Constantinople: The Last Great Siege, 1453 Read online

  For five successive years between 674 and 678 the Arabs conducted the campaign on a steady pattern. Between spring and autumn each year they besieged the walls and mounted naval operations in the straits that involved running battles with the Byzantine fleet. Both sides fought with the same types of oared galleys and largely with the same crews, as the Muslims had access to the seafaring skills of Christians from the conquered Levant. In winter the Arabs regrouped at their base at Cyzicus, repaired their ships and prepared to tighten the screw the following year. They were in the siege for the long haul, secure in the belief that victory was inevitable.

  And then in 678 the Byzantine fleet made a decisive move. They launched an attack on the Muslim fleet, probably in their base at Cyzicus at the end of the campaigning season – the details are either unclear or were deliberately suppressed – spearheaded by a squadron of fast dromons: light, swift-sailing, many-oared galleys. There are no contemporary versions of what happened next, though the details can be deduced from later accounts. As the attack ships closed on their opponents, they unleashed, behind the conventional volley of winged missiles, an extraordinary stream of liquid fire from nozzles mounted high on their prows. Jets of fire burned the surface of the sea between the closing vessels, then caught hold of the enemy ships, falling ‘like a flash of lightning on the faces in front of it’. The explosion of flame was accompanied by a noise like thunder; smoke darkened the sky and steam and gas suffocated the terrified sailors on the Arab ships. The fire storm seemed to defy the laws of nature: it could be directed sideways or downwards in whatever direction the operator wished; where it touched the surface of the sea, the water ignited. It seemed to have adhesive properties too, sticking to the wooden hulls and masts and proving impossible to extinguish, so that the ships and their crews were rapidly engulfed in a propulsive torrent of fire that seemed like the blast of an angry god. This extraordinary inferno ‘burned the ships of the Arabs and their crews alive’. The fleet was destroyed and the traumatized survivors, ‘having lost many fighting men and received great injury’, lifted the siege and sailed home. A winter storm wrecked most of the surviving ships while the Arab army was ambushed and destroyed on the Asian shore. Discouraged, Muawiyyah accepted a thirty-year truce on unfavourable terms in 679, and died, a broken man, the following year. For the first time the Muslim cause had received a major setback.

  The chroniclers presented the episode as clear evidence that ‘the Roman Empire was guarded by God’, but it had, in truth, been saved by a new technology: the development of Greek fire. The story of this extraordinary weapon remains the subject of intense speculation even now – the formula was regarded as a Byzantine state secret. It seems that at about the time of the siege, a Greek fugitive called Kallinikos came to Constantinople from Syria bringing with him a technique for projecting liquid fire through siphons. If so, it is likely that he built on techniques of incendiary warfare widely known throughout the Middle East. The core ingredient of the mixture was almost certainly crude oil from natural surface wells on the Black Sea, mixed with powdered wood resin that gave it adhesive properties. What was probably perfected in the secret military arsenals of the city over the length of the siege was a technology for projecting this material. The Byzantines, who were heirs to the practical engineering skills of the Roman Empire, seem to have developed a technique for heating the mixture in sealed bronze containers, pressurizing it by means of a hand pump then emitting it through a nozzle, where the liquid could be ignited by a flame. To handle inflammable material, pressure and fire on a wooden boat required precision manufacturing techniques and highly skilled men, and it was this that comprised the true secret of Greek fire and destroyed Arab morale in 678.

  For forty years the setback at Constantinople rankled with the Umayyad caliphs in Damascus. It remained inconceivable within Islamic theology that the whole of humankind would not, in time, either accept Islam or submit to Muslim rule. In 717 a second and even more determined attempt was made to overcome the obstacle that hindered the spread of the Faith into Europe. The Arab attack came at a time of turmoil within the empire. A new emperor, Leo II, had been crowned on 25 March 717; five months later he found an army of 80,000 men dug in the length of the land walls and a fleet of 1,800 ships controlling the straits. The Arabs had advanced their strategy from the previous siege. It was quickly realized by the Muslim general Maslama that the walls of the city were invulnerable to siege machines; this time there was to be a total blockade. The seriousness of his intentions was underlined by the fact that his army brought wheat seed with them. In the autumn of 717 they ploughed the ground and planted a food supply outside the walls for harvesting the following spring. Then they settled down to wait. A foray by the Greek fire ships had some success but failed to break the stranglehold. Everything had been carefully planned to crush the infidels.

