these literal destinations, it was the symbol of messianic belief in the final victory of the Faith. Within Europe, the image of the Turk became synonymous with all that was faithless and cruel. By 1536 the word was in use in English to mean, in the words of the Oxford English Dictionary, ‘anyone behaving as a barbarian or savage’. And what added fuel to these attitudes was a discovery that typified the very spirit of Renaissance enlightenment – the invention of printing.

  The fall of Constantinople happened on the cusp of a revolution – the moment that the runaway train of scientific discovery started to gather speed in the West at the expense of religion. Some of these forces were at play in the siege itself: the impact of gunpowder, the superiority of sailing ships, the end of medieval siege warfare; the next seventy years would bring Europe, amongst other things, gold fillings in teeth, the pocket watch and the astrolabe, navigation manuals, syphilis, the New Testament in translation, Copernicus and Leonardo da Vinci, Columbus and Luther – and movable type.

  Seeing your enemy: sixteenth-century German print of Ottoman cavalry

  Gutenberg’s invention revolutionized mass communications and spread new ideas about the holy war with Islam. A huge corpus of crusader and anti-Islamic literature poured off the presses of Europe in the next 150 years. One of the earliest surviving examples of modern printing is the indulgence granted by Nicholas V in 1451 to raise money for the relief of Cyprus from the Turks. Thousands of copies of such documents appeared across Europe along with crusader appeals and broadsheets – forerunners of modern newspapers – that spread news about the war against ‘the damnable menace of the Grand Turk of the infidels’. An explosion of books followed – in France alone, eighty books were published on the Ottomans between 1480 and 1609, compared to forty on the Americas. When Richard Knolles wrote his bestseller The General History of the Turks in 1603, there was already a healthy literature in English on the people he called ‘the present terror of the world’. These works had suggestive titles: The Turks’ Wars, A Notable History of the Saracens, A Discourse on the Bloody and Cruel Battle lost by Sultan Selim, True News of a Notable Victory obtained against the Turk, The Estate of Christians living under the Subjection of the Turk – the flood of information was endless.

  Othello was engaged in fighting the world war of the day – against the ‘general enemy Ottoman’, the ‘malignant and turbaned Turk’ – and for the first time, Christians far from the Muslim world could see woodcut images of their enemy in highly influential illustrated books such as Bartholomew Georgevich’s Miseries and Tribulations of the Christians held in Tribute and Slavery by the Turk. These showed ferocious battles between armoured knights and turbaned Muslims, and all the barbarism of the infidel: Turks beheading prisoners, leading off long lines of captive women and children, riding with babies spitted on their lances. The conflict with the Turk was widely understood to be the continuation of a much longer-running contest with Islam – a thousand year struggle for the truth. Its features and causes were exhaustively studied in the West. Thomas Brightman, writing in 1644, declared that the Saracens were ‘the first troop of locusts … about the year 630’ who were succeeded by ‘the Turks, a brood of vipers, worse than their parent, [who] did utterly destroy the Saracens their mother’. Somehow the conflict with Islam was always different: deeper, more threatening, closer to nightmare.

  It is certainly true that Europe had much to fear from the wealthier, more powerful and better organized Ottoman Empire in the two hundred years after Constantinople, yet the image of its opponent, conceived largely in religious terms at a time when the idea of Christendom itself was dying, was highly partial. The inside and the outside of the Ottoman world presented two different faces, and nowhere was this clearer than in Constantinople.

