Tell me please how and when the end of this world will be? And how will men know that the end is close, at the doors? By what signs will the end be indicated? And whither will pass this city, the New Jerusalem? What will happen to the holy temples standing here, to the venerated icons, the relics of the Saints, and the books? Please inform me.
Epiphanios, tenth-century Orthodox monk, to St. Andrew the Fool for Christ
As the Ottoman troops poured into the city and their flags were seen flying from the towers, panic spread through the civilian population. The cry “the city is lost!” rang through the streets. People started to run. The Bocchiardi brothers at the walls near the Circus Gate saw soldiers fleeing past their position. They mounted their horses and drove at the enemy, temporarily forcing them back. However, they too soon realized the hopelessness of the situation. Ottoman troops on the ramparts hurled missiles down on them, and Paolo was wounded on the head. They realized that they were in imminent danger of being surrounded. Paolo was captured and killed, but his brothers fought their way out and back down to the Horn with their men. At the harbor, the wounded Giustiniani learned that the defense had crumbled, and “ordered his trumpeters to sound the signal to recall his men.” For others it was too late. The Venetian bailey, Minotto, and many of the leading Venetians and the sailors who had come from the galleys to fight were surrounded and captured at the Palace of Blachernae, while farther up the land wall toward the sea of Marmara, where the defense had remained firm, the soldiers now found themselves attacked from the rear. Many were killed; others, including the commanders Philippo Contarini and Demetrios Cantacuzenos surrendered and were captured.
“Verily they will conquer Constantinople. Truly their commander will be an excellent one. Truly that army will be an excellent one!”: a saying attributed to the Prophet
Within the city, confusion spread with extraordinary speed. The collapse at the front line was so dramatic and unexpected that many were taken by surprise. While some of those who had escaped from the land walls were fleeing toward the Horn in the hope of getting on board the ships, others were running toward the front line. Alerted by the sound of battle, some of the civilians were making their way up to the walls to offer help to the troops when they met the first marauding bands of Ottoman soldiers pressing into the city, who “attacked them with great anger and fury” and cut them down. It was a mixture of fear and hatred that sparked the initial slaughter in the city. Suddenly finding themselves in the maze of narrow streets, the Ottoman soldiers were confused and apprehensive. They expected to meet a large and determined army; it was impossible to believe that the 2,000 routed in the stockade comprised the total military resources of the city. At the same time weeks of suffering and the taunts hurled over the battlements by the Greeks had marked the conflict with a bitterness that made them savage. Now the city would pay for failing to accept negotiated surrender. They killed initially “to create universal terror”; for a short while “everyone they found they dispatched at the point of a scimitar, women and men, old and young, of any condition.” This ruthlessness was probably intensified by pockets of spirited resistance from the populace who “threw bricks and paving stones at them from above … and threw fire upon them.” The streets became slippery with blood.
The flags of the sultan fluttering from the high towers on the land walls spread the word quickly down the Ottoman line. Along the Golden Horn the Ottoman fleet redoubled its attacks, and as defenders slipped away, the sailors forced open the sea gates one after another. Soon the Plateia Gate, close to the Venetian quarter, was opened, and detachments of men started to penetrate the heart of the city. Farther around the coast, the word reached Hamza Bey and the Marmara fleet. Eager to join in the opportunity for plunder, the sailors brought their ships back into shore and threw ladders up against the walls.
For a short while, indiscriminate slaughter continued to rage: “the whole city was filled with men killing or being killed, fleeing or pursuing,” according to Chalcocondylas. In the panic everyone now consulted his own best interests. While the Italians made for the Horn and the safety of the ships, the Greeks fled home to protect their wives and children. Some were captured on the way; others got home to find “their wives and children abducted and their possessions plundered.” Yet others, on reaching home, “were themselves bound and fettered with their closest friends and wives.” Many who reached home before the intruders, realizing the likely outcome of surrender, decided to die in defense of their families. People hid themselves away in cellars and cisterns or wandered about the city in dazed confusion waiting to be captured or killed. A pathetic scene took place at the church of Theodosia down near the Golden Horn. It was the saint’s feast day, kept with adoration and zeal down hundreds of years of worship to a faithfully preserved ritual. The facade was adorned with early summer roses. Within, the customary all-night vigil had taken place at the saint’s sepulcher, the lighted candles glimmering in the short summer night. In the early morning, a procession of men and women were wending their way toward the church, blindly trusting in the miraculous power of prayer. They were carrying the customary gifts, “beautifully embellished and adorned candles and incense,” when they were intercepted by soldiers and carried off; the whole congregation was taken prisoner; the church, which was rich with the offerings of worshipers, was stripped. Theodosia’s bones were thrown to the dogs. Elsewhere women awoke in their beds to the sight of intruders bursting through the door.
