Janissary foot soldier in the early days of firearms.
At this moment, an Ottoman banner was seen flying atop the wall near the Palace of the Porphyrogenitus. At the vulnerable right angle of fortifications, a postern gate had apparently been left open in the confusion; a squad of attackers had spotted it and rushed through. Soon they were joined by more and more Turks, overwhelming the Venetians defending the Blachernae quarter.
The end had come. Constantine XI Dragases, the eighty-ninth and last emperor of Byzantium, tried rallying his men to turn back what was now an unstoppable tide. In all likelihood, he and his faithful courtiers rushed to the breach of the Lycus, and died there, fighting for their world. The rest of the defenders on those walls met the same fate, as the armies of Mehmet poured into the city. The Red Apple was theirs.
Sometime in the midafternoon, Mehmet II, now Fatih the Conqueror, rode slowly through the Edirnekapi into Constantinople. His horse picked its way along the same Mese down which Constantine and Phrantzes had traveled the night before. Fatih had promised his men a three-day sack of the city—the customary fate of any town taken by force—and they had been vigorously looting, raping, killing, and enslaving since daybreak. Smoke hung in the air; bodies lay sprawled in the streets.
At last Fatih reached the Hagia Sophia. He dismounted, crouched briefly on the ground, and then sprinkled a handful of dirt over his turban in a gesture of humility. The congregants, who had gathered there in the morning to pray for an angel to appear and smite the Muslim invaders, were all gone—shackled and herded into groups to be sold, ransomed, or ravished. Pious legend has the priests disappearing into the very walls of the church, destined to reemerge and continue their service once Christ returned to Constantinople.
Fatih entered the sanctuary, which was empty save for a few tardy treasure-hunters squabbling over the slim pickings left by the thorough looting of the morning. The sultan sharply ordered one man to desist from prying a marble slab from the floor. Fatih looked upward at the great dome, just as Justinian had done nine hundred years earlier when he boasted of surpassing Solomon. The Hagia Sophia would henceforth be a mosque.
The conqueror climbed up onto the dome of the Ayasofya. From this dizzying vantage point he could see nearby the old palace of the Byzantine emperors, by then a mournful ruin, neglected for centuries in favor of the Blachernae and the Porphyrogenitus. The musty grandeur of the building moved Fatih to melancholy. On this, the day of his greatest triumph, the twenty-one-year-old showed a largeness of soul uncommon in men of action three times his age. On beholding the desolate panorama spread out below, Fatih recited an old Persian couplet about kings long dead and the fate to which they—and we—are all condemned, no matter how great their works:
The spider serves as gatekeeper in the halls of Chosroes
The owl calls the watches in the palace of Afrasiyab.
The Edirnekapi, through which Mehmet II rode to take possession of Constantinople. To the right is the commemorative plaque affixed in i£)53.
The miracle awaited by the Greeks did not happen. Somehow, the angel on duty in 1453 had neglected to swoop down from heaven to drive back the infidel berserks. What had begun at Manzikert was now complete—the Byzantine Empire was gone. Yet for all the loud lamentations that this occasioned in the capitals of Christendom, a miracle did indeed occur: Constantinople was born anew.
For Fatih, the collection of scattered villages that was the Constantinople of May 29, 1453—their churches in disrepair, their hedgerows shored up by fragments of forgotten statuary, their inhabitants murdered or enslaved by his soldiers—could hardly have resembled the prize he had coveted. If, from his perch atop the newest and grandest mosque of the dar al Islam, his mind's eye conjured up the ghosts of vanished monarchs, he could still see very well stretched out beneath him what had made this city such a marvel. Its location remained peerless. The steady flow of the Bosporus, the expanse of the Marmara, the haven of the Golden Horn, the land and sea walls, the forested hills, the meeting of Europe and Asia, the passage from Black to White (Mediterranean) seas—despite the devastation, these assets endured. In classical days, the inhabitants of Byzantium used to joke that their cousins in Chalcedon (Kadikoy) had to be blind: how else could they have foolishly installed their polls on the Asian side, a generation before the eponymous Byzas came across what was obviously the finest place in the world to found a city?
