Constantinople: The Last Great Siege, 1453 (29 page)

A furious row broke out, ‘each side accusing the other of intending to escape’. All the deeper enmities between the Italians bubbled to the surface.
The Venetians declared that they had unloaded their ships again at the command of the emperor and suggested that the Genoese should likewise ‘put the rudders and sails from your ships in a safe place in Constantinople’. The Genoese retorted that they had no intention of abandoning the city; unlike the Venetians, they had wives, families and property in Galata ‘which we are preparing to defend to the last drop of our blood’ and refused to put ‘our noble city, an ornament to Genoa, into your power’. The deep ambiguity of the position of the Genoese at Galata laid them open to charges of deception and treachery from every direction. They traded with both sides yet their natural sympathies lay with their fellow Christians and they had compromised their overt neutrality by allowing the chain to be fixed within their walls.

It is probable that Constantine had to intervene personally in the quarrel between the suspicious Italians, but the Horn itself remained a zone of unresolved tension. Haunted by the fear of night attacks or a pincer movement between the two arms of the Ottoman fleet, the one inside the Horn at the Springs and the other outside at the Columns, it was impossible for the Christian fleet to relax. Day and night they stood to arms, straining their senses for the sound of approaching fire ships. At the Springs the Ottoman guns remained primed against a second assault but their ships did not move. The Venetians reorganized themselves after the loss of Coco. A new commander, Dolfin Dolfin, was appointed to his galley and consideration was given to other strategies for destroying the Ottoman ships in the Horn. Evidently another ship-borne assault was considered too risky after the failure of 28 April so the decision was taken to use long-range means to discomfort the enemy.

On 3 May two fairly large cannon were placed by one of the water gates onto the Horn directly opposite the Ottoman fleet at a distance of about 700 yards across the water and proceeded to bombard the ships. Initial results were promising. Some of the
fustae
were sunk and ‘many of their men were being killed by our bombardment’, according to Barbaro, but the Ottomans took swift measures to counter this threat. They moved their ships back out of range and replied with three large cannon of their own ‘and caused considerable damage’. The two sets of guns blasted away at each other day and night for ten days across the strait but neither could knock the other out, ‘because our cannon were behind the walls, and theirs were protected by good embankments, and the bombardment was carried out across a distance
of half a mile’. In this way the contest petered away into a stalemate, but the pressure in the Horn remained and on 5 May Mehmet responded with an artillery initiative of his own.

His restless mind had evidently been considering for some time how to bombard the ships at the boom, given that the walls of Galata lay within the line of fire. The solution was to create a cannon with a more looping trajectory that could fire from behind the Genoese town. He accordingly put his gun founders to work devising a primitive mortar, ‘that could fire the stone very high, so that when it came down it would hit the ships right in the middle and sink them’. The new cannon had duly been made and was now ready. From a hill behind Galata it opened fire on the ships at the boom. The trajectory was complicated by the walls of the town within the line of fire but this was probably a positive advantage to Mehmet: it also allowed him to put psychological pressure on the suspect Genoese. As the first shots from the mortar hurtled over their roofs, the townspeople must have felt the Ottoman noose tightening on their enclave. The third shot of the day ‘came from the top of the hill with a crash’ and hit not an enemy vessel but the deck of a neutral Genoese merchant ship ‘of three hundred botte, which was loaded with silk, wax and other merchandise worth twelve thousand ducats, and immediately it went straight to the bottom, so that neither the masthead nor the hull of the ship were visible, and a number of men on the ship were drowned’. At once all the vessels guarding the boom moved into the lee of Galata’s city walls. The bombardment went on, the range was shortened slightly and balls started to hit the walls and houses of the town itself. Men on the galleys and ships continued to be killed by the stone bullets, ‘some shots killing four men’, but the walls afforded sufficient protection to prevent any more ships being sunk. For the first time the Genoese found themselves under direct bombardment and although only one person was killed, ‘a woman of excellent reputation, who was standing in the middle of a group of thirty people’, the declaration of intent was clear.