As the morning wore on and the Ottomans realized the truth – that there no longer was any organized resistance – the principles of slaughter became more discriminating. The Ottoman soldiers acted, according to Sad-ud-din, in accordance with the precept, “slaughter their aged and capture their youth.” The emphasis shifted to taking live prisoners as booty. The hunt began for valuable slaves – young women, beautiful children – with the irregular troops of many “nations, customs and languages,” including Christians, being in the forefront, “plundering, destroying, robbing, murdering, insulting, seizing and enslaving men, women, children, old and young, priests and monks – people of every age and rank.” The accounts of the atrocities were largely written by Christians, more coyly by Ottoman chroniclers, but there is no doubt that the morning unfolded in scenes of terror. They have left a series of vivid snapshots, sights “terrible and pitiful and beyond all tragedies,” according to Kritovoulos, the generally pro-Ottoman Greek writer. Women were “dragged violently from their bed chambers.” Children were snatched from their parents; old men and women who were unable to flee their houses were “slaughtered mercilessly,” along with “the weak-minded, the old, the lepers and the infirm.” “The newborn babies were hurled into the squares.” Women and boys were raped, then ill-assorted groups of captives were tied together by their captors; “dragging them out savagely, driving them, tearing at them, manhandling them, herding them off disgracefully and shamefully into the crossroads, insulting them and doing terrible things.” Those who survived, particularly the “young and modest women, nobly born and wealthy, who were used to staying in their homes,” were traumatized beyond life itself. Rather than undergo this fate, some of the girls and married women preferred to throw themselves into wells. Among the pillagers fights broke out over the most beautiful girls, which were sometimes fought to the death.
Churches and monasteries were particularly sought out. Those near the land walls – the military church of St. George by the Charisian Gate, the Church of St. John the Baptist at Petra and the Chora Monastery – were quickly plundered. The miracle-working icon of the Hodegetria was hacked into four pieces and divided among the soldiers for its valuable frame. Crosses were smashed from the roofs of the churches; the tombs of saints were cracked open and searched for treasures; their contents were torn to pieces and thrown into the streets. The church treasures – chalices, goblets, and “holy artifacts and precious and sumptuous robes embroidered with much gold and glittering with precious stones and pearls” – were carted away and melted down. The altars were torn down and the “walls of churches and sanctuaries were ransacked … looking for gold.” “The consecrated images of God’s saints” witnessed scenes of rape, according to Leonard. Entering the convents, nuns were “led to the fleet and ravished”; the monks were killed in their cells or “hauled out of the churches where they had sought sanctuary, and driven away with insults and dishonour.” The tombs of the emperors were smashed open with iron bars in search of hidden gold. These “and ten thousand other terrible things were done,” Kritovoulos mournfully recorded. In a few hours a thousand years of Christian Constantinople largely disappeared.
In front of this tidal wave, those who could, panicked and ran. Many headed for St. Sophia guided by instinct and superstition. They remembered the old prophecy that the enemy would penetrate the city as far as the Column of Constantine, near the great church, when an avenging angel would descend, sword in hand, and inspire the defenders to drive them out of the city “and from the West and from Anatolia itself to the place called the Red Apple tree on the borders of Persia.” Inside the church, a large congregation of clergy and laity, men, women, and children gathered for the service of matins and to put their faith in God. The massive bronze doors of the church were swung shut and barred. It was eight in the morning.
The doors of St. Sophia
Elsewhere, some of the outlying areas of the city were able to negotiate wholesale surrender. By the middle of the fifteenth century the population of Constantinople was so shrunk within its outer walls that some parts of the city were separate villages, protected by their own walls and palisades. Some of these – Studion on the Marmara and the fishing village of Petrion near the Horn – voluntarily opened their gates on condition that their houses would be spared the general ransack. The headman in each case was conducted to the sultan to make formal surrender of his village, and Mehmet probably detailed a detachment of military police to protect the houses. Such acts of surrender could be held to secure immunity under Islamic laws of war, and a number of churches and monasteries survived intact as a result. Elsewhere, heroic or desperate pockets of resistance continued. Down on the Horn, a group of Cretan sailors barricaded themselves into three towers and refused to surrender. All morning they resisted Ottoman attempts to dislodge them. Many on the sea walls farthest from the land wall also battled on, often ignorant of the true situation until they suddenly found the enemy in their rear. Some threw themselves from the battlements, others surrendered to the enemy unconditionally. Prince Orhan, the pretender to the Ottoman throne, and his small band of Turks had no such options. They fought on, as did the Catalans stationed farther along the sea wall near the Bucoleon Palace.
