Europe: A History (92 page)
The progress of the siege at first gave encouragement to the defenders, though the impaling of Christian prisoners in view of the Walls was calculated to cause panic. On 12 April a naval attack on the boom failed. The great cannon, firing once every seven minutes from sunrise to sunset, day after day, reduced large sections of the outer wall to rubble. But the gaps were filled at night with wooden stockades. On 20 April an imperial transport flotilla fought its way into the harbour. Turkish mining operations were betrayed.
But then, in a masterstroke, the Sultan ordered his fleet of galleys to be dragged overland behind Pera and into the Golden Horn. The City lost its harbour. From then on, the defenders had only three options: victory, death, or conversion to Islam. On 27 April an ecumenical mass was celebrated in St Sophia, for Greeks and Italians, Orthodox and Catholics. ‘At this moment, there was Union in the Church of Constantinople.’
35
The decisive assault was launched about half-past one in the morning of Tuesday, 29 May, the fifty-third day of the siege. First came the bashi-bazouk irregulars, then the Anatolians, then the Janissaries:
The Janissaries advanced at the double, not rushing in wildly… but keeping their ranks in perfect order, unbroken by the missiles of the enemy. The martial music that urged them on was so loud that the sound could be heard between the roar of the guns from right across the Bosphorus. Mehmet himself led them as far as the fosse, and stood there shouting encouragement… Wave after wave of these fresh, magnificent and stoutly armoured men rushed up to the stockade, to tear at the barrels of earth that surmounted it, to hack at the beams that supported it, to place their ladders against it… each wave making way without panic for its successor.
36
Just before sunrise, Giustiniani took a culverin shot on his breastplate and retired, covered in blood. A giant janissary called Hasan was slain after mounting the stockade; but he showed it was possible. A small sally-port, the Kerkoporte, was left open by retreating Greeks, and the Turks swarmed in. The Emperor dismounted from his white Arabian mare, plunged into the fray, and disappeared.
Constantinople was sacked. Gross slaughter and rapine ensued. St Sophia was turned into a mosque:
The
muezzin
ascended the most lofty turret, and proclaimed the
ezan
or public invitation … The imam preached; and Mohammed the Second performed the
namaz
of thanksgiving on the great altar, where the Christian mysteries had so lately been celebrated before the last of the Caesars. From St Sophia, he proceeded to the august but desolate mansion of a hundred successors of the great Constantine… A melancholy reflection on the vicissitudes of human greatness forced itself on his mind, and he repeated an elegant distich of Persian poetry. ‘The spider has woven his web in the Imperial Palace, and the owl hath sung her watch-song on the towers of Afrasiab’.
37
The Roman Empire had ceased to exist.
In the course of their conquest of the eastern Mediterranean, the Ottoman Turks gradually set the terms of trade in the region, controlling the routes which linked Europe with the Levant and India. In practice the Turks were tolerant to Christian traders, and the reluctance of Venice and Genoa to assist Constantinople can only be explained by the lucrative trade which they already operated in the Ottoman realms. But contemporaries further afield may have judged the situation differently; and the rise of the Ottomans is traditionally associated with the attempts by Christian leaders in the West, led by Portugal, to discover a new route to India. It may well be, of course, that the Portuguese were as unwelcome to the Venetians as to the Turks, or were pulled by the lure of African slaves and beautiful islands.
At all events, for forty years Prince Henry of Portugal (1394–1460), known as ‘the Navigator’, sent expedition after expedition down the western coast of Africa in the wake of earlier Arab voyagers. His ships found Porto Santo (1419), Madeira (1420), the Canaries (1421), later ceded to Castile, the Azores (1431), Cabo Blanco (1441), and Cape Verde (1446). The fate of the Canaries, where the native Guanche population was annihilated under Spanish rule, gave a foretaste of the instincts of later European colonization. In 1437 the Colonial and Naval Institute at Sagres was founded, the first of its kind. By 1471 the Portuguese were strong enough to wrest Tangier from the Moors. In 1486, sailing from Portuguese settlements on the Gold Coast, Bartholomew Diaz rounded the
Cabo Tormentoso
, subsequently renamed the Cape of Good Hope. In 1497 Vasco da Gama completed an unbroken voyage from Lisbon to Calicut, thereby circumventing the Ottoman sphere.