A deputation from the city made its way to the sultan’s camp to complain about this attack. The vizier protested with a straight face that they thought the ship belonged to the enemy and blandly assured them that ‘whatever they were owed they would be repaid’ when the city was finally captured. ‘With this act of aggression did the Turks repay the friendship which the people of Galata had shown them,’
Doukas proclaimed sarcastically, referring to the intelligence that had undone Coco’s attack. Meanwhile stone balls continued to loop down over the Horn in an arced trajectory. By 14 May, according to Barbaro, the Ottomans had fired ‘two hundred and twelve stone balls, and they all weighed at least two hundred pounds each’. The Christian fleet remained pinned down and useless. Well before that date it was clear that the Christians had surrendered effective control of the Horn, and the pressing need to provide more men and materials on the land walls further deepened the divisions amongst the sailors. With the pressure easing, Mehmet ordered a pontoon bridge to be constructed across the Horn just above the city walls to shorten his lines of communication and to allow men and guns to be moved about at will.

At the land walls Mehmet also set about tightening the screw. His tactics became attritional and increasingly psychological. Now that the defenders had to be spread even more thinly, he decided to wear them down with incessant gunfire. In late April he moved some of the big guns to the central section of wall near the St Romanus Gate, ‘because in that place the wall was lower and weaker’, though attention was still also being directed to the single wall in the palace area. Day and night the guns blasted away; occasional skirmishes were mounted at irregular moments to test the resolve of the defence, then suspended for days at a time to lull the defenders into a false sense of security.

Towards the end of April a substantial bombardment brought down about thirty feet from the top of the wall. After dark Giustiniani’s men set to once again, walling up the breach with an earth bank, but the following morning the cannon renewed their attack. However, towards mid-day the chamber of one of the big guns cracked, probably because of flaws in the barrel, although the Russian Nestor-Iskander claims that it had been hit by one of the defenders’ own cannon. Infuriated by this setback, Mehmet called for an impromptu attack. A charge was made at the wall that took the defenders by surprise. A huge firefight ensued. Bells were rung in the city and people rushed to the ramparts. With the ‘clatter and flashing of weapons, it seemed to all that the city had been uprooted from its foundation’. The charging Ottoman troops were mown down and trampled underfoot by those coming up behind in their frenzy to reach the walls. To the Russian Nestor-Iskander it was a ghoulish prospect: ‘as if on the steppes, the Turks
walked over the broken human corpses crammed to the top and fought on, for their dead resembled a bridge or a stairway to the city’. With huge difficulty the attack was eventually repulsed, although it took until nightfall. Corpses were left piled in the ditches; ‘from near the breach to the valleys they were filled with blood’. Exhausted by the effort, soldiers and townspeople retired to sleep, leaving the wounded groaning outside the walls. The following day the monks again started their lugubrious task of burying the Christian dead and counting the number of their fallen enemy. Constantine, now strained by the attritional fighting, was visibly upset by the casualties.

In effect exhaustion, hunger and despair were beginning to take their toll on the defenders. By early May food supplies were running short; it was now more difficult to trade with the Genoese at Galata and dangerous to row out into the Horn to fish. During quiet spells soldiers at the wall took to deserting their posts in search of food for their families. The Ottomans became aware of this and made surprise raids to drag down the barrels of earth on the ramparts with hooked sticks; they could even openly approach the walls and retrieve cannon balls with nets. Recriminations mounted. The Genoese archbishop, Leonard, accused the Greeks who had left their posts of being afraid. They replied, ‘What is the defence to me, if my family’s in need?’ Others, he considered, ‘were full of hatred for the Latins’. There were complaints of hoarding, cowardice, profiteering and obstruction. Rifts started to open up across the fault lines of nationality, language and creed. Giustiniani and Notaras competed for military resources. Leonard railed against ‘what certain people did – drinkers of human blood – who hoarded food or raised its price’. Under the stress of the siege, the fragile Christian coalition was falling apart. Leonard blamed Constantine for failing to control the situation: ‘The Emperor lacked severity, and those who did not obey were neither punished with words nor the sword’. These rifts probably made their way back to Mehmet outside the wall. ‘The forces defending the city fell into disunity,’ recorded the Ottoman chronicler, Tursun Bey, of these days.

To ensure that the walls were not neglected in the search for food, Constantine ordered that supplies should be evenly distributed among the dependants of the soldiers. So serious was the situation that with the advice of his ministers he began to requisition church plate and had it melted down for coin to pay the men so that whatever food was available might be purchased. It was probably a controversial move,
unlikely to win the favour of the pious Orthodox who saw the sufferings of the city as a consequence of sin and error.