In the midst of this unfolding destruction, the Ottoman sailors made a fateful decision. When they saw the army within the walls, and fearing that they would miss the chance to plunder, they drove their ships up onto the shore and abandoned them “to search for gold, jewels and other riches.” So keen were the sailors to get ashore down on the Horn that they ignored the Italians fleeing over the walls the other way. It was to be a rare stroke of luck.
The search for booty became obsessive. The Jewish quarter down by the Horn was an early target for plundering, due to its traditional trade in gems, and Italian merchants similarly were eagerly sought out. As the day wore on booty collection became more organized. The first troop to enter a house raised a flag outside to indicate that it had already been stripped; other parties automatically moved on to look elsewhere: “and so they put their flags everywhere, even on monasteries and churches.” The men worked in teams, carting off the prisoners and plunder back to the camp or the ships, then returning for more. No corner was left untouched: “churches, old vaults and tombs, cloisters, underground chambers and hidden places and crannies and caves and holes. And they searched in all the hidden corners, and if there was anyone or anything hidden there, they dragged it into the light.” Some even engaged in secondary activity, stealing the unguarded booty deposited back in the camp.
Meanwhile the struggle for survival went on. During the course of the morning hundreds of individual fates were decided by luck. Cardinal Isidore, the archbishop of Kiev, with the help of his servants, managed to swap his sumptuous episcopal robes for those of a soldier lying dead in the street. Ottoman troops soon came across the corpse dressed in the bishop’s robes, cut off the head, and carried it in triumph through the streets. The elderly Isidore was himself quickly captured but, unrecognized, seemed too wretched to be worth the bother of dragging off into slavery. For a small sum of money he bought his freedom from his captors on the spot and managed to get aboard one of the Italian ships in the harbor. Prince Orhan was less fortunate. Dressed as a soldier and with a fluent command of Greek, he sought to make good his escape from the sea walls but was recognized and pursued. Seeing that his situation was hopeless he hurled himself off the battlements. The severed head was taken to Mehmet, who had been anxious to know his fate. Other leading notables were captured alive – Lucas Notaras and his family were taken, probably in their palace, George Sphrantzes and his family likewise. The monk Gennadios, who had led the antiunionist cause, was captured in his cell. The Catalans fought on until they were all killed or captured, but the Cretans in their towers beside the Golden Horn proved impossible to dislodge. Eventually someone reported their resistance to Mehmet. In a characteristically quixotic gesture, he offered them a truce and the chance to sail away in their ships. After some hesitation they accepted the offer and departed, free men.
For many, the Horn seemed to offer the best chance of escape. During the early morning, hundreds of soldiers and civilians streamed down the narrow lanes, hoping to clamber aboard the Italian ships in the harbor. The scene at the sea gates was one of confusion and panic. In headlong flight many hurled themselves into crowded rowing boats that capsized and sank, drowning their occupants. The sense of tragedy was magnified by a decision taken by some of the gatekeepers. Seeing their Greek compatriots fleeing to the shore and remembering the prophecy that the enemy could be turned back at the statue of Constantine, they decided that the defenders could be persuaded to turn and drive the enemy out if their exit was barred. Accordingly they threw the keys away from the top of the wall and prevented further escape. As any means of reaching the Italian galleys offshore disappeared, the scene on the foreshore became increasingly pitiful – “men, women, monks and nuns crying pitifully, beating their breasts, imploring the ships to come in and rescue them” – but the situation aboard the galleys was also panic-stricken and the captains were torn on how best to proceed. By the time the Florentine merchant Giacomo Tetaldi reached the shore, two hours after the collapse of the front line, there was nothing for it but to swim or await “the fury of the Turks.” Preferring to risk death by drowning, he stripped off his clothes and struck out for the ships and was hauled aboard. He was just in time. Looking back, he saw about forty more soldiers, seized by the Ottomans in the very act of removing their armor to follow him. “May God help them,” he wrote. Some of the distraught figures lining the shore were rescued from across the water by the Podesta of Galata and persuaded to accept the comparative safety of the Genoese colony: “not without great danger, I brought back into the town those at the palisade; you never saw such a terrible thing.”
