by David Brewer
Thereafter the Turkish ships stayed in the western part of the Golden Horn while the defenders guarded the boom at the eastern end. The Turkish ships from The Columns made three attempts to break through the boom, all failures. In fact the Turkish ships dragged overland with such effort are barely mentioned again. The exercise of transporting them had been spectacular, but ultimately pointless. It was some years yet before Turkish skill at deploying land forces would be matched by the same skill at sea.
By the beginning of May the defenders of Constantinople had suffered three weeks of constant cannon fire, and were running short of food. Their only hope was help from abroad. In the autumn of 1452 Constantine had begun his appeals for help, to the Pope, Venice and Genoa, who were the most likely sources of aid, but also to Hungary, Russia and Serbia. The only hopeful response was from Venice but the ships she sent, after months of debate, were too late to save the city. ‘The whole of Christendom’, said Constantine, ‘has been unwilling to help me against this faithless Turk, the enemy of Christendom.’13 The failure of Constantine’s appeals perhaps reflects the divisions in Christendom caused by the question of the union of the Churches, the Pope for instance being disturbed by Greek opposition to union and the Orthodox Russians angered by its formal acceptance. Perhaps it also reflects the assumption that in the face of these odds Constantinople was already doomed.
Meanwhile, the daily bombardment of Constantinople’s land walls continued, and the Turks devised other means of attack. On 19 May they built, in a single night, a huge tower of wooden beams protected by hurdles and camel skins, which overtopped the walls. From the top of it they shot arrows into the city, and under its protection they shovelled earth into the defensive ditch to ease their passage across it. The Turks also dug mines under the north end of the land walls, where these had been extended and were weaker. On 16 May the defenders discovered the first of these mines. They were clearly unprepared for such a threat, as a search had to be made throughout the city for men with experience of mining. This mine was destroyed, as were five more found in the next ten days under the same part of the walls. The Turks had probably prepared this network of mines to be collapsed simultaneously and to bring a whole section of the wall to the ground. But according to one contemporary they were wasting their time. The mines ‘proved to be superfluous and involved only useless expense, as cannons decided everything’.14
Although Constantinople’s fall was becoming daily more inevitable, there were two things that might possibly have spared it. One was a peace offer from the Sultan, made some time in May. It was on generous terms: the Emperor and his ministers could leave the city with their property, and the citizens staying behind would not be harmed. But Constantine refused the offer, saying, ‘The city is not mine to give you.’15 Some thought the offer by the Sultan was a trick: under Islamic law a war was just only if a peace offer had been made and rejected, and Mehmed knew that Constantine would refuse it. And perhaps Constantine had to. Whatever the terms, it was inconceivable that a Byzantine Emperor should peacefully surrender the queen of Christian cities to the infidel.
The other possibility of salvation was that the Turkish army would withdraw anyway. It is reported that in the last week of the siege Mehmed held a four-day conference, where the Sultan’s grand vizier Halil argued for raising the siege. But Halil’s arguments were dismissed by the Sultan’s second vizier, Zagan, the commander of the Turkish forces north of the Golden Horn: much of the city’s walls was already destroyed, he said, the rest would soon follow, and there was no possibility of aid to the city from Italy. The Sultan accepted Zagan’s view. It is far from certain that withdrawal was seriously considered; Mehmed could no more retreat than Constantine could surrender. It seems likely that the main topic of this meeting was to draw up in detail the plans for the final assault, which quickly followed.
There were three days of preparation, 26 to 28 May, in the Turkish camp. Previous efforts had been against specific areas, but this culminating assault was to be against the whole perimeter of the city. Troops were deployed along the total length of the land walls, and the artillery – including the monster cannon – was concentrated at the St Romanus gate. A wide bridge of barrels covered with planks had been constructed earlier, and was now stretched across the west end of the Golden Horn, so that the troops north of Galata could easily be brought across. The Turkish ships in the Golden Horn were at last given a role to attack the walls there, and ships from The Columns were to attack along the Sea of Marmora. Every night fires blazed in the Turkish camp and there was a constant din from shouting, singing and playing of castanets: psychological warfare designed to exhaust and dishearten the enemy.
