The History of the Renaissance World (110 page)

Constantine XI Palaeologus was forty-five years old, twice widowed, and emperor of a shabby, demoralized, poor empire. He had fewer than nine thousand soldiers in Constantinople, and half of those were mercenaries. The walls of the city were crumbling, in places gapped through. He did not defy Murad II, but when Murad died in 1451 of a stroke, he faced a new sultan who did not intend to let Constantinople remain unconquered.

Mehmet II had retreated silently into the shadows, waiting for his father to die. The two had never been on close terms; Murad had preferred his two older sons, Mehmet’s half brothers, but both had died young. Now Mehmet returned to Edirne. He was nineteen years old, withdrawn and cautious, and the only person who did not underestimate him was the vizier Halil Pasha. “The late Sultan was a lenient and conscientious friend to you,” he wrote to Constantine XI, when the Byzantine emperor had annoyed him by suggesting that Constantinople might decide to support a rival for Mehmet II’s throne. “The present Sultan is not of the same mind. If . . . [you] elude his bold and impetuous grasp, it will be only because God continues to overlook your cunning and wicked schemes. . . . If you want to recover the places which you lost long since, try it. But know this . . . all you will achieve is to lose what little you still have.”
¹¹

Halil Pasha himself had set his affairs in order; he thoroughly expected to be done away with. But Mehmet II kept him on. The vizier was experienced, well liked, and well connected; Mehmet II did not necessarily want his father’s right-hand man in the sultan’s palace, but he was able to push away his dislike, when necessary, for the good of his reign. On the other hand, Mehmet’s infant half brother, son of his father’s new young wife, was a potential rival. As soon as he arrived at Edirne, Mehmet invited his stepmother to his throne room and gave her a sincere welcome. When she returned to her rooms, she found the body of her baby son, strangled while she had been away.
¹²

Mehmet did not fritter his strength away in multiple campaigns. He at once arranged truces with Hungary, Venice, Wallachia, and the Greek cities on the southern peninsula, which allowed him to put all of his energies into building a new fortress. Called Boğazkesen, “Cutter of the Strait,” it stood on Byzantine land, on the western shore of the Bosphorus Strait. He assigned his entire workforce to build it, completely finishing it in less than twenty weeks. The Cutter of the Strait stood directly across from a fortress built by his grandfather Bayezid on the Turkish shore. It had only one purpose—to serve as a base for the conquest of Constantinople—and for twenty weeks, the citizens of Constantinople had been perfectly aware of this as they watched the fortress rise, stone by stone. Mehmet had ignored Constantine’s diplomatic protests. The emperor had no power outside the city’s walls, and the sultan’s one wish was to breach those walls and bring Constantinople to an end.
¹³

In November 1452, the Cutter of the Strait claimed its first victim. As soon as the fortress was completed, Mehmet had announced that all ships passing through the strait would pay toll. A Venetian merchant ship refused to stop and shell out the tax; Turkish cannon blasted the ship to bits, killing most of the crew. The captain was hauled out of the water and impaled on the shore where other ships could see him.
¹⁴

The storm was coming. Constantine set his people, that winter, to collecting weapons, repairing the walls, gathering provisions. A Hungarian cannon maker named Urban came to the city and offered his services; he was too expensive for Constantine, so with regret the emperor turned him away. He went to Cutter of the Strait instead, where Mehmet promptly hired him.
¹⁵

At the beginning of April, Mehmet began to move his forces into place. He established his own headquarters right across from the gate known as St. Romanus and established other camps all along the walls. Monstrelet says that he had 200,000 men; the Venetian eyewitness Nicolò Barbaro guessed 160,000, the Greek chronicler Chalkokondyles 400,000. Among them were at least 60,000 archers and 40,000 horsemen; some of the foot soldiers armed only with scimitars, but others with iron helmets and French chain mail. “There were very many bombards and culverins,” Monstrelet says;
bombards
were wide-mouthed cannon that hurled granite balls,
culverins
smaller cannon that could be fired by hand. One of the bombards, according to Monstrelet, shot out stones “weighing eighteen hundred pounds.” This was the work of the renegade Hungarian cannon maker; it had taken sixty oxen pulling thirty wagons to haul it from its forging place in Edirne (once called Adrianople) to the city’s walls, and road workers had spent two months fortifying bridges and roadways ahead of it; the stones it hurled were more than seven feet around. The sultan hoped to use these to break through the triple land walls west of the city. No attacking force had ever before succeeded in this, but no attacking force had ever used cannon that hurled seven-foot stones either.
¹⁶

The bombardment began on April 4, 1453.
*
It continued for fifty-five days; on each one of those days, the cannon launched 100 to 120 massive stones against the city’s walls. Barbaro, who was inside the city during the attack, records that the first Turkish attempt to storm through the gaps knocked in the walls came on April 18. It was driven back by the defenders, stones piled back into the walls.
¹⁷

The most vulnerable wall of the city was the one lining the edge of the Golden Horn, the finger of water that ran from the Bosphorus inland. The Horn itself was blocked with a massive chain, the chain guarded by towers. But Mehmet had planned for this. His engineers had outfitted about seventy of his ships with wheels. In the night of April 22, his men hauled the ships by land over the hills north of the Golden Horn and then slipped them into the water, behind the protective chain. When dawn came on the twenty-third, the Golden Horn was filled with enemy ships.