The sultan was not blind. Although the lovely Ottoman capital of Edirne lay invitingly between forest and river to the northwest, Fatih saw that its seductions paled in comparison to those of Constantinople. For a conqueror with pretensions that spanned two continents and centuries of history, a sleepy, verdant headquarters, no matter how excellent the hunting, was out of the question. He ordered an evacuation. Edirne was abandoned by its courtiers and concubines, and the Topkapi Palace began rising atop the acropolis overlooking the Golden Horn and the Sea of Marmara. Henceforth, Kostantiniyye (as both Turkish and Arabic rendered the city's name) was Fatih's capital.
The phoenix city would reflect his extraordinary personality: polyglot, cultured, libidinous, and ruthless. As the medieval millennium drew to a close in the Mediterranean, this final flowering of convivencia was about to begin, a long moment of coexistence that would conclude only during the insecurity of the modern era, when the Ottoman Empire became what was known as the Sick Man of Europe. But that rendezvous with provincialism and nationalism lay far in the future. In its first century or so as their capital, the Kostantiniyye of the Ottomans would outdo the Córdoba, of the Umayyads in its cosmopolitan embrace. Under Fatih, the line linking the Mezquita to the Ayasofya was never clearer.
The first thing the conqueror needed was people; therefore, in the renascent Kostantiniyye, everyone was invited into the city. According to debatable popular etymology, "into the city" in Greek (ees ten polin) would eventually slide off Turkish tongues as "Istanbul," the nickname that would eventually be decreed the city's official tag in modern times. In many instances, Fatih's invitation was coercive—thousands of Anatolian families were told to move to Kostantiniyye on pain of death. Artisans and skilled workers received special attention from the dragooning servants of the sultan. Fatih was a man in a hurry to build his capital, and his acquaintance with restraint was as glancing as one might expect from an absolute despot. In moving populations around his possessions—under the Ottomans most land belonged to the sultan—he caused tremendous human suffering, but the refurbishment of a has-been capital would have been nowhere near as rapid otherwise. And his willingness to look beyond the talent pool of Islam made the transformation even faster.
News came to the sultan in the autumn of 1453 of a remarkably learned old Greek held in slavery in Edirne. His owner, who had picked up a job lot of captive Byzantines in the buyer's market immediately after the fall of the city, recognized in his purchase an individual of extraordinary quality. The old fellow was treated reverentially, allowed to study and pray and drink wine like any self-respecting Christian holy man. Inquiries were made, and soon Fatih himself arrived to coax George Scholarius into returning to the city on the Golden Horn. Scholarius, or, as he is better known, Gennadios, was the most prominent of the Orthodox churchmen who, until the very last, had held out against any plan of unity with the Latin westerners in embattled Constantinople. Fatih promised Gennadios a restored see in Kostantiniyye—that is, an Orthodox patriarchate that would function independently of the Latins under the protection of an Islamic ruler. Although he would not give the Greeks back the Hagia Sophia, they were free to use another great church as their headquarters, and a handful of other Christian sanctuaries in the city would be ruled out of bounds to imams in search of ready-made mosques.
The overture, unprecedented for the era, was accepted. By way of contrast, the sophisticated Venice of the time collapsed into civil anarchy when the doge proposed allowing a lone mosque to be built in the city for visiting Muslim merchants.* Fatih was rumored to harbor a curiosity about
Christianity—he is even said to have ventured incognito into a Franciscan church one Sunday to observe the goings-on. He had Gennadios write him a treatise explaining Christian doctrine. He commissioned a Greek sycophant of talent to write what would now be called an authorized biography. In it Fatih's dedication to Kostantiniyye produced an ecumenical lovefest, whereby the sultan took people "from all parts of Asia and Europe, and he transferred them with all possible care and speed, people of all nations, but more especially of Christians."
Whatever the affinities lying behind his motives, the result of Fatih's initiatives was enlightened. The natives of the city—those who had eluded slavery or been ransomed—returned. Although the brain drain of Byzantine scholars to the Italian peninsula accelerated, a large Greek community took root once again on the shores of the Bosporus. Soon the wharves of the Golden Horn once again rang with the shouts of Greek merchantmen. In due time the Armenians, permitted to establish their own patriarchate for their ancient monophysite version of Christianity, also returned in force, bringing with them their formidable knack for craftsmanship and commerce.
