Constantinople: The Last Great Siege, 1453 (19 page)

No one knows exactly how many men Mehmet brought to the siege. The Ottoman genius for mobilizing both regular troops and volunteers on a grand scale repeatedly stunned their opponents into the wildest projections. To the eulogizing Ottoman chroniclers they were simply ‘a river of steel’ ‘as numerous as the stars’. The European eyewitnesses were more mathematical but given to very large round numbers. Their calculations ranged from 160,000 men to upwards of 400,000. It took Michael the Janissary, who had seen Ottoman armies up close, to impose some sense of realism on such ‘facts’: ‘Know there-fore that the Turkish emperor cannot assemble such a large army for pitched battle as people tell of his great might. For some relate that they are innumerable, but it is an impossible thing, that an army could be without number, for every ruler wants to know the number of his army and to have it organised.’ The most realistic numerical guess seems to be that of Tetaldi, who soberly calculated that ‘at the siege there were altogether two hundred thousand men, of whom perhaps sixty thousand were soldiers, thirty to forty thousand of these being cavalry’. In the fifteenth century, when the French and English fought the Battle of Agincourt with a combined total of 35,000 men, this was a huge force. If Tetaldi’s estimate was anywhere close, even the number of horses that must have come to the siege was impressive. The rest of the Ottoman host were auxiliaries or hangers-on: supply teams, carpenters, gun-founders, blacksmiths, ordnance corps as well as ‘tailors, pastry-cooks, artisans, petty traders, and other men who followed the army in the hope of profit or plunder’.

Constantine had no such difficulty estimating his army. He simply counted it. At the end of March he ordered a census of districts to record ‘how many able-bodied men there were including monks, and whatever weapons each possessed for defence’. Having collected the returns he entrusted the adding up to his faithful chancellor and lifelong friend, George Sphrantzes. As Sphrantzes recalled, ‘The Emperor summoned me and said, “This task belongs to your sphere of duties and to no-one else, because you are competent to make the necessary calculations and to observe that the proper measures are taken for the defence and that full secrecy is observed. Take these lists and study them at home. Make an accurate assessment of how many hand weapons, shields, bows and cannon we have.”’ Sphrantzes duly did the totting up. ‘I carried out the Emperor’s orders and presented to him a detailed estimate of our resources with considerable gloom.’
The reason for his mood was clear: ‘In spite of the great size of our city, our defenders amounted to 4,773 Greeks, as well as just 200 foreigners.’ In addition there were the genuine outsiders, the ‘Genoese, Venetians and those who came secretly from Galata to help the defence’, who numbered ‘hardly as many as three thousand’, amounting to something under 8,000 men in total to defend a perimeter wall of twelve miles. Even of these, ‘the greater part of the Greeks were not skilled in warfare, and fought with shields, swords, lances and bows by natural instinct rather than with any skill’. Desperately lacking were those ‘skilled in the use of the bow and cross-bow’. Nor was it certain what help the disaffected Orthodox population would give to the cause. Constantine was appalled by the possible effects of this information on morale, and determined to suppress it. ‘The true figure remained a secret known only to the emperor and myself,’ Sphrantzes recalled. It was clear that the siege was to be a conflict between the few and many.

Constantine kept this knowledge to himself and set about making final preparations. On 2 April, the day that the gates were closed for the last time, he ordered the boom to be hauled across the Golden Horn by ship, from Eugenius the gate near to the Acropolis Point in the city, to a tower within the sea walls of Galata. The work was undertaken by a Genoese engineer, Bartolamio Soligo, chosen probably for his ability to persuade his fellow Genoese at Galata to let the chain be fixed to their walls. This was a contentious matter. By permitting it, the citizens could be said to be compromising their strict neutrality. It was certain to invoke Mehmet’s ire if the siege went badly, but they agreed. For Constantine it meant that the four-mile stretch of shoreline along the Horn could be left virtually unguarded as long as sufficient naval resources were deployed to protect the boom itself.

As Mehmet spread his army out around the city, Constantine called a council of war with Giustiniani and his other commanders to deploy his small force along the twelve-mile front. He knew that the Horn was secure as long as the boom was held; the other sea walls were also not cause for major concern. The Bosphorus currents were too strong to permit an easy assault by landing craft round the point of the city; the Marmara walls were similarly unpromising for concerted attack because of currents and the pattern of shoals off the shore. It was the land walls, despite their apparent strength, that needed the most detailed attention.