  Sa’d-ud-din might declare that after the capture of Istanbul ‘the churches which were within the city were emptied of their vile idols, and cleansed from their filthy and idolatrous impurities’ – but the reality was rather different. The city that Mehmet rebuilt after the fall hardly conformed to the dread image of Islam that Christendom supposed. The sultan regarded himself not only as a Muslim ruler but as the heir to the Roman Empire and set about reconstructing a multicultural capital in which all citizens would have certain rights. He forcibly resettled both Greek Christians and Turkish Muslims back into the city, guaranteed the safety of the Genoese enclave at Galata and forbade any Turks to live there. The monk Gennadios, who had so fiercely resisted attempts at union, was rescued from slavery in Edirne and restored to the capital as patriarch of the Orthodox community with the formula: ‘Be Patriarch, with good fortune, and be assured of our friendship, keeping all the privileges that the Patriarchs before you enjoyed.’ The Christians were to live in their own neighbourhoods and to retain some of their churches, though under certain restrictions: they had to wear distinctive dress and were forbidden from bearing arms – within the context of the times it was a policy of remarkable tolerance. At the other end of the Mediterranean, the final reconquest of Spain by the Catholic kings in 1492 resulted in the forced conversion or expulsion of all the Muslims and Jews. The Spanish Jews themselves were encouraged to migrate to the Ottoman Empire – ‘the refuge of the world’ – where, within the overall experience of Jewish exile, their reception was generally positive. ‘Here in the land of the Turks we have nothing to complain of,’ wrote one rabbi to his brethren in Europe. ‘We possess great fortunes, much gold and silver are in our hands. We are not oppressed with heavy taxes and our commerce is free and unhindered.’ Mehmet was to bear the brunt of considerable Islamic criticism for these policies. His son, the more pious Bayezit II, declared that his father ‘by the counsel of mischief makers and hypocrites’ had ‘infringed the Law of the Prophet’.

  Although Constantinople would become a more Islamic city over the centuries, Mehmet set the tone for a place that was astonishingly multicultural, the model of the Levantine city. For those Westerners who looked beneath the crude stereotypes, there were plenty of surprises. When the German Arnold von Harff came in 1499 he was amazed to discover two Franciscan monasteries in Galata where the Catholic mass was still being celebrated. Those who knew the infidel up close were quite clear. ‘The Turks do not compel anyone to renounce his faith, do not try hard to persuade anyone and do not have a great opinion of renegades,’ wrote George of Hungary in the fifteenth century. It was a stark contrast to the religious wars that fragmented Europe during the Reformation. The flow of refugees after the fall would be largely one way: from the Christian lands to the Ottoman Empire. Mehmet hims
elf was more interested in building a world empire than in converting that world to Islam.

  The fall of Constantinople was a trauma for the West; not only had it dented the confidence of Christendom, it was also considered the tragic end of the classical world, ‘a second death for Homer and Plato’. And yet the fall also liberated the place from impoverishment, isolation and ruin. The city surrounded by ‘the garland of waters’, which Procopius had celebrated in the sixth century, now regained its old dash and energy as the capital of a rich and multicultural empire, straddling two worlds and a dozen trade routes; and the people whom the West believed to be tailed monsters spawned by the Apocalypse – ‘made up of a horse and a man’ – reincarnated a city of astonishment and beauty, different to the Christian City of Gold, but cast in equally glowing colours.

  Ottoman calligraphy

  Constantinople once again traded the goods of the world through the labyrinthine alleys of the covered bazaar and the Egyptian bazaar; camel trains and ships once more connected it to all the principal points of the Levant, but for sailors approaching from the Marmara, its horizon acquired a new shape. Alongside Aya Sofya, the hills of the city started to bubble with the grey leaded domes of mosques. White minarets as thin as needles and as fat as pencils, grooved and fluted and hung with tiers of delicately traceried balconies, punctuated the city skyline. A succession of brilliant mosque architects created, under sprung domes, abstract and timeless spaces: interiors of calm light, tiled with intricate geometric patterns and calligraphy and stylized flowers whose sensuous colours – crisp tomato and turquoise and celadon and the clearest blue from the depths of the sea – created ‘a reflection of the infinite garden of delight’ promised in the Koran.

