Constantinople: The Last Great Siege, 1453 (39 page)

The heavy infantry and Janissaries were ‘eager and fresh for battle’. They were fighting in the presence of their sultan both for honour and for the prize of being first onto the ramparts. They advanced on the
stockade without any wavering or hesitancy, ‘like men intent on entering the city’ who knew their business. They ripped down the barrels and wooden turrets with hooked sticks, tore at the framework of the stockade, propped ladders against the rampart, and raising their shields over their heads attempted to force their way up beneath a withering bombardment of rocks and missiles. Their officers stood behind yelling instructions, and the sultan himself wheeled back and forth on his horse shouting and encouraging.

From the opposite side the weary Greeks and Italians joined battle. Giustiniani and his men, and Constantine, accompanied by ‘all his nobles and his principal knights and his bravest men’, pressed forward to the barricades with ‘javelins, pikes, long spears and other fighting weapons’. The first wave of palace troops ‘fell, struck by stones, so that many died’, but others stepped up to replace them. There was no wavering. It was soon a hand-to-hand, face-to-face struggle for control of the rampart with each side fighting with total belief – for honour, God and great rewards on one side, for God and survival on the other. In the pressed close-up combat it was the terrible sound of shouting voices that filled the air – ‘taunts, those stabbing with their spears, others being stabbed at, killers and being killed, those doing all kinds of terrible things in anger and fury’. Behind, the cannon fired their huge shot and smoke drifted across the battlefield, alternately concealing and revealing the combatants to each other. ‘It seemed’, said Barbaro, ‘like something from another world.’

For an hour the fighting continued, with the palace regiments making little headway. The defenders never stepped back. ‘We repelled them vigorously,’ reported Leonard, ‘but many of our men were now wounded and pulled back from fighting. However, Giustiniani our commander still stood firm and the other captains remained in their fighting positions.’ There came a moment, imperceptibly at first, when those inside the stockade felt the pressure from the Ottomans ease a fraction. It was the pivotal moment, the instant when a battle turns. Constantine noticed it and urged the defenders on. According to Leonard he called out to his men: ‘Brave soldiers, the enemy’s army is weakening, the crown of victory is ours. God is on our side – keep fighting!’ The Ottomans faltered. The weary defenders found new strength.

And then two strange moments of fortune swung the battle away from them. Half a mile up the line towards the Blachernae Palace, the
Bocchiardi brothers had been successful in repulsing the troops of Karaja Pasha, occasionally making sorties from the Circus Gate, the postern hidden in an angle of the walls. This gate was now to live up to ancient prophecy. Returning from a raid, one of the Italian soldiers failed to close the postern behind him. In the growing light, some of Karaja’s men spotted the open door and burst in. Fifty managed to get access via a flight of stairs up to the wall and to surprise the soldiers on top. Some were cut down, others preferred to jump to their death. Exactly what happened next is unclear; it appears that the intruders were successfully isolated and surrounded before too much further damage could be done, but they managed to tear down the flag of St Mark and the emperor’s standard from some towers and replace them with Ottoman standards.

Down the line at the stockade Constantine and Giustiniani were unaware of these developments. They were confidently holding the line, when bad luck dealt a more serious blow. Giustiniani was wounded. To some it was the God of the Christians or the Muslims answering or refusing prayers who created this moment. To bookish Greeks it was a moment straight from Homer: a sudden reversal in battle, caused, according to Kritovoulos, by ‘wicked and merciless fortune’, the instant when a serene and merciless goddess, surveying the battle with Olympian detachment, decides to tilt the outcome – and swipes the hero to the dust and turns his heart to jelly.

There is no clear agreement on what happened, but everyone knew its significance: it caused immediate consternation amongst his Genoese troops. In the light of subsequent events, the accounts become fragmentary and quarrelsome: Giustiniani, ‘dressed in the armour of Achilles’, falls to the ground in a dozen ways. He is hit on the right leg by an arrow; he is struck in the chest by a crossbow bolt; he is stabbed from below in the belly while struggling on the ramparts; a lead shot passes through the back of his arm and penetrates his breastplate; he is struck in the shoulder by a culverin; he is hit from behind by one of his own side by accident – or on purpose. The most probable versions suggest that his upper body armour was punctured by lead shot, a small hole concealing grave internal damage.

