Constantinople: The Last Great Siege, 1453 (40 page)

As the Ottoman troops poured into the city and their flags were seen flying from the towers, panic spread through the civilian population. The cry, ‘The city is lost!’ rang through the streets. People started to run. The Bocchiardi brothers at the walls near the Circus Gate saw soldiers fleeing past their position. They mounted their horses and drove at the enemy, temporarily forcing them back. However, they too soon realized the hopelessness of the situation. Ottoman troops on the ramparts hurled missiles down on them and Paolo was wounded on the head. They realized that they were in imminent danger of being surrounded. Paolo was captured and killed, but his brothers fought their way out and back down to the Horn with their men. At the harbour, the wounded Giustiniani learned that the defence had crumbled, and ‘ordered his trumpeters to sound the signal to recall his men’. For others it was too late. The Venetian bailey, Minotto, and many of the leading Venetians and the sailors who had come from the galleys to fight were surrounded and captured at the Palace of Blachernae, while
further up the land wall towards the sea of Marmara, where the defence had remained firm, the soldiers now found themselves attacked from the rear. Many were killed; others, including the commanders, Philippo Contarini and Demetrios Cantacuzenos surrendered and were captured.

Within the city, confusion spread with extraordinary speed. The collapse at the front line was so dramatic and unexpected that many were taken by surprise. While some of those who had escaped from the land walls were fleeing towards the Horn in the hope of getting on board the ships, others were running towards the front line. Alerted by the sound of battle, some of the civilians were making their way up to the walls to offer help to the troops when they met the first marauding bands of Ottoman soldiers pressing into the city, who ‘attacked them with great anger and fury’ and cut them down. It was a mixture of fear and hatred that sparked the initial slaughter in the city. Suddenly finding themselves in the maze of narrow streets, the Ottoman soldiers were confused and apprehensive. They expected to meet a large and determined army; it was impossible to believe that the 2,000 routed in the stockade comprised the total military resources of the city. At the same time weeks of suffering and the taunts hurled over the battlements by the Greeks had marked the conflict with a bitterness that made them savage. Now the city would pay for failing to accept negotiated surrender. They killed initially ‘to create universal terror’; for a short while ‘everyone they found they dispatched at the point of a scimitar, women and men, old and young, of any condition’. This ruthlessness was probably intensified by pockets of spirited resistance from the populace who ‘threw bricks and paving stones at them from above … and threw fire upon them’. The streets became slippery with blood.

The flags of the sultan fluttering from the high towers on the land walls spread the word quickly down the Ottoman line. Along the Golden Horn the Ottoman fleet redoubled its attacks and as defenders slipped away, the sailors forced open the sea gates one after another. Soon the Plateia Gate, close to the Venetian quarter, was opened and detachments of men started to penetrate the heart of the city. Further round the coast, the word reached Hamza Bey and the Marmara fleet. Eager to join in the opportunity for plunder, the sailors brought their ships back inshore and threw ladders up against the walls.

For a short while indiscriminate slaughter continued to rage: ‘The whole city was filled with men killing or being killed, fleeing or pursuing,’
according to Chalcocondylas. In the panic everyone now consulted his own best interests. While the Italians made for the Horn and the safety of the ships, the Greeks fled home to protect their wives and children. Some were captured on the way; others got home to find ‘their wives and children abducted and their possessions plundered’. Yet others, on reaching home, ‘were themselves bound and fettered with their closest friends and wives’. Many who reached home before the intruders, realizing the likely outcome of surrender, decided to die in defence of their families. People hid themselves away in cellars and cisterns or wandered about the city in dazed confusion waiting to be captured or killed. A pathetic scene took place at the church of Theodosia down near the Golden Horn. It was the saint’s feast day, kept with adoration and zeal down hundreds of years of worship to a faithfully preserved ritual. The facade was adorned with early summer roses. Within, the customary all-night vigil had taken place at the saint’s sepulchre, the lighted candles glimmering in the short summer night. In the early morning, a procession of men and women were wending their way towards the church, blindly trusting in the miraculous power of prayer. They were carrying the customary gifts, ‘beautifully embellished and adorned candles and incense’, when they were intercepted by soldiers and carried off; the whole congregation was taken prisoner; the church, which was rich with the offerings of worshippers, was stripped. Theodosia’s bones were thrown to the dogs. Elsewhere women awoke in their beds to the sight of intruders bursting through the door.