  What actually ensued for the Arabs was an unimaginable catastrophe that unfolded in inexorable stages. According to their own chroniclers, Leo managed to deceive his enemies by an extraordinary diplomatic double-cross that was impressive even by the standards of the Byzantines. He persuaded Maslama that he could get the city to surrender if the Arabs both destroyed their own food stores and gave the defenders some grain. Once done, Leo sat tight behind the walls and refused to parley. The tricked army was then subjected to a winter of freak severity for which they were ill prepared. Snow lay on the ground for a hundred days; the camels and horses started to perish in the cold. As they died, the increasingly desperate soldiers had no option but to eat them. The Greek chroniclers, not known for their objectivity, hinted at darker horrors. ‘It is said’, wrote Theophanes the Confessor a hundred years later, ‘that they even cooked in ovens and ate dead men and their dung which they leavened.’ Famine was followed by disease; thousands died in the cold. The Arabs had no experience of the surprising severity of winters on the Bosphorus: the ground was too hard to bury the dead; hundreds of corpses had to be thrown into the sea.

  The following spring a large Arab fleet arrived with food and equipment to relieve the stricken army but failed to reverse the downward spiral of fortune. Warned of the dangers of Greek fire, they hid their ships on the Asian coast after they had unloaded. Unfortunately some of the crews, who were Egyptian Christians, defected to the emperor and revealed the position of the fleet. An imperial force of fire ships fell on the unprepared Arab vessels and destroyed them. A parallel relief army dispatched from Syria was ambushed and cut to pieces by Byzantine infantry. Meanwhile Leo, whose determination and cunning seem to have been indefatigable, had been negotiating with the pagan Bulgars. He persuaded them to attack the infidels outside the walls; 22,000 Arabs were killed in the ensuing battle. On 15 August 718, almost a year to the day from their arrival, the armies of the caliph lifted the siege and straggled home by land and sea. While the retreating soldiers were harassed across the Anatolian plateau, there was one further calamity in store for the Muslim cause. Some ships were destroyed by storms in the Sea of Marmara; the rest were overwhelmed by an underwater volcanic eruption in the Aegean which ‘brought the sea water to a boil, and as the pitch of their keels dissolved, their ships sank in the deep, crews and all’. Of the vast fleet that had set sail, only five ships made it back to Syria ‘to announce God’s mighty deeds’. Byzantium had buckled but not collapsed under the onslaught of Islam. Constantinople had survived through a mixture of technological innovation, skilful diplomacy, individual brilliance, massive fortifications – and sheer luck: themes that were to be endlessly repeated in the centuries ahead. Not surprisingly under the circumstances, the Byzantines had their own explanation: ‘God and the all-holy Virgin, the Mother of God, protect the City and the Christian Empire, and … those who call upon God in truth are not entirely forsaken, even if we are chastised for a short time on account of our sins.’

  The failure of Islam to take the city in 717 had far-reaching consequences. The collapse of Constantinople would have opened the way for a Muslim expansion into E
urope that might have reshaped the whole future of the West; it remains one of the great ‘what ifs’ of history. It blunted the first powerful onslaught of Islamic jihad that reached its high water mark fifteen years later at the other end of the Mediterranean when a Muslim force was defeated on the banks of the Loire, a mere 150 miles south of Paris.

  For Islam itself the significance of resounding defeat at Constantinople was rather more theological than military. In the first century of its existence there had been little reason to doubt final victory for the Faith. The law of jihad dictated inevitable conquest. But under the walls of Constantinople, Islam had been repulsed by the mirror image of its own faith; Christianity was a rival monotheism with a matching sense of mission and desire to win converts. Constantinople had defined the front line in a long running struggle between two closely related versions of the truth that was to be pursued for hundreds of years. In the interim, Muslim thinkers were forced to recognize a practical change in the relationship between the House of Islam and the House of War; the final conquest of the non-Muslim world would have to be postponed, perhaps until the end of the world. Some jurists conceived of a third state, the House of Truce, to express postponement of final victory. The age of jihad seemed to be over.