The inhabitants of Constantinople were deeply apprehensive, and turned to God as their only hope of salvation. ‘We carried the sacred images in a remorseful procession around the ramparts,’16 wrote Leonard of Chíos of the final day before the attack. In the evening a last service was held in Ayía Sophía. All nationalities, religions and shades of opinion filled the great building – Greeks, Italians and Catalans, Catholic and Orthodox, pro- and anti-unionists. But the ceremony was ‘in reality a liturgy of death’.17
At about 1.30 a.m. on the night of 28–29 May the attack began. Darkness would last some hours yet, and, while the attackers could easily make out the fortifications they were attacking, the defenders could only dimly discern the enemy. The main assault came on the land walls at the St Romanus gate where the walls had suffered weeks of heavy cannonade. The attack came in three waves. First came the impressed men, many of them Christians, whose task was to bring the scaling ladders up to the walls. When these were driven back, the Turkish regular soldiers followed, and finally the elite janissaries. There were said to be 50,000 men in each group, and even if the number was exaggerated the forces may well have seemed that numerous to the defenders. The Turkish troops soon got inside the outer defensive walls, where fierce hand-to-hand fighting held them, but the inner walls were not yet breached. Meanwhile, an hour before dawn, the Turkish ships at The Columns sailed to attack the sea walls, and those inside the Golden Horn attacked the walls at its western end.
Two chance events finally sealed the city’s fate. Giustiniani, the commander of the crucial defences at St Romanus, was wounded and went back inside the city to be treated. His men thought he was giving up the fight and themselves began to retreat. At about the same time a small gate called the Kerkoporta at the northern end of the land walls, which had inadvertently been left unbarred, was burst open and the Turks rushed in through it.
The Emperor Constantine fought on among his troops but death soon overtook him. There are many different accounts of how he died: that he asked one of his courtiers to kill him and, on being refused, rushed into the melée and disappeared, or that he was crushed to death in the crowd pouring back through a narrow gate into the city, or that he was mortally wounded in the thick of the fighting. The most likely explanation, and certainly the only one acceptable to Greeks of future generations, was that the last Byzantine Emperor died heroically in battle at the head of his troops.
On the principal tower of the city the Turkish flag now replaced those of Byzantium and Venice, and Constantinople was at the mercy of the Turks. Mehmed had promised his troops three days of pillage and the crews of the Turkish ships abandoned their vessels to join the frenzied search for booty. Things worth plundering were now only to be found in the churches. Anything valuable elsewhere had gone, thanks to the depredations of the crusaders in 1204 and the city’s increasing impoverishment ever since. Sacred objects were seized and put to vulgar uses. In the Turkish camp afterwards, as one contemporary wrote, ‘there might be seen in the midst of the barbarians one with a patriarch’s robe, another with some prelate’s golden chain around his waist, using it to drag his dogs along, and others again using cloths embroidered in gold with the Lamb of God as saddle blankets. Others were sitting down and making merry, eating from the sacred dishes.’18
Captives, t
o be enslaved or ransomed, were the most valuable prizes. The same writer gives a lurid picture of their fate:
One Turk would look for the captive who seemed the wealthiest, a second would prefer a pretty face among the nuns, and then a third, more powerful, would snatch his prize from him and truss her up. Curling locks, a shoulder or a breast laid bare or an outflung arm, might all serve to attract attention to a captive, who would then be snatched and dragged aside. Then long chains of captives could be seen leaving the church and its shrines, being herded along like cattle or flocks of sheep, weeping and wailing, with no one to show pity for them.19
Among the captives was Notarás, the leading Greek commander, though most of the other Greek captains had died in the fighting. Notarás was later killed, allegedly on Mehmed’s orders because Notarás had refused to surrender his fourteen-year-old son to the Sultan’s homosexual demands. Sphrantzís and his family were seized; his two children died in captivity, but Sphrantzís eventually bought freedom for himself and his wife. Also captured but later ransomed were Leonard of Chíos, the Pope’s emissary Cardinal Isidore, and 29 Venetians, though the diarist Barbaro escaped.
