100 Mistakes That Changed History (18 page)

After his largest siege tower was lost, some of the sultan’s generals began to council him to withdraw. But others encouraged the Turkish leader to give it one more try. If the general assault failed, they would withdraw. The cannon that Constantine XI had previously turned down had seriously weakened the great wall where the Lycus River entered the city. On May 29, Mohammed II threw everything into one final assault. Almost 20,000 Bashi-Bazouks, mercenaries who fought for loot, attacked first. They were driven off, but directly behind them came a second line of Turkish regulars who took up the attack on the weakened wall. They pushed at the partially blocked breaches and were driven off after only two hours of intense fighting. The defenders were exhausted and the great wall provided less and less protection. But before they could recover, a third wave of Turks attacked. Summoning their last reserves, the Christian defenders drove them away as well.

Unfortunately for the city, while almost every soldier was fighting near the Lycus breach in the center of the great wall, a few Turkish soldiers managed to rush through a small gate that had been left open elsewhere. They seized control of a small tower at the far north end of the wall and raised the sultan’s banner over it. While this really was just a minor threat, it appeared to be a disaster to the wall’s defenders. Their morale and determination plummeted as word spread among the defenders. Then the leader of the largest group of mercenaries was wounded and had to be carried from the wall. Exhausted men who had been fighting on adrenaline lost hope.

The sultan sent in his own elite troops, the Janissaries, who managed to gain control of the section of the eastern great wall from the Lycus to the next gate above it, the Adrianople Gate. Once the Janissaries had that gate open, tens of thousands of Turkish soldiers poured into Constantinople. Constantine XI Palaeologus, the last Byzantine emperor, died fighting in the streets.

The Turkish victory almost didn’t occur. Under pressure from his generals, if the last attack had failed, Mohammed II was ready to pack up and leave. Had the Byzantine emperor hired Urban the Hungarian and his cannon, the breaches that weakened the great wall would have never happened. Without those breaches, the sultan’s army would have found assaulting the walls of Byzantium an almost impossible task.

The effect of the fall of Constantinople on Europe was a surprising one. The subsequent monopoly prices charged by the Turkish merchants for the products and spices of the East inspired western Europe to search for another way to trade with the Orient. Within thirty years the Portuguese were traveling around Africa, and exactly forty years later, Ferdinand and Isabella financed Christopher Columbus’ first expedition. The fall of the city forced the beginning of the greatest period of exploration ever recorded. While Constantine XI’s mistake of not hiring Urban doomed Constantinople and brought about the end of the Byzantine empire, that same loss led to the great Age of Exploration.

33

SOME MISTAKES HAVE TURNED OUT WELL

A Math Error
1492

I
n 1491, a noted Spanish ship’s captain and seaman made a math error when calculating the circumference of the earth. At the equator, a line drawn all the way around our planet is about 25,000 miles long. This has been known and verified by various forms of mathematics since the time of ancient Egypt. But Christopher Columbus was convinced based on his own calculations that this number was 15,000 miles. That is a 10,000-mile difference and the reason he was sure he could reach China by sailing westward from Spain. If he had been correct, it would have been an easy sail. The error appears to have come from Columbus using the wrong value for a degree of longitude when looking at Chinese maps. It is even possible he used the distances as shown on Ptolemy’s maps, which were also far off.

At this time, the rivalry between Portugal, who had a painfully long but known route to the Orient around Africa, and Spain was intense. The Spanish monarchs were willing to do just about anything to find their own entry into the incredibly profitable trade. Many of us have heard the tale of Columbus convincing Queen Isabella that the earth was round by using an orange. There is no chance that really happened as just about every educated person in Europe already knew it was round. Columbus’ math error explains why the advisers to Ferdinand and Isabella all opposed financing his expedition. It wasn’t because they thought the earth was flat; it was because they had checked the sailor’s calculations. The learned men of Spain’s greatest court opposed financing the explorer because they had determined his math was wrong . . . and it was.

