Constantinople: The Last Great Siege, 1453 (37 page)

There was nothing left to be done. Both sides understood the climactic significance of the coming day. Both had made their spiritual preparations. According to Barbaro, who of course gave the final say in the outcome to the Christian god, ‘and when each side had prayed to his god for victory, they to theirs and we to ours, our Father in Heaven decided with his Mother who should be successful in this battle that would be so fierce, which would be concluded next day’. According to Sa’d-ud-din, the Ottoman troops, ‘from dusk till dawn, intent on battle … united the greatest of meritorious works … passing the night in prayer’.

There is an afterword to this day. One of the chronicles of George Sphrantzes sees Constantine riding through the dark streets of the city on his Arab mare and returning late at night to the Blachernae Palace. He called his servants and household to him and begged them for forgiveness, and thus absolved, according to Sphrantzes ‘the Emperor mounted his horse and we left the palace and began to make the circuit of the walls in order to rouse the sentries to keep watch alertly and not lapse into sleep’. Having checked that all was well, and that the gates were securely locked, at first cockcrow they climbed the tower at the Caligaria Gate, which commanded a wide view over the plain and the Golden Horn, to witness the enemy preparations in the dark. They could hear the wheeled siege towers creaking invisibly towards the ramparts, long ladders being dragged over the pounded ground and the activity of many soldiers filling in the ditches beneath the shattered walls. To the south, on the glimmering Bosphorus and the Marmara the outlines of the larger galleys could be discerned as distant, ghostly shapes moving into position beyond the bulking dome of St Sophia, while within the Horn the smaller
fustae
worked to float the pontoon bridge over the straits and to manoeuvre close to the walls. It is a haunting, introspective moment and an enduring image of the long-suffering Constantine – the noble emperor and his faithful friend standing on the outer tower listening to the ominous preparations for
the final attack, the world dark and still before the moment of final destiny. For fifty-three days their tiny force had confounded the might of the Ottoman army; they had faced down the heaviest bombardment in the Middle Ages from the largest cannon ever built – an estimated 5,000 shots and 55,000 pounds of gunpowder; they had resisted three full-scale assaults and dozens of skirmishes, killed unknown thousands of Ottoman soldiers, destroyed underground mines and siege towers, fought sea battles, conducted sorties and peace negotiations, and worked ceaselessly to erode the enemy’s morale – and they had come closer to success than they probably knew.

This scene is accurate in geographical and factual detail; the guards on the highest ramparts of the city could hear the Ottoman troops manoeuvring in the darkness below the walls and would have commanded a wide view over both land and sea, but we have no idea if Constantine and Sphrantzes were actually there. The account is possibly an invention, concocted a hundred years later by a priest with a reputation for forgery. What we do know is that at some point on 28 May Constantine and his minister parted, and that Sphrantzes had a presentiment of this day and its meaning. The two men were lifelong friends. Sphrantzes had served his master with a faithfulness conspicuously absent among those who surrounded the emperor in the quarrelsome final years of the Byzantine Empire. Twenty-three years earlier, he had saved Constantine’s life at the siege of Patras. He had been wounded and captured for his pains, and had languished in leg irons in a verminous dungeon for a month before being released. He had undertaken endless diplomatic missions for his master over a thirty-year period, including a fruitless three-year embassy round the Black Sea in search of a wife for the emperor. In return Constantine made Sphrantzes governor of Patras, had been the best man at his wedding and the godfather of his children. Sphrantzes had more at stake than many during the siege: he had his family with him in the city. Whenever the two men parted on 28 May it must have been with foreboding on Sphrantzes’ part. Two years earlier to the day he had had a premonition while away from Constantinople: ‘On the same night of May 28 [1451] I had a dream: it seemed to me that I was back in the City; as I made a motion to prostrate myself and kiss the Emperor’s feet, he stopped me, raised me, and kissed my eyes. Then I woke up and told those sleeping by me: “I just had this dream. Remember the date.”’ 

