CHAPTER XII

The Fall of Constantinople

When, with the fall of Konya to the Karaman Turks in 1308, the moribund empire of the Seljuks finally crumbled, many small Turkoman states–some of them hardly larger than the tribes they represented–rose from its ruins. Among them was that of a young warrior named Othman (or Osman) who after a whirlwind campaign had declared his independence as ruler of the extreme western end of Anatolia. This territory he governed wisely and well until his death in 1326, in which year his son and successor Orhan–who assumed the title of Sultan–conquered the city of Bursa and made it his capital.¹¹² Three years later he captured the great Byzantine city of Nicaea (Iznik). Then in 1354 Orhan’s son Süleyman crossed the Dardanelles to capture the fortress of Gallipoli, which he converted into a permanent stronghold.

Here was the first Turkish base on European soil, and an invaluable bridgehead; almost at once, the Ottomans began their relentless progress. As early as 1359 an advance guard had reached the walls of Constantinople. Fortunately it was not large enough to constitute any immediate threat to the city, but the rest of Thrace, less well protected and exhausted by civil war, proved an easy victim. In 1362, Adrianople surrendered and became under the name of Edirne, Orhan’s European capital. Its position on the great road leading from Belgrade to Constantinople provided a perfect base from which to drive deeper into the Balkans; it also effectively isolated Constantinople from its European possessions. In every city and village that was captured, a large part of the native population was transported to slavery in Asia Minor, its place being taken by Turkish colonists.

That same year, 1362, saw the death of Orhan. He was succeeded as sultan–Süleyman having died of a fall from his horse two years before–by his second son, Murad, who soon proved himself a more energetic and determined leader than either his father or his elder brother, campaigning not only in Thrace but also in Bulgaria, capturing Philippopolis (Plovdiv) in 1363 and putting considerable pressure on the Bulgar Tsar John Alexander to collaborate with him against Byzantium. After a decisive battle on the Maritsa river in 1371, Bulgaria became a Turkish vassal and was soon wholly absorbed. Murad’s other signal achievement was to reduce the emirs of western Anatolia to a state of total subjection; henceforth, as the Ottoman Sultans advanced into Europe, their rear would be secure.

Murad was assassinated during the historic battle of Kosovo, ‘the field of blackbirds’, on 15 June 1389. On that day, under the inspired leadership of his son Bayezit–who was proclaimed Sultan on the field–the Serbian army was utterly destroyed, the Serbian nation effectively annihilated for four hundred years. Bayezit–known to his subjects as Yilderim, the Thunderbolt–was a man of superhuman energy, given to outbreaks of almost insane violence and utterly merciless to all who stood in his way. During his thirteen-year reign, the pace of conquest quickened still further. In the spring of 1394 an immense Turkish host marched against Constantinople itself, and by the beginning of autumn the siege had begun in earnest. The Sultan ordered a complete blockade, and for some time essential supplies in the city ran desperately short. The blockade was to continue in one form or another for eight years; fortunately for the citizens, however, as the ever-unpredictable Bayezit lost interest and involved himself in other operations that offered more immediate rewards, the pressure was soon relaxed.

Nevertheless, although Constantinople was spared for a little longer, other cities were less lucky. Thessalonica fell in 1394; in 1396, at Nicopolis (Nikopol) on the Danube, the Sultan smashed an army estimated at 100,000–the largest ever launched against the infidel–raised by King Sigismund of Hungary. Thus it was that by the end of the fourteenth century the Ottoman conquest of eastern Europe and Asia Minor had acquired a momentum that could no longer be checked. Of the Sultan’s Christian enemies, Serbia and Bulgaria were no more. Byzantium remained, but it was a Byzantium so reduced, so impoverished, so humiliated and demoralised as to be scarcely identifiable as the glorious Empire of the Romans that it had once been. And yet, doomed as it was, it was never to give up the struggle. Almost unbelievably, it was to endure another sixty years–and, at the last, to go down fighting.

For the Most Serene Republic of Venice, the last quarter of the fourteenth century had been traumatic indeed. The old rivalry with Genoa had come to a head. Beginning with a struggle over the island of Tenedos–which lay at the gateway to the Dardanelles, controlling the entrance to the straits–it had continued a good deal nearer home, with the siege and ultimate capture in August 1379 of Chioggia, a fortified city within the Venetian lagoon commanding a direct deep-water channel to Venice itself. Never in all its long history had the Republic been so seriously threatened; indeed, had the Genoese admiral Pietro Doria followed up his victory with an immediate assault on the city, it is hard to see how he could have failed. Fortunately for Venice, he decided instead to blockade it and starve it into submission, and the Venetian commander Vettor Pisani saw his chance. Chioggia, almost landlocked, depended on only three narrow channels; on midwinter night, 21 December, three large, stone-filled hulks were towed out in the darkness, and one sunk in each of them. The blockaders were blockaded. On 24 June 1380 the 4,000 beleaguered Genoese, half-dead with hunger, made their unconditional surrender.

It was not quite the end of the war; not until the following year did the two exhausted republics accept the offer of Count Amadeus of Savoy to mediate, and the consequent Treaty of Turin provided for the continuation of trade in the Mediterranean and the Levant by both Venice and Genoa side by side. But as time went on it gradually became clear that Venice’s victory had been greater than she knew. Not for the first time, she was to astonish her friends and enemies alike by the speed of her economic and material recovery. Genoa, on the other hand, went into a decline. Her governmental system began to crumble; torn asunder by factional strife, she was to depose ten doges in five years and soon fell under a French domination which was to last a century and a half. Only in 1528, under Andrea Doria, was she finally to regain her independence; but by then the world had changed. Never again would she constitute a threat to Venice.