Both sides were well aware of the two weak spots. The first was the central section of wall, called by the Greeks the
Mesoteichion
, the ‘middle wall’ that lay between two strategic gates, the St Romanus and the Charisian, on ridges either side. Between the gates the land sloped down about a hundred feet to the Lycus valley, where the small stream was culverted under the wall and into the city. This section had been the focus of the Ottoman siege of 1422 and Mehmet set up his headquarters on the hill of Maltepe opposite as a clear signal of intent. The second vulnerable zone was the short length of single wall near the Golden Horn that was unmoated, particularly the point where the two walls met at right angles. In late March Constantine had persuaded the Venetian galley crews hurriedly to dig out a ditch along part of this stretch, but it remained a cause for concern.

Constantine set about organizing his forces accordingly. He divided the fourteen zones of the city into twelve military divisions and allocated his resources. He decided to establish his headquarters in the Lycus valley, so that emperor and sultan almost confronted each other across the walls. Here he stationed the bulk of his best troops, about 2,000 in all. Giustiniani was originally positioned at the Charisian Gate on the ridge above, but subsequently moved his Genoese soldiers to join the emperor in the central section and to take effective day-to-day command of this critical sector.

Sections of the land wall were then parcelled out for defence under the command of ‘the principal persons of Constantinople’. On the emperor’s right the Charisian Gate was probably commanded by Theodore of Karystes, ‘an old but sturdy Greek, highly skilful with the bow’. The next section of the wall north, up to the right-angle turn, was entrusted to the Genoese Bocchiardi brothers who had come ‘at their own expense and providing their own equipment’, which included handguns and powerful frame-mounted crossbows, and the vulnerable section of single wall that ran round the Blachernae Palace was also largely entrusted to Italians. The Venetian bailey, Minotto, took up residence in the palace itself; the flag of St Mark flew from its tower beside that of the emperor. One of its gates, the Caligaria, was commanded by ‘John from Germany’, a professional soldier and ‘an able military engineer’ who was actually Scottish. He was also given the task of managing the city’s supply of Greek fire.

Constantine’s force was truly multi-national but was similarly divided along the fault lines of religion, nationality and commercial
rivalry. In order to minimize potential friction between Genoese and Venetian, Orthodox and Catholic, Greek and Italian, he seems to have made it a deliberate policy to intermix the forces in the hope of increasing their interdependence. On his immediate left a section of wall was commanded by his kinsman, ‘the Greek Theophilus, a noble from the house of Palaiologos, highly erudite in Greek literature and an expert geometrician’ – a man who probably knew more about the
Iliad
than actually defending Troy’s walls. Towards the Golden Gate, the wall was supervised by a succession of Greek, Venetian and Genoese soldiers, with a noble of the great Byzantine family of Cantacuzenos, Demetrios, at the corner point where the land wall meets the sea wall at the Marmara shore.

The defences along the Marmara shore were even more mixed. Another Venetian – Jacopo Contarini – was stationed at the village of Studion, while Orthodox monks watched an adjacent section where little attack was expected. Constantine had then placed his renegade Turkish contingent under the pretender Prince Orhan at the harbour of Eleutherii – well away from the land walls, though their loyalty was hardly to be questioned given their certain fate should the city fall. Towards the apex of the city, the seashore was manned by a Catalan contingent and the Acropolis point itself was entrusted to Cardinal Isidore and a force of 200. It says much about the fighting skills of the men on these sections, that despite the natural protection afforded by the sea Constantine decided to supply each tower with two skilled marksmen – one archer plus a crossbowman or handgunner. The Golden Horn itself was guarded by Genoese and Venetian sailors under the command of the Venetian sea captain Trevisano, while the crews of two Cretan ships in the harbour manned a gate near the boom, the Horaia. Protection of the boom itself and the ships in the harbour was in the charge of Aluvixe Diedo.