On board the Italian ships there was paralyzing indecision. They had heard the defiant clanging of the church bells die away in the early morning, the sound of screaming floating across the water as the Ottoman sailors brought their ships ashore and stormed the walls of the Horn. The Venetians had seen too the pitiful spectacle of the population imploring the captains to bring their craft into shore or drowning in their attempts to reach them, but it was too dangerous to risk approaching the shore; apart from the obvious danger of being captured by the enemy, a sudden stampede by desperate people at the water’s edge could easily risk the safety of a vessel. In addition a large part of the Italian galley crews had been sent to man the walls, and ships were alarmingly short-crewed. Yet the behavior of the Ottoman fleet, which had abandoned its vessels to take part in the plunder, was a massive stroke of good luck and presented, doubtless only for a short time, the possibility of escape. It was imperative that the galley fleet acted decisively before Ottoman naval discipline was restored.
The mood of uncertainty was mirrored in Galata. When it was obvious that the city had been taken the people panicked. “I always knew that if Constantinople was lost, this place was also lost,” recorded Angelo Lomellino, the podesta, afterward. The question was how to react. Mehmet’s attitude to the Genoese, whom he considered to be guilty of collaboration in the defense of the city, was uncertain. The majority of its able-bodied men were indeed fighting across the water, including the podesta’s own nephew. There were only 600 men left in the town. Many were tempted to quit Galata at once. A large number of people boarded a Genoese ship to make their escape, abandoning their homes and possessions; another boat, largely carrying women, was captured by Ottoman ships, but Lomellino decided to set an example and sit tight. He reckoned that if he himself abandoned the city, sack would be inevitable.
In the midst of these deliberations the captain of the Venetian fleet, Aluvixe Diedo, accompanied by his armorer and the surgeon Nicolo Barbaro, put ashore to consult with the podesta on what to do: should the Genoese and Venetian ships jointly confront the Ottomans, openly declaring a state of war between the Italian Republics and the sultan, or should they make good their escape? Lomellino begged them to wait while he sent an ambassador to Mehmet, but for the Venetian captains time was pressing. They had delayed as long as possible to collect those survivors who could swim away from the stricken city, and they dared wait no longer, given the difficulty of preparing their ships for sea. Diedo and his companions in Galata could see the galleys getting ready to depart in the bay below them and were hurrying back through the streets to rejoin their ships, when they discovered, to their horror, that Lomellino had barred the gates to prevent a mass exodus. “We were in a terrible situation,” Barbaro recalled, “we were shut in their town, the galleys suddenly began to raise their sails, spreading them and drawing in their oars, ready to leave without their captain.” They could see their ships preparing to sail away, and it was certain that Mehmet would not deal kindly with the captain of the enemy fleet. Desperately they implored the podesta to let them go. Finally he permitted the gates to be opened. Just in time they made it to the foreshore and were taken back on board. The galleys slowly kedged their way up to the chain, which still barred the mouth of the bay. Two men leaped down into the water with axes and hacked away at one of the wooden floating sections of the boom until it gave way. One by one the ships hauled themselves out into the Bosphorus while Ottoman commanders watched from the shore in impotent fury. The flotilla of ships rounded the point of Galata and formed up in the now empty Ottoman harbor at the Double Columns. There they waited in the hope of taking their shipmates and other survivors on board, but by midday it was clear that all had been killed or captured and they could wait no longer. For a second time fate smiled on Christian ships. The south wind, which had propelled the Genoese ships up the straits so helpfully in late April, was now blowing a powerful twelve knots from the north. Without this stroke of luck, Barbaro acknowledged, “all of us would have been captured.”