The Serenissima, by contrast, had emerged from six years of the most desperate war in her history with her political structure unshaken. No other state in Italy could boast such stability, or anything approaching it. Beyond her borders, all Italy had succumbed to the age of despotism; only she remained a strong, superbly ordered republic, possessed of a constitution that had effortlessly weathered every political storm, foreign and domestic, to which it had been exposed. The majority of her people, admittedly, had been shorn of effective power for the past hundred years,¹¹³ but the civil service was open to all, the commerce and the craftsmanship for which the city was famous provided a source of pride and satisfaction as well as rich material rewards, and few citizens ever seriously doubted that the administration–quite apart from being outstandingly efficient–had their own best interests at heart.

With the Genoese war now safely behind her, Venice set about rebuilding and extending her commercial empire. By the first years of the fifteenth century, thanks to a combination of political opportunism, diplomatic finesse, business acumen and an occasional touch of blackmail, she had acquired considerable territories on the Italian mainland, including the cities of Padua, Vicenza and Verona and continuing westward as far as the shores of Lake Garda–to say nothing of Scutari and Durazzo in southern Dalmatia; Nauplia, Argos and her old bases of Modone and Corone in the Morea; and most of the islands of the Cyclades and the Dodecanese. At last she could treat as an equal with nations like England, France and Austria–in her own right, as one of the great powers of Europe.

The Venetians had never considered themselves Italians. Cut off as they were from the terra firma by their lagoon, from earliest times their gaze had been fixed on the east, the source of almost all their commerce and their wealth. Thus their situation was as different from that of the cities of mainland Italy as it was possible for it to be. These cities too were independent republics, but they lacked Venice’s extraordinary political constitution, with its intricate system of checks and balances that made it impossible for any one individual or family to acquire a stranglehold on the state. It was therefore inevitable that sooner or later, at some moment of foreign threat or domestic crisis, each would feel the need of a leader, and more than likely that, when the threat or the crisis was past, that leader would prove a good deal harder to get rid of than he had been to summon. Then, almost before the people knew it, he would have founded a dynasty.

This pattern–which, with minor variations, we find repeated time and again among the major cities of north and central Italy–was not without its advantages. The despot might well prove a tyrant, but he would depend for his position and his prestige on cutting a dash; this meant surrounding himself with a dazzling court, showing himself a munificent patron of the arts–and, incidentally, providing a perfect setting in which the Renaissance could flourish. One of the earliest, Can Grande della Scala of Verona, gave generous support to Dante and Giotto; other names that spring almost unbidden to the mind are those of the Visconti and the Sforza of Milan, the Gonzaga of Mantua, the Este of Ferrara, the Malatesta of Rimini, the Montefeltro of Urbino and above all the Medici of Florence.

What lent additional splendour to these Renaissance courts was the fact that, although the various rulers were almost constantly at war, they seldom if ever fought in person. Such fighting as needed to be done was the work of the condottieri, mercenary generals who sold their swords to the highest bidder. They were not invariably satisfactory; devoid of any emotional loyalty to their cause, they were often dilatory and occasionally duplicitous. But they spared their employers the discomforts of campaigning, allowing them still more time to pursue the arts of peace, and at their best they could be quite extraordinarily effective.

To the south of these Renaissance courts was the Papacy, now–with the return of the Popes from Avignon–on the threshold of a dramatic transformation. Cardinal Albornoz, the papal legate to Italy, had reorganised and consolidated the Papal States; with Venice, Milan, Florence and Naples, Rome was once again one of the five major powers in Italy. It was unfortunate, however, that at this moment the Church was once again rent by a particularly violent schism. Urban VI had so antagonised the cardinals of both the French and the Italian factions¹¹⁴ that they had declared his election null and void and had elected a rival Pope, Clement VII, in his place. Urban, firmly entrenched in Rome, had refused to yield, and so the dispute had dragged on, with new Popes being elected on both sides as necessary. Finally, in March 1409, a General Council of the Church met in Pisa, repudiated both the rival Popes and elected a single successor. Its choice fell on the Cardinal Archbishop of Milan who, having started his life as an orphaned beggar boy in Crete, was to end it as Pope Alexander V.

But the Council had made one disastrous mistake. By calling the two rival Popes to appear before it–and declaring them contumacious when they refused–it implied its superiority over the Papacy, a principle which neither of the rival pontiffs could have been expected to endorse. Before long it became clear that its only real effect had been to saddle Christendom with three Popes instead of two. But it was unrepentant, and when Pope Alexander died suddenly in May 1410 it lost no time in electing his successor.

Baldassare Cossa, who now joined the papal throng under the name of John XXIII,¹¹⁵ was widely believed at the time to have poisoned his predecessor. Whether he actually did so is open to doubt. He had, however, unquestionably begun life as a pirate; and a pirate, essentially, he remained. Morally and spiritually, he reduced the Papacy to a level of depravity unknown since the days of the ‘pornocracy’ in the tenth century. A contemporary chronicler records in shocked amazement the rumour current in Bologna–where Cossa had been papal governor–that during the first year of his pontificate he had violated no fewer than 200 matrons, widows and virgins, to say nothing of a prodigious number of nuns. His score over the three following years is regrettably not recorded; he seems, however, to have maintained a respectable average, for on 29 May 1415 he was arraigned before another General Council, this time at Constance. As Gibbon delightedly noted, ‘the most scandalous charges were suppressed: the vicar of Christ was only accused of piracy, murder, rape, sodomy, and incest; and after subscribing his own condemnation, he expiated in prison the imprudence of trusting his person to a free city beyond the Alps.’

