The Venetians: A New History: from Marco Polo to Casanova (17 page)

My Lords and Captains, so far it is not possible for us to tell whether your Signory has sent any assistance to protect our unhappy city in its hour of need. I beseech you to despatch some small vessel into the Aegean, in the direction of your colony at the Negropont, where it can make contact with any Venetian fleet and instruct it on the need to make speed towards Constantinople with the greatest urgency.

The Venetians were as baffled as Constantine by the lack of response from the Republic, and readily agreed to his plan. In the early hours of that night, under cover of darkness, the boom across the Golden Horn was briefly lowered, and a small Venetian brigantine flying the Turkish flag and manned by twelve volunteer sailors in Turkish dress slipped unnoticed into the Bosphorus, where it swiftly sailed south into the Sea of Marmara, heading for the Aegean.

Meanwhile, the Turks set about tightening their grip upon the city in spectacular fashion:

On the night of the eighteenth of May the Turks built a tower on the edge of the ditch which surrounds the city walls. This tower reached higher than the ramparts and was just ten paces distant from the main city walls … The Turks built this tower so quickly that the soldiers patrolling on the ramparts did not even realise that it was being built, except when they saw it in the first light of day, a looming sight which filled them with terror.

Mehmet’s forces began shooting flaming arrows and bolts onto the roofs of Constantinople below. The following day, on the other side of the city:

The wretched Turks, filled with evil schemes, now began constructing a bridge, made of large barrels strapped together, with long wooden
planks placed across them, and fastened together to make a roadway for their army to cross from the Pera shore to Constantinople.

The defenders realised that as soon as the Turks began to drag this into place, it could easily be destroyed by a single direct hit from a cannon; but it eventually dawned on them that this was in fact part of a more devious strategy – its intention ‘was to make sure that our soldiers were spread around the entire walls, so that they could not concentrate at the weaker spots’.

Meanwhile the very walls themselves remained under constant threat. Each day the cannon barrage continued, and each night the citizens frantically worked to shore up the damaged sections:

Men and women, children and their grandparents, and even the priests, all came out to work together to make good the necessary repairs. This was a matter of the greatest urgency, as the walls had to be kept strong and intact. The cannon used by the Turks were very powerful, but one was exceptionally so. Whenever it fired, the explosion made all the walls of the city shake, as well as the ground inside the walls, and even the ships in the harbour shuddered under its power. The tremendous noise of its detonation kept causing women in the city to faint.

Fortunately for the Byzantines, such was the sheer magnitude of Orban’s great ‘basilic’ cannon that it took the Ottoman artillerymen three hours to reload it, and by now, after almost seven weeks of siege, there were very few of its massive cannonballs remaining.

At noon on 21 May, Barbaro recorded:

We discovered a mine under the north-western walls by the Calegaria gate. The evil Turks had dug under the foundations of the walls and up towards the inside of the city. Their intention was to explode the mine at night and launch a surprise attack. But the whole thing was not quite so dangerous as it at first appeared, and as soon as the tunnel was discovered we destroyed it by pouring fire into it.

The following day they discovered another tunnel close by ‘and once again our soldiers poured fire into it, burning alive the Turks who were inside’. The same day yet another tunnel was discovered at Calegaria. ‘This tunnel was much better hidden, but by the grace of God it simply collapsed of its own accord, killing all the Turks inside.’

Then, during the afternoon of 23 May, the lookouts on the walls overlooking the Sea of Marmara spied a brigantine tacking against the wind towards them, pursued by a number of Turkish galleys. The lookouts eventually recognised it as the brigantine that had sailed to the Aegean earlier that month in search of the Venetian fleet. As the news spread through the city, many speculated that the brigantine might be the vanguard of the Venetian fleet on its way to rescue the city. The brigantine finally managed to elude its pursuers, and under cover of darkness slipped over the boom into the Golden Horn. But the news conveyed by the Venetian captain of the brigantine to Constantine XI was dire. After searching for almost three weeks around the Aegean, they had discovered no evidence of any Venetian fleet, and no news that one had even set sail. When the emperor heard this, he is said to have muttered that the city could now only place its faith in Christ and His mother, and in St Constantine, its founder.