And so, “at midday with the help of the Lord God, Master Aluvixe Diedo, the captain of the Tana fleet, set sail on his galley,” and with him a small flotilla of ships and galleys from Venice and Crete. One of the great galleys from Trebizond, which had lost 164 of its crew, had great difficulty hoisting its sails, but there was no one to oppose them, and they surged down the Marmara, past the corpses of Christians and Muslims floating out to sea, “like melons along a canal,” and away toward the Dardanelles with a mixture of relief at their good fortune and regret for the memory of their lost shipmates, “some of whom had been drowned, some dead in the bombardment or killed in the battle in other ways,” including Trevisano himself. They carried 400 survivors rescued in the final chaotic hours, as well as a surprising number of Byzantine nobles who had already boarded before the city fell. Seven ships from Genoa also got away, among them the galley carrying the wounded Giustiniani. Even as they did so Hamza Bey managed to regroup the Ottoman fleet, which swept around into the mouth of the Horn and captured fifteen ships, belonging to the emperor, Ancona, and the Genoese, which were still lying there, some too overcrowded with refugees to sail. Other pitiful groups of figures stood on the foreshore, wailing and beseeching the departing galleys. Ottoman marines simply rounded them up and herded them onto their own vessels.
It was three miles from the land walls to the heart of the city. By dawn determined bands of Janissaries were already forcing their way down the central thoroughfare from the St. Romanus Gate, intent on St. Sophia. Alongside the legend of the Red Apple there was a belief, widely circulated in the Ottoman camp, that the crypt of St. Sophia, so visible on the distant skyline during the weeks of fruitless siege, contained an enormous treasure of gold, silver, and precious stones. The Janissaries clattered through the destitute squares and deserted highways – past the Forum of the Ox and the Forum of Theodosius and down the Mese, the Middle Way that led into the heart of the city. Others came through the Charisian Gate farther north past the Church of the Holy Apostles, which remained unsacked: it seems that Mehmet had placed a guard on the church to limit the wholesale devastation of the city’s monuments. There was little resistance. When they reached the Forum of Constantine where the founder of the city gazed down from his imperial column, no angel turned them back with a fiery sword. At the same time sailors from the Horn and Marmara fleets were storming through the bazaars and churches at the tip of the peninsula. By seven in the morning both groups had reached the center of the city and poured into the forum of the Augusteum. Here stood the greatest remaining trophies of Byzantium’s imperial splendor – Justinian still riding toward the rising sun, the Milion, the milepost from which all distances in the empire were measured; beyond it on one side lay the Hippodrome and some of Constantine the Great’s original plunder – ornaments that linked the city to an even more ancient past: the strange triple-headed brass serpent column from the temple of Apollo at Delphi, a commemorative token for a Greek victory against the Persians at the battle of Plataea in 479 BC, and even older, the Egyptian column of the pharaoh Tutmose III. The perfectly preserved hieroglyphs on its polished granite surface were already three thousand years old when Ottoman troops looked up at them for the first time. On the other side stood St. Sophia itself, the Great Church, rising “to the very heavens.”
Inside, the service of matins had begun and the nine massive brass fronted wooden doors, surmounted by their protective crosses, were barred shut. The huge congregation prayed for a miracle to save them from the enemy at the gate. The women had taken their usual places in the gallery, the men downstairs. The priests were at the altar conducting the service. Some people hid themselves in the farthest recesses of the great structure, climbing up into the service passages and onto the roof. When the Janissaries surged into the inner courtyard and found the doors barred, they started to batter down the central one, the imperial gate, reserved for the entrance of the emperor and his entourage. Under repeated axe blows, the four-inch-thick door shuddered and crashed open and the Ottoman troops poured into the great building. Above them the mosaic figure of Christ in blue and gold watched impassively, his right hand raised in blessing, and in his left a book inscribed with the words “Peace be with you, I am the light of the world.”
If there is any precise moment when Byzantium could be said to have died, it is now with the final blow of an axe. St. Sophia had witnessed many of the great dramas of the imperial city. A church had stood on the site for 1,100 years; the great church of Justinian for 900. The mighty building reflected and had lived the turbulent spiritual and secular life of the city. Every emperor, with the ominous exception of the last, had been crowned here, many of the defining dramas of the empire had been played out under the great dome “suspended by heaven by a golden chain.” Blood had been spilled on its marble floors before; riots had taken place; patriarchs and emperors had taken sanctuary from mobs and plotters, or been dragged from it by force. Three times the dome had collapsed in earthquakes. Its imposing doorways had seen the papal legates march in with their Bull of Excommunication. Vikings had carved graffiti on its walls; barbarian Frankish crusaders had pillaged it mercilessly. It was here that the whole population of Russia had been converted to Christianity as a result of the unearthly beauty of the Orthodox liturgy, here too that the great religious controversies had been played out and ordinary people had worn the floors smooth with their feet and their prayers. The history of the church of the Holy Wisdom was the reflection of Byzantium – sacred and profane, mystical and sensuous, beautiful and cruel, irrational, divine, and human, and after 1,123 years and 27 days it was nearly over.