  Ottoman Istanbul was a city that lived vividly in the eye and the ear – a place of wooden houses and cypress trees, street fountains and gardens, graceful tombs and subterranean bazaars, of noise and bustle and manufacture, where each occupation and ethnic group had its quarter, and all the races of the Levant in their distinctive garb and headdresses worked and traded, where the sea could be suddenly glimpsed, shimmering at the turn of a street or from the terrace of a mosque, and the call to prayer, rising from a dozen minarets, mapped the city from end to end and from dawn to dusk as intimately as the street cries of the local traders. Behind the forbidding walls of the Topkapi palace, the Ottoman sultans created their own echo of the Alhambra and Isfahan in a series of fragile, tiled pavilions more like solid tents than buildings, set in elaborate gardens, from which they could look out over the Bosphorus and the Asian hills. Ottoman art, architecture and ceremonial created a rich visual world that held as much astonishment for Western visitors as Christian Constantinople had done before it. ‘I beheld the prospect of that little world, the great city of Constantinople,’ wrote Edward Lithgow in 1640, ‘which indeed yields such an outward splendor to the amazed beholder … whereof now the world makes so great account that the whole earth cannot equal it.’

  The new skyline: the Islamic city from the sea

  Nowhere is the sensuous texture of Ottoman Istanbul recorded more vividly than in the endless succession of miniatures in which sultans celebrated their triumphs. It is a joyous world of primary colour patterned flat and without perspective, like the decorative devices on tiles and carpets. Here are court presentations and banquets, battles and sieges, beheadings, processions and festivities, tents and banners, fountains and palaces, elaborately worked kaftans and armour and beautiful horses. It is a world in love with ceremony, noise and light. There are ram fights, tumblers, kebab cooks and firework displays, massed Janissary bands that thump and toot and crash their way soundlessly across the page in a blare of red, tight-rope walkers crossing the Horn on ropes suspended from the masts of ships, cavalry squadrons in white turbans riding past elaborately patterned tents, maps of the city as bright as jewels, and all the visible exuberance of paint: vivid red, orange, royal blue, lilac, lemon, chestnut, grey, pink, emerald and gold. The world of the miniatures seems to express both joy and pride in the Ottoman achievement, the breathtaking ascent from tribe to empire in two hundred years, an echo of the words once written by the Seljuk Turks over a doorway in the holy city of Konya: ‘What I have created is unrivalled throughout the world.’

  In 1599 Queen Elizabeth I of England sent Sultan Mehmet III an organ as a gift of friendship. It was accompanied by its maker, Thomas Dallam, to play the instrument for the Ottoman ruler. When the master musician was led through the successive courts of the palace and into the presence of the sultan, he was so dazzled by the ceremonial that ‘the sight whereof did make me almost to think that I was in another world’. Visitors had been emitting exactly the same gasps of astonishment since Constantine the Great founded the second Rome and the second Jerusalem in the fourth century. ‘It seems to me’, wrote the Frenchman Pierre Gilles in the sixteenth century, ‘that while other cities are mortal, this one will remain as long as there are men on earth.’

