Constantinople: The Last Great Siege, 1453 (20 page)

With his logistical skill in co-ordinating equipment, materials and huge numbers of men, Mehmet was now ready to act. His supplies of cannonballs and saltpetre, mining equipment, siege engines and food
were collected, counted and ordered; weapons were cleaned, cannon were hauled into position, and the men – cavalry and infantry, archers and lancers, armourers, gunners, raiders and miners – had been assembled and brought to a pitch of expectation. The Ottoman sultans were close enough to a shared tribal past to understand the motivations of men and how to work their enthusiasm into a common purpose. Mehmet knew well how to whip up fervour for holy war. The ulema went among the corps, reciting the old prophecies from the Hadith about the city’s fall and its meaning to Islam. Daily Mehmet prayed in public on a carpet in front of the red and gold tent turned east towards Mecca – and also towards St Sophia. This went hand in hand with the promise of limitless booty if the city had to be taken by force. The lure of the Red Apple was dangled before the expectant gaze of the faithful. It was on these dual promises, so attractive to the tribal raider, of taking plunder whilst fulfilling the will of God, that Mehmet prepared his strike.

He knew, and his old vizier Halil Pasha knew even better, that speed was now essential. Capturing cities required human sacrifice. The enthusiasm and expectation whipped up for the assault – and the willingness to fill up ditches with trampled corpses – had a limited time frame. Unexpected setbacks could quickly tip morale; among such a condensed body of men, rumour, dissent and disaffection could ripple through the tents like wind over the grasslands, and even the well-organized camps of the Ottomans were prey to typhus if they tarried too late in the summer. There was clearly danger for Mehmet in this venture. He was aware, through his network of Venetian spies, that help from the West would eventually come by land or sea no matter how quarrelsome and divided the Christian powers might be. As he gazed up from the hill at Maltepe at the rise and fall of the land walls with their close-packed towers, their triple defensive system and their history of stubborn resistance, he might have expressed public faith in the valour of his troops, but his ultimate confidence was probably in the potential of the guns.

Time was the prime co-ordinate for Constantine too. The calculation for the defenders was depressingly simple. There was no possibility of lifting the siege by counter-attack. Their only hope lay in holding on long enough for some relieving force from the West to muscle its way through the blockade. They had resisted the Arabs in 678. They must hold out now.

If Constantine possessed one trump card it lay in the person of Giovanni Giustiniani. The Genoese had come to the city with a reputation that preceded him as a ‘man experienced in war’. He understood how to appraise and rectify obvious weaknesses in the fortifications, the best use of defensive weapons such as catapults and handguns, and deployment of the limited numbers of men to greatest advantage. He drilled the defenders in effective techniques of siege fighting and contemplated the opportunities for counter-attack from the city’s sally ports. The vicious wars amongst Italian city-states bred generations of such talented specialists, technical mercenaries who studied city defence as both a science and an art. However Giustiniani could never have encountered massive artillery bombardment before. The events about to unfold would test his skill to the limit.

The big guns took a long time to arrive, lurching along the muddy tracks from Edirne on their solid-wheeled carts through the spring rain. They could be heard far ahead. The ox teams floundered and bellowed; the men shouted; the grating axles emitted a continuous, single-note music like an eerie transmission from the stars.

When they did reach the front line, each cannon took an age to unload on hoists, site and aim. By 6 April only some of the light guns were probably in place. They fired their first shots at the walls with apparently little effect. Soon after the start of the siege an enthusiastic but ragged assault by irregular troops was made against the weak section of the wall in the Lycus valley. Giustiniani’s men sallied out from the ramparts and put the intruders to flight, ‘killing some and wounding a few’. Order in the Ottoman camp was only restored by a substantial counter-attack that forced the defenders back behind the walls. The initial failure probably convinced the sultan to await a full deployment of artillery, rather than risk further damage to morale.

In the interim he instigated the other set procedures of an Ottoman siege. Hidden in bunkers behind the earth ramparts sappers commenced discreet mining operations in the central sector; their aim was to tunnel the 250 yards to the wall, which could then be collapsed
from underneath. Orders were also given to start trying to fill in the great fosse at suitable points by ‘bringing up stones and timbers and mounds of earth and amassing every other kind of material’, against the day when a concerted assault of the walls should be undertaken. This was dangerous, even deadly, work for the troops. The fosse was only forty yards from the defended wall and provided an unprotected sector that could be raked from the ramparts unless deterred by heavy counter-fire. Each sphere of operation where a toehold could be established or a line moved forward was to be bitterly contested. Giustiniani studied the terrain and set about disrupting their efforts. Sorties were made and ambushes laid in the dark when defenders would ‘burst out of the city gates to attack those outside the walls. Leaping out of the fosse, they would sometimes be beaten back; at other times they would take Turkish captives’ who could then be tortured for intelligence. These fierce skirmishes for the ditch were effective, but it quickly became clear to the defenders that the ratio of losses was unacceptable. The death of each skilled fighter was significant, no matter how many Turks were killed in the process, so the decision was taken early on to fight mainly from the ramparts, ‘some firing crossbow bolts, others plain arrows’. The war for the fosse was to be one of the bitter inner struggles of the siege.

In the days after 7 April while he awaited the arrival of his heavy guns, the impatient sultan turned his attention to other matters. As the Ottoman army had swept up through Thrace it had taken the Greek villages in its path, but a few isolated strongholds still held out. These Mehmet had bypassed, leaving detachments to watch them. Probably on 8 April he set out with a sizeable force and some guns to eradicate the fortress of Therapia, which stood on a hilltop overlooking the Bosphorus beyond the Throat Cutter. It resisted for two days until the cannons destroyed its fortifications and killed most of the defenders. The rest ‘when they could not hold out any longer, surrendered and said he could do with them as he wanted. And he impaled these forty men.’ A similar castle at Studius on the Sea of Marmara was quickly demolished by gunfire. This time the thirty-six unfortunate survivors were impaled outside the city walls.

A few days later Baltaoglu, Mehmet’s admiral, took a portion of the fleet to seize the Princes’ Islands in the Sea of Marmara, the traditional retreat of the imperial family in times of trouble. On the largest island, Prinkipo, there was a solid fortress, manned by ‘thirty heavily-armed
men and some of the local people’, that refused to surrender. When gunfire failed to reduce them to submission, Baltaoglu’s men piled huge quantities of brushwood against the walls and set fire to it. With the help of pitch and brimstone and a stiff wind the flames licked the turrets so that the castle itself was soon alight. Those who were not burned alive surrendered unconditionally. The soldiers were killed on the spot and the villagers sold into slavery.