By nightfall on Monday 28 May, the great guns had been firing at the land walls for forty-seven days. Over time Mehmet had come to concentrate his batteries in three places: to the north between the Blachernae Palace and the Charisian Gate, in the central section around the Lycus River, and to the south towards the Marmara at the Third Military Gate. Severe damage had been inflicted at all these points, so that when he addressed his commanders before the battle he could claim, with convenient exaggeration, that ‘the moat has all been filled up and the land wall at three points has been so broken down that not only heavy and light infantry like yourselves, but even the horses and heavily armed cavalry can easily penetrate it’. In fact it had been clear to both sides for some time that a concerted attack would be focused on only one spot, the middle section, the Mesoteichion, the shallow valley between the gates of St Romanus and Charisius. This was the Achilles heel of the defensive system and it was here that Mehmet had expended his greatest firepower.

By the eve of the total assault, there were nine substantial holes in the outer wall, some about thirty yards long and mostly in the valley,
which had been replaced piecemeal by Giustiniani’s stockade. It was a ramshackle structure that patched up the defences whenever a stretch of wall gave way. Baulks of timber lashed together provided its basic framework, along with hardcore from the fallen wall augmented by any other materials readily to hand: brushwood, branches, bundles of reeds and loose stones, all in-filled with earth, which had the advantage of absorbing the shock of the cannon balls more effectively than any stone structure. In time it was evidently nearly as high as the original wall, and wide enough to provide a good fighting platform. The defenders were protected from enemy fire by barrels and wicker containers full of earth that served as battlements, and whose removal was always the initial objective of Ottoman attacks. Since 21 April the maintenance of the stockade had been the city’s highest priority. Both soldiers and civilians worked unceasingly to mend and extend it. Men, women and children, monks and nuns had all contributed, lugging stones, timber, cartloads of earth, branches and vine cuttings up to the front line in an exhausting and apparently unceasing cycle of destruction and repair. They had worked under cannon fire and attack, by day and by night, rain and sun to plug gaps wherever they appeared. The stockade represented the collective energy of the population and under Giustiniani’s direction it had repaid their efforts, repulsing every attempt on the city and demoralizing the enemy.

It was behind this stockade that the pick of the available fighting troops took up their positions late on the sunny afternoon of 28 May. According to Doukas, here were ‘three thousand Latins and Romans’ – the remainder of the 700 crack Italian troops who had come with Giustiniani, sailors from the Venetian galleys plus the bulk of the Byzantine troops. In all probability the figure was nearer 2,000. They were well armoured and helmeted in chainmail and plate, and equipped with a variety of weapons: crossbows, rifles, small cannon, long bows, swords and maces – all the equipment for mowing down their attackers at a distance and fighting them hand to hand at the barricades. In addition a large number of rocks had been brought up to the front line by civilians, as well as inflammatory materials – barrels of Greek fire and pitchers of tar. The troops entered the enclosure through the gates in the inner wall and spread out down the length of the stockade to fill the Mesoteichion for 1,000 yards. The enclosure was only twenty yards deep, backed by the higher inner wall and a
scooped out ditch at its foot where earth had been removed to fortify the stockade. There was just room for horsemen to gallop up and down the line behind the men pressed to the stockade. In the whole stretch there were only four entry points through the inner walls: two posterns by the gates of St Romanus and Charisius to left and right on the brow of the hills, the forbidding Fifth Military Gate that led only into the enclosure halfway up the northern slope, and another postern at an unidentified point that had been created by Giustiniani to make entry into the city more convenient. It was obvious to everyone that the battle would be won or lost at the stockade; there could be no retreat from this station. A decision was therefore taken that the posterns back into the city should be locked behind the defenders once they had entered the enclosure and the keys entrusted to their commanders. They would do or die with their backs to the inner wall and their leaders with them. As night fell they settled down to wait. A heavy shower of rain fell in the dark but the Ottoman troops continued to advance siege equipment outside. Later Giustiniani entered the enclosure, then Constantine and his inner retinue of nobles: the Spaniard Don Francisco of Toledo, his cousin Theophilus Palaiologos and his faithful military companion John Dalmata. They waited on the stockade and the wall for the first signs of an attack. Though perhaps few would have shared the optimism of the Podesta of Galata who declared that ‘victory was assured’, they were not without confidence in their ability to weather one final storm.