Next, in early July, Pope Gregory XII–Urban’s third successor–was prevailed upon to abdicate with honour, with the promise that he would rank second in the hierarchy, immediately after the future Pope–a privilege that was the more readily accorded in view of the fact that, since he was by now approaching ninety and looked a good deal older, it was not thought likely that he would enjoy it for long. Indeed, two years later he was dead. By then, the anti-Pope Benedict XIII had been deposed in his turn, and with the election of Otto Colonna as Pope Martin V in 1417, the schism was effectively at an end.

It was Martin who, more than anyone else, was responsible for the Renaissance Papacy. Entering Rome in 1420 and continuing where Albornoz had left off, he took in hand the chaotic papal finances; in a largely ruined city with a population reduced to some 25,000, he initiated a programme of restoration and reconstruction of churches and public buildings; he strengthened papal power by dissolving the Council of Constance; and he succeeded–at least to some degree–in bringing under his control the Church in France, which had become quite impossibly arrogant and overbearing during the years of the Avignon Popes. Himself a member of one of the oldest and most distinguished Roman families, he took the first significant steps in transforming the College of Cardinals and the curia from the genuinely international bodies that they had been heretofore into institutions that were predominantly Italian. (This aroused much criticism at the time, but it enabled him to create the first really efficient curia.) Finally, he re-established order in the Papal States.

The Papal States should never have existed. They were founded on the so-called Donation of Constantine,¹¹⁶ a story deliberately fabricated by the curia in the early eighth century according to which Constantine the Great, on moving his capital to Constantinople in 330, had conferred upon Pope Sylvester I dominion over Rome and ‘all the provinces, places and civitates of Italy and the Western regions’. No one thought to doubt its veracity until 1440, when the Renaissance humanist Lorenzo Valla proved the document on which it was based to be a forgery; by that time the six states had long been a fait accompli. Papal control over them varied considerably; Ferrara and Bologna, for example, were allowed almost complete self-government, while Pesaro and Forlì were kept on a much tighter leash, with the Popes frequently imposing their own vicars. All six, however, were obliged in one way or another to provide an annual subsidy to the papal coffers; together, they were often the Papacy’s chief source of income.

Pope Martin’s death in 1431 left his work still unfinished. His two separate responsibilities–on the one hand, that of re-establishing papal supremacy over the conciliar movement (an inevitable consequence of the recent schism) and, on the other, that of defending papal lands against his neighbours and several rapacious condottieri–had left him little time for anything else. His successor, Eugenius IV, was forced out of Rome three years later by a republican revolution and spent the next nine years in exile in Florence. There, however, he scored what appeared at the time to be a major diplomatic victory. Early in 1438 the Byzantine Emperor John VIII Palaeologus had arrived in Italy with a huge following–it included inter alia the Orthodox Patriarch of Constantinople, eighteen metropolitans and twelve bishops, including the brilliant young Bessarion, Metropolitan of Nicaea, and Isidore, Bishop of Kiev and all Russia–with the object of reaching some sort of accommodation with the Church of Rome. Neither John nor any of his subjects had the slightest wish to reconcile their differences on theological grounds, but his empire seemed doomed and he knew that while it remained in Roman eyes heretical there was no hope of persuading the west to send a military expedition against the ever more threatening Turk. The conference began its deliberations at Ferrara, but subsequently moved to Florence–where, on 5 July 1439, an official Decree of Union was signed by all but one of the senior Greek churchmen. The Latin text of the decree began with the wordsLaetentur Coeli–‘let the heavens rejoice’. But the heavens, as it soon became clear, had precious little reason to do so.

The Emperor John had a sad homecoming. Back in Constantinople, he found the Council of Florence universally condemned. The Patriarchs of Jerusalem, Antioch and Alexandria had already disowned the delegates who had signed on their behalf. These and the other signatories were condemned as traitors to the faith, castigated throughout the capital and in several cases physically attacked–to the point where in 1441 a large number of them issued a public manifesto, regretting that they had ever put their names to the decree and formally retracting their support for it. Suddenly, the Emperor’s own position on the throne looked distinctly uncertain. True, there were other distinguished pro-unionists who might have given him their support, but Bessarion of Nicaea, who had converted to Catholicism in 1439 and had almost immediately been made a cardinal, had left Constantinople in disgust within a few months of his return and taken the first available ship back to Italy, never again to set foot on Byzantine soil. His friend Isidore of Kiev, who had also been admitted to the cardinalate, was less lucky; on his return to Moscow he was deposed and arrested, though later he too managed to escape to Italy.¹¹⁷

For Pope Eugenius, on the other hand, there was no uncertainty. Church union now existed, at least on paper; and it was now his duty to raise a Crusade against the enemies of Byzantium. Were he not to do so, he would not only be going back on his word to the Emperor; he would be proclaiming to all that the Council of Florence had been a failure, the Laetentur Coeli worthless. In eastern Europe if not in the west, he found willing recruits, and an army some 25,000 strong, composed largely of Serbs and Hungarians, set off in the late summer of 1443 under the Hungarian King Ladislas, the Serb George Brankovich and the brilliant John Hunyadi, Voyevod of Transylvania. It began promisingly enough: the cities of Nish and Sofia had both fallen by Christmas. The Ottoman Sultan Murad II, simultaneously threatened with serious risings by the Karaman Turks in Anatolia, by George Kastriotes–the famous Skanderbeg–in Albania and by the Emperor’s brother Constantine Palaeologus, Despot of the Morea,¹¹⁸ saw that he must come to terms and invited the three leaders to his court at Adrianople. The result was a ten-year truce, granted by the Sultan in return for a number of not very generous concessions in the Balkan peninsula.