It was at this point that the defense of the city began to seem more like a deathwatch.

Two more attempted invasions through breaches in the walls took place on May 7 and May 18, both pushed back by the pitifully small garrison within. Constantine, losing heart, sent a message to Mehmet asking for terms on which the sultan would withdraw: “Either I shall take this city,” Mehmet sent back, “or the city will take me, dead or alive. . . . The city is all I want, even if it is empty.”
¹⁸

On May 28, the bombardment suddenly ceased. Silence settled over the city. And then, just after midnight, a final attack—every man, every cannon, every horse, every archer Mehmet commanded—was flung against and over the city walls. Constantine himself came out, sword in hand, to join the fighting. His body was never found, probably buried in a mass pit along with thousands of others; there were so many bodies, both Turkish and Byzantine, says Barbaro, that they floated in the Sea of Marmara “as melons float through the canals of Venice.”

94.2 The Golden Horn

By the morning of the twenty-ninth, Constantinople belonged to the Turks. Mehmet himself came in through the St. Romanus gate and went directly to the Hagia Sophia, the great cathedral of the Greek church, to say the first Muslim prayers inside it.
¹⁹

The day after the conquest, Mehmet arrested his vizier Halil Pasha and had him executed. He was strong now, and he no longer needed the old man.
²⁰

T
HE
T
URKS
called it “The Conquest,” but in the West it was known as “The Fall.”

There was no more emperor in the east, no more Christian jewel on the Black Sea. The chain connecting the fifteenth century to Constantine’s dream was broken. For the ideal of holy crusade, the conquest of 1453 was a postscript to the Battle of Varna; for the ideal of a holy empire, it was simply and purely the end. The old trade routes were no more. The old hopes were dead. The old promises were empty and hollow.
²¹

The conquest was the beginning of many other things: the Muslim advance into the west; a new wave of Greek thought, moving westward as Byzantine scholars fled from Constantinople into the courts of Europe; the seeds of new nations; the roots of new wars.

But endings were easier to see than beginnings. Even for the Ottomans, who saw victory rather than the end of the world, the sack of the city was a period and not the start of a new sentence. The single detailed Ottoman account of the siege speaks less of triumph than of severed limbs and severed heads, of fire and charred remains, of dust and death and destruction.

And, from the furthest reaches below to the top-most parts, and from the upper heights down to ground level, hand-to-hand combat and charging was being joined with a clashing and plunging of arms and hooked pikes and halberds in the breaches amidst the ruin wrought by the cannon . . . a veritable precipitation and downpouring of calamities from the heavens as decreed by God.
²²

*
The 1453 siege of Constantinople is one of the most-studied (and familiar) in Western history. Much more detailed accounts can be found in the illustrated and readable
The Fall of Constantinople: The Ottoman Conquest of Byzantium
, by David Nicolle, John Haldon, and Stephen R. Turnbull (Osprey Publishing, 2007), and in the narrative history
Constantinople: The Last Great Siege
, by Roger Crowley (Faber and Faber, 2005). The comprehensive 800-page study
The Siege and the Fall of Constantinople in 1453: Historiography, Topography and Military Studies
, by Marois Philippides and Walter K. Hanak (Ashgate Publishing, 2011), offers a survey of the research and sources available.

Notes

Preface

1. Richard A. Fletcher,
Moorish Spain
(New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1992), p. 151.

Chapter One
Logic and Compromise

1. William of Malmesbury,
The Deeds of the Bishops of England (Gesta Pontificum Anglorum)
, trans. David Preest (2002), p. 575.

2. Guy Carleton Lee,
Source-book of English History
(1900), pp. 125–127; David Charles Douglas,
William the Conqueror: The Norman Impact upon England
(1964), pp. 265–266.

3. Douglas, pp. 273–274.

4. William of Malmesbury,
The Deeds of the Bishops of England
, p. 98.

5. Jaroslav Pelikan,
The Growth of Medieval Theology (600–1300)
(1978), p. 98.

6. William of Malmesbury,
The Deeds of the Bishops of England
, p. 26.

7. Saint Anselm,
Proslogion
, in
A Scholastic Miscellany: Anselm to Ockham
, ed. and trans. Eugene R. Fairweather (1956), p. 69.

8. Ibid., p. 100.

9. Uta-Renate Blumenthal,
The Investiture Controversy
(1988), p. 156.

10. William of Malmesbury,
Gesta Regum Anglorum (The History of the English Kings)
, trans. R. A. B. Mynors, R. M. Thomson, and Michael Winterbottom, vol. 1 (1998), p. 749.

11. Henry White,
History of Great Britain and Ireland
(1849), p. 114.