Constantinople: The Last Great Siege, 1453 (33 page)

The God-protected city

 

The following day, a deputation of priests and ministers went to Constantine to express their forebodings. The mysterious light was duly described and they tried to persuade the emperor to seek a safer place from which to mount effective resistance to Mehmet: ‘Emperor: weigh all of what has been said about this city. God granted the light in the time of Emperor Justinian for the preservation of the great holy church and this city. But in this night, it departed for heaven. This signifies that God’s grace and generosity have gone from us: God wishes to hand over our city to the enemy … we beseech you: Leave the city so that we will not all perish!’ From a mixture of emotion and sheer exhaustion, Constantine collapsed to the ground in a dead faint and remained unconscious for a long time. When he came round, his response was unchanged: to leave the city would be to invite immortal ridicule on his name. He would remain and die with his subjects if need be. He furthermore ordered them not to spread words of discomfort among the people: ‘do not allow them to fall into despair and weaken their effort in battle’.

Others responded differently. On the night of 26 May, a Venetian sea captain, one Nicholas Giustiniani – unrelated to Giovanni Giustiniani, the hero of the siege – slipped the chain and sailed off under the wing of night. A few smaller boats put out from the small harbours along the Marmara sea walls, dodged the naval blockade and made for the ports of the Greek-speaking Aegean. Some of the richer citizens sought refuge on the Italian ships within the Horn, judging them to offer the best chance of escape in the event of a final catastrophe. Others began to look for safe bolt-holes within the city. Few had any illusions what defeat might bring.

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Within the mystical framework of the medieval world, the astrological portents and unseasonable weather that destroyed the city’s morale were clear signs of the will of God. In fact the most likely explanation for these terrifying phenomena lay far away in the Pacific Ocean and rivalled even the most lurid vision of Armageddon. Some time around the start of 1453 the volcanic island of Kuwae, 1,200 miles east of Australia, literally blew itself up. Eight cubic miles of molten rock were blasted into the stratosphere with a force two million times that of the Hiroshima bomb. It was the Krakatoa of the Middle Ages, an event that dimmed the world’s weather. Volcanic dust was propelled across the earth on global winds, lowering temperatures and blighting harvests from China to Sweden. South of the Yangtze River, an area with a climate as mild as Florida, it snowed continuously for forty days. Contemporary tree-ring records from England show years of stunted growth. The sulphur-rich particles from Kuwae could well have been responsible for the unseasonably cool and unstable mixture of rain, hail, fog and snow that blighted the city throughout the spring. Suspended in the atmosphere they would also have created lurid sunsets and strange optical effects. It could have been volcanic particles, alone or in conjunction with the effect of St Elmo’s fire – the glow from the discharges of atmospheric electricity – that bathed the copper dome of the cathedral in ominous ribbons of fire on 26 May, and conjured for the defenders these visions of oblivion. (Lurid light effects after the Krakatoa eruption in 1883 similarly alarmed people in New York, but living in a more scientific age, they tended to assume huge fires were raging and sent for the fire brigade.)

The febrile atmosphere of foreboding was not confined to the city. By the last week of May the Ottoman camp was also suffering a severe crisis of morale. A muffled discontent fluttered among the Islamic banners. It was now the fifth month of the Arabian lunar year; for seven weeks they had assaulted the city by land and sea. They had endured wretched spring weather and had suffered terrible casualties at the walls. Unknown numbers of trampled dead had been carried away from the choked ditches; day after day the smoke of funeral pyres rose over the plain. And yet as they looked up from the sea of ordered tents, the walls still stood; and where they had been demolished by the great guns, the long earth rampart surmounted by barrels had risen in their place as the taunt of a stubborn enemy. The double-headed eagle
of the emperor still fluttered over the ramparts while the lion of St Mark over the imperial palace served as the reminder of the presence of Western aid, and the fear that reinforcements might be on their way. No armoured host could sustain a lengthy siege as effectively as the Ottomans. They understood the essential rules of camp life better than any Western army – the rapid burning of corpses, the protection of water sources and the sanitary disposal of excrement were essential disciplines in Ottoman warfare – but gradually the mathematics of the siege were stacking against them. It has been estimated that in the Middle Ages a besieging army of 25,000 men, a third the size of that at Constantinople, must transport 9,000 gallons of water and thirty tons of fodder a day to provision itself. In a sixty-day siege such an army would need to remove 1 million gallons of human and animal urine and 4,000 tons of solid biological waste. Soon the summer heat would add to the Muslims’ material discomforts and the threat of disease. The clock was ticking on Ottoman resolve.

In reality, after seven weeks of warfare, an immense weariness was affecting both sides. There was recognition that a final outcome could not long be postponed. Nerves were strained to breaking point. In this climate the struggle for Constantinople had become a personal contest between Mehmet and Constantine for the morale of their men. While Constantine watched confidence disintegrate inside the city, an identical affliction mysteriously struck the rank and file of the Ottoman army. The exact sequence and dating of events remains uncertain. The arrival of the Venetian brigantine on 23 May, bringing news that that there was no relieving fleet, was perhaps perceived by the Ottomans as the outrider of that fleet. The next day word spread quickly among the tents that a powerful fleet was approaching the Dardanelles while a Hungarian crusader army under John Hunyadi, ‘the redoubtable white knight’, had already crossed the Danube and was marching on Edirne. The most likely explanation is that Constantine had allowed this message to seep out in a last attempt to undermine Ottoman morale. It was immediately successful. Uncertainty and alarm rippled across the plain. The men remembered, in the words of the chronicler, that ‘many kings and sultans had aspired … and had assembled and equipped large armies, but no one had reached the foot of the fortress. They had withdrawn in pain, wounded and disillusioned.’ A mood of despondency gripped the camp, and if Leonard of Chios is to be believed, ‘the Turks began to shout against their Sultan’. For the second
time doubt and a sense of danger gripped the Ottoman high command and the old divisions over the conduct of the siege started to resurface.