A wail of fear arose from the cowering population as the soldiers burst in. Cries were raised to God but it made no difference; they were “trapped as in a net.” There was little bloodshed. A few who resisted and perhaps some of the old and infirm were slaughtered, but the majority surrendered “like sheep.” The Ottoman troops had come for plunder and profit. They ignored the screaming of men, women, and children as each soldier struggled to secure his own prize. Young women were almost torn apart in the race to secure the most valuable slaves. Nuns and noble women, young and old, masters and servants, were bound together and dragged out of the church. The women were secured with their own veils, while the men were tied up with rope. Working in teams each man would lead his captives to “a certain spot, and placing them in safekeeping, returned to take a second and even a third prize.” Within an hour the whole congregation had been bound up. “The infinite chains of captives,” recorded Doukas, “who like herds of cattle and flocks of sheep poured out of the temple and the temple sanctuary made an extraordinary spectacle!” A terrible noise of lamentation filled the morning air.
The soldiers then turned their attention to the fabric of the church. They hacked the icons to pieces, stripping away the valuable metal frames and seized “in an instant the precious and holy relics which were kept safe in the sanctuary, the vessels of gold and silver and other valuable materials.” Then rapidly all the other fixtures and fittings followed, things that the Muslims considered both idolatrous affronts to God and rightful booty for soldiers – the chains, candelabra, and lamps, the iconostasis, the altar and its coverings, the church furniture, the emperor’s chair – in a short time everything was either seized and carried off or destroyed in situ, leaving the great church “ransacked and desolate,” according to Doukas. The great church reverted to a shell. This defining moment of loss for the Greeks gave rise to a legend so typical of their enduring belief in the power of miracles and their yearning for the holy city. At the moment that the soldiers approached the altar, the priests took the holy vessels and approached the sanctuary and – the story goes – the wall opened to admit them, and closed again behind them; and there they will remain safe until an Orthodox emperor restores St. Sophia to a church. The basis for this story may lie in the possibility that some of the priests were able to get away through one of the old passages that connected the church to the patriarch’s residence behind, and so escape. And there was one other small, grim consolation. The Ottomans smashed open the tomb of the hated Venetian doge, Enrico Dandolo, who had wrought a similar devastation on the city 250 years earlier. They found no treasure, but they hurled his bones into the street for the dogs to gnaw.
All morning Mehmet remained in his camp outside the walls, awaiting reports of the city’s capitulation and its sack. He received a steady stream of news and frightened deputations of citizens. Ambassadors came from the podesta of Galata with gifts, seeking assurance that the pact of neutrality should remain in place, but he made no categoric reply. Soldiers brought the head of Orhan, but it was the face of Constantine that Mehmet was most anxious to look on. The fate of the emperor and the verification of his death remain confused and apocryphal. For a long time there was no definitive report of his end, and it seems that Mehmet may have ordered a search of the battlefield for his body. Later in the day some Janissaries, possibly Serbs, brought a head to the sultan; according to Doukas, the grand duke Lucas Notaras was present at this scene and confirmed the identity of his master. The head – or a head – was then fixed on the column of Justinian opposite St. Sophia as a proof to the Greeks that their emperor was dead. Later the skin was peeled off, the head stuffed with straw and was progressed with elaborate ceremony around the principal courts of the Muslim world as an emblem of power and conquest.
How – or even, according to some, if – he died is uncertain. No reliable eyewitness was present at the scene and the truth splinters and fragments into partisan and apocryphal accounts. The Ottoman chroniclers unite in presenting a disparaging but quite specific account, many versions of which were written long after the event and seem to draw on one another: “the blind-hearted emperor” tried to flee when it was obvious that the battle was lost. He was making his way down to the steep streets to the Horn or the Marmara with his retinue to look for a ship when he ran into a band ofazaps and Janissaries bent on plunder. “A desperate battle ensued. The Emperor’s horse slipped as he was attacking a wounded azap, whereupon the azap pulled himself together, and cut off the Emperor’s head. When they saw this, the rest of the enemy troops lost hope and azaps managed to kill or capture most of them. A great quantity of money and precious stones in the possession of the Emperor’s retinue were also seized.”
