It is far better for a country to remain under the rule of Islam than be governed by Christians who refuse to acknowledge the rights of the Catholic Church.
Pope Gregory VII, 1073
Flee from the papists as you would from a snake and from the flames of a fire.
St. Mark Eugenicus, fifteenth-century Greek Orthodox theologian
The principal source of Constantine’s difficulties in mustering help from the West and organizing an effective defense of his city could be pinpointed to a dramatic incident one summer’s day nearly four hundred years earlier – though its causes were far older even than that.
On July 16, 1054, at about three o’clock in the afternoon, as the clergy were preparing for the afternoon liturgy in St. Sophia, three prelates, dressed in full canonical robes, stepped into the church through one of the great west doors and walked purposefully toward the altar, watched by the gathering congregation. The men were cardinals of the Catholic Church sent from Rome by the pope to settle theological disputes with their brothers in the East and led by one Humbert of Mourmoutiers. They had been in the city for some time, but this afternoon, after lengthy and awkward negotiations, they had lost patience and were coming to take decisive action. Humbert carried in his hands a document whose content was to prove explosive for Christian unity. Advancing into the sanctuary, he placed a bull of excommunication on the great altar, turned smartly on his heels, and walked out. As the stiff-necked cardinal clopped back into the brilliant summer light he shook the dust from his feet and proclaimed: “Let God look and judge.” One of the church deacons ran into the street after Humbert, waving the bull and beseeching him to take it back. Humbert refused and walked off, leaving the document lying in the dust. Two days later the cardinals took a ship back to Rome; violent religious rioting broke out in the streets that was only pacified by pronouncing anathema on the papal delegation; the offending document was publicly burned. This incident was the start of a process known to history as the Great Schism, which was to inflict deep wounds on Christendom – the anathemas were not rescinded until 1965, but the scars still remain. And for Constantine in the winter of 1452 they were to pose an intractable problem.
The church of St. Sophia
In reality the events of that day were only the culmination of a lengthy process of separation between two forms of worship that had been gathering force for hundreds of years. It was based as much as anything on cultural, political, and economic differences. In the East they worshiped in Greek, in the West in Latin; there were different forms of worship, different approaches to church organization, and differing views on the role of the pope. More generally the Byzantines had come to regard their Western neighbors as uncouth barbarians; they probably had more in common with the Muslims on their frontier than the Franks across the sea. At the center of their disagreement, however, were two key issues. The Orthodox were prepared to accept that the pope had a special place among the patriarchs, but they bridled at the notion articulated by Pope Nicholas I in 865 that his office was endowed with authority “over all the earth, that is, over every church.” This they perceived as autocratic arrogance.
The second issue was doctrinal. The bull of excommunication had accused the Eastern Church of omitting one word from the creed – a matter of supreme importance to the theologically preoccupied citizens of Byzantium. The apparently innocuous word, in Latin filioque, “and from the son,” had immense significance. Whereas the original Nicene Creed ran: “I believe … in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the Giver of Life, who proceeds from the Father, who with the Father and the Son together is worshipped and together glorified,” the Church in the West had come to add the additional word “filioque” to make the text read “who proceeds from the father and from the son.” In time the upshouldering Roman church even started to accuse the Orthodox of error for omitting the phrase. The Orthodox, in reply, claimed that the addition was theologically untrue; that the Holy Spirit proceeds only from the Father, and to add the name of the Son was heretical. Such issues were the stuff of riots within Constantinople.
With time the rift widened, despite efforts to patch it up. The sack of Constantinople in 1204 by “Christian” crusaders, which Pope Innocent III himself declared to be “an example of perdition and the works of darkness,” added a wider cultural hatred of all things connected to the West; so did the mercantile power of the Italian city-states that grew at Byzantium’s expense as a direct result of the plunder. In 1340 Baalaam of Calabria suggested to Pope Benedict XII that it was not so much “a difference of dogma that turns the hearts of the Greeks against you as the hatred of the Latins which has entered into their spirits, in consequence of the many and great evils which the Greeks have suffered from the Latins at various times, and are still suffering day by day.” It was true up to a point. But dogma was always central to the way ordinary people in the city lived their faith, and their tenacity to its tenets, in the face of attempts over the centuries by their own emperors to impose anything they considered contrary, had been a stubborn and persistent pattern in the mosaic of Byzantine history.
