Constantinople: The Last Great Siege, 1453 (26 page)

Spurred by this, Mehmet set out early next morning, 21 April, with ‘about ten thousand horse’ and rode from his camp at Maltepe to the harbour at the Double Columns where the fleet was anchored. Baltaoglu was summoned ashore to answer for the naval debacle. The unfortunate admiral had been badly wounded in one eye from a stone hurled by one of his own men in the heat of battle; he must have presented a ghastly spectacle as he prostrated himself before his sultan. In the colourful words of a Christian chronicler, Mehmet ‘groaned from the depths of his heart and breathed smoke from his mouth in his rage’. Furiously he demanded to know why he had failed to take the ships when the sea was flat calm: ‘if you could not take them, how do you hope to take the fleet which is in the harbour at Constantinople?’ The admiral replied that he had done everything in his power to seize the Christian ships: ‘You know,’ he pleaded, ‘it was visible to all, that with the ram of my galley I never let go of the poop of the Emperor’s ship – I fought fiercely all the time – the events were plainly visible, that my men are dead and there are many dead on the other galleys too.’ Mehmet was so upset and angry that he ordered his admiral to be impaled. Appalled, the council and courtiers threw themselves before Mehmet to plead for his life, arguing that he had fought bravely to the end and that the loss of his eye was visible proof of his efforts. Mehmet relented. The death sentence was commuted. In front of his
fleet and the watching circle of cavalry, Baltaoglu received a hundred lashes. He was stripped of his rank and property, which was distributed among the Janissaries. Mehmet understood the negative and positive propaganda value of such actions. Baltaoglu vanished into the obscurity of history and the poisoned chalice of naval command passed back to Hamza Bey, who had been admiral under Mehmet’s father. The lessons of this episode would not have been wasted on either the watching soldiers and sailors or on the inner circle of viziers and advisers. It was a chance to observe the perils of the sultan’s displeasure at first hand.

There is another version of this episode told by the Greek chronicler Doukas, whose tale of the siege is vