Constantinople: The Last Great Siege, 1453 (12 page)

Back in Edirne Mehmet had either predicted, or got wind of, Constantine’s appeal to his brothers in the Morea – and moved rapidly to scotch it. On 1 October 1452 he ordered his elderly general Turahan Bey to march into the Peloponnese and attack Demetrios and Thomas. He ravaged the countryside, striking far into the south and making the release of forces back to Constantinople an impossibility. Meanwhile the supply of grain from the Black Sea was starting to dry up. A new embassy was sent to Venice in the autumn. The Senate’s reply on 16 November was as vague as before, but the Venetians were shortly to have their attention drawn into sharp focus by events further east.

By November the masters of Italian ships plying the routes between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean found themselves in a quandary as to whether to submit to Mehmet’s custom toll at the Throat Cutter or to ignore it and risk the consequences. The force of the current meant that ships travelling downstream had a fair chance of passing through the checkpoint before they could be blasted out of the water. On 26 November a Venetian captain, Antonio Rizzo, came down the Bosphorus from the Black Sea with a cargo of food for the city. Approaching the castle he decided to take the risk. Ignoring warning shouts from the bank to lower his sails, Rizzo pressed on. A volley of shots sped low across the water and one giant stone ball struck the lightweight hull of his galley, shattering it. The captain and thirty survivors were able to make it to the shore in a small boat where they were promptly captured, bound in chains and marched off to face the Sultan’s displeasure in the town of Didimotkon near Edirne. While they languished in prison, the Venetian ambassador in Constantinople travelled hotfoot to the imperial court to beg for the sailors’ lives. He arrived too late. Mehmet had determined to make an example of the Venetians. Most of the men he beheaded; Rizzo himself was impaled
‘by a stake through his anus’. All the bodies were then left to rot outside the town walls as a warning against disobedience. ‘I saw them a few days later, when I went there,’ the Greek chronicler Doukas recalled. A few of the sailors were returned to Constantinople to ensure the news got back to the city. There was one other survivor: Mehmet took a fancy to the son of Rizzo’s clerk and put the boy in the seraglio.

This savage demonstration had the desired effect. It drove the populace of Constantinople into instant panic. Meanwhile, despite Constantine’s embassies, there was still no sign of concerted help from the West. Only the Pope could stand above Europe’s factional mercantile interests, dynastic feuds and wars, and appeal for help in the name of Christendom, but the papacy itself was involved in an intractable and long-running dispute with the Orthodox Church that cast a shadow over all such dealings. It was about to severely blight Constantine’s chances of organizing effective resistance.

The principal source of Constantine’s difficulties in mustering help from the West and organizing an effective defence of his city could be pinpointed to a dramatic incident one summer’s day nearly 400 years earlier – though its causes were far older even than that.

On 16 July 1054, at about 3 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 towards 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 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 that 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.

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 worshipped 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 neighbours as uncouth barbarians; they probably had more in common with the Muslims on their frontier than the Franks across the sea. At the centre 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 towards 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 imperilled for base and materialistic motives. The people were profoundly anti-papist: 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.