It seems that Mehmed, despite having promised his troops a free hand for three days, brought the sack to an end on the evening of the first day, and personally stopped his troops from damaging Ayía Sophía, with the words ‘Be satisfied with the booty and the captives; the buildings of the city belong to me.’20 Indeed they did. This was the city where for over a thousand years Greek art had flourished, Greek language had been dominant, Greek religion had had its home and from which Greek influence had radiated. It now became, and would remain, the capital of the Ottoman Empire and the seat of Ottoman power.
Such was the story of the fall of Constantinople in terms of events and human agency, of troop numbers and morale, cannon and fortifications, imperial ambition and mundane chance. But there is another parallel story in quite different terms: of prophecies fulfilled, sinister portents, divine retribution and myth. The mounted statue of Constantine I near Ayía Sophía, his hand pointing east, was believed to prophesy ‘From this direction will come the one who will undo me.’21 An oracle given to the Emperor Michael VIII Palailogos nearly two centuries earlier was in the cryptic form AMAIMI, predicting the initials of the Emperors between himself and Constantine XI (Andronikos, Michael, Andronikos and so on); thus Constantine XI was destined to be the last of the line. The most alarming portent for the Byzantines was the eclipse of the moon five days before the final assault. There was also a strange light that appeared over Ayía Sophía, and on a more everyday level oysters were gathered that dripped blood when opened. These portents and prophecies were linked to the idea of God’s punishment for sins. ‘Our iniquities had separated us from God,’ wrote Leonard of Chíos, ‘so instead of the kindly God for whom we had hoped, we found an avenger of our sins.’22 As a fervent supporter of the union of the Churches, he saw opposition to the union as the primary sin: ‘You Greeks scorned to be united in One Faith; now as a punishment for your sin, you are yourselves scattered.’23 The fall of Constantinople was also sometimes seen as human retribution; the Greeks were being punished for seizing Troy over two thousand years ago. The Trojans were known as Teucri, and the name was thought to show that they were the ancestors of the Turks.
In these ways the mythical story sought to explain the past catastrophe, but the most potent elements of the story pointed to hope for the future. A popular tradition maintained that when the Turks entered Ayía Sophía, a service was in progress. The priest then miraculously disappeared through the wall, which closed behind him, and when Constantinople again belongs to Christians he will reappear and complete the last liturgy of Ayía Sophía. Another tradition holds that the Emperor Constantine is not dead but sleeping. An angel had rescued him at the last moment and turned him into a marble statue, which would one day be reanimated so that he could lead his people again. In the centuries that followed, these myths of perennial hope were a powerful support to the Greeks as they looked towards an eventual regeneration.
3
Sultans and Patriarchs
To many Greeks the fall of Constantinople seemed an unmitigated catastrophe. As one contemporary versifier wrote:
On Tuesday twenty-ninth of May, the God of War was master,
When armies marched in from the east and took the imperial city,
Those infidels, those Turkish dogs. O terrible disaster,
That blackest day of burning fire and all-consuming lightning.1
There were good reasons for apprehension. Constantinople had resisted a prolonged Turkish siege, refusing offers of peace terms, and the Turks had expended huge amounts of war matériel and blood before they prevailed. What form would Turkish retribution take? In particular, what would be the fate of the Greek Orthodox Christians now that infidel Muslims had seized the city that had long been the Orthodox spiritual home?
As it turned out, Mehmed the Conqueror’s treatment of his Christian subjects was not governed by desire for revenge, but by quite different considerations: primarily the dictates of the Muslim faith, the traditions of Muslim treatment of conquered Christians, and the practicalities of government. He also had a personal regard for the Greeks and an interest in their religion.
The Muslim attitude to other religions is based on the Koran: ‘Those who are Jews or Christians, whosoever believe in God and the last day and act aright, they have their reward at their Lord’s hand, and they shall not fear nor shall they grieve.’2 According to Muslims, God has revealed himself through a number of prophets. The first was Adam, followed by others, including Jesus Christ, and finally Muhammad. Each revelation was an improvement on its predecessors, and the revelation was complete through Muhammad, the last of the prophets. So Islam was not incompatible with Christianity, but was simply a further advance from it.
Muslim law naturally had to be elaborated beyond the fundamental statements of the Koran, in two directions. One led to holy law, sharia, based on the Koran but extended by the sayings of Muhammad and his immediate successors and by rulings from the learned. The other led to secular law, the kanuns, based on the customs of the country and decrees issued by the Sultan. But in both types of law the tolerant spirit of the Koran prevailed.
Christians and Jews were so-called people of the book, that is they had received a revelation, albeit incomplete, which was recorded in a text. The people of the book were classified as zimmi, protected persons. There were three categories of such people under Muslim rule: Orthodox Christians, Jews and Armenian Christians, the last being known as Gregorians after their third-century founder Gregory the Illuminator. Each formed a partly self-governing community, a millet. Each had a spiritual head who was also to some extent the political leader: for the Jews it was the chief rabbi, for the Armenians the Gregorian patriarch, and for the Orthodox the Orthodox patriarch.
This tolerant treatment by Muslims of Christians and others was not something newly introduced by Sultan Mehmed, but had a long history. According to tradition, as early as ad 638 Caliph Omar, about to take possession of Jerusalem, promised not to interfere with the Christians’ religious practices or their management of their own affairs. More recently in 1430 Sinan Pasha, the conqueror of Iánnina, had promised the Orthodox Christians: ‘Have no fear, there will be no captivity, no abduction of children, no destruction of churches; we shall not change them into mosques, but your church bells will ring as is your custom. The metropolitan bishop will have charge of justice over the Greeks and all the ecclesiastical rights. The lords who have feudal estates will continue to hold them.’3 Clearly the traditional view of permanent and irreconcilable conflict between Muslim and Christian is something of a fiction. It was given currency by the early chroniclers on both sides, keen to invoke militant piety to justify, as crusade or as jihad, struggles to win territory, wealth and power. ‘Modern historians’, writes one of their number severely, ‘have too often been willing accomplices in accepting the chroniclers’ v
ersion.’4
Apart from considerations of the Muslim faith and the tradition of tolerance, there were practical reasons for Mehmed’s policy. He had by now many more non-Muslim subjects than Muslim. There was no point in taking over the administration of what the subjects could perfectly well manage for themselves, or in antagonising them unnecessarily, provoking rebellion that it would be troublesome to quell. Their service to the Ottoman state would be their productivity, their payment of taxes and their contribution of skills – as Greek sailors and traders, for example, or Jewish financiers – which the state lacked. Also, if Constantinople was to recover from devastation and become a worthy capital of Ottoman rule, it would have to be repopulated. Many of the new arrivals would inevitably be Christians, who would need to be treated tolerantly.
Finally, there were Mehmed’s personal inclinations. He could be ruthless in war and vicious in revenge, but he also had a respect for Byzantine achievements and a regard for Christians. His beloved stepmother, Mara, his father’s widow, was the daughter of the Christian ruler of Serbia and his Christian Greek wife. And Mehmed was, it seems, genuinely interested in the doctrines of Christianity, an interest shown in his relationship with the first post-Byzantine Orthodox patriarch Georgios Scholários Yennádhios.
Yennádhios was born Georgios Kourtésis in Constantinople around 1405, and received a good education in philosophy and theology. Among his teachers was Márkos Evyenikós, bishop of Ephesus, a strong opponent of the union of the Catholic and Orthodox churches. Yennádhios, however, initially supported the union, and accompanied the pro-union Emperor John VIII Palaiologos to the council on union held at Ferrara and then Florence in 1438–9. Yennádhios was the Emperor’s private secretary, a post from which he acquired the name Scholários. When union was finally accepted by the Greek delegation the anti-union bishop Márkos Evyenikós, who was also a member of it, refused to sign the agreement. Yennádhios gave his written consent to it, though he had returned home before the formal signing.