When the news reached Rome, Eugenius and his curia were horrified. The Crusade had been intended to drive the Turks out of Europe; by the terms of this truce, they seemed almost as firmly entrenched as ever. The Pope’s right-hand man, Cardinal Giuliano Cesarini, left at once for Ladislas’s court at Szegedin, where he formally absolved the King from his oath to the Sultan and virtually ordered the Crusade on its way again. Ladislas should have refused. Absolution or no absolution, he was breaking his solemn word to the Sultan. Besides, his forces were by now dangerously diminished. Many of the erstwhile Crusaders had already left for home, and Brankovich–who had had his Serbian territories restored to him–was delighted with the truce and determined to observe it. But the young King decided to do as he was bidden.

In September he was back with what was left of the army, and accompanied now by the cardinal himself. Somehow he managed to make his way across Bulgaria to the Black Sea near Varna, where he expected to find his fleet awaiting him. The allied ships, however–mostly Venetian–were otherwise engaged. Murad, on hearing of Ladislas’s betrayal, had rushed back from Anatolia with an army of 80,000 men, and the ships were at that moment striving to prevent him from crossing the Bosphorus. They failed. Forcing his way across the strait, the furious Sultan hurried up the Black Sea coast and on 10 November 1444, just outside Varna, with the broken treaty pinned to his standard, tore into the Crusading army. The Christians fought with desperate courage; outnumbered, however, by more than three to one, they had no chance. Ladislas fell; so, shortly afterwards, did Cesarini. The army was annihilated; of its leaders, only John Hunyadi managed to escape, with a handful of his men. The last Crusade ever to be launched against the Turks in Europe had ended in catastrophe.

Resistance was not yet quite over. The following summer the Despot Constantine embarked on a raiding expedition through central Greece as far as the Pindus Mountains and into Albania. He was welcomed everywhere he went. Meanwhile his own governor of Achaia, with a small company of cavalry and foot-soldiers, crossed to the north shore of the Gulf of Corinth and drove the Turks out of western Phocis (the region around Delphi). This last insult was too much for Murad. Only a few months before, he had abdicated his throne in favour of his son; now he furiously resumed his old authority to take vengeance on these upstart Greeks. In November 1446 he swept down into the Morea at the head of an army of some 50,000. Phocis was once again overrun; Constantine hurried back to the Hexamilion, a great defensive fortification running six miles across the Isthmus of Corinth, roughly along the route of the present canal, determined to hold it at all costs. But Murad had brought with him something the Greeks had never seen before: heavy artillery. For five days his huge cannon pounded away at the wall, and on 10 December he gave the order for the final assault. Most of the defenders were taken prisoner or massacred; Constantine himself barely managed to make his way back to his capital at Mistra.

In one respect he was lucky: his capital was spared. It had been saved by one thing only: an unusually early and severe winter. Had the Sultan launched his campaign in May or June rather than in November, his army would have had no difficulty in reaching the furthest corners of the Peloponnese; Mistra would have been reduced to ashes, the Despot would have been killed–and Byzantium would have been deprived of its last Emperor.

On 31 October 1448 John VIII died in Constantinople, to be succeeded by his brother Constantine. Of all the Byzantine Emperors John is in appearance the best known, thanks to his portrait in the famous fresco by Benozzo Gozzoli that adorns the chapel of the Palazzo Medici– Riccardi in Florence. He had hardly deserved his posthumous celebrity; but he had done his best, and had worked diligently for what he believed to be right. Besides, the situation was already past all hope; anything he attempted would have been doomed to failure. And perhaps it was just as well. Byzantium, devoured from within, threatened from without, scarcely capable any longer of independent action, reduced now to an almost invisible dot on the map of Europe, needed–more, perhaps, than any once-great nation has ever needed–the coup de grâce. It had been a long time coming. Now, finally, it was at hand.

Four months after John’s death, on 13 February 1451 in Adrianople after an apoplectic seizure, Sultan Murad followed him to the grave. He was succeeded by his third son, Mehmet–the two older brothers having died some years before, at least one of them in suspicious circumstances–who was now eighteen. Mehmet was a serious, scholarly boy; by the time of his accession he is said to have been fluent not only in his native Turkish but in Arabic, Greek, Latin, Persian and Hebrew. On hearing the news he hastened to the capital, where he confirmed his father’s ministers in their places or appointed them elsewhere. In the course of these ceremonies Murad’s chief widow arrived to congratulate him on his succession. Mehmet received her warmly and engaged her for some time in conversation; she returned to the harem to find that her infant son had been murdered in his bath. The young Sultan, it seemed, was not one to take chances.