As for the Latins, their presence was at once more straightforward and more complicated. The trading concessions granted to them by Byzantine emperors were renewed by the Ottomans, and many were extended under the name of "capitulations." The Genoese of Galata became fast friends with the denizens of the Topkapi. These local Genoese—as opposed to Giustiniani and his men—had remained neutral during the siege of 1453, a politically astute posture that had not gone unnoticed. The capitulations granted the Genoese went practically untouched until modern times. The Venetians, after concluding a war with Fatih shortly after the fall of Constantinople over the rump of the Byzantine Empire in southern Greece, also set up shop in Galata, as did their rivals in Mediterranean trade, the Florentines and the Catalans.
The Levantines—the name later given to these Bosporus Latins—grew in number and influence in Fatih's effervescent city, the women famous for the dazzle of their come-hither clothing and demeanor, the men known for their acumen in business and their penchant for poisoning anyone who hindered their accumulation of wealth. (The Venetians attempted to bribe Fatih's Jewish physician into poisoning him in 1471.) Governed by their own mayors—the podestd for the Genoans, the bailo for the Venetians—and regulated by their own courts of law, the Latins of Kostantiniyye achieved a measure of autonomy and freedom that left many Muslim Turks scratching their heads. "If you wish to stand in high honor on the Sultan's threshold," wrote one, "you must either be a Jew, a Persian or a Frank." But the sultan, who reaped a tax windfall from his non-Muslim subjects under the time-honored dhimmi system, had no such qualms about his resident infidels, who in 1500 numbered an astonishing one half of Kostantiniyye's population. His agents, who tried to keep the fractious Greek and Latin Christians away from each other's throats, also made sure that the clangorous bells of their churches did not drown out the muezzins' call to prayer. If Kostantiniyye could not look like a Muslim city, at least it could sound like one.
Even more unusual was the composition of Fatih's court and household. Just as he had compelled Muslims into the city, so too were the Christians of the hinterlands forced to bend to the sultan's will. In the years following the conquest, Fatih expanded the heartless devshirme or "gathering" system, whereby young Christians were abducted and moved to the capital. In effect, he took the Janissary recruiting method and broadened it to what we would call the state civil service. Once every few years roving Ottoman talent scouts, accompanied by soldiers, descended on the villages of the Balkans and Anatolia and culled the most promising peasant boys from their playmates and siblings. In some instances families consented to—even encouraged—this boy tribute, hoping to see their sons get ahead in the world. In others, no doubt the majority, only sorrow and hatred ensued.
Separated from their kin, the boys were quickly circumcised and converted to Islam, then were educated in austere academies devoted to turning out the elite who would run the empire. A section was reserved for good-looking youths who would become the ruler's personal attendants. Cruel though this boy tribute may have been, it did have the signal advantage of inculcating among its victims unswerving loyalty to the sultan—brainwashing and the lure of material gain have that effect—and ensuring a formidable cohesion at the top. These formerly Christian youths became, in their adulthood, the backbone of the Ottoman state, a cohort of carefully molded men with no past or dynastic attachments. Under this system the sultans avoided the bane of European monarchs—there was no native aristocracy to challenge the authority of the ruler, hence no Magna Carta or fronde. Many a great pasha began life as an illiterate Balkan goatherd, and the office of grand vizier, one of the most perilous in the execution-happy courtyards of the Topkapi, was often held by a former Christian. This arrangement is reminiscent of Shmuel HaNagid's exalted position in the Granadan court, save for one notable difference: Grand Vizier HaNagid was not obliged to renounce his Judaism in order to serve his sovereign; Fatih's ministers, on the other hand, had all been forcibly converted to Islam. The mores of conviviencia had varied over the centuries, and even Kostantiniyye could go only so far in its easygoing cosmopolitanism.
In Spain, the land where convivencia first shone, the idea of a multiconfessional society was a thing of the past, and developments there, famously, would make Fatih's boomtown even livelier. Across the twilight of the Moors, which had begun on a summer day at Las Navas de Tolosa, darkness finally fell. On January 2,1492, the armies of los reyes catolicos (the Catholic monarchs) took possession of Granada, the capital of the last remaining taifa state. The Christian rejoiced; the Muslim mourned. Granada's last Muslim ruler, Boabdil, paused while crossing a snowy pass in the Sierra Nevada, to look back, through tears, on the Al-hambra palace in his dream city. His aged mother is supposed to have said to him in reproach, "You may well weep like a woman for what you could not defend like a man."