  Byzantium had proved the most obdurate of enemies and Constantinople itself remained for Muslims both a scar and a source of deep longing. Many martyrs had perished at its walls, including the Prophet’s standard-bearer Ayyub in 669. Their deaths designated the city as a holy place for Islam and imparted a messianic significance to the project of its capture. The sieges left a rich legacy of myth and folklore that was handed down the centuries. It included amongst the Hadith, the body of sayings attributed to Muhammad, prophecies that foretold a cycle of defeat, death and final victory for the warriors of the Faith: ‘In the jihad against Constantinople, one third of Muslims will allow themselves to be defeated, which Allah cannot forgive; one third will be killed in battle, making them wondrous martyrs; and one third will be victorious.’ It was to be a long-range struggle. So huge was the architecture of the conflict between Islam and Byzantium that no Muslim banners would be unfurled again before the city walls for another 650 years – a span of time greater than that separating us from 1453 – but prophecy decreed that they would return.

  Constantinople, constructed on the site of a settlement raised by the legendary Greek Byzas a thousand years earlier, had already been a Christian city for 400 years when Maslama’s forces straggled home. The place chosen by the Emperor Constantine for his new Christian capital in ad 324 possessed the formidable natural advantages of its site. Once the land walls had been built in the fifth century, the city was virtually impregnable to attack as long as siege equipment was limited to the power of catapults. Within the twelve miles of perimeter wall, Constantinople rose on a series of steep hills that afforded natural vantage points over the surrounding sea, while on the east side the inlet of the Golden Horn, shaped like a curved antler, provided a safe deep-water harbour. The only drawback was the barrenness of the promontory, a problem that Roman water engineering would solve with an elaborate series of aqueducts and cisterns.

  The site was uniquely positioned at the crossroads of trade routes and military corridors; the history of its earlier settlement echoes with the sound of marching feet and splashing oars – Jason and the Argonauts sailed past to seek fleeces from gold-panners at the mouth of the Dneiper; the Persian king Darius marched 700,000 men across on a bridge of boats to fight the Scythians; the Roman poet Ovid looked up wistfully at ‘the place that’s the vast doorway of two seas’ on his way to exile on the shores of the Black Sea. At this crossroads the Christian city came to control the wealth of a huge hinterland. To the east, the riches of Central Asia could be funnelled through the Bosphorus into the go-downs of the imperial city: barbarian gold, furs and slaves from Russia, caviar from the Black Sea, wax and salt, spices, ivory, amber and pearls from the far Orient. To the south, routes led overland to the cities of the Middle East: Damascus, Aleppo and Baghdad; and to the west, the sea lanes through the Dardanelles opened up the whole of the Mediterranean: the routes to Egypt and the Nile delta, the rich islands of Sicily and Crete, the Italian peninsula, and everything beyond to the Gates of Gibraltar. Nearer to hand lay the timber, limestone and marble to build a mighty city and all the resources to sustain it. The strange currents of the Bosphorus brought a rich seasonal harvest of fish, while the fields of European Thrace and the fertile lowlands of the Anatolian plateau provided olive oil, corn and wine in rich abundance.

  The prosperous city that arose in this place was an expression of imperial splendour, ruled by a Roman emperor and inhabited by Greek-speaking people. Constantine laid out a grid of colonnaded streets, flanked by porticoed public buildings, great squares, gardens, columns and triumphal arches that were both pagan and Christian. There were statues and monuments looted from the classical world (including the fabulous bronze horses perhaps made for Alexander the Great by the Greek sculptor Lysippos, now the icon of Venice), a hippodrome to rival that of Rome, imperial palaces and churches ‘more numerous than days of the year’. Constantinople became a city of marble and porphyry, beaten gold and brilliant mosaics, whose population at its height topped 500,000. It astounded the visitors who came to trade or pay homage to the emperors of the eastern Roman Empire. Barbarians from benighted Europe gazed open-mouthed at ‘the city of the world’s desire’. The reaction of Fulcher of Chartres who came in the eleventh century is typical of many that ring across the ages: ‘O what a splendid city, how stately, how fair, how many monasteries therein, how many palaces raised by sheer labour in its broadways and streets, how many works of art, marvellous to behold: it would be wearisome to tell of the abundance of all good things; of gold and silver, garments of manifold fashion and such sacred relics. Ships are at all times putting in at this port, so that there is nothing that men want that is not brought hither.’