The Greek accounts see him generally charging into the fray at the wall with his faithful band of nobles as the front line collapses. In the version of Chalcocondylas, “the Emperor turned to Cantacuzenos and the few that were with them, and said, ‘Let us then go forward, men, against these barbarians.’ Cantacuzenos, a brave man, was killed, and the Emperor Constantine himself was forced back and was relentlessly pursued, struck on the shoulder and then killed.” There are many variants of this story that end in a mound of bodies at the St. Romanus Gate or near one of the locked posterns; all of them provided the Greek people with enduring legends about the emperor. “The Emperor of Constantinople was killed,” recorded Giacomo Tetaldi with unvarnished simplicity. “Some say his head was cut off, others that he died in the crowd pressed against the gate. Both stories could very well be true.” “He was killed and his head was presented to the Lord of the Turks on a lance,” wrote Benvenuto, the consul of Ancona in the city. The fact that there was no clear identification of the body suggests that Constantine may well have stripped off his imperial regalia at the final onslaught and died like a common soldier. Many of the corpses were decapitated, and it would subsequently have been difficult to distinguish the fallen. Apocryphal stories abounded, some that he had escaped by ship, but these may be discounted, others that Mehmet gave his body to the Greeks for burial in one of several locations in the city, but no sure site can be identified. The uncertainty of his ending would become the focus for a growing body of Greek legend, a sense of yearning for lost glory, reflected in songs and lamentations:
Weep Christians of the East and the West, weep and cry over this great destruction. On Tuesday the 29th day of May in the year 1453, the sons of Hagar took the town of Constantinople … And when Constantine Dragases … heard the news … he seized his lance, strapped on his sword, he mounted his mare, his mare with white feet and struck the Turks, the impious dogs. He killed ten pashas and sixty Janissaries, but his sword broke and his lance broke and he remained alone, alone without any help … and a Turk struck him on the head and poor Constantine fell from his mare; and he lay stretched out on the earth in the dust and the blood. They cut off his head and fixed it on the end of a lance, and they buried his body under a laurel tree.
The “unfortunate emperor” was forty-nine years old when he died. Whatever the circumstances of his death, it seems clear that he tried to the very end to keep the flame of Byzantium alight. “The ruler of Istanbul was brave and asked for no quarter,” declared the chronicler Oruch, in a rare note of begrudging respect from the Ottomans. He had been a redoubtable opponent.
Later in the day, when the chaos had died down and some semblance of order had been restored, Mehmet made his own triumphant entry into Constantinople. He passed through the Gate of Charisius – that was to become in Turkish, the Edirne Gate – on horseback, accompanied on foot by his viziers, beylerbeys, the ulema, and commanders and by his crack troops, his bodyguards, and foot soldiers, in a show of pageantry that has been amplified by legend. The green banners of Islam and the red banners of the sultan were unfurled as the cavalcade jingled through the archway. After portraits of Kemal Ataturk, it is probably the single most famous image in Turkish history, endlessly memorialized in poems and pictures. In nineteenth-century prints the bearded Mehmet sits upright on his proudly stepping horse, his face turned to one side. He is flanked by sturdy mustachioed Janissaries carrying matchlocks, spears, and battle axes and imams whose white beards symbolize the wisdom of Islam, and behind the waving banners a thicket of clustered spears stretches deep to the horizon. To the left a black warrior, muscled like a bodybuilder, stands proudly erect as a representative of all the other nations of the Faith welcoming the gazi warriors into the inheritance promised by the Prophet. His scimitar points to a heap of fallen Christians at the sultan’s feet, whose shields are surmounted with crosses – a memory of the Crusades and a symbol of the triumph of Islam over Christianity. According to legend, Mehmet stopped and gave thanks to God. Then he turned to congratulate his “seventy or eighty thousand Muslim heroes, crying out: ‘Halt not Conquerors! God be praised! You are the Conquerors of Constantinople!’” It was the iconic moment at which he assumed the name by which he has always been known in Turkish –Fatih, the Conqueror – and the instant at which the Ottoman Empire came fully into its own. He was twenty-one years old.
Mehmet then processed into the heart of the city to inspect the buildings that he had visualized so clearly from afar – past the church of the Holy Apostles and the mighty aqueduct of Valens toward St. Sophia. He was probably sobered rather than impressed by what he saw. It resembled a human Pompeii more than the City of Gold. Uncontrolled, the army had forgotten the edict to leave the fabric of the buildings untouched. They had fallen on Constantinople, according to Kritovoulos, with a measure of exaggeration, “like a fire or a whirlwind … the whole city was deserted and emptied and appeared ravaged and charred as if by fire … the only houses left had been devastated, so ruined that they struck fear in the hearts of all that saw them because of the enormous devastation.” Although he had promised his army three days of looting, it had effectively been picked clean in one. In order to prevent even greater destruction he broke his promise and ordered an end to the looting by nightfall on the first day – and it says something for the underlying discipline of his army that the chavushes were able to enforce obedience.
