Constantinople: The Last Great Siege, 1453 Read online

  The only other bright spot for Constantine during this period was the arrival of a straggle of Italian ships that he was able to persuade – or forcibly detain – to take part in the city’s defence. On 2 December a large Venetian transport galley from Kaffa on the Black Sea, under the command of one Giacomo Coco, managed to trick its way past the guns at the Throat Cutter by pretending that it had already paid its customs dues further upstream. As it approached the castle the men on board began to salute the Ottoman gunners ‘as friends, greeting them and sounding the trumpets and making cheerful sounds. And by the third salute that our men made, they had got away from the castle, and the water took them on towards Constantinople.’ At the same time news of the true state of affairs had reached the Venetians and Genoese from their representatives in the city and the Republics stirred themselves into tardy activity. After the sinking of Rizzo’s ship, the Venetian Senate ordered its Vice-captain of the Gulf, Gabriel Trevisano, to Constantinople to accompany its merchant convoys back from the Black Sea. Among the Venetians who came at this time was one Nicolo Barbaro, a ship’s doctor, who was to write the most lucid diary of the months ahead.

  Within the Venetian colony in the city, concern was growing. The Venetian bailey, Minotto, an enterprising and resolute man, was desperate to keep three great merchant galleys and Trevisano’s two light galleys for the defence of the city. At a meeting with the emperor, Trevisano and the other captains on 14 December he begged them to stay ‘firstly for the love of God, then for the honour of Christianity and the honour of our Signoria of Venice’. After lengthy negotiations the ships’ masters, to their credit, agreed to remain, though not without considerable wrangling over whether they could have their cargo on board or should keep it in the city as surety of their good faith. Constantine was suspicious that once the cargo was loaded, the masters would depart; it was only after swearing to the emperor personally that they were allowed to load their bales of silk, copper, wax and other stuffs. Constantine’s fears were not unfounded: on the night of 26 February one of the Venetian ships and six from the city of Candia on Crete slipped their anchors and fled before a stiff north-easterly wind. ‘With these ships there escaped many persons of substance, about 700 in all, and these ships got safely away to Tenedos, without being captured by the Turkish armada.’

  A Venetian great galley, the bulk carriers of the Mediterranean

  This dispiriting event was offset by one other positive contribution. The appeals of the Genoese podesta at Galata had elicited a concrete offer of help. On about 26 January two large galleons arrived loaded ‘with many excellent devices and machines for war, and outstanding soldiers, who were both brave and confident’. The spectacle of these ships entering the imperial harbour with ‘four hundred men in full armour’ on deck made an immediate impression on both the populace and the emperor. Their leader was a professional soldier connected to one of the great families of the republic, Giovanni Giustiniani Longo, a highly experienced commander who had prepared this expedition at his own initiative and cost. He brought 700 well-armed men in all, 400 recruited from Genoa, another 300 from Rhodes and the Genoese island of Chios, the power base of the Giustiniani family. Constantine was quick to realize the value of this man and offered him the island of Lemnos if the Ottoman menace should be repulsed. Giustiniani was to play a fateful role in the defence of the city in the weeks ahead. A straggle of other soldiers came. Three Genoese brothers, Antonio, Paolo and Troilo Bocchiardo brought a small band of men. The Catalans supplied a contingent and a Castilian nobleman, Don Francisco of Toledo, answered the call. Otherwise the appeal to Christendom had brought nothing but disharmony. A sense of betrayal ran through the city. ‘We had received as much aid from Rome as had been sent to us by the sultan of Cairo,’ George Sphrantzes recalled bitterly.

  Source Notes

  5 The Dark Church

  1 ‘It is far better …’, quoted Mijatovich, p. 17

  2 ‘Flee from …’, quoted in an article on the Daily Telegraph website, 4 May 2001

  3 ‘Let God look and judge’, quoted Ware, p. 43

  4 ‘over all the earth …’, quoted ibid., p. 53

  5 ‘an example of perdition …’, quoted Clark, p. 27

  6 ‘a difference of dogma …’, quoted Norwich, vol. 3, p. 184

  7 ‘Whenever the Turks …’, quoted Mijatovich, pp. 24–5

  8 ‘the wolf, the destroyer’, quoted Gill, p. 381

  9 ‘If you, with your nobles …’, quoted Runciman, The Fall of Constantinople, pp. 63–4

  10 ‘Constantine Palaiologus …’, quoted Nicol, The Immortal Emperor, p. 58

  11 ‘apart from …’, Pertusi, La Caduta, vol. 1, p. 125

  12 ‘We don’t want …’, quoted Gill, p. 384

  13 ‘with the greatest solemnity…’, Pertusi, La Caduta, vol. 1, p. 11

  14 ‘the whole of the city …’, ibid., p. 92

  15 ‘nothing better than …’, quoted Stacton, p. 165

  16 ‘like the whole heaven …’, quoted Sherrard, p. 34

  17 ‘Wretched Romans …’, Doukas, Fragmenta, p. 254

  18 ‘has not stopped marching …’, Kritovoulos, Critobuli, p. 30

  19 ‘without it … on this very account’, Kritovoulos, History of Mehmet, pp. 29–31