Within months of his succession Mehmet had concluded treaties with Hunyadi, Brankovich and the Doge of Venice, Francesco Foscari; messages of goodwill had been sent to the Prince of Wallachia, to the Knights of St John in Rhodes and to the Genoese lords of Lesbos and Chios. To the ambassadors despatched by Constantine XI in Constantinople the Sultan is said to have replied almost too fulsomely, swearing by Allah and the Prophet to live at peace with the Emperor and his people, and to maintain with him those same bonds of friendship that his father had maintained with John VIII. Perhaps it was this last promise that put the Emperor on his guard; he seems to have been one of the first European rulers to sense that the young Sultan was not all that he seemed. On the contrary, he was very dangerous indeed.

Mehmet may well have had similar feelings about Constantine, who in his days as Despot of the Morea had constituted a considerable thorn in the flesh of his father, Murad. Constantine Dragases–although a Palaeologus through and through, he preferred to use this Greek form of his Serbian mother’s name–was now in his middle forties, twice widowed and–since neither of his marriages had proved fruitful–actively seeking a third wife. When he had heard of the death of Murad in 1451 he had had the brilliant idea of marrying one of the Sultan’s widows: Maria, the Christian daughter of old George Brankovich. After fifteen years in the harem she had remained childless, and it was generally believed that the marriage had never been consummated. She was, however, the stepmother of the new young Sultan; what better way could there be of keeping the boy under proper control?

There is little point in speculating on how history might have been changed had Constantine Dragases indeed married Maria Brankovich. Not, probably, very much. It is perhaps just conceivable that she could have succeeded in persuading her stepson to renounce his designs on Constantinople; in such an event the Byzantine Empire might possibly have struggled on for another generation or two. But it could never have recovered its strength. Powerless and penniless, a Christian island alone in a Muslim ocean, its days would still have been numbered, its eventual destruction inevitable. In fact, although her parents gave their delighted blessing to the plan, it foundered on Maria herself. She had sworn an oath, she explained, that if ever she escaped from the infidel she would devote the rest of her life to celibacy, chastity and charitable works. Subsequent events were all too soon to justify her resolution.

Mehmet, meanwhile, was losing no time. At that point on the Bosphorus where the straits were at their narrowest, immediately opposite the castle which his great-grandfather Bayezit I had erected on the Asiatic shore, he decided to build another; the two fortresses together would give him undisputed control of the channel. (It was true that the land on which this new castle was to stand was theoretically Byzantine but, as Mehmet pointed out, he could not help that.) In the early spring of 1452 all the churches and monasteries in the immediate neighbourhood were demolished to provide additional building materials, and on 15 April the construction work began. Nineteen and a half weeks later, on 31 August, the great castle of Rumeli Hisar was complete, looking essentially the same as it does today. The Sultan then mounted three huge cannon on the tower nearest the shore and issued a proclamation that every passing ship, whatever its nationality or provenance, must stop for examination. In late November a Venetian vessel, laden with food and provisions for Constantinople, ignored this instruction. It was blasted out of the water. The crew were executed; the captain, a certain Antonio Rizzo, was impaled on a stake and exposed as a warning to any other commander who might think of following his example.

Early the following year the Turkish fleet began to assemble off the Gallipoli peninsula. It seems to have comprised not less than ten biremes and six triremes,¹¹⁹ fifteen oared galleys, some seventy-five fast longboats, twenty heavy sailing-barges for transport and a number of light sloops and cutters. Even the Sultan’s closest advisers were said to have been astonished by the scale of this vast armada, but their reactions can have been as nothing compared with those of the Byzantines, who saw it a week or two later making its way slowly across the Marmara to drop anchor beneath the walls of their city.

The Ottoman army, meanwhile, was gathering in Thrace. The Greek estimate of 300–400,000 is plainly ridiculous; Turkish sources–presumably fairly reliable–suggest some 80,000 regular troops and up to 20,000 irregulars, or bashi-bazouks. Included in the former category were about 12,000 janissaries. These elite troops of the Sultan had been recruited as children from Christian families throughout the empire, forcibly converted to Islam and subjected to a rigorous military and religious training; some had been additionally trained as sappers and engineers. Legally they were slaves, in that they enjoyed no personal rights outside their regimental life. But they received regular salaries and were anything but servile; as recently as 1451 they had staged a near-mutiny for higher pay, and janissary revolts were to be a regular feature of Ottoman history until well into the nineteenth century.

Mehmet was proud of his army and prouder still of his navy, but he took the greatest pride of all in his weaponry. Cannon, in a very primitive form, had already been in use for well over a hundred years; Edward III had employed one at the siege of Calais in 1347, and they had been known in north Italy for a good quarter of a century before that, but in those early days they were powerless against solid masonry. By 1446, as we have seen, they had grown effective enough to demolish the Hexamilion at Corinth; even so, it was not until 1452 that a German engineer named Urban presented himself before the Sultan and offered to build him cannon that would blast the walls of Babylon itself. The first of these had accounted for the Venetian ship off Rumeli Hisar; Mehmet then ordered another, double the size. This was completed in January 1453. It is said to have been nearly twenty-seven feet long, with a barrel two and a half feet in diameter. The bronze was eight inches thick. When it was tested, a ball weighing some 1,340 pounds hurtled through the air for well over a mile before burying itself six feet deep in the ground. Two hundred engineers were sent out to prepare for the journey of this fearsome construction to Constantinople, smoothing the road and reinforcing the bridges, and at the beginning of March it set off, drawn by thirty pairs of oxen, with another 200 men to hold it steady.

The Sultan himself left Adrianople on 23 March. Medieval armies–particularly if they were carrying siege equipment–moved slowly, but on 5 April he pitched his tent before the walls of Constantinople, where the bulk of his huge host had arrived three days before. Determined to lose no time, he at once sent under a flag of truce the message to the Emperor that was required by Islamic law, undertaking that all subjects of the Empire would be spared, with their families and property, if they made immediate and voluntary surrender. If they refused, no mercy would be shown.