By the fifteenth century the relentless pressure of the Ottoman state was forcing successive emperors westward in a wearying round of pleas for help. When the emperor John VIII toured Italy and Hungary in the 1420s the Catholic king of Hungary suggested that aid would be more readily forthcoming if the Orthodox united with the Church of Rome and swore loyalty to its pope and creed. Union had become for the ruling families a potential tool of policy as much as a matter of faith: the threat of a united Christian Crusade was used repeatedly to restrain Ottoman aggression against the city. (John’s father Manuel had given typically Byzantine advice to his children on his deathbed: “Whenever the Turks begin to be troublesome, send embassies to the West at once, offer to accept union, and protract negotiations to great length; the Turks so greatly fear such union that they will become reasonable; and still the union will not be accomplished because of the enmity of the Latin nations!”) The advice had proved useful in the past, but as the Ottomans grew stronger they tended to exactly the opposite course of action: the move toward union became increasingly a spur to armed intervention. For John VIII, however, fear of Ottoman displeasure and the distrust of his people were being outweighed by the frequency with which the enemy was knocking on the gates of the city, and when Pope Eugenius IV proposed a council in Italy to accomplish union of the churches, he set sail again in November 1437, leaving his brother Constantine as regent to mind the city.
The resulting Council of Florence was a protracted, bitter affair that was not concluded until June 1439. When it finally proclaimed that the union of the two churches had been achieved, church bells rang out across Europe all the way to England. Only one of the Orthodox delegates had refused to sign the document, which had been phrased in a wording designed to fudge some of the key issues: papal claims to supremacy were recognized along with the concept of the filioque, though the Orthodox were not actually required to insert it into their creed. But for the Greeks, acceptance began to unravel almost before the ink was dry. Back in the city the Orthodox faithful greeted the returning delegation with hostility; many of those who signed immediately revoked their signatures. The Eastern patriarchs refused to accept the decision of their delegates; the next patriarch of Constantinople, Gregory Mammas, who supported the union, was widely unpopular, and it became impossible to celebrate the union in St. Sophia. The issue split the city in two: Constantine and most of his immediate circle of nobles, officers, and civil servants supported the union; only a fraction of the clergy and people did – they believed that union had been forced on them by the treacherous Franks and that their immortal souls had been imperiled for base and materialistic motives. The people were profoundly antipapist: they were accustomed to equate the pope with the antichrist, “the wolf, the destroyer”; “Rum Papa,” the Roman Pope, was a popular choice of name for city dogs. The citizens formed a volatile proletariat: impoverished, superstitious, easily swayed to riot and disorder.
The sea of religious trouble that Constantine inherited with the title of emperor was not untypical of the whole long history of Byzantium: Constantine the Great had been similarly vexed by doctrinal disputes eleven hundred years earlier. Constantine XI was a soldier rather than a theologian, and his view of the union was strictly pragmatic. He was obsessed by only one thing – saving the city whose ancient past had been put in his care. If union presented the only chance of doing this, then so be it, but this did not endear him to his citizens. His constitutional position was also precarious: he had never been formally crowned in Mistra. The ceremony should have taken place in St. Sophia, but there was a strong feeling that the coronation of a unionist emperor by a unionist patriarch would risk grave public disorder. It was quietly shelved. Many in the city refused to remember their new emperor in their prayers, and one of the chief doubters at the Council, George Scholarios, took to a monastery under the monastic name of Gennadios and started to orchestrate resistance in the form of a synod of antiunionist clergy. In 1451 the patriarch Gregory tired of this unremitting hostility and departed for Rome, where he kept Pope Nicholas fully informed of the activities of the antiunionists. No suitable candidate could be found to replace him. Constantinople henceforth had neither a fully legitimate emperor nor a patriarch.
As the threat of war with Mehmet grew, Constantine addressed a series of increasingly desperate pleas to the pope; unwisely perhaps, he also included a statement from the antiunionists proposing a new synod. Gregory’s briefings about the state of the union in Constantinople had hardened Nicholas’s heart, and he was in no mood for further prevarication from the backsliding Greeks. The response was frosty: “If you, with your nobles and the people of Constantinople accept the decree of union, you will find Us and Our venerable brothers, the cardinals of the Holy Roman Church, ever eager to support your honour and your empire. But if you and your people refuse to accept the decree, you will force Us to take such measures as are necessary for your salvation and Our honour.” The threat only stiffened the resolve of the antiunionists, who continued to work to undermine Constantine’s position in the city. In September 1452 one of their number wrote: “Constantine Palaiologos … remains uncrowned because the church has no leader and is indeed in disarray as a result of the turmoil and confusion brought upon it by the falsely named union … This union was evil and displeasing to God and has instead split the church and scattered its children and destroyed us utterly. Truth to tell, this is the source of all our other misfortunes.”