  20 ‘We must spare nothing …’, Kritovoulos, Critobuli, p. 32

  21 ‘unusual and strange …’, ibid., p. 37

  22 ‘wheat, wine, olive oil …’, Doukas, Fragmenta, p. 257

  23 ‘And from this …’, Barbaro, Giornale, p. 3

  24 ‘as friends, greeting them …’, ibid., p. 4

  25 ‘firstly for the love of God …’, ibid., p. 5

  26 ‘With these ships …’, ibid., p. 13

  27 ‘with many excellent devices …’, Doukas, Fragmenta, p. 265

  28 ‘four hundred men …’, Kritovoulos, History of Mehmed, p. 39

  29 ‘We received as much …’, Sphrantzes, trans. Philippides, p 72

  6 The Wall and the Gun

  JANUARY–FEBRUARY 1453

  From the flaming and flashing of certain igneous mixtures and the terror inspired by their noise, wonderful consequences ensue which no-one can guard against or endure … when a quantity of this powder, no bigger than a man’s finger, be wrapped up in a piece of parchment and ignited, it explodes with a blinding flash and a stunning noise. If a larger quantity were used, or the case were made of some more solid material, the explosion would be much more violent and the flash and noise altogether unbearable.

  Roger Bacon, thirteenth-century English monk, on the effects of gunpowder

  With the arrival of the Genoese contingent the preparations for a siege were carried forward with greater urgency. Giustiniani, who was ‘an expert in the art of wall fighting’, appraised the city’s defences with a cool eye and took appropriate measures. Under his direction, during February and March they ‘dredged the fosse and repaired and built up the walls, restoring the battlements, refortifying inner and outer towers and strengthening the whole wall – both the landward and seaward sectors’.

  Despite their dilapidated condition, the city still possessed formidable fortifications. Among all the many explanations for the longevity of Byzantium, the impregnable defences of its capital city remain a cardinal factor. No city in the world owed as much to its site as Constantinople. Of the twelve miles of its perimeter, eight were ringed by sea. On the south side, the city was fringed by the Sea of Marmara, whose swift currents and unexpected storms made any sea-borne landing a risky undertaking. In a thousand years no aggressor ever seriously attempted an attack at this point. The seashore was guarded by a single unbroken wall at least fifty feet above the shoreline interspersed with a chain of 188 towers and a number of small defended harbours. The threat to this wall came not from ships but from the ceaseless action of the waves undermining its foundations. At times nature was more brutal still: in the bitter winter of 764 the sea walls were crushed by ice floes that rode up over the parapets. The whole length
of the Marmara wall was studded with marble inscriptions commemorating the repairs of successive emperors. The sea ran strongly round this shoreline as far as the tip of the Acropolis point, before turning north into the calmer waters of the Golden Horn. The Horn itself provided an excellent sheltered anchorage for the imperial fleet; 110 towers commanded a single wall along this stretch with numerous water gates and two substantial harbours, but the defences were always considered vulnerable. It was here that the Venetians had driven their ships up on the foreshore during the Fourth Crusade, overtopping the ramparts and storming the city. In order to block the mouth of the Horn in times of war, the defenders had been in the habit, since the Arab siege of 717, of drawing a boom across the entrance of the Horn. This took the form of a 300-yard chain, consisting of massive cast-iron links each twenty inches long that were supported on sturdy wooden floats. With the good will of the Genoese, the chain could then be secured to a tower on the sea wall of Galata on the far side. During the winter months both chain and floats were prepared against the possibility of a naval attack.

  The base of the triangle of the city’s site on the westward side was protected by the four-mile land wall, the so-called wall of Theodosius, which ran across the grain of the land from the Sea of Marmara to the Golden Horn and sealed off Constantinople from any conventional land-borne assault. Many of the most significant events in the history of the city had been played out along this extraordinary structure. It almost matched the city itself in longevity, and projected a sense of legendary immutability within the Mediterranean world. For many approaching Constantinople across the flat Thracian plains as a trader or pilgrim, an ambassador from a Balkan court or a plundering army with pretensions to conquest, the first sight of Constantinople at its apogee would be the ominous prospect of the land walls riding the gentle undulations of the landscape from horizon to horizon in a regular unbroken succession of ramparts and towers. In the sunlight the limestone walls create a facade of brilliant white, banded with horizontal running seams of ruby red Roman brick, and arrow slits similarly arched; the towers – square, hexagonal, octagonal, occasionally circular – are so close together that, as one crusader put it, ‘a seven-year-old boy could toss an apple from one turret to the next’. They rise up in successive tiers to the summit of the inner wall where the eagle banners of the emperor flutter proudly in the wind. At intervals the eye can pick out the darkness of a heavily guarded entrance to the city through which men and animals vanish in times of peace, and at the western end, close to the Sea of Marmara, a gateway panelled with flat plates of gold and decorated with statues of marble and bronze shines in the sun. This is the Golden Gate, the great ceremonial archway flanked by two massive towers of polished marble through which, in the heyday of Byzantium, emperors returned in triumph with the visible tokens of their victories: conquered kings walking in chains, recaptured sacred relics, elephants, outlandishly dressed barbarian slaves, carts piled high with booty and the whole might of the imperial army. By 1453 the gold and many of the decorations had gone but the structure was still an impressive monument to Roman glory.