  Byzantium was not only the last heir to the Roman Empire, it was also the first Christian nation. From its founding, the capital city was conceived as the replica of heaven, a manifestation of the triumph of Christ, and its emperor was considered God’s vice-regent on earth. Christian worship was evident everywhere: in the raised domes of the churches, the tolling of bells and wooden gongs, the monasteries, the huge number of monks and nuns, the endless parade of icons around the streets and walls, the ceaseless round of prayer and Christian ceremony within which the devout citizens and their emperor lived. Fasts, feast days and all-night vigils provided the calendar, the clock and the framework of life. The city became the storehouse of the relics of Christendom, collected from the Holy Land and eyed with envy by Christians in the West. Here they had the head of John the Baptist, the crown of thorns, the nails from the cross and the stone from the tomb, the relics of the apostles and a thousand other miracle-working artefacts encased in reliquaries of gold and studded with gems. Orthodox religion worked powerfully on the emotions of the people through the intense colours of its mosaics and icons, the mysterious beauty of its liturgy rising and falling in the darkness of lamplit churches, the incense and the elaborate ceremonial that enveloped church and emperor alike in a labyrinth of gorgeous ritual designed to ravish the senses with its metaphors of the heavenly sphere. A Russian visitor who witnessed an imperial coronation in 1391 was astonished by the slow-motion sumptuousness of the event:

  during this time, the cantors intoned a most beautiful and astonishing chant, surpassing understanding. The imperial cortège advanced so slowly that it took three hours from the great door to the platform bearing the throne. Twelve men-at-arms, covered with mail from head to foot, surrounded the Emperor. Before him marched two standard-bearers with black hair: the poles of their standards, their costume, and their headdress were red. Before these standard-bearers went heralds: their rods were plated with silver … Ascending the platform, the Emperor put on the imperial purple and the imperial diadem and the crenated crown … Then the holy liturgy be
gan. Who can describe the beauty of it all?

  Anchored in the centre of the city, like a mighty ship, was the great church of St Sophia, built by Justinian in only six years and dedicated in 537. It was the most extraordinary building in late antiquity, a structure whose immensity was matched only by its splendour. The huge levitated dome was an incomprehensible miracle to eyewitnesses. ‘It seems’, said Procopius, ‘not to rest upon solid masonry but to cover the space beneath as though suspended from heaven.’ It encased a volume of space so vast that those seeing it for the first time were left literally speechless. The vaulting, decorated with four acres of gold mosaic, was so brilliant, according to Paul the Silentiary, that ‘the golden stream of rays pours down and strikes the eyes of men, so that they can scarcely bear to look’, while its wealth of coloured marbles moved him to poetic trance. They looked as though they were ‘powdered with stars … like milk splashed over a surface of shining black … or like the sea or emerald stone, or again like blue cornflowers in grass, with here and there a drift of snow’. It was the beauty of the liturgy in St Sophia that converted Russia to Orthodoxy after a fact-finding mission from Kiev in the tenth century experienced the service and reported back: ‘We knew not whether we were in Heaven or earth. For on earth there is no such splendour and beauty, and we are at a loss how to describe it. We only know that there God dwells among men.’ The detailed gorgeousness of Orthodoxy was the reversed image of the sparse purity of Islam. One offered the abstract simplicity of the desert horizon, a portable worship that could be performed anywhere as long as you could see the sun, a direct contact with God, the other images, colours and music, ravishing metaphors of the divine mystery designed to lead the soul to heaven. Both were equally intent on converting the world to their vision of God.