Giustiniani had been fighting continuously since the start of the siege and was undoubtedly exhausted beyond endurance. He had been wounded the day before, and this second wound seems to have broken his spirit. Unable to stand and more seriously injured than any
bystander could see, he ordered his men to carry him back to his ship to seek medical attention. They went to the emperor to ask for the key to one of the gates. Constantine was appalled by the danger presented by the withdrawal of his principal commander and begged Giustiniani and his officers to stay until the danger was over, but they would not. Giustiniani entrusted command of the troops to two officers and promised to return after attending to his wound. Reluctantly Constantine handed over the key. The gate was opened and his bodyguard carried him away down to his galley at the Horn. It was a catastrophic decision. The temptation of the open gate was too much for the other Genoese; seeing their commander departing, they streamed through the gate after him.

Desperately Constantine and his entourage attempted to stem the tide. They forbade any of the Greeks to follow the Italians out of the enclosure, and ordered them to close ranks and step up to fill the empty spaces in the front line. Mehmet seems to have perceived that the defence was slackening, and rallied his troops for another assault. ‘Friends, we have the city!’ he called out. ‘With just a little more effort the city is taken!’

A group of Janissaries under the command of one of Mehmet’s favourite officers, Cafer Bey, ran forward shouting ‘
Allahu Akbar
– God is great’. With the cry of the sultan ringing in their ears – ‘Go on my falcons, march on my lions!’ – and remembering the promised reward for raising the flag on the walls, they surged towards the stockade. At the front, carrying the Ottoman flag, was a giant of a man, Hasan of Ulubat, accompanied by thirty companions. Covering his head with his shield, he managed to storm the rampart, throwing back the wavering defenders and establishing himself on top. For a short while he was able to maintain his position, flag in hand, inspiring the onrush of the Janissary corps. It was a defining and thrilling image of Ottoman courage – the Janissary giant finally planting the flag of Islam on the walls of the Christian city – and destined to pass into the nation-making mythology. Before long however, the defenders regrouped and retaliated with a barrage of rocks, arrows and spears. They threw back some of the thirty and then cornered Hasan, finally battering him to his knees and hacking him to pieces – but all around more and more Janissaries were able to establish themselves on the ramparts and to penetrate gaps in the stockade. Like a flood breaching coastal defences thousands of men started to pour into the enclosure,
remorselessly pushing back the defenders by weight of numbers. In a short time they were hemmed in towards the inner wall, in front of which a ditch had been excavated to provide earth for the stockade. Some were pushed into it and were trapped. Unable to clamber out, they were massacred.

Ottoman troops were pouring into the enclosure along a broadening front; many were killed by the defenders bombarding them from the stockade, but the flood was now unstoppable; according to Barbaro there were 30,000 inside within fifteen minutes, uttering ‘such cries that it seemed to be hell itself’. At the same time the flags planted by the few enemy intruders on towers near the Circus Gate were spotted and the cry went up, ‘The city is taken!’ Blind panic seized the defenders. They turned and ran, seeking a way to escape the locked enclosure back into the city. At the same time, Mehmet’s men were starting to climb the inner wall as well and were firing down on them from above.

There was only possible exit route – the small postern through which Giustiniani had been carried away. All the other gates were locked. A struggling mass of men converged on the gateway, trampling each other in their attempts to get out, ‘so that they made a great mound of living men by the gate which prevented anyone from having passage’. Some fell underfoot and were crushed to death; others were slaughtered by the Ottoman heavy infantry now sweeping down the stockade in orderly formation. The mound of bodies grew and choked off any further chance of escape. All the surviving defenders in the stockade perished in the slaughter. By each of the other gateways – the Charisian, the Fifth Military Gate – lay a similar pile of corpses, the men who had fled there unable to get out of the locked enclosure. And somewhere in this choking, panicking, struggling mêlée, Constantine is glimpsed for the last time, surrounded by his most faithful retinue – Theophilus Palaiologos, John Dalmata, Don Francisco of Toledo – his last moments reported by unreliable witnesses who were almost certainly not present, struggling, resisting defiantly, falling, crushed underfoot, until he vanishes from history into the afterlife of legend.

A posse of Janissaries clambered over the dead bodies and forced open the Fifth Military Gate. Making their way up the inside of the city walls, some turned left towards the Charisian gate and opened it from the inside; others going right opened the gate of St Romanus. From tower after tower Ottoman flags fluttered in the wind. ‘Then all
the rest of the army burst violently into the city … and the Sultan stood before the mighty walls, where the great standard was and the horsetail banners, and watched the events.’ It was dawn. The sun was rising. Ottoman soldiers moved among the fallen, beheading the dead and dying. Large birds of prey circled overhead. The defence had collapsed in less than five hours.