By now, all hope amongst the besieged citizens of Constantinople was fading fast. The constant bombardment, the proliferation of tunnels undermining the walls, the blockading Turkish fleet reducing the city to starvation – an atmosphere of doom and despair pervaded the houses lining the eerily empty, rubble-strewn streets. Yet curiously, and unknown to the besieged citizens, morale in the Turkish encampments below the walls was little better. Constantinople seemed to be resisting all that the great Ottoman army could throw at it, and still the infidels refused to surrender. The Ottoman officers felt humiliated; and to their soldiery, unused to long spells of inaction in the trenches, it began to seem as if the order to attack was never going to come. Although they were set to work at night filling in the ditches at the foot of the walls, in evident preparation for a final assault, discipline amongst the ranks had begun to deteriorate, with internecine fighting and even desertions.

Then news reached Mehmet II of alarming developments. There were
rumours that the King of Hungary had gathered an army for the relief of Constantinople and had already crossed the Danube. And reports from the Aegean suggested that a Venetian fleet had already reached the island of Chios, just 200 miles sailing distance south of Constantinople. The twenty-one-year-old Mehmet summoned his council to his tent; whereupon the venerable and experienced Grand Vizier (chief minister) Halil Pasha, who had from the start warned the headstrong young sultan against embarking upon such an ambitious enterprise, insisted that the time had come to abandon the siege. Surprisingly, Mehmet agreed to a compromise, and a peace envoy was sent to Constantine XI, promising that the siege would be raised if the emperor agreed to pay the sultan an annual tribute of 100,000 gold bezants (the equivalent of around 50,000 gold ducats
*
). Constantine simply did not have 100,000 gold bezants, but nonetheless summoned his Byzantine Council to deliberate upon an answer to the sultan’s ultimatum. The councillors could do nothing but dither and bicker, their arguments suitably embodying the name of their council. The envoy returned with a devious, prevaricating reply, to which Mehmet reacted in anger: ‘the only choice left to the Greeks lay between surrender of the city, death by the sword, or conversion to Islam’. At the ensuing council meeting on 25 May, Halil Pasha still insisted upon lifting the siege, but was overcome by more passionate advocates who supported what they knew to be the sultan’s view.
†

On 28 May, the Byzantine soldiers on the battlements reported that overnight the Ottoman soldiers had largely completed filling in the ditch at the foot of the walls, and now many of them appeared to be resting in their tents, whilst others could be seen constructing ladders for scaling the walls. Late that afternoon Constantine XI led a long procession of hymn-singing patriarchs of the Orthodox Church bearing icons and holy relics,
followed by representatives of the Roman Church and other nobles, around the city to the walls on each side, and finally to the cathedral of Hagia Sophia, where a solemn ceremony was held. This was said to have been attended by all the citizens except the soldiers lining the walls. As the chanting voices echoed beneath the great 100-foot-diameter dome, a structure unrivalled since classical times, Constantine gave his blessing to those present, urging them to be prepared to die for their religion and reassuring them that, with the help of God, their cause might yet prove victorious. Few were convinced – sources alluded to the sense of apocalyptic foreboding that prevailed, as many sensed they were partaking in the final act of Christian worship in the church that had been the centre of Eastern Christianity for a thousand years.

A few hours later, just after midnight on 29 May 1453, Mehmet II gave the order for the assault to begin. Suddenly the silence of the night was filled with the screaming battle-cries of the Turks, urged on by drums and blaring trumpets, as they rushed over the filled-in ditch towards the foot of the walls. Immediately the lookouts on the ramparts sounded the alarm, and the churches near the walls began ringing their bells, their peals chiming out over the rooftops of the entire city, summoning every able-bodied man, priest and youth to hurry to his post in defence of Constantinople. Meanwhile the townswomen and nuns began loading carts of stones with which to repair the walls, as well as bringing pails of water to assuage the thirst of the defenders as they fought during the heat of the day. The older women carried the children into the churches, where they began to pray for their lives and the salvation of Christendom.