As the morning wore on and the Ottomans realized the truth – that there no longer was any organized resistance – the principles of slaughter became more discriminating. The Ottoman soldiers acted, according to Sa’d-ud-din, in accordance with the precept, ‘Slaughter their aged and capture their youth.’ The emphasis shifted to taking live prisoners as booty. The hunt began for valuable slaves – young women, beautiful children – with the irregular troops of many ‘nations, customs and languages’, including Christians, being in the forefront, ‘plundering, destroying, robbing, murdering, insulting, seizing and enslaving men, women, children, old and young, priests and monks – people of every age and rank’. The accounts of the atrocities were largely written by Christians, more coyly by Ottoman chroniclers, but there is no doubt that the morning unfolded in scenes of terror. They have left a series of vivid snapshots, sights ‘terrible and pitiful and beyond all tragedies’,
according to Kritovoulos, the generally pro-Ottoman Greek writer. Women were ‘dragged violently from their bed chambers’. Children were snatched from their parents; old men and women who were unable to flee their houses were ‘slaughtered mercilessly’, along with ‘the weak-minded, the old, the lepers and the infirm’. ‘The newborn babies were hurled into the squares.’ Women and boys were raped, then ill-assorted groups of captives were tied together by their captors, ‘dragging them out savagely, driving them, tearing at them, manhandling them, herding them off disgracefully and shamefully into the crossroads, insulting them and doing terrible things’. Those who survived, particularly the ‘young and modest women, nobly born and wealthy, who were used to staying in their homes’ were traumatized beyond life itself. Rather than undergo this fate, some of the girls and married women preferred to throw themselves into wells. Among the pillagers fights broke out over the most beautiful girls, which were sometimes fought to the death.

Churches and monasteries were particularly sought out. Those near the land walls – the military church of St George by the Charisian Gate, the Church of St John the Baptist at Petra and the Chora Monastery – were quickly plundered. The miracle-working icon of the Hodegetria was hacked into four pieces and divided among the soldiers for its valuable frame. Crosses were smashed from the roofs of the churches; the tombs of saints were cracked open and searched for treasures; their contents torn to pieces and thrown into the streets. The church treasures – chalices, goblets and ‘holy artefacts and precious and sumptuous robes embroidered with much gold and glittering with precious stones and pearls’ – were carted away and melted down. The altars were torn down and the ‘walls of churches and sanctuaries were ransacked … looking for gold’. ‘The consecrated images of God’s saints’ witnessed scenes of rape, according to Leonard. Entering the convents, nuns were ‘led to the fleet and ravished’; the monks were killed in their cells or ‘hauled out of the churches where they had sought sanctuary, and driven away with insults and dishonour’. The tombs of the emperors were smashed open with iron bars in search of hidden gold. These ‘and ten thousand other terrible things were done’, Kritovoulos mournfully recorded. In a few hours a thousand years of Christian Constantinople largely disappeared.

In front of this tidal wave, those who could, panicked and ran. Many headed for St Sophia guided by instinct and superstition. They
remembered the old prophecy that the enemy would penetrate the city as far as the Column of Constantine, near the great church, when an avenging angel would descend, sword in hand, and inspire the defenders to drive them out of the city ‘and from the West and from Anatolia itself to the place called the Red Apple tree on the borders of Persia’. Inside the church, a large congregation of clergy and laity, men, women and children gathered for the service of matins and to put their faith in God. The massive bronze doors of the church were swung shut and barred. It was eight in the morning.

The doors of St Sophia

 

 Elsewhere, some of the outlying areas of the city were able to negotiate wholesale surrender. By the middle of the fifteenth century the population of Constantinople was so shrunk within its outer walls that some parts of the city were separate villages, protected by their own walls and palisades. Some of these – Studion on the Marmara and the fishing village of Petrion near the Horn – voluntarily opened their gates on condition that their houses would be spared the general ransack. The headman in each case was conducted to the sultan to make formal surrender of his village and Mehmet probably detailed a detachment of military police to protect the houses. Such acts of surrender could be held to secure immunity under Islamic laws of war, and a number of churches and monasteries survived intact as a result. Elsewhere, heroic or desperate pockets of resistance continued. Down on the Horn, a group of Cretan sailors barricaded themselves into three towers and refused to surrender. All morning they resisted Ottoman attempts to dislodge them. Many on the sea walls furthest
from the land wall also battled on, often ignorant of the true situation until they suddenly found the enemy in their rear. Some threw themselves from the battlements, others surrendered to the enemy unconditionally. Prince Orhan, the pretender to the Ottoman throne, and his small band of Turks had no such options. They fought on, as did the Catalans stationed further along the sea wall near the Bucoleon Palace.

In the midst of this unfolding destruction, the Ottoman sailors took a fateful decision. When they saw the army within the walls, and fearing that they would miss the chance to plunder, they drove their ships up onto the shore and abandoned them ‘to search for gold, jewels and other riches’. So keen were the sailors to get ashore down on the Horn that they ignored the Italians fleeing over the walls the other way. It was to be a rare stroke of luck.

The search for booty became obsessive. The Jewish quarter down by the Horn was an early target for plundering, due to its traditional trade in gems, and Italian merchants similarly were eagerly sought out. As the day wore on booty collection became more organized. The first troop to enter a house raised a flag outside to indicate that it had already been stripped; other parties automatically moved on to look elsewhere: ‘and so they put their flags everywhere, even on monasteries and churches’. The men worked in teams, carting off the prisoners and plunder back to the camp or the ships, then returning for more. No corner was left untouched: ‘churches, old vaults and tombs, cloisters, underground chambers and hidden places and crannies and caves and holes. And they searched in all the hidden corners, and if there was anyone or anything hidden there, they dragged it into the light.’ Some even engaged in secondary activity, stealing the unguarded booty deposited back in the camp.