Mehmet rode on, stopping to inspect particular landmarks along the way. According to legend, as he passed the serpent column of Delphi, he struck it with his mace and broke off the under jaw of one of the heads. Passing the statue of Justinian, he rode up to the front doors of St. Sophia and dismounted. Bowing down to the ground, he poured a handful of dust over his turban as an act of humility to God. Then he stepped inside the wrecked church. He seems to have been both amazed and appalled by what he saw. As he walked across the great space and stared up at the dome, he caught sight of a soldier smashing away at the marble pavement. He asked the man why he was demolishing the floor. “For the Faith,” the man replied. Infuriated by this visible defiance of his orders to preserve the buildings, Mehmet struck the man with his sword. He was dragged off half-dead by Mehmet’s attendants. A few Greeks, who were still hiding in the farthest recesses of the building, came out and threw themselves at his feet, and some priests reappeared – possibly those who had miraculously been “swallowed up” by the walls. In one of those unpredictable acts of mercy that characterized the sultan, Mehmet ordered that these men should be allowed to go home under protection. Then he called for an imam to go up into the pulpit and recite the call to prayer, and he himself climbed onto the altar and bowed down and prayed to the victorious God.
Later, according to the Ottoman historian Tursun Bey, Mehmet, “mounting as [Jesus] the spirit of God ascending to the fourth sphere of heaven,” climbed up through the galleries of the church out onto the dome. From here he could look out over the church and the ancient heart of the Christian city. Below, the decay of a once-proud empire was all too apparent. Many of the buildings surrounding the church had collapsed, including most of the raised seating of the Hippodrome and the old Royal Palace. This building, once the center of imperial power, had long been a ruin, totally wrecked by the crusaders in 1204. As he surveyed the desolate scene, “he thought of the impermanence and instability of this world, and its ultimate destruction,” and remembered a couplet of poetry that recalled the obliteration of the Persian Empire by the Arabs in the seventh century:
The spider is curtain-bearer in the Palace of Chosroes
The owl sounds the relief in the castle of Afrasiyab.
It is a melancholy image. Mehmet had achieved everything he had dreamed of; at the end of an enormous day when he had confirmed the Ottoman Empire as the great superpower of the age, he had already stared over the edge of its own decline. He rode back through the wrecked city. Long lines of captives were being herded into makeshift tents outside the fosse. Almost the whole population of 50,000 had been led away to the ships and the camp; maybe 4,000 had been killed in the day’s fighting. Separated from their families, children could be heard calling out for their mothers, men for their wives, all “dumbfounded by such a catastrophe.” In the Ottoman camp there were fires and festivities, singing and dancing to pipes and drums. Horses were dressed in the robes of priests and the crucifix was mockingly paraded through the Ottoman camp, topped with a Turkish cap. Booty was traded, precious stones bought and sold. Men were said to become rich overnight “by buying jewels for a few pence,” “gold and silver were traded for the price of tin.”
If the day had unfolded in pitiful scenes and terrible instances of massacre, there was nothing particular to Islam in this behavior. It was the expected reaction of any medieval army that had taken a city by storm. The history of Byzantium could produce many similar episodes that were only incidentally conducted on religious grounds. It was no worse than the Byzantine sack of the Saracen city of Candia on Crete in 961, when Nicephorus Phocas – a man nicknamed “the white death of the Saracens” – lost control of his army for three days of appalling carnage; no worse than the Crusader sack of Constantinople in 1204 itself, and more disciplined than an irrational outburst of xenophobia that had preceded it in 1183, when the Byzantines butchered nearly every Latin in the city, “women and children, the old and infirm, even the sick from the hospitals.” But when night fell on the Bosphorus and on the city on May 29, 1453, and slanted in through the windows of the dome of St. Sophia and obliterated the mosaic portraits of emperors and angels, the porphyry columns, the onyx and marble floors, the smashed furniture and the pools of dried blood, it carried Byzantium away with it too, once and for all.
The ruined palace of Hormisdas on the Marmara shore