  Source Notes

  16 The Present Terror of the World

  1 ‘Whichever way I look …’, Melville Jones, p. 135

  2 ‘I ransomed … in pain and grief’, Camariotes, p. 1070

  3 ‘scattered across …’, Pertusi, La Caduta, vol. 2, p. 416

  4 ‘said that we did …’, ibid., pp. 44–6

  5 ‘full of wine … the bloodthirsty beast’, Doukas, trans. Magoulias, pp. 234–5

  6 ‘and the Islamic invocation …’, quoted Lewis, Istanbul, p. 8

  7 ‘the sweet five-times-repeated …’, Khoja Sa’d-ud-din, p. 33

  8 ‘What a city we have …’, Kritovoulos, Critobuli, p. 76

  9 ‘Nothing worse than this …’, quoted Wheatcroft, The Ottomans, p. 23

  10 ‘a great and excessive crying …’, Pertusi, La Caduta, vol. 1, p. xxxviii

  11 ‘the horrible and deplorable …’, quoted Schwoebel, p. 8

  12 ‘On the day when the Turks …’, ibid., p. 4

  13 ‘What is this execrable news …’, quoted ibid., p. 9

  14 ‘in this year was …’, ibid., p. 4

  15 ‘the cunning of the Pope …’, Lewis, The Muslim Discovery of Europe, p. 32

  16 ‘The Sultan and all the men …’, Ibn Taghribirdi, pp. 38–9

  17 ‘stuffed with straw… Turks’, Doukas, Fragmenta, p. 300

  18 ‘It is your responsibility …’, Inalcik, The Ottoman Empire, p. 56

  19 ‘There must be only …’, quoted Schwoebel, p. 43

  20 ‘Our Senators could not …’, Barbaro, Giornale, p. 66

  21 ‘I thank Muhammad …’, quoted Schwoebel, p. 11

  22 ‘The enemy is at …’, quoted Babinger, p. 358

  23 ‘We ourselves allowed …’, quoted Babinger, pp. 170–71

  24 ‘the general enemy Ottoman … malignant and turbaned Turk’, Othello

  25 ‘the first troop … their mother’, quoted Matar, p. 158

  26 ‘the churches which were within the city …’, Khoja Sa’d-ud-din, p. 33

  27 ‘Be Patriarch …’, quoted Runciman, The Fall of Constantinople, p. 155

  28 ‘Here in the land of …’, quoted Mansel, p. 15

  29 ‘by the counsel … Law of the Prophet’, quoted Mansel, p. 32

  30 ‘The Turks do not compel …’, quoted Mansel, p. 47

  31 ‘a second death for Homer and Plato’, quoted Schwoebel, p. 9

  32 ‘the garland of water’, quoted Freely, p. 3

  33 ‘made up of a horse and a man’, quoted Matar, p. 159

  34 ‘a reflection of the infinite …’, quoted Levey, p. 15

  35 ‘I beheld the prospect …’, quoted Istanbul: Everyman Guides, p. 82

  36 ‘What I have created …’, quoted Levey, p. 18

  37 ‘the sight whereof …’, quoted Mansel, p. 57

  38 ‘It seems to me …’, quoted Freely, p. 14

  Epilogue: Resting Places

  It was fortunate for Christendom and for Italy that death checked the fierce

  and indomi
table barbarian.

  Giovanni Sagredo, seventeenth-century Venetian nobleman

  In the spring of 1481, the sultan’s horsetail banners were set up on the Anatolian shore across the water from the city, signifying that the year’s campaign would be in Asia. It is typical of Mehmet’s secrecy that no one, not even his leading ministers, knew its true objective. It was, in all likelihood, war against the rival Muslim dynasty of the Mamluks of Egypt.

  For thirty years the sultan had worked to build the world empire, personally managing the affairs of state himself: appointing and executing ministers, accepting tribute, rebuilding Istanbul, forcibly resettling populations, reorganizing the economy, concluding treaties, visiting terrible death on recalcitrant peoples, granting freedom of worship, dispatching or leading armies year after year to east and west. He was forty-nine years old and in poor health. Time and self-indulgence had taken their toll. According to an unflattering contemporary report, he was fat and fleshy, with ‘a short, thick neck, a sallow complexion, rather high shoulders, and a loud voice’. Mehmet, who collected titles like campaign medals – ‘The Thunderbolt of War’, ‘The Lord of Power and Victory on Land and Sea’, ‘Emperor of the Romans and of the Terrestrial Globe’, ‘The World Conqueror’ – could at times hardly walk. He was affected by gout and a deforming morbid corpulence, and shut himself away from human gaze in the Topkapi Palace. The man whom the West called ‘the Blood Drinker’, ‘the Second Nero’, had taken on the appearance of a grotesque. The French diplomat Philippe de Commynes declared that ‘men who have seen him have told me that a monstrous swelling formed on his legs; at the approach of summer it grew as large as the body of a man and could not be opened; and then it subsided’. Behind the palace walls Mehmet indulged in the untypical pursuits of a tyrant: gardening, handicrafts and the commissioning of obscene frescoes from the painter, Gentile Bellini, recently imported from Venice. Bellini’s famous last portrait, framed in a golden arch and surmounted with imperial crowns, hints at some unappeased essence in the man: the World Conqueror remained, to the last, moody, superstitious and haunted.