Anadolu Hisari. The streams known as the Sweet Waters of Asia meet the Bosporus nine kilometers north of the great city on the Golden Horn, toward the other end of the watery frontier separating Europe and Asia. Here, at the narrowest point of the Bosporus, on the Asian side, Sultan Beyazit built the Anatolian Fortress, the Anadolu Hisari, a mean-looking castle dedicated to harassing maritime traffic. Today, in the small park enclosed by its crumbling crenellations, a rickety swingset echoes with the squeals of uniformed schoolchildren under the gaze of their nannies, and of Atamrk. A bust of the great man rests on a plinth, the inscription on its base his paean to the sheer felicity of being born a Turk: "How Happy Is He Who Can Say He Is a Turk."
Atamrk's Turcophilia is fitting, given the significance of the Anadolu Hisari. The construction of the fortress marked the second stage of the sea change initiated at Gallipoli. When Beyazit completed the fort at the dawn of the fifteenth century, the old city's final days as a Christian capital appearted to have begun, for the Ottomans clearly wanted to make Constantinople their own. In the decade following Kosovo, Beyazit had battled unceasingly in Anatolia, doubling the size of the empire his father had left to him there, so that the Ottomans grandly bestrode Europe and Asia, their territories remarkably similar in extent to the long-vanished embrace of the Byzantine imperium. The only thing missing was the center, the cynosure—Constantinople, the "Red Apple" of temptation in Turkish lore. The Prophet, in a hadith, had said, "They shall conquer Qostantinya, glory be to the prince and to the army that shall achieve it."
Beyazit's idea was simple: wear the city down. At the same time as he was laying siege before the great land walls of Constantinople, he would attempt to place a tourniquet on the Bosporus. From Anadolu Hisari his raiders would hinder the transports gliding through the dark waters in from the Black Sea, laden with the grains and minerals of the Trebizond, the carpets and silks of Persia and Armenia, and the shackled masses of Circassians bound for sexual or military slavery throughout the Mediterranean world. Destined first for the Genoese trading city of Galata on the northern shore of the Golden Horn across from Constantinople, these ships were the source of wealth for much of the Christian east. Starve the Byzantine capital on land; cripple its Latin suburb on the water—he assumed that in only a matter of time the city would be his.
Rendering of the Anadolu Hisari as it might have looked in Beya{it's time. Beyond it are the hills of the Asian shore of the Bosporus.
This calculation did not take into account the reaction of his adversaries. In duplicating the old empire ruled from the Bosporus, Beyazit also inherited its problems. Just like the Byzantines prior to Manzikert, the sultan was soon faced with two threats, one from the east, the other from the west. The latter emerged first, in the form of the greatest international crusade to be launched in more than a century. The powers of western Christendom finally took note of the Ottoman menace—the capture by Beyazit and his generals of Bulgaria and much of Greece and Hungary had sounded the alarm. Accordingly, in July 1396, an immense host of warriors from Wallachia, France, Germany, Poland, Italy, Spain, and England mustered at Buda, then marched down the Danube under the command of the Hungarian king, Sigismund. The crusaders, thought to number as many as one hundred thousand, aimed to crush the Turkish infidel.
Alarmed, Beyazit summoned all the men at his command, lifting the siege of Constantinople and instructing his vassals to strike out north into the Balkans to thwart the holy warriors of Christendom. On September 25, 1396, at Nicopolis, the Danubian town now known as Nikopol, Bulgaria, the collision of the two huge forces took place, the outcome having been decided before the westerners even realized that Beyazit's great army was in the vicinity. Unfamiliar with Turkish tactics of deception, thousands of Burgundian knights, eager to emulate the heroics celebrated in the chansons de geste, charged a small contingent of Ottoman outriders seen trotting on a hilltop; when the knights crested the hill in pursuit of their fleeing quarry, they found themselves riding at full tilt into the midst of the main Ottoman army, tens of thousands strong, deployed behind the concealing hill. Massacre ensued. Riderless horses came cantering back to the encampment of the Christian army before Nicopolis, and foreboding gave way to panic once the great Turkish host at last emerged from its hiding place and roared down the same slope over which the headstrong Burgundians had just disappeared. It was said that the exultant Beyazit had more than ten thousand captives beheaded on that September day—until his own men begged him for a respite. The defeat, a catastrophe of such magnitude that early reports of it were not believed in the capitals of the west, seemed certain to spell the doom of Christianity's eastern capital. Beyazit's besiegers once again appeared in the Thracian plain outside the land walls of Constantinople, and the skirmishers of the Anadolu Hisari took to the waters of the Bosporus. Nothing short of an unimaginably powerful bolt from the blue seemed able to counter Yilderim the Thunderbolt.