Back in Rome Pope Nicholas resolved on steps to enforce the decisions taken in Florence. He decided to send a papal legate to Constantinople to ensure that the union was celebrated in St. Sophia. The man he chose was Cardinal Isidore, formerly Bishop of Kiev. Isidore was a Byzantine who understood the delicacies of the problem at first hand. He had accepted union at Florence. On his return to Kiev his Orthodox flock had rejected and imprisoned him. He set out for Constantinople in May 1452 with a body of 200 archers, funded by the pope, as a gesture of military support for his principally theological mission. En route he was joined by Leonard of Chios, the Genoese archbishop of Lesbos, a man who was to be an engaged and partisan commentator on everything that ensued. Advance warning had reached the antiunionists of their coming and whipped the city into deeper turmoil. Gennadios delivered a virulent public harangue against union that lasted from midday until evening. He begged the people to hold fast to their faith rather than hope for material assistance that would be of little value. However, when Cardinal Isidore stepped ashore at Constantinople on October 26, 1452, the sight of his small body of archers made a favorable impression on the populace. This small troop of men might only be the advance guard of a substantial force: there was a visible shift in favor of union. For a while opinion seesawed back and forth in the volatile city. The antiunionists were held to be unpatriotic, but when no further ships arrived, the people again swung back to Gennadios, and there were outbreaks of antiunionist rioting. Leonard demanded in shrill tones that Constantine should imprison the ringleaders. He complained bitterly that: “apart from … a certain few monks and laymen, pride had possessed nearly all the Greeks, so that there was no one who, moved by zeal for the true Faith or for his own salvation, would be seen to be the first to be contemptuous of his obstinate opinions.” Constantine refused to act on this advice; he feared the city might descend into chaos. Instead he called the antiunionist synod to the palace to explain their objections.
Ten days later, the sound of gunfire at the Throat Cutter could be heard in the city. As the fate of Rizzo and his crew became known, a new spasm of fear gripped the population. Support returned to the unionists once more. Gennadios issued another blast against the waverers: that help from the West would lead to the loss of their faith, that its value would be doubtful, and that he at least would have nothing to do with it. Gennadios had deeper worries than the loss of the city: he sincerely believed that the end of the world was nigh. He was concerned that the Orthodox should face the apocalypse with spotless souls. There was further disorder in the streets. Monks, nuns, and lay people ranged about shouting: “We don’t want Latin help or Latin union; let us be rid of the worship of the unleavened.” Despite Gennadios, it seems that a begrudging decision was taken by the frightened populace to accept the Council of Florence, at least temporarily. (With true sophistry, the Byzantines had a time-honored escape clause for such an action: the Doctrine of Economy, which permitted the temporary acceptance of an unorthodox theological position to ensure survival – it was an approach to spiritual matters that had repeatedly infuriated the Catholic Church.) Cardinal Isidore for his part judged that the moment was ripe to enforce the act of union – and to save the imperiled souls of the Greeks.
In this supercharged atmosphere of fear and religious hysteria, a liturgy to celebrate the union was performed on December 12, 1452, in the dead days of winter. It took place in St. Sophia “with the greatest solemnity on the part of the clergy, and also the reverend cardinal of Russia was there, who was sent by the Pope, and also the most serene Emperor with all his lords and the whole population of Constantinople.” The decrees of the union were read out and the pope was commemorated in the prayers, along with the absent patriarch Gregory, but the details of the service were alien to many of the watching Greeks: the language and ritual of the service were Catholic rather than Orthodox, the consecrated Host consisted of unleavened bread, a heresy to the Orthodox, and cold water was poured into the cup and mixed with the wine. Isidore wrote to the pope announcing the success of his mission:
the whole of the city of Constantinople was united with the Catholic church; your Holiness was remembered in the liturgy, and the most reverend patriarch Gregory, who during his stay in Constantinople was not remembered in any church, not even his own monastery, after the union was remembered in the whole city. They were all from the least to the greatest, together with the emperor, thanks be to God, united and catholic.