[GONCALVEZ]
In neighbouring Spain, that same era was crowned by a famous political union. The two rival kingdoms of Castile and Aragón had long tempered their rivalry with dynastic alliances and marriages. The marriage of Juan I of Trastámara, King of Castile (r. 1379–90), to Eleanora of Aragan produced the protoplasts of both the Castilian and the Aragonese houses of the following century. One son, Henry III (r. 1390–1406), reigned in Castile, whilst the second son, Ferdinand I, was unexpectedly chosen in 1412 for the throne of Aragón in Barcelona. The marriage between Henry Ill’s granddaughter Isabella, Princess of Castile (1451–1504), ‘La Católica’, and Ferdinand I’s grandson, Ferdinand, Prince of Aragon (1452–1516), ‘El Católico’, which was concluded in 1469 at Valladolid, was not without precedent; but its future implications were immense.
Both bride and groom were heirs to the desperately troubled families, and to viciously disputed kingdoms. They were cousins, and knew well what to expect if their relatives or their nobles were allowed to gain control. Isabella, upright and devout, had been touted for marriage in Portugal, England, and France throughout her childhood, and had only been saved from the altar by the death of an unwanted suitor on his way to the wedding. Her claim to Castile only arose through the unlawful exclusion of her niece; and her accession in 1474 sparked off both a civil and an international war with France and Portugal. Ferdinand, devious and devout, sought her hand as a means of escape from his own miserable
circumstances. His childhood was passed amidst the horrors of a protracted Catalan revolt. His claim to Aragón only arose through the exclusion of his bastard cousin, Ferrante of Naples, and the poisoning of his half-brother, Charles of Viana, Prince of Navarre. Isabella’s brother, Henry IV (r. 1454–74), has been described as ‘a miserable, abnormal cipher’. Ferdinand’s father, John II (r. 1458–79), was the hated poisoner of a son and a daughter. It is not surprising, therefore, that Ferdinand and Isabella, ‘the Catholic monarchs’, were advocates of strong and orderly government.
GONCALVEZ
I
N
1441 Antam Goncalvez sailed his tiny ship out of Lisbon, edged southwards along the Atlantic coast of Morocco, passed the Canary Islands, and rounded Cape Bojador. Since the prevailing winds blow northerly off that part of the African coast, it was only seven years earlier that a similar Portuguese ship had succeeded in passing the fearful Cape and in returning safely to Europe.
Goncalvez had set out to collect a cargo of blubber and sea-lion skins. But landing on the shore of the Rio de Oro, he was seized by the idea of taking a few of the local inhabitants as a prize for his master, Prince Henry. So the next evening a party of ten sailors marched inland. Returning empty-handed across the sand dunes at dawn, they spied a naked Berber walking behind a camel and carrying two spears. The man defended himself with spirit, but was soon wounded, overpowered, and captured. Together with a luckless black woman, probably a local slave girl, who also appeared on the scene, he was tied up and carried off. They were the first recorded victims of a European slave-raid south of the Sahara.
1
Soon afterwards Goncalvez joined up with another ship commanded by Nuno Tristao. Their combined crews mounted a night attack on a native encampment. With wild cries of ‘Portugal’ and ‘Santiago’ they fell on the sleeping villagers, killing three and taking ten prisoner. In all, they returned to Lisbon with twelve captives. Their exploits were recorded by the chronicler Zurara, and Prince Henry sent an embassy to Rome to seek the Pope’s blessing for this new sort of crusade. The Pope granted ‘complete forgiveness of sins … to all engaged in the said war’.
2
Slave-raiding and slave-trading were an immemorial feature of African life, but this was the moment when Europeans broke into operations that had hitherto been handled by African and Muslim traders. It happened some fifty years before Europe’s first contacts with the Americas, and it put European entrepreneurs into a good position for exploiting the new opportunities. In 1501 Spain issued a decree to limit the export of Christian girls to garrison brothels across the Atlantic. In 1515 Spain sent the first consignment of black slaves directly from Africa to America, whilst receiving the first shipment of slave-grown American sugar.
More than a century after Goncalvez, a fresh stage of the Atlantic slave trade was reached, when English sea captains broke into the Spanish and Portuguese monopoly. In October 1562 John Hawkins sailed from Plymouth for the coast of Guinea with three ships—the
Salomon
, the
Swallow
, and the
Jonas
. Variously described as a pirate and an admiral, Hawkins established the ‘Great Circuit’, with its threefold profits of English goods sold in Africa, African slaves sold in the Indies, and American products sold in England. On that first voyage he took a short cut by relieving a Portuguese slave ship of its human cargo at sea. On his second voyage, in 1564, he received financial backing from the Queen of England herself, who rewarded him with a knighthood and with a coat of arms bearing ‘a demi-Moor, chained’. On a third voyage, in 1567, he obtained 470 slaves as booty after lending his crewmen as mercenaries to the kings of Sierra Leone and of Castros, who were fighting a war against their enemies, Zacina and Zatecama.