Even so, the Spanish monarchs decided to take a chance and in 1492 supplied three rather small ships to the mathematically challenged seaman. Or maybe it seemed a cheap way to just get rid of him after he had lobbied them for months on end. And so the rest is, as we say, history. Columbus sailed in the
Nina
,
Pinta
, and
Santa Maria
. Eventually, and rather heroically, he discovered the New World. Or at least he found a few islands in the Caribbean. The real importance of this being that Columbus showed everyone that something was there.

Incidentally, Columbus made another mistake while on his journeys. But this one was more fun. He mistook manatees for mermaids and recorded the finned women’s presence in the newly found waters.

Believing his own math was vindicated, the captain called the native peoples “Indians” and called the islands he finally landed on the “Indies.” Columbus died poor and would be amazed at how he has been revered today. He also might be a little upset to find out just how wrong he was. This math error may have been for Spain and Europe the most serendipitous mistake of all time. It brought the Spanish crown two centuries of plundered wealth and power while opening two continents to Europe.

34

OFF COURSE

Oh Yeah,
and a New Continent
1500

T
he Portuguese spice trade route to the Orient was the glory and the secret of that small nation. They had found a path, albeit a long one, that bypassed the Islamic merchants. The route they took was to sail around Africa and then up the eastern African coast before sailing across to India. Navigation was primitive, and techniques for preserving food were not much better. Spending any time in the open waters could get a ship lost and doom the crew to a death of thirst or starvation. Most merchants in the fifteenth century tried to always stay in sight of land. The long trip was risky, but immensely profitable. If one ship in ten returned full of spices, the profits were enough to cover the cost of the lost ships and give the investors 1000 percent return on their money.

In 1500, a Portuguese merchant named Pedro Alvares Cabral led his own fleet of fifteen ships attempting to trace the route of Vasco da Gama to India. But rounding the horn of West Africa, his ships caught some unusual winds and were pushed away from the coast. This likely caused everyone on board a good deal of concern. He sailed south and ran into an unfamiliar coastline. Cabral knew it was not part of Africa because it was on the wrong side of the ocean. It was to his west, and since he was supposed to be sailing down the coast of Africa, that would be to his east. It was a strange and wild land covered mostly by jungle. Today we call the country he found Brazil. Cabral had other business: He was after spices, not new continents. So after sailing along its coast for ten days and claiming the new land in the name of his king, Manuel I, (more or less standard procedure in his time), the Portuguese admiral wrote up a report and sailed east until he found a coast that was on the correct side of the ocean. Cabral finally did reach India, and four of his ships made it back to Portugal more than a year later.

Four ships filled with spices made Cabral, his investors, and the crown very happily rich. He filed his report with the king of the new land he had claimed for him and nobody cared. Cabral had not seen any golden cities or diamond mines, so it took an amazing twenty-five years before anyone sailed to Brazil again. In the centuries that followed, the riches of Brazil made tiny Portugal a wealthy and prosperous nation. When a pope later tried to make peace between Portugal and Spain as they competed in the New World, Cabral’s accidental discovery while sailing off course gave his nation claim to Brazil. For Portugal, that unusual offshore wind pushing Pedro Cabral into strange waters was the best accident that ever happened. Even if at the time no one really cared.

35

BROKE THE RULES ONCE TOO OFTEN

Dispensing with a Nation
1503

T
his is the tale of two Roman Catholic popes, one king, and several queens. The Roman Catholic Church, during much of the Dark Ages and Renaissance, was always short on money. Or perhaps more accurately, for most of that period before the riches of the New World poured in, most of Europe was always short of hard currency, and that was all there was. There was no paper money. The Church needed to support the clergy, the buildings, the Papal States (including their army), and its charities.