It came from the east. There was one force fiercer than the Ottoman sultan: a warlord of Samarkand known as Tamerlane, or Timur Leng (Timur the Lame). His fourteenth-century Mongol armies mixed the inhuman toughness of the steppe nomad with an exalted belief in jihad—even against fellow Muslims—and exceeded all of their predecessors in the pursuit of atrocity. Not only did they brutally sack many of the great cities of Islam—Isfahan, Baghdad, Mosul, Aleppo, Damascus—they also made a point of constructing tall pyramids with the heads of their victims, the macabre monuments often containing tens of thousands of skulls. The wives and daughters of those so arrayed were stripped and hauled from the sanctuary of the Muslim home to the shame of the public square or the nomad tent. In central and west Asia in the last decades of the fourteenth century, millions were killed or enslaved.
Around 1400 Timur came west to devastate Syria, causing its immediate neighbors to fear, quite rightly, the spread of the Mongol contagion. In a meeting as unusual as that between Francis of Assisi and Sultan al-Kamil, the great scholar Ibn Khaldun was enlisted by the Mamluks of Egypt to treat with the dread Timur. The two men, despite the chasm separating their pursuits, had several long conversations, and Ibn Khaldun came away impressed with Timur's thoughtfulness—perhaps he saw in him the vector of asabiyya, the kinship system central to building an Islamic empire. The contemplative interlude did not last, for Timur, in his late sixties but possessed of an indomitable thirst for war, was bent on punishing all those who ignored his demands for submission. Conspicuously defiant had been the Ottomans. He sent messengers to Beyazit ordering him to return all the lands of Anatolia to the Byzantines and to the various Turkish emirs the Ottomans had despoiled.
Enraged and no doubt exasperated at having to lift the siege of Constantinople yet again, Beyazit summoned his troops and raced into Anatolia, this time to inflict punishment in the east. The decisive encounter occurred near Ankara on July 28,1402. Although no horrific one-sided massacre occurred, the Ottomans were soundly beaten. Stefan Lazarevic and his Serbs, who had fought alongside the Turks at Nicopolis, resisted best the Mongol onslaught and managed to rescue some of the sultan's kinsmen from capture. The Thunderbolt was not as lucky—taken prisoner, he was carted around in a litter, which later legend made into a cage, as Timur sacked the cities of northwestern Turkey that the sultan's ancestors, Osman and Orhan, had conquered. Apparently, during this campaign Beyazit's lovely Serbian bride, Olivera, was relieved of her clothes and forced to serve, stark naked, at the table of the great Mongol. Beyazit, dejected and humiliated, died the following year.
The Christians of Constantinople could scarcely believe their luck. Their hopes had been dashed at Nicopolis, only to revive at Ankara. The Ottomans were now divided and sullen, their empire on shaky footing, their soldiery huddled around the walls of the Anadolu Hisari, not to harass Christian shipping but to shelter from the wrath of Timur's marauding Mongols. As if to prove that the good fortune was heaven sent, Timur's dangerous armies left as quickly as they had come—the astounding old warrior decided to turn around and march acr
oss the world to conquer China instead. Beyazit was no more, and a civil war broke out among the Ottomans over his succession. Constantinople, the new Rome of the mare nostrum, had been saved—for the moment.