Henceforth Islam was homeless in Iberia. The great rock of Gibraltar loomed impassive on the horizon as the Granadans sailed past it on their way to exile in the Maghrib, 781 years after Tariq had gone the other way to defeat the Visigoths. Many of the exiled Iberian Muslims fanned out over the Islamic world; naturally some made their way to the Golden Horn, where a Christian church of Galata was transformed into what is still called the Arap Camii (the Arab Mosque).
Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand, who through marriage had at last united Castile and Aragon, were intent on creating a monolith of faith in Iberia. Under the Catholic monarchs and their like-minded successors, the homeland of convivencia became its burial ground: the memory of King Alfonso's Toledo of the translators was immured in the archives; the Córdoba, of the Umayyads was dredged up solely for its episode of Christian martyrdom. Cosmetic surgery was performed on the Mezquita, only to be defeated by the greatness of the original. The story of Rodrigo Diaz became clouded in incense, the legend of the Cid brilliantly making a talented adventurer into a devout paladin of Catholicism. For the rulers of Spain, the past had become an embarrassment, a skeleton of confessional promiscuity to be locked away in a closet of the sacristy.
This new, single-minded Spain had no room for Jews. That epochal year of 1492 thus saw the expulsion of Spain's Jews, one of the most wanton acts of self-sabotage ever performed by sane rulers. Millennium-old ties of Mediterranean trade and trust, as evidenced in the trove of Cairo's Geniza documents, were denied the Spanish crown. Although many Jews accepted to convert to Christianity, only to be later persecuted by the Inquisition for having done so, many others fled across the Mediterranean. Great numbers of the Sephardim found a home in the lands of the Ottomans, particularly in Thessalonica—which in effect became a Spanish Jewish city—and in Kostantiniyye. The sultans were delighted to admit more dhimmi; aside from the corresponding increase in revenue, the influx of commercial skill, master craftsmanship, and linguistic acumen that the Jews brought could only add luster to the Ottoman work-in-progress on the Bosporus. "They sa
y Ferdinand is a wise monarch," Fatih's son, Beyazit II, is supposed to have exclaimed to his courtiers. "How could he be, he who impoverishes his country to enrich mine!"
The jigsaw was almost complete with the arrival of the Iberian Muslims and Jews. In 1517 Ottoman armies rolled over much of the Middle East and the Arabian peninsula, toppling the long-tottering Mamluks of Cairo and installing in their place pashas answerable to the Topkapi. The Hashemites, descendants of the Prophet and sharifs (guardians) of Madina and Mecca, became mere subjects of the Ottomans. With this demotion came the necessity for them to put in an appearance on the Bosporus, adding yet another exotic bird to the city's menagerie of nationalities. The sultan was now the equivalent of a caliph, his home the keystone of Islam. Yet it was more than that: by the opening of the reign of Fatih's great-grandson, Suleyman the Magnificent in 1520, the Conqueror's ambition for his city had been realized.
The view from the hills of Kostantiniyye during Suleyman's time would have gladdened the hearts of the disconsolate Byzantines of the previous century. In the Golden Horn an ever-moving waltz of masts and riggings signaled the bustle of maritime traffic docking at the warehouses, taverns, markets, hammams, barracks, and shipyards that lined both sides of the waterway. The car-racks of the Venetians, the lateen sails of the Egyptians, the galleys of the Genoese, the slim golden lighter of the sultan, rowed by two hundred men—all slipped past Seraglio Point, the headland of Kostantiniyye, on errands of commerce and pleasure. The constant babel of the Golden Horn's business and intrigue contrasted with the quieter shores of the Bosporus, enlivened by multicolored palaces, where wealthy grandees from Europe and Asia, from cross and crescent, met for decorous entertainments away from the heat of the city. One of the most lavish hosts was Joseph Nasi, a Lisbon-born Jew whose business empire and influence stretched into the heart of Christendom. Ennobled by the sultan and given the duchy of Naxos in the Aegean, Nasi held court in his mansion on the Bosporus, the persecutions suffered by his coreligionists in sixteenth-century Europe an unthinkable barbarity in the Ottoman capital. Indeed, Nasi often remonstrated with his Latin counterparts, combining flattery with threats, to have the authorities in their home countries cease harassing the Jews.
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