For Mehmet it was the moment of crisis. Failure to take the city might prove fatal to his reputation but time and the patience of his army were running out. He needed to regain the confidence of his men and to act decisively. The night of the eclipse provided a lucky moment to bolster flagging morale. The religious zeal of the mullahs and dervishes who had come to the siege ensured that a favourable interpretation of the lunar eclipse was spread throughout the camp, but the decision to continue with the siege remained uncertain. With a characteristic mixture of shrewdness and cunning, he decided to make one more attempt to persuade Constantine to surrender peacefully.

Probably around 25 May he sent an emissary to the city, Ismail, a renegade Greek nobleman, to confront the Byzantines with their probable fate. He appealed to the hopelessness of their situation: ‘Men of Greece, your fate is indeed balanced on a razor’s edge. Why then do you not send an ambassador to discuss peace with the Sultan? If you will entrust this matter to me, I shall arrange for him to offer you terms. Otherwise, your city will be enslaved, your wives and your children will be sent into slavery, and you yourselves will utterly perish.’ Cautiously they decided to investigate the proposition, but resolved to hedge their bets by sending a man ‘not of high rank’, rather than risk the life of one of the leaders of the city. This unfortunate individual was brought to the red and gold tent to prostrate himself before the sultan. Mehmet tersely offered two choices: the city could either offer a huge annual tribute of 100,000 bezants, or the whole population could abandon the city, ‘taking their possessions with them, and go wherever each one of them wished’. The offer was relayed to the emperor and his council. Paying the tribute was clearly beyond the means of the poverty-stricken city, and the notion of sailing away and abandoning Constantinople remained inconceivable to Constantine. His reply was to the effect that he would surrender all that he had, with the exception of the city. Mehmet retorted that the only choices left were surrender of the city, death by the sword or conversion to Islam. Perhaps underlying this, there was a feeling in the city that Mehmet’s offer had not been sincere, that he had sent Ismail ‘as a means of testing the state of mind of the Greeks … to find out what the Greeks thought of their situation, and how secure their position
was’. For Mehmet, however, voluntary surrender was still the preferred option. It would preserve the fabric of a city that he intended for his capital; under the laws of Islam, he would be compelled to allow his troops three days of pillage if it had to be taken by force.

No one knows how close the city came to a voluntary surrender. It has been suggested that the Genoese, whose colony at Galata was also indirectly threatened, exerted pressure on the emperor to refuse the surrender offer, but it seems unlikely that Constantine, whose approach remained remarkably consistent, was ever seriously minded to hand over Constantinople. For both sides it was probably too late for negotiated surrender. There was too much bitterness. For fifty days they had taunted and slaughtered each other across the walls and executed prisoners in full view of their compatriots. It was a case of either lifting the siege or conquering the city. Doukas probably caught the true tenor of Constantine’s reply: ‘Impose as large an annual tribute as you can, then agree a peace treaty and withdraw, for you don’t know if you will gain victory or be deceived. It is not in my power, nor in that of any citizen, to hand over the city to you. It is our universal resolve to die rather than have our lives spared.’

If Constantine had released the rumour of approaching Western armies into the Ottoman camp it was a double-edged weapon. Outside the walls there was uncertainty what to do, but the threat of relief accelerated decisive action. The categoric reply from Constantine refocused debate in the Ottoman camp. Probably on the next day, 26 May, Mehmet called a council of war to resolve the matter one way or the other – either to lift the siege or proceed to an all-out assault. The argument that followed was a reprise of the earlier crisis meeting after the naval defeat on 21 April. Once again the old Turkish vizier, Halil Pasha, rose to speak. He was cautious, fearful of the consequences of the young sultan’s rashness and the risk of provoking Christendom into a united response. He had witnessed the vicissitudes of fortune under Mehmet’s father and knew the dangers of an uneasy army. He spoke with passion for peace: ‘Your power, which is already very great, you can increase more by peace than by war. For the outcome of war is uncertain – more often you see adversity rather than prosperity accompany it.’ He raised the spectre of an advancing Hungarian army and an Italian fleet and urged Mehmet to demand heavy penalties from the Greeks and lift the siege. Again Zaganos Pasha, the Greek convert, argued for war, pointing out the huge discrepancy in forces,
the daily erosion of the defenders’ strength and their near total exhaustion. He scorned the notion that help would come from the West, and showed a good knowledge of the realities of Italian politics: ‘The Genoese are split into factions, the Venetians are under attack from the Duke of Milan – neither would give any help at all.’ He appealed to Mehmet’s desire for glory and demanded ‘the chance of making one short sharp general assault, and if we fail, we shall afterwards do whatever you think best’. Zaganos was again supported by other generals, such as Turahan Bey, the commander of the European army, and by a strong religious faction, led by Sheikh Akshemsettin and Mullah Gurani.

The debate was heated. It was the decisive moment in a power struggle between two factions at the Ottoman court that had been raging for ten years. The outcome was to be hugely influential for the future of the Ottoman state, but both sides also knew that that they were arguing for their lives – a failed policy would lead inexorably to the hangman’s noose or the strangler’s bowstring. In the event Mehmet was persuaded by the appeal to military glory to blot out the possibility of failure or military revolt; it is possible that he dispatched Zaganos to tour the camp and report back on the mood of the army before finally deciding. If so, the answer was naturally unequivocal – Zaganos dutifully ‘discovered’ that the army was full of enthusiasm for the final attack. Mehmet decided that the moment for hesitation was past: ‘Decide the day of battle, Zaganos. Prepare the army, surround Galata so that it can’t help the enemy and make all these preparations quickly.’