CHAPTER NINE
CONSTANTINOPLE 1453 AND
KOSTANTINIYYE
The fall of the new Rome; the rise of the new convivencia
By definition a reprieve is temporary. In the fifty years following Timur's eleventh-hour rescue of Constantinople from Beyazit, there was reason to hope that the capital of eastern Christendom might defy the lexicon of defeat. The Ottomans ineffectually besieged Constantinople in 1422, but dynastic quarrels at the time hampered their ability to mete out sustained grief to their Greek neighbors. Restoration of purpose and of glory occurred under a long-lived and capable sultan, Murad II, who, for all his warrior prowess, confounded expectations by preferring the life of the mind to the tent of the campaigner. He and his statesmanlike vizier, Chandarli Halil Pasha, seemed satisfied with an uneasy peace. The sea of faith, at least in its eastern reaches, looked as if it might just settle into placid convivencia.
Twice, however, Murad was summoned out of the early retirement he had accorded himself to face down threats in the north, from which the great Tran-sylvanian lord and regent of Hungary, John Hunyadi, led invading armies intent on smashing Ottoman power. The sultan annihilated a Christian host at Varna, Bulgaria, in 1444 and again at Kosovo's already-notorious Field of the Blackbirds, in 1448. This second battle of Kosovo was a close-run affair—had the armies of George Skanderbeg, a truly redoubtable Albanian warlord, managed to rendezvous with Hunyadi's forces before the sultan got to them, the outcome could have been entirely different. As it was, Skanderbeg failed to show in time, and Hunyadi had to fight the Turks alone. Like the Serbs before them, the once-mighty Hungarians were decisively knocked out of contention for the remnants of the Byzantine Empire.
Despite the double disaster, Christians praying that Timur's reprieve would last could still discern a silver lining. Murad's recent triumphs were defensive in nature—the Hungarians had violated the truces—and throughout his career the sultan had left his non-Muslim subjects to their own pursuits, with the notable exception of the boy-tribute for the Janissary corps. And while the Ottomans had harassed or reduced to vassalhood most of the sovereign cities and statelets of eastern Europe, Halil Pasha was on excellent terms with his Greek counterparts—so much so that some whispered he was no stranger to the largesse of Constantinople's treasury. A facilitator and a diplomat, in the mold of the Ayyubid sultan al-Kamil who had given St. Francis a hearing and the Stupor Mundi the keys to Jerusalem two cenmries earlier, the immensely powerful grand vizier—his father and grandfather had been viziers before him—was seen as the guarantor of good governance and sensible coexistence. With Halil Pasha in charge, some thought hopefully, the person wearing the sultan's turban barely mattered.
The optimists' theory was put to the test in 1451, at the death of Murad II. His nineteen-year-old son, Mehmet (Muhammad) II, took the throne—after prudently having his infant stepbrother drowned in the bath—and promised ambassadors from all and sundry the maintenance of the status quo. The Europeans were gladdened by this undertaking and, in some cases, emboldened to stir up trouble for the Turks in Thrace. This same Mehmet, while barely an adolescent, had briefly taken command of the Ottoman Empire on his father's self-imposed retirement prior to Varna and Kosovo, and he had proved to be putty in Halil Pasha's hands—and unpopular with the rank and file of the Turkish armies. Surely the young man, now sultan for the foreseeable future, would persist in his career of perfect incompetence.
Alas, for the Europeans, he would not. Rarely, in fact, did the acquisition of power and the onset of maturity forge a leader as outstanding as the new sultan. At the court in Edirne (Adrianople), the primacy of Halil Pasha suffered incremental but steady abrasion as his pacific counsels were ignored and a new generation of pashas and generals came to the fore. Many of Mehmet's coterie were renegades, capable Christian adventurers who had "turned Turk" in the pursuit of advancement and wealth. Such men were seldom peace-lovers. Mehmet, conversant in Turkish, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, Persian, and Latin, welcomed individuals of great ability regardless of their origins and possessed a breadth of knowledge that precluded clannish small-mindedness. After mealtimes, as he reclined with the women and boys to enjoy his favor, he had biographies of Alexander the Great read to him in the original Greek. His interest in Graeco-Roman antiquity went far beyond avocation, for this fleshy-lipped, starry-eyed scion of the Ottomans saw himself not only as the sultan of the Turks, but also as emperor of the Romans. With Mehmet, the mare nostrum had come full circle—Islam was less the lucky beneficiary of the legacy of antiquity than its rightful and legitimate continuator, in much the same way as the Quran had made obsolete the revelations of the Christians and the Jews. The Byzantine Greeks, in this view, had outlived their role as the torch-bearers of Alexander. The great basileus Heraclius—and indeed the Prophet himself—would have been dumbfounded at this turn of the wheel; for Mehmet, it was as natural as the absolute power he held over millions of lives. His mission was to become what Turks call him to this very day: Fatih, "Conqueror."