The Catholic Church used all of the tools it had to help raise money. One of these was its power to forgive sins or even decide if something was a sin. The really interesting part was that the Church could forgive sins before they were made. This led to the widespread sale of dispensations by the clergy. These were absolutions, or forgiveness, sometimes even in advance, for sinning. You paid your money in, and your sin was forgiven. These dispensations were one of the reasons for the Protestant Reformation. But at this time, if you were rich and important enough, you could get a dispensation for something as serious as murder. Even then, the Roman Catholic Church was working to reform itself. It was under pressure from the Protestants and just as much pressure from the reformers internally. Nevertheless, at the start of the 1500s, if the matter was serious enough and the donation (bribe) was large enough, a dispensation could still be bought. This was particularly true when kings and thrones were involved. As it had been for several centuries, the Catholic Church was very much both a political and a spiritual entity.

Pope Clement VII was in a difficult situation. Elected as pope in 1523, Clement inherited a volatile political situation in Europe, resulting from the Protestant Reformation. A series of miscues resulted in an inability for him to grant King Henry VIII of England concessions. Between 1523 and 1527, Clement’s loyalty and support oscillated between France, Spain, the Holy Roman empire and various Italian princes. His wavering contributed to the mutinous invasion of Rome by the Holy Roman emperor Charles V’s troops; Charles’ men had even taken the pope prisoner for a brief time. While Charles V had not ordered the attack and was embarrassed by his troops’ actions, he must have considered the political consequences to be palatable. Clement became subservient to Charles V and would spend the rest of his papacy as the emperor’s lapdog.

In 1500, King Henry VII had two sons and two daughters. The oldest son was Arthur, expected to someday become king. His younger brother, Henry, was well-thought-of and well educated. A life in the Church as a priest was expected of Henry, with the advantage that he would not be breeding little nephews to the king who might someday become rivals for the throne. England was, at this time, a bastion of the Roman Catholic Church. In this it became the ally of Spain, ruled by the fanatically devout King Ferdinand (of Columbus fame). It was decided that rich Spain and England should draw even closer with the marriage of Arthur, heir to the English throne, to the youngest daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella, Catherine of Aragon. No one had any problems with this and when both of them were around fourteen years old (adult in those short-lived times) the two married. The problems began when Arthur died at age fifteen of tuberculosis. This left Catherine a very young widow, ten-year-old Henry the heir to the English crown, and a carefully planned political alliance that supported the pope weakened.

The solution seemed to be that Henry marry Catherine. But there was a problem. The Church had strict rules about marrying your brother’s wife. For a range of social and practical reasons, this was a serious sin. There had been too many cases when a queen was forced to marry a cousin to add legitimacy after he had grabbed the throne. Catherine had been Henry’s brother’s wife first. But the union was just too good to pass up. So both Spain and England appealed to Pope Julius II for a dispensation to allow the marriage. Effectively, this waived the sin and allowed the Church to bless the union. With all that clout behind the appeal and for a substantial share of the dowry, Julius II issued the dispensation. At the time no one was concerned that this alone weakened the validity of the marriage.

The dispensation was duly issued in 1503, but due to Henry’s youth, the wedding did not happen until June 1509. There were also rules about getting married before the marriage could be consummated. Henry had been king for two months when they married, and all seemed to be going as desired for everyone involved. At first the royal couple seemed happy. In the next nine years, Catherine bore Henry three sons and three daughters. All but one daughter, Mary, died very young. This created a problem because having a son who could inherit the throne was vital to the stability of England . . . and to Henry’s ego. There still was no heir. Perhaps equally important to the young, energetic, rather brilliant, and very lusty Henry VIII was that Catherine had been worn and aged by the childbearing and losses. Now, if there had been an heir or two, this would not have mattered. As even the modern generation of royals has demonstrated, taking mistresses was an accepted practice. But there was no heir, and this complicated the situation. Henry and England needed an heir, and Catherine was no longer an appealing prospect. It was likely she was also no longer capable of conceiving.