As expected, his message remained unanswered. Early in the morning of 6 April his cannon opened fire.

The people of Constantinople too had been at work: repairing and strengthening the defences, clearing out the moats, laying in stores of food, arrows, tools, heavy rocks and anything else that they might need. Meanwhile their Emperor had sent further appeals to the west, but the response had as usual been lukewarm. In February the Venetian Senate had finally agreed to the despatch of two transports, each carrying 400 men, with fifteen galleys as soon as they could be prepared, but this fleet did not leave the lagoon until 20 April. Fortunately for the honour of the Serenissima, the Venetian colony in the city produced a nobler response, undertaking that none of its vessels would return home; in all, the Venetians were able to provide nine merchantmen, including three from their colony of Crete.¹²⁰

The defenders also included a Genoese contingent. Many of them came, as might have been expected, from the Genoese colony at Galata, the largely foreign quarter of Constantinople lying to the northeast of the Golden Horn; in addition, there was an honourable group from Genoa itself, some 700 young men who had been appalled by the pusillanimity of their government–it had promised Constantine just one ship–and had determined to fight for Christendom. Their leader, Giovanni Giustiniani Longo, was a member of one of the Republic’s leading families and a renowned expert in siege warfare. Allies like these were more than welcome, but though they may have afforded the Emperor some encouragement, they cannot have given him any real hope. His ships in the Golden Horn numbered just twenty-six, a pitiable number in comparison to the Ottoman fleet. Towards the end of March he had ordered his secretary George Sphrantzes–who has left us a full account of the siege–to make a census of all the able-bodied men in the city, including priests and monks, who could be called upon to man the walls. The population of the city had been dramatically reduced by ten separate visitations of the Black Death in the previous century; nonetheless, the final figure was far worse than he could have imagined: 4,983 Greeks and rather less than 2,000 foreigners. To defend fourteen miles of walls against Mehmet’s army of 100,000, he could muster less than 7,000 men.

The land walls in which Byzantium put its trust during that fateful spring of 1453 ran from the shores of the Marmara to the upper reaches of the Golden Horn, forming the western boundary of the city. They were already more than a thousand years old. Known as the Theodosian Walls after the Emperor Theodosius II in whose reign they were built, they were in fact completed in 413 when he was still a child. In terms of medieval siege warfare they were impregnable. Any attacking army had first to negotiate a deep ditch some sixty feet across, much of which could be flooded to a depth of about thirty feet in an emergency. Beyond this was a low crenellated breastwork with a terrace behind it about thirty feet wide; then the outer wall, seven feet thick and nearly thirty feet high, with ninety-six towers at regular intervals along it. Within this wall ran another broad terrace, and then the principal element of the defence, the great inner wall, about sixteen feet thick at the base and rising to a height of forty feet above the city. It too had ninety-six towers, alternating in position with those of the outer bastion. The result was almost certainly the most formidable municipal fortification constructed in the middle ages.

But the middle ages were past. Over the next eight weeks the Sultan subjected those walls to a bombardment unprecedented in the history of siege warfare. Behind makeshift wooden stockades, the defenders worked ceaselessly to repair the damage, but it was clear that they could not continue to do so indefinitely. Only one of their defences seemed immune from any onslaught that the enemy could launch against it: the great chain which stretched across the entrance to the Golden Horn from a tower just below the Acropolis, on what is now Seraglio Point, to another on the sea walls of Galata. A few days after the siege began the Turkish admiral had led a number of his heaviest ships to ram it, but it had held firm.

It was one of the Sultan’s characteristics that he would suddenly focus all his attention on a single objective, which he would pursue obsessively until it was gained; by the middle of April his mind was fixed on control of the Golden Horn. The method by which he proposed to achieve it seems barely credible to us today: he set his engineers to work on a road running behind Galata, from a point on the Bosphorus shore over the hill near what is now Taksim Square and down to the Golden Horn at Kasımpaa. Iron wheels had been cast, and metal tracks; his carpenters, meanwhile, had been busy fashioning wooden cradles large enough to accommodate the keels of medium-size vessels. On Sunday morning, 22 April, the Genoese colony in Galata watched dumbfounded as some seventy Turkish ships were slowly hauled, by innumerable teams of oxen, over a 200-foot hill and then lowered gently down again into the Horn.

By the beginning of May, the Emperor knew that he could not hold out much longer. One hope only remained: a relief expedition from Venice. Was there a fleet on its way, or not? If so, how big was it, and what was its cargo? Most important of all, how soon would it arrive? On the answers to these questions the whole fate of Constantinople now depended. And so it was that just before midnight on 3 May a Venetian brigantine, flying a Turkish standard and carrying a crew of twelve volunteers all disguised as Turks, slipped out under the boom. On the night of the 23rd it returned, pursued by an Ottoman squadron. Fortunately, Venetian seamanship was still a good deal better than Turkish, and soon after nightfall it succeeded in entering the Horn. The captain immediately sought an audience with the Emperor. For three weeks, he reported, he had cruised through the Aegean; nowhere had he seen a trace of the promised expedition, or indeed of any Venetian shipping. When he realised that it was useless to continue the search, he had called a meeting of the sailors and asked them what they should do. One had advocated sailing home to Venice, arguing that Constantinople was probably already in Turkish hands, but he had been shouted down. To all the rest, their duty was clear; they must report back to the Emperor, as they had promised to do. And so they had returned, knowing full well that they would probably never leave the city alive. Constantine thanked each one personally, his voice choked with tears.

