Read Constantinople: The Last Great Siege, 1453 Online
Authors: Roger Crowley
Constantinople: The Last Great Siege, 1453 (49 page)
Two other chronicles destined to a colourful afterlife are those of George Sphrantzes and Doukas respectively. Sphrantzes is famous for having written two versions of the story, known as the Lesser and the Greater chronicles. For a long time it was assumed that the Greater was just a later expansion of the Lesser, which says almost nothing about the siege – the most significant, if traumatic, event in Sphrantzes’ long life. The Greater, which is vivid, detailed and highly plausible, was for a long time widely used as a major source of information about 1453. However, it has been conclusively shown to be an ingenious work of literary impersonation, written over a hundred years later by one Makarios Melissenos, taking on the first-person guise of Sphrantzes. His credentials do not inspire confidence: Melissenos was a priest known to have forged an imperial decree to win an ecclesiastical dispute. Consequently all the contents of the Greater chronicle have been thrown into doubt. Historians now tiptoe around the work in various ways – anyone who wants to write about
the siege must decide how to tackle it. A case has been made, based on close textual analysis, for believing that it does rest on a longer version of Sphrantzes, now lost, and the sheer specificity of some of its content would argue for a historical novelist of a very high order if it were a complete invention. Melissenos is responsible for the incident in which Sphrantzes stands in the dark on the tower before the battle with Constantine; he is also the source for an iconic moment in Turkish history: the tale of Hasan of Ulubat, the giant Janissary who becomes the first to plant the Ottoman flag on the walls. The second at least seems to be too detailed to be invented.
Just as exotic is the chronicle of Doukas – a long-range history of the fall of Byzantium. Doukas witnessed many of the events surrounding the siege, if not the siege itself. He probably saw the test firing of Orban’s great cannon at Edirne and the rotting bodies of the sailors impaled by Mehmet after their ship was sunk at the Throat Cutter. His vivid, intransigent account comes to a strange end: abruptly, in mid-sentence, during its description of the Ottoman siege of Lesbos in 1462, leaving the fate of its author, like so much in this story, hanging in the air. The vivid account of events on Lesbos gives a strong impression that the author was there, and prompts the speculation that he was stopped pen in hand by the final collapse of the Greek defence. Did he undergo the terrible fate of the defenders – sawn in two to fulfil a promise that their heads would not be cut off – or was he sold into slavery? He walks out of the room in mid-phrase.
Telling the story of Constantinople has an immensely rich history of its own. The present book rests on the shoulders of a long tradition of versions in English; there is a line of succession that runs through Edward Gibbon in the eighteenth century, via two English knights, Sir Edwin Pears in 1903, and the great Byzantine historian Sir Stephen Runciman in 1965, and a host of accounts in other languages. As to the difficulties of getting it right, Kritovoulos of Imbros, a man with a good line in historical awareness, spotted the problem five hundred years ago, and provided himself with a neat disclaimer in his dedication to Mehmet – a prudent measure when addressing the World Conqueror when you were not actually present yourself. Any subsequent version might wish to invoke his words: ‘Therefore, O mighty Emperor, I have laboured hard, for I was not myself a witness of the events, to know the exact truth about these things. In writing the history I have at the same time inquired of those who knew, and have examined exactly how it all happened … And if my words seem inferior to your deeds … I myself … yield in the matter of historical record to others who in such things are far more competent than I.’
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