The main attack was concentrated on the walls just south of the Military Gate of San Romano. The first wave of the assault consisted of 50,000 conscripted irregulars, a motley horde that included ill-trained Turks, Slavonic mercenaries, even Christians press-ganged from the conquered Balkan territories. Barbaro describes how they:

were ordered to carry the ladders to the walls and lay these against them so that they could climb up to the battlements. But as soon as they raised the ladders, our soldiers quickly managed to throw them back, so that they fell to the ground, killing those who were already trying to
climb the ladders. We then threw huge stones down from the battlements onto the heads of those who were waiting to climb the ladders, so that most of them were killed. And even their replacements were squashed. When those who were trying to raise the ladders saw how many were being killed, they began fleeing back towards their camp, trying to escape the hail of stones. But when the rest of the Turks who were behind them saw that they were running away, they drew their scimitars and began cutting them to pieces, driving them back towards the walls, so that they only had the choice of being crushed or being sliced to pieces.

Many of the defenders still believed this was no more than an isolated night attack, intended to wear down the city’s defences prior to the major assault that would come hours, or even days, later and probably at a different point in the walls. Then came a second attack, consisting of waves of fully trained Anatolian troops, who ‘leapt forward like lions unchained’ towards the foot of the great walls:

They too launched a concerted attempt to raise scaling ladders up against the walls, but once again our soldiers on the ramparts bravely hurled them to the ground, killing many Turks. At the same time, our crossbows and cannons on the battlements continued firing down onto the enemy camp, killing a huge number of Turks.

For a moment there was a lull, as the sounds of fighting faded into the darkness. Then Mehmet II ordered in a third wave of attackers, consisting of the crack regiments of his personal guard, the feared Janissaries:

These charged like men possessed, with such screams and shouts, banging of drums and blaring of trumpets, that they could be heard throughout the city. This third wave of Turkish soldiers was confronted by our soldiers on the walls, who were already tired out from repulsing the first two waves.

All this took place in the moonlit hours before dawn, and when the clouds obscured the moon the scene was illuminated by the garish light
of flares. At the foot of the outer walls the Janissaries clambered over each other, perching on each other’s shoulders as they attempted to press ladders up against the ramparts, but to little avail. Yet just as this third wave too appeared to falter, the pre-dawn darkness was filled with the unmistakable boom of the great ‘basilic’ cannon, and a vast cannonball scored a direct hit on the outer wall beside the Military Gate of San Romano, causing a wide section of the ramparts to collapse. Amidst the clouds of dust, the Janissaries charged forward over the rubble.

With dawn rising over this scene of chaos, the defenders desperately sought to contain the breach in the outer walls. But now the Genoese troops began retreating through the Kerkoporta postern, a small gate in the northern part of the walls. Amidst the confusion the gate was left unlocked, and the Janissaries began streaming after them into the city itself. By now Constantine XI had personally entered the fray, taking command of a company of Byzantine soldiers at the breach by the Military Gate of San Romano. At first the emperor and his men stood their ground, but soon it became clear they were being overwhelmed. The emperor, sensing that all was lost, determined to fight to the last. According to a contemporary source, ‘He rushed into the mêlée with his sword drawn, fell, rose again, fell once more, and so died.’ (This account was later confirmed by the discovery, amidst the bodies of the slain defenders, of a headless corpse wearing Constantine XI’s insignia of golden Byzantine eagles, its legs wrapped in the imperial purple buskins.)

After fifty-two days the siege of Constantinople was over, and the Ottoman troops poured into the city in their tens of thousands, hell-bent on looting, rape and pillage. When the hordes reached the precincts of Hagia Sophia, they broke down its great bronze gates and surged into the cathedral itself, where numerous old men, women and children had fled for sanctuary. Amidst scenes of mayhem, many were slaughtered, women were stripped of their valuables and maidens were carried off. Others were fought over, before being roped together and led off into slavery.
*

Few come well out of this historic day. The remnant Venetian and Genoese soldiers simply fled for the harbour, scrambling aboard their ships; when these were full and had cast off, others swam out into the Golden Horn after them, their beseeching voices crying out in vain across the water. Alviso Diedo, commander of the Venetian fleet in the Golden Horn, led his flotilla towards the boom followed by seven Genoese ships. At the boom, Diedo ordered his sailors to hack through its wooden floats, so that the boom drifted open in the current.