On 26 May the Sultan held a council of war. The siege, he told those around him, had continued long enough. The time had come for the final assault. The following day would be given over to preparations, the day after that to rest and prayer. The attack would begin in the early hours of Tuesday, 29 May. No attempt was made to conceal the plan from the defenders within the city. Some of the Christians in the Turkish camp even shot arrows over the walls with messages informing them of Mehmet’s intentions, but such measures were hardly necessary; the frenzied activity day and night in the Turkish camp told its own story.

On the last Monday of the Empire’s history, the people of Constantinople–including their Emperor–left their houses and gathered for one last collective intercession. As the bells pealed out from the churches, all the most sacred icons and the most precious relics were carried out to join the long, spontaneous procession of Greeks and Italians, Orthodox and Catholic alike, that wound its way through the streets and along the whole length of the walls. By the time it was finished, dusk was falling. From all over the city, as if by instinct, the people were making their way to the Church of the Holy Wisdom. For the past five months the building had been generally avoided by the Greeks, defiled as they believed it to be by the Latin usages that no pious Byzantine could possibly accept. Now, for the first and last time, liturgical differences were forgotten. St Sophia was, as no other church could ever be, the spiritual centre of Byzantium. In this moment of supreme crisis there could be nowhere else to go.

The service was in progress when the Emperor arrived to take communion with his subjects. Much later, when all but the few permanent candles had been put out and the great church was in darkness, he slipped back in and spent some time alone in prayer. Then he returned to the walls. He had no sleep that night, for Mehmet did not wait for dawn to launch his assault. At half past one in the morning he gave the signal. Suddenly, the silence of the night was shattered, the blasts of trumpets and the hammering of drums combining with the bloodcurdling Turkish war cries to produce a clamour fit to waken the dead. At the same time the bells of all the churches in Constantinople began to peal, a sign to the whole city that the final battle had begun.

The attacks came in wave after wave: first the irregular bashibazouks–untrained and with little staying power, but readily expendable and ideal for demoralising the defenders and making them easier victims for the more sophisticated fighters that would follow them; then the regiments of Anatolian Turks, fully trained and superbly disciplined, pious Muslims to a man and determined to win eternal rewards in paradise by being the first to enter the greatest city in Christendom; finally the janissaries, advancing across the plain at the double, their ranks unbroken and dead straight despite all the missiles that the defenders could hurl against them. Soon after dawn, a bolt struck Giovanni Giustiniani Longo and smashed through his chest. Confusion spread through the ranks of the Genoese, many of whom fled, but by now it hardly mattered. Within an hour the Turks had made a breach in the wall and were streaming into the city. The Emperor, seeing that all was lost, plunged into the fray where the fighting was thickest. He was never seen again.

By now it was morning, with the waning moon high in the sky. The hours that followed were horrible indeed. By noon the streets of Constantinople were running red with blood. Houses were ransacked, women and children raped and impaled, churches razed, icons wrenched from their golden frames, books ripped from their silver bindings. In the Church of the Holy Wisdom, matins were already in progress when the berserk conquerors were heard approaching. The poorer and more unattractive of the congregation were massacred on the spot, the remainder lashed together and led off to the Turkish camps for their captors to use as they liked. The officiating priests continued with the Mass for as long as possible before being slaughtered where they stood, at the high altar; there are among the Orthodox faithful those who still believe that at the last moment one or two of them gathered up the most precious of the sacred vessels and mysteriously disappeared with them into the southern wall of the sanctuary. There they will remain until the day Constantinople becomes once again a Christian city, when they will resume the liturgy at the point at which it was interrupted.

The Sultan had promised his men the three days of looting to which by Islamic tradition they were entitled, but the orgy of violence had been on such a scale that there were no protests when he brought it to a close on the same day as it had begun. He himself waited until the worst excesses were over before entering the city. Then, in the late afternoon, he rode slowly down the principal thoroughfare, the Mese, to St Sophia. Dismounting outside the central doors, he stooped and picked up a handful of earth which, in a gesture of humility, he sprinkled over his turban; only then did he enter the building. At his command the senior imam mounted the pulpit and proclaimed the name of Allah, the All-Merciful and Compassionate: there was no God but God, and Mohammed was his Prophet. That was the moment. Cross gave way to Crescent; St Sophia became a mosque; the Byzantine Empire was supplanted by the Ottoman; Constantinople became Istanbul. At twenty-one, Mehmet II had achieved his highest ambition.

The news of the fall of Constantinople, and with it the Byzantine Empire, was received with horror throughout Christendom. As the refugees spread westward they carried the epic story with them, and the story doubtless lost nothing in the telling. But western Europe, for all its deep and genuine dismay, was not profoundly changed. The two states most immediately affected, Venice and Genoa, lost no time in making the best terms they could with the Sultan.