3
[USKOK]
In this way, European traders entered a lasting and lucrative partnership with their African suppliers. ‘The Root of the Evil’, writes one historian, lay in ‘a demand for slaves on one side, and on the other a monopolist interest among African chiefs in obtaining European consumer goods, especially firearms.’
4
Before the trade was stopped in the nineteenth century, some 15 million Africans had been seized for slavery in the Western hemisphere. Of those, perhaps 11 or 12 million were actually landed alive.
5
For the time being, the union of Castile and Aragon remained a personal one. The two kingdoms retained their separate laws and governments. Isabella had little choice but to attack the nobility of Castile; Ferdinand had no choice but to work with the Cortes of Aragon. Even when he asked for a window to be closed in the debating chamber, he was wont to add: ‘if the
fueros
permit’. The sense of common purpose was achieved partly by the introduction of a common currency and the removal of commercial barriers and partly by the enforcement of ultra-Catholic ideology. In 1476 Isabella set up a sinister but efficient law-enforcement agency, initially aimed at the noble brigands of Castile—the
Santa Hermandad
or Holy Brotherhood. In 1483, both Castile and Aragón were required to play host to the first institution of united Spain, a reorganized royal version of the Holy Inquisition under its president, the Queen’s confessor, the Dominican Thomas Torquemada (1420–98). Henceforth, treason and heresy were virtually indistinguishable. Non-conformers, Jews, and dissidents were rigorously persecuted. The further existence of the emirate of Granada could not be tolerated,
[DEVIATIO]
The final conquest of Granada began in 1481 and lasted for ten years. In wealth and population Granada was as superior among the provinces of Spain as Constantinople among the cities of the East. Seventy walled towns, supplied by
the most fertile countryside, might have hoped to resist indefinitely. But the dissensions of the Moorish rulers gave entry to the united Spanish forces. When Granada itself was besieged, a wooden city called Santa Fe or ‘Holy Faith’ was built to house the besiegers. The capitulation came on 2 January 1492. In the eyes of Christian enthusiasts, Constantinople was avenged.
DEVIATIO
N
O
medieval institution has attracted greater opprobrium from later ages than the Holy Inquisition. To many modern commentators, the ferocity aroused during the pursuit of heretics, Jews, or witches
[HEXEN]
is often incomprehensible. The inquisitors were simply deranged. Yet a little reflection suggests that the phenomenon is not exclusively medieval. The definition of ‘normal’ and ‘deviant’ is always subjective. People whose unconventional conduct threatens entrenched interests can easily be denounced as ‘mad’ or ‘dangerous’. Comparisons have been made between the Inquisition and the contemporary medical establishment’s opposition to the Mental Health Movement.
1
They can also be made with the treatment of dissidents to the Soviet regime, who in the 1980s were still regularly consigned to psychiatric clinics, diagnosed as ‘schizophrenic’, and forcibly disabled with drugs.
2
The conquest of Granada was accompanied by an appalling breach of good faith. Promises of religious toleration were not kept. When Queen Isabella hesitated, the Grand Inquisitor, Torquemada, is said to have held out a cross with the words: ‘Judas sold his master for thirty pieces of silver. How many will you take for this cross?’ The Jews were then faced with a decree enforcing conversion or banishment.
38
Perhaps 20,000 Sephardic families chose exile—many, ironically, in Smyrna and Istanbul, whence the Sultan sent ships to collect them.
39
The class of
conversos
, many still secretly loyal to Judaism, was greatly enlarged. By a decree of 1502 the Muslims were given the same choice. Many migrated to North Africa; the remainder were left to form a second group of dubious converts, the
moriscos
. Only in Aragon did the Cortes prevent the King from compelling the Muslim serfs, the
mudejares
, to change religion. In a climate of religious hatred and suspicion, the Inquisitors could barely cope. The fires of the
autos-da-fé
, the ‘acts of faith’, burned all over Spain. Spaniards became obsessed with the
limpieza de sangre
, the ‘purity of blood’.