Mehmet II, conqueror of Constantinople, in middle age.
During the first few months of his reign, knowledge of the scope of his ambition remained in the sole possession of his inner circle. Yet rumors began to fly—the courts of the Christian kingdoms and the Ottoman sultanate had too intimate a history of intermarriage and intermingling for confidences to be kept for very long. So it was that by the spring of 1452 those Christians formerly sanguine about the new sultan's incompetence and irresoluteness had to admit the truth: they had been clutching at straws. In May, after perfunctorily informing the authorities of Constantinople of his intentions, Mehmet arrived on the European shore of the Bosporus at the head of an army bearing a tactical component of hundreds of stonemasons. As their warrior comrades stood guard, in the unlikely event of an attack from the skeletal army of the Greeks, the masons set to work, spending four feverish months just upstream from the Byzantine capital. Three of Mehmet's pashas, including Halil, were each given a portion of the project to complete, thus ensuring that rivalry would spur them to prodigies of speed. The arrangement worked its desired effect: at the end of August 1452, the gigantic Rumeli Hisari was finished.
Still today a stone cascade of turrets and curtain walls spilling down a steep slope to the Bosporus at its narrowest point, the Rumeli Hisari—the Rumelian (European) Castle—dwarfs its sister seven hundred meters opposite on the Asian shore, Beyazit's Anadolu (Anatolian) Hisari. In Mehmet's day the two fortresses formed what the Turks called bogaz kesen, the strait-cutter: henceforth no one would be allowed passage from the Black Sea to Constantinople without the sultan's say-so. With no Timur to burst onto the scene and create havoc, young Mehmet intended to succeed where Beyazit had failed.
At the Rumeli Hisari of today there is no playground, as there is at the Anadolu. Instead, within its massive embrace, scores of old cannons molder in the mist that drifts in from the dark waters of the strait. Although loud groups of schoolchildren clamber over them as if they were intended for play, the cannons serve more appositely as a sharp reminder of Mehmet's martial genius. However much he was a dreamer of the heroics of past campaigns, the young sultan recognized the hard outlines of future warfare: on hearing that the Greeks had spurned the talents of a Hungarian cannon-founder named Urban, he engaged the man to construct a ballistic device capable of keeping the promise implied by bogai kesen. Unlike Callinichus, the Syrian who had saved Byzantium from Muawiya with his invention of Greek fire, Urban brought to bear a technological innovation that would hasten its destruction.
By the fall Urban had delivered. His ballistic behemoth was installed at the Rumeli Hisari. Warnings were issued, the wait began. In early November two Venetian merchant galleys ran before a strong wind below the walls of the fortress. The cannon roared; its payload sp
lashed harmlessly into the Bosporus. The daredevil sailors were greeted joyfully in the Venetian quarter of the capital, on the southern shores of the Golden Horn. Mehmet's artillery sergeants corrected their range and adjusted the trajectory. Two weeks later, emboldened by the success of its sister, another Venetian ship tried running the gauntlet. Urban's cannon blew it out of the water. The crew was fished out of the waves and beheaded; the ship's captain, Antonio Rizzo, was brought to the sultan near Edirne, who promptly had him impaled. The builder of the Rumeli Hisari had given notice that he would countenance no further impertinence. Satisfied with his summer project, the sultan spent the winter months assembling the soldiery required for the next phase of his plan. The stonemasons were dismissed.
The Rumeli Hisari today, looking north toward the Bosporus as it approaches the Black Sea.
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