The Venetian relief fleet–which had in fact been largely equipped by Pope Nicholas V–was anchored off Chios, waiting for a favourable wind to continue its journey to Constantinople, when some of the Genoese ships that had escaped from Galata drew alongside with the news. Its captain, Giacomo Loredan, promptly withdrew to Euboea, there to await further orders. Meanwhile, a special envoy, Bartolomeo Marcello, was sent at once to congratulate Mehmet on his victory, to emphasise the Republic’s firm intent to observe the peace treaty concluded with his father and confirmed by himself, and to request the restitution of all Venetian ships remaining in Constantinople, pointing out that these were not warships but merchantmen. If the Sultan agreed to renew the treaty, Marcello was to ask that Venice should be allowed to maintain her trading colony in the city, with the same rights and privileges that she had enjoyed under Byzantine rule. Mehmet proved a hard bargainer. After the best part of a year’s negotiation the ships and prisoners were released and the Venetian colony allowed to return; no longer, however, would it enjoy those territorial and commercial concessions on which its former power and prosperity had depended. The Latin presence in the east was already on the decline.

The Genoese had even more at stake than the Venetians, and had continued to play their double game. In Galata, their podestà had opened the gates the moment the Turks appeared, and had done everything he could to prevent his countrymen’s unseemly exodus. After a time he was given assurances that the Genoese of Galata would remain in possession of their property and might practise their religion unhindered as long as they rang no bells and built no new churches, but they must surrender their arms and destroy their fortifications and citadel. Theoretically the Genoese trading colonies along the northern shore of the Black Sea–including the prosperous port of Caffa in the Crimea–would be allowed to continue, but since the death of Antonio Rizzo few sailors ventured through the straits and few merchants were prepared to pay the immense tolls demanded. With the exception of the island of Chios–which was to remain Genoese until 1566–by the end of the century Genoa’s commercial empire was gone.

In Rome, Pope Nicholas showed none of the cynicism and self-interest of the merchant republics. He did his utmost to galvanise the west for a Crusade, a cause which was enthusiastically supported by the two Greek cardinals, Bessarion and Isidore, as also by the papal legate in Germany, Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini, the future Pope Pius II. But it was no use. Two or three hundred years before, Christian zeal had been enough to launch military expeditions for the rescue of holy places of pilgrimage; with the advent of Renaissance humanism, however, the old religious fire had been extinguished. Europe had dithered, and Byzantium had died. With the Ottoman army stronger than it had ever been, the old Empire was beyond all hope of resurrection.

The decade following the fall of Constantinople saw a number of mopping-up operations, notably in Greece, where the Latin Duchy of Athens ended in 1456 with the Turkish capture of the city. The last duke, Franco Acciajuoli, was murdered four years later when the Despotate of the Morea, in which he had taken refuge, came to a similar end. The Venetian colony of Negroponte–better known to us as the island of Euboea–fell in 1470. The still remaining Christian outposts included Crete, Cyprus, one or two strongholds in the Morea and a few of the Ionian Islands–notably Corfu, Cephalonia and Zante–together with a narrow strip of the Dalmatian coast. All of these remained Venetian. But in the Balkan hinterland, part of Bosnia had fallen as early as 1438 and the rest, together with Herzegovina in the south, was to crumble between 1463 and 1480.

There was, however, one other stronghold: the island of Rhodes, where since 1306 the Knights of St John had been simultaneously running their hospital and waging their own war against the infidel. For the west, they were now the first line of defence against the march of Islam: no longer a medieval anachronism but conceivably the very saviours of Christendom. For Sultan Mehmet, on the other hand, they were a permanent irritation, and in the spring of 1480 he moved against them. His army was probably about 70,000 strong, carried to the island by a fleet of some fifty ships. Also on board was a number of those formidable cannon which had served him so well at Constantinople. Against this huge host the Knights opposed about 600 members of their order, together with perhaps 1,500 paid foreign troops and local militia. They could also count on the active cooperation of the Rhodiots themselves, Christians to a man. They were commanded by their Grand Master, the fifty-seven-year-old Pierre d’Aubusson. Several years before, knowing that attack was inevitable, he had summoned the greatest military architects of the day to make the city of Rhodes as nearly impregnable as any city could be. Now that the Turks were at last on their way, he was ready for them.

The siege began on 23 May. Already by the middle of June parts of the city wall, pounded by nearly 1,000 cannonballs a day, were beginning to crumble, but somehow the Knights held firm. On 27 July came the final assault. As usual, the bashi-bazouks, untrained and expendable, led the way, followed by the janissaries. Bursting through what was left of the wall by the so-called Italian Tower, they managed to hoist the standard of the Prophet within the city; but then the Knights staged a massive counter-attack. The Grand Master was badly wounded a moment later, but suddenly panic spread through the bashibazouk line; they turned and fled. Why they did so remains a mystery. It has even been suggested that they were terrified by the sight of the Christian banners, emblazoned with pictures of the Virgin and saints, twisting and turning in the wind; they were after all Muslims, most of whom would never before have seen two-dimensional representations of the human face or figure. Whatever the reason, it is a rare thing indeed in the history of warfare for a besieging army to take flight after the walls are breached; for the Turkish army, triumph was from one moment to the next transformed into disaster. Probably some 4,000 lost their lives, including 300 janissaries who had invaded the Jewish quarter and had been cut off there.

The Knights had won a battle, but they had not yet won the war. Furious at his defeat, Sultan Mehmet immediately began preparing a fresh army, which he resolved to lead in person against them the following year. Had he done so, they would have stood no chance; the defences could never have been repaired in time. But in the spring of 1481, as he was riding south through Asia Minor on his way to take up his command, the Sultan was stricken by a sudden dysenteric fever. A day or two later he was dead. The Knights of St John were to hold their lovely island for another forty years, but now it was an island in more than just the geographical sense. The eastern Mediterranean had become, to all intents and purposes, a Muslim sea.