  The walls in cross-section showing the three defensive layers: inner and outer walls and moat

  The man responsible for the land wall, built to define the mature limits of the city, was not the boy Emperor Theodosius after whom it is named, but a leading statesman of the early fifth century, Anthemius, ‘one of the wisest men of the age’, for whose far-sightedness the city would owe a limitless debt of gratitude. The first line of the walls built in 413 deterred Attila the Hun, ‘the scourge of God’, from making an attack on the city in 447. When it collapsed under a severe earthquake the same year with Attila ravaging Thrace not far away, the whole population responded to the crisis. Sixteen thousand citizens totally rebuilt the wall in an astonishing two months, not just restoring Athemius’s original structure, but adding an outer wall with a further string of interspaced towers, a protecting breastwork and a brick-lined moat – the fosse – to create a formidable barrier of extraordinary complexity. The city was now protected on this side by a chain of 192 towers in a defensive system that comprised five separate zones, 200 feet wide and 100 feet high from the bed of the moat to the top of the tower. The achievement was recorded with a suitably boastful inscription: ‘In less than two months, Constantine triumphantly set up these strong walls. Scarcely could Pallas have built so quickly so strong a citadel.’

  In its mature form, the Theodosian wall summarized all the accumulated wisdom of Graeco-Roman military engineering about defending a city before the age of gunpowder. The heart of the system remained the inner wall constructed by Anthemius: a core of concrete faced on both sides by limestone blocks quarried nearby, with brick courses inserted to bind the structure more firmly. Its fighting ramparts were protected by battlements and reached by flights of steps. In line with Roman practice, the towers were not bound to the walls, ensuring that the two structures could each settle at their own rate without breaking apart. The towers themselves rose to a height of sixty feet and consisted of two chambers with a flat roof on which engines to hurl rocks and Greek fire could be placed. Here the sentinels scanned the horizon unceasingly, keeping themselves awake at night by calling out to each other down the line. The inner wall was forty feet high; the outer one was lower, about twenty-seven feet high, and had correspondingly lower towers that interspaced those on the inner wall. The two walls were separated by a terrace sixty feet wide, where the troops defending the outer wall massed, ready to engage the enemy at close quarters. Below the outer wall another terrace sixty feet wide provided a clear killing field for any aggressor who made it over the moat. The brick-lined moat itself was another sixty-feet-wide obstacle, surmounted by a wall on the inner side; it remains unclear whether it was in parts flooded in 1453 or simply comprised a dry ditch. The depth and complexity of the system, the stoutness of its walls and the height from which it commanded its field of fire rendered the Theodosian wall virtually impregnable to an army equipped with the conventional resources of siege warfare in the Middle Ages.

  Along its length the land wall was pierced by a succession of gates. Some gave access to the surrounding countryside via bridges over the moat, which would be destroyed in the run-up to a siege; others, the military gates, allowed connection between the different layers of the walls and were used to move troops about within the system. The wall also contained a number of posterns – small subsidiary doorways – but the Byzantines were always aware of the danger these sally ports posed for the security of their city and managed them rigorously. In general the two sets of gates alternated along the length of the wall, with the military gates being referred to by number while the public gates were named. There was the Gate of the Spring, named after a holy spring outside the city, the Gate of the Wooden Circus, the Gate of the Military Boot Makers, the Gate of the Silver Lake. Some spawned multiple names as associations were forgotten and new ones created. The Third Military Gate was also referred to as the Gate of the Reds, after a circus faction in the early city, while the Gate of Charisius, a leader of the blue faction, was also called the Cemetery Gate. And into the structure were built some remarkable monuments that expressed the contradictions of Byzantium. Towards the Golden Horn the imperial palace of Blachernae nestled behind the wall, a building said once to be of such beauty that foreign visitors could find no words to describe it; adjoining it, the dank and dismal prison of Anemas, a dungeon of sinister reputation, scene of some of the most ghastly moments in Byzantine history. Here John V blinded both his son and his three-year-old grandson, and from here one of Byzantium’s most notorious emperors, Andronikos the Terrible, already horribly mutilated, was led out on a mangy camel amongst taunting crowds to the Hippodrome, where he was strung upside down between two columns and mockingly slaughtered.

  The continuous life of the wall was so long that a deep accretion of history, myth and half-forgotten association attached to the various sectors. There was hardly a place that had not wit
nessed some dramatic moment in the city’s history – scenes of terrible treachery, miraculous deliverance and death. Through the Golden Gate Heraclius brought the True Cross in 628; the Gate of the Spring saw the stoning of the unpopular Emperor Nicephorus Phocas by an enraged mob in 967 and the restoration of the Orthodox emperors after Latin rule in 1261 when the gate was opened from within by sympathizers. The dying Emperor Theodosius II was carried through the Fifth Military Gate in 450 following a fall from his horse in the valley outside, while the Gate of the Wooden Circus was blocked up in the twelfth century after a prophecy that the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa would use it to capture the city.