Deliberations amongst the commanders intensified. The presence of the enemy fleet in the Horn had greatly confused the defence and they were forced to reallocate their troops and commands accordingly. The sea was watched from the walls twenty-four hours a day but nothing stirred on the western horizon. Probably on 3 May a major council was called, involving the commanders, civic dignitaries and churchmen, to discuss the situation. The guns were still pummelling the walls, morale was weakening and there was a feeling that all-out assault was imminent. In an atmosphere charged with foreboding, a move was made to persuade Constantine to leave the city for the Peloponnese where he could regroup, gather new forces and strike again. Giustiniani offered his galleys for the emperor’s escape. The chroniclers give an emotional account of Constantine’s response. He ‘fell silent for a long time and shed tears. He spoke to them as follows: “I praise and thank your counsel and all of you, as all of this is in my interest; it can only be so. But how can I do this and leave the clergy, the churches of God, the empire and all of the people? What will the world think of me, I pray, tell me? No, my lords, no: I will die here with you.” Falling, he bowed to them and cried in grief. The patriarch and all of the people present started to weep in silence.’

Recovering from this moment, Constantine made a practical suggestion that the Venetians should send out a ship at once to search the eastern Aegean for signs of a rescue fleet. Twelve men volunteered for the hazardous duty of running the Ottoman blockade and a brigantine was accordingly prepared for the task. Towards midnight on 3 May the crew, dressed as Turks, stepped aboard the small boat, which was towed to the boom. Sporting the Ottoman flag, it unfurled its sail and slipped unnoticed through the enemy patrol and headed west down the Marmara under cover of darkness.

Mehmet continued to bombard the walls despite technical difficulties with the big guns. On 6 May he decided that the time was right for a knock-out blow: ‘he ordered all of the army to march once more on the city and to make war for all day’. News from within the city probably convinced him that morale was collapsing; other reports may have warned him of the slowly gathering momentum of an Italian
relief force. He sensed that the weakness of the central section of wall was now at a critical point. He decided to attempt another major attack.

The big guns opened up on 6 May, supported by smaller cannon in the now familiar pattern of firing, accompanied by ‘cries and the banging of castanets to frighten the people of the city’. Soon another portion of wall fell in. The defenders waited for nightfall to make their repairs but on this occasion the guns continued firing in the dark. It became impossible to repair the gap. The following morning the cannon again plugged away at the base of the wall and brought down a further substantial section. All day the Ottomans kept firing. At about 7 o’clock at night, with the customary din, a massive assault was launched at the breach. Away in the harbour the Christian sailors heard the wild cries and stood to arms, fearing a matching attack by the Ottoman fleet. Thousands of men crossed the ditch and ran for the breach, but numbers were not an advantage in the limited space and they trampled one another in their attempt to force their way in. Giustiniani rushed to meet the intruders and a desperate hand-to-hand struggle took place in the gap.

In the first wave, a Janissary called Murat led the assault, slashing fiercely at Giustiniani, who was only saved from death by a Greek jumping down from the wall and cutting off his assailant’s legs with an axe. A second wave was led by one Omar Bey, the standard bearer of the European army – and was met by a substantial contingent of Greeks commanded by their officer Rhangabes. In the slashing, hacking confusion, the two leaders squared up to each other in single combat in front of their men. Omar ‘bared his sword, he attacked him and with fury did they slash at each other. Rhangabes stepped on a rock, grasped his sword with two hands, struck him on the shoulder, and cut him into two, for he had great strength in his arms.’ Infuriated at the death of their commander, the Ottoman troops encircled Rhangabes and cut him down. Like a scene from the
Iliad
, the two sides surged forward to try to seize the body. The Greeks were desperate to gain control of the corpse and piled out of the gates, ‘but they were unable and suffered many losses’. The Ottomans cut the mutilated body to pieces and drove the Greek soldiers back into the city. For three hours the battle raged on but the defenders successfully held the line. As the fighting died down, the cannon started to open up again to prevent the breach being filled and the Ottomans launched a second diversionary
raid, trying to set fire to the gate near the palace. This was again defeated. In the darkness Giustiniani and the exhausted defenders worked to rebuild the makeshift defences. Because of the firing at the wall, they were forced to build their protective barrier of earth and timber slightly inside its original line. The wall was holding – but only just. And inside the city ‘there was great mourning and dread among the Greeks over Rhangabes, because he was a great warrior, was courageous, and was beloved of the Emperor’.