Only Gennadios and eight other monks had refused to participate, according to Isidore. It was probably wishful thinking. One Italian eyewitness recorded that the day was marked by great lamentations in the city. There was evidently no rioting during the service. More likely the Orthodox faithful participated through clenched teeth, then marched off to the monastery of the Pantocrator to consult Gennadios, who had become de facto the spiritual father of Orthodoxy and the patriarch in waiting. He, however, had retreated to his cell in silence and would not come out.
Henceforth the Orthodox shunned St. Sophia as “nothing better than a Jewish synagogue or a heathen temple”; they worshiped only in the securely Orthodox churches of the city. Without patriarch or congregation, the great church fell dark and silent. The continuous round of prayer died away, and the thousands of oil lamps that illuminated its dome, “like the whole heaven, scattered with glittering stars,” sputtered and went out. The sparsely attended services of the unionists huddled before the sanctuary. Birds fluttered mournfully around the nave. The Orthodox felt that the fulminations of Gennadios had proved justified: no mighty fleet sailed up the Marmara in defense of Christendom. From now on the split between unionist and Orthodox, between Greek and Latin, was deeper than ever, and it was reflected, henceforward, in all the Christian accounts of the siege. Schism was to cast a long shadow over Constantine’s attempts to defend the city.
On November 1, 1452, shortly before he retreated into self-imposed isolation, Gennadios had posted a manifesto on the monastery door of the Pantocrator. It read like the blast of prophecy, full of apocalyptic doom and self-justification:
Wretched Romans, how you have been led astray! You have departed from hope, which rests in God, by trusting in the power of the Franks. As well as the City itself, which will soon be destroyed, you have lost the true religion. O Lord, be merciful to me. I give witness in Your presence that I am pure and innocent from blame in this matter. Be aware, miserable citizens, what you are doing today. With slavery, which is hanging over your heads, you have denied the true faith handed down to you by your forefathers. You have confessed your impiety. Woe to you when you are judged!
A hundred and fifty miles away in Edirne, Mehmet followed these developments with more than passing interest. Fear of Christian unity had always been one of the guiding principles of Ottoman foreign policy; to Halil Pasha it justified the continuation of a peace policy: any attempt on the city might finally unite Christendom and turn Constantinople into the cause of a new Crusade. However, to Mehmet the intelligence from the city seemed promising. It encouraged him to be bold.
The sultan spent the short winter days and long nights brooding over his dreams of conquest. He was obsessed but uncertain. He tried on the trappings of imperial power in his new palace at Edirne, continuing to reform his household troops and tampering with the silver content of the currency to pay for it all. Mehmet gathered about him a group of Italian advisers, from whom he gleaned intelligence about the events in the West and military technology. He spent his days poring over illustrated treatises on fortifications and siege warfare. He was restless, febrile, irresolute. He consulted astrologers and turned over in his mind a method for unlocking the city’s defenses, struggling with the conservative wisdom of the old viziers who declared that it could not be done. At the same time he studied Ottoman history and the accounts of previous sieges of the city, forensically examining the causes for their failure. Unable to sleep, he spent his nights drawing sketches of the fortifications that he had scrutinized in the summer and designing strategies for storming them.
The chronicler Doukas has left a vivid account of these dark obsessive days. The picture he paints of the secretive, mistrustful sultan, eaten up by ambition, has a ring of truth about it, though probably intensified for his Christian audience. According to Doukas, Mehmet took to wandering about the streets at dusk disguised as a common soldier, listening to the gossip about him in the markets and caravanserais. If anyone were unwise enough to recognize and hail their sultan with the customary acclamation, Mehmet would stab the man to death. It was the kind of story, repeated with endless variants, that fully satisfied the Western image of the bloodthirsty tyrant. One night, toward the small hours, he sent his palace guards to fetch Halil, whom he perhaps saw as the main hindrance to his plans. The old vizier trembled at the summons; to be called to appear before “God’s shadow on earth” at such an hour did not bode well. He embraced his wife and children as if for the last time and followed the soldiers, carrying a golden salver loaded with coins. Doukas suggests that his fear was justified: that he had taken many bribes from the Greeks to dissuade Mehmet from war, though the truth of this remains forever unclear – Halil had been rich enough in his own right to lend money to the old sultan, Mehmet’s father. When Halil reached the royal bedchamber, he found Mehmet up and dressed. The old man prostrated himself on the ground and proffered the dish. “What is this?” Mehmet asked. “Lord,” Halil replied, “it is customary when a noble is summoned before his master at an unusual hour not to appear empty handed.” “I do not need gifts,” Mehmet said, “just give me the City.” Thoroughly frightened, as he was intended to be, at the strangeness of the summons and the feverish demeanor of the sultan, Halil gave his wholehearted support to the project. Mehmet concluded: “by placing our trust in the assent of God and in the prayer of the Prophet, we will take the city,” and dismissed the chastened vizier back into the night.