In order to provide further support for his overstretched ‘army’, Constantine decided to keep a rapid-reaction force in reserve. Two troops were kept in readiness back from the walls. One, under the Grand Duke Lucas Notaras, a skilled soldier and ‘the most important man in Constantinople apart from the emperor’, was stationed in the Petra quarter with a hundred horses and some mobile guns; another under Nicephorus Palaiologos was placed on the central ridge near the ruined church of the Holy Apostles. These reserves comprised about a thousand men.

Constantine brought a lifetime’s experience of warfare and troop management to these arrangements, but he probably had little idea how well this democracy of competing contingents would function together in days ahead. Many of the crucial positions had been given to foreigners because he was uncertain where his own position on church union placed him with the Orthodox faithful of the city. He entrusted keys to four of the principal city gates to leading Venetians and ensured that the Greek commanders on the walls were unionist in their religious leanings. Lucas Notaras, who was probably against union, had been pointedly kept away from having to co-operate with Catholics at the defence of the walls.

As Constantine sought to match his scanty resources to the four-mile extent of the land wall, there was one further crucial decision to take. The triple wall had been designed for defence by a far larger contingent, which could man it in depth – at both the high inner wall and the lower outer one. He lacked the resources adequately to defend both layers, so he was forced to choose where to make a stand. The wall had been bombarded in the 1422 siege, and whereas the outer one had been substantially repaired, the inner had not. Defenders at the previous siege had faced the same choice and had opted – successfully – for a defence of the outer wall. Constantine and his siege expert, Giustiniani, adopted the same strategy. In some quarters it was a controversial decision. ‘This was always against my advice’, wrote the ever-critical Archbishop Leonard, ‘I urged us not to desert the protection of our high inner walls’, but this was probably the counsel of perfection.

The emperor resolved to do all he could for the morale of his troops, and knowing that Mehmet feared the possibility of Catholic aid arriving for the Orthodox city, decided on his own small show of force. At his request on 6 April the men of the Venetian galleys disembarked and paraded the length of the land walls in their distinctive European armour ‘with their banners in front … to give great comfort to the people of the city’, as a highly visible statement that there were Franks at the siege. On the same day the galleys themselves were put on a war footing.

Mehmet for his part sent a small detachment of cavalry up to the city gates, pennants fluttering in the wind, indicating that they had come to parley. They brought with them the traditional invitation to surrender required under Koranic law: ‘Nor do We punish’, says the Koran, ‘until We have sent forth a messenger. When We resolve to
raise a city, We first give warning to those its people who live in comfort. If they persist in sin, judgement is irrevocably passed, and We destroy it utterly.’ Under this formula the Christian defenders could convert to Islam, surrender and pay the poll tax, or hold out and anticipate three days of plunder, should their city be stormed. The Byzantines had first heard this formula as long ago as 674, and several times since. The response had always been the same: ‘We accept neither the tax, nor Islam, nor the capitulation of our fortress.’ With this denial, the Ottomans could feel that the siege had been sanctioned by Holy Law and heralds moved among the camp formally proclaiming the start of the siege. Mehmet proceeded to wheel up his guns.

Constantine decided on a policy of maximum visibility. His headquarters was a large tent behind the St Romanus gate, from which he rode out on his small Arab mare each day with George Sphrantzes and the Spaniard Don Francisco of Toledo, ‘encouraging the soldiers, inspecting the watches, and searching for those missing from their posts’. He heard Mass in whatever church was closest at the time and ensured that a group of monks and priests was attached to each body of men to hear confession and deliver the last rites in battle. Orders were also issued to conduct services day and night for the salvation of the city, and morning liturgies were concluded by procession of the icons through the streets and along the walls to cheer the troops. The watching Muslims could make out the long beards of the Christians and catch the sound of hymns in the spring air.

The morale of the defenders was not improved by the weather. There was a series of minor earthquakes and torrential rain. In the heightened atmosphere, portents were seen and old prophecies remembered. ‘Icons sweated in the churches, and the pillars and statues of saints,’ recalled the chronicler Kritovoulos. ‘Men and women were possessed and inspired by visions that did not bode well, and soothsayers foretold many misfortunes.’ Constantine himself was probably more perturbed by the arrival of the guns. He must have known what to expect from his previous experience of Ottoman artillery fire at the Hexamilion in 1446 when his carefully built wall collapsed in five days and a massacre ensued.