Whatever the exact truth of this episode, sometime around January 1453 Mehmet called his ministers together and made the case for war in a speech recorded by the Greek chronicler Kritovoulos. It set the matter of Constantinople within the whole story of the rise of the Ottomans. Mehmet clearly understood the damage that the city had inflicted on the fledgling state during the ruinous civil war fifty years earlier, how it “has not stopped marching against us, constantly arming our people against each other, promoting disorder and civil war and damaging our realm.” He feared its potential to furnish a cause for endless war with Christian powers in the future. Captured, it would provide the centerpiece of the empire, “without it, or while it is as at present, nothing we have is safe, and we can hope for nothing additional.” Constantine’s recent initiative to exploit Orhan must have been clearly in the mind of his listeners. He also attempted to overturn a deep-seated belief in the Islamic mind-set dating all the way back to the Arab sieges: that the city was simply not conquerable. He was well informed on recent events in the city; he knew that as he spoke the inhabitants “are fighting as enemies over their differing religious beliefs, and their internal organisation is full of sedition and disturbance on this very account,” and that, unlike in the past, the Christians no longer controlled the sea lanes. There was also an appeal to the gazi tradition – like their forefathers, it was the duty of Muslims to wage holy war. Mehmet was particularly keen to emphasize the need for speed; all available resources must be concentrated to deliver a knockout blow; “we must spare nothing for the war, neither human resources nor money nor weapons nor anything else, nor must we consider anything else as important until we take or destroy it.” It was the rallying cry for a massive strike, and it seemed to have carried the day. Preparations for war started to gather pace.
Winters on the Bosphorus can be surprisingly severe, as the Arabs had discovered during the siege of 717. The site of the city, jutting out into the straits, leaves it exposed to fierce squalls hurtling down from the Black Sea on the north wind. A particularly dank and subzero cold penetrates to the marrow of the bones; weeks of cheerless rain can churn the streets into mud and prompt flash floods down the steep lanes; sudden snowstorms arise as if from nowhere to obliterate the Asian shore half a mile away then vanish as quickly as they have come; there are long still days of muffling fog when an eerie silence seems to hold the city in an iron grasp, choking the clappers in church bells and deadening the sound of hooves in the public squares, as if the horses were shod in boots of felt. The winter of 1452–1453 seems to have afflicted the citizens with particularly desolate and unstable weather. People observed “unusual and strange earthquakes and shakings of the earth, and from the heavens thunder and lightning and awful thunderbolts and flashing in the sky, mighty winds, floods, pelting rain and torrential downpours.” It did not improve the overall mood. No flotillas of Christian ships came to fulfill the promises of union. The city gates remained firmly closed, and the supply of food from the Black Sea dried up under the sultan’s throttle. The common people spent their days listening to the words of their Orthodox priests, drinking unwatered wine in the taverns, and praying to the icon of the Virgin to protect the city, as it had in the Arab sieges. A hysterical concern for the purity of their souls seized the people, doubtless influenced by the fulminations of Gennadios. It was considered sinful to have attended a liturgy celebrated by a unionist or to have received communion from a priest who was present at the service of union, even if he were simply a bystander to the rites. Constantine was jeered as he rode in the streets.
Seal depicting the protecting Virgin
Despite this unpromising atmosphere, the emperor made what plans he could for the city’s defense. He dispatched envoys to buy food from the Aegean islands and beyond: “wheat, wine, olive oil, dried figs, chick peas, barley and other pulses.” Work was put in hand to repair neglected sections of the defenses – both the land and sea walls. There was a shortage of good stone and no possibility of obtaining more from quarries outside the city. Materials were scrounged from ruined buildings and abandoned churches; even old tombstones were pressed into service. The ditch was cleared out in front of the land wall, and it appears that despite their reservations, Constantine was successful in persuading the populace to participate in this work. Money was raised by public collection from individuals and from the churches and monasteries to pay for food and arms. All the available weapons in the city – of which there were far too few – were called in and redistributed. Armed garrisons were dispatched to the few fortified strongholds still held by Byzantium beyond its own walls: at Selymbria and Epibatos on the north shore of the Marmara, Therapia on the Bosphorus beyond the Throat Cutter, and to the largest of the Princes’ Islands. In a final gesture of impotent defiance, Constantine sent galleys to raid Ottoman coastal villages on the Sea of Marmara. Captives were taken and sold in the city as slaves. “And from this the Turks were roused to great anger against the Greeks, and swore that they would bring misfortune on them.”
The only other bright spot for Constantine during this period was the arrival of a straggle of Italian ships that he was able to persuade – or forcibly detain – to take part in the city’s defense. On December 2 a large Venetian transport galley from Kaffa on the Black Sea, under the command of one Giacomo Coco, managed to trick its way past the guns at the Throat Cutter by pretending that it had already paid its customs dues farther upstream. As it approached the castle, the men on board began to salute the Ottoman gunners “as friends, greeting them and sounding the trumpets and making cheerful sounds. And by the third salute that our men made, they had got away from the castle, and the water took them on toward Constantinople.” At the same time news of the true state of affairs had reached the Venetians and Genoese from their representatives in the city, and the Republics stirred themselves into tardy activity. After the sinking of Rizzo’s ship, the Venetian Senate ordered its vice-captain of the Gulf, Gabriel Trevisano, to Constantinople to accompany its merchant convoys back from the Black Sea. Among the Venetians who came at this time was one Nicolo Barbaro, a ship’s doctor, who was to write the most lucid diary of the months ahead.
A Venetian great galley, the bulk carriers of the Mediterranean
Within the Venetian colony in the city, concern was growing. The Venetian bailey, Minotto, an enterprising and resolute man, was desperate to keep three great merchant galleys and Trevisano’s two light galleys for the defense of the city. At a meeting with the emperor, Trevisano, and the other captains on December 14, he begged them to stay “firstly for the love of God, then for the honour of Christianity and the honour of our Signoria of Venice.” After lengthy negotiations the ships’ masters, to their credit, agreed to remain, though not without considerable wrangling over whether they could have their cargo on board or should keep it in the city as surety of their good faith. Constantine was suspicious that once the cargo was loaded, the masters would depart; it was only after swearing to the emperor personally that they were allowed to load their bales of silk, copper, wax, and other stuffs. Constantine’s fears were not unfounded: on the night of February 26, one of the Venetian ships and six from the city of Candia on Crete slipped their anchors and fled before a stiff northeasterly wind. “With these ships there escaped many persons of substance, about 700 in all, and these ships got safely away to Tenedos, without being captured by the Turkish armada.”
This dispiriting event was offset by one other positive contribution. The appeals of the Genoese podesta at Galata had elicited a concrete offer of help. On about January 26 two large galleons arrived loaded “with many excellent devices and machines for war, and outstanding soldiers, who were both brave and confident.” The spectacle of these ships entering the imperial harbor with “four hundred men in full armour” on deck made an immediate impression on both the populace and the emperor. Their leader was a professional soldier connected to one of the great families of the republic, Giovanni Giustiniani Longo, a highly experienced commander who had prepared this expedition at his own initiative and cost. He brought 700 well-armed men in all, 400 recruited from Genoa, another 300 from Rhodes and the Genoese island of Chios, the power base of the Giustiniani family. Constantine was quick to realize the value of this man and offered him the island of Lemnos if the Ottoman menace should be repulsed. Giustiniani was to play a fateful role in the defense of the city in the weeks ahead. A straggle of other soldiers came. Three Genoese brothers, Antonio, Paolo, and Troilo Bocchiardo, brought a small band of men. The Catalans supplied a contingent, and a Castilian nobleman, Don Francisco of Toledo, answered the call. Otherwise the appeal to Christendom had brought nothing but disharmony. A sense of betrayal ran through the city. “We had received as much aid from Rome as had been sent to us by the sultan of Cairo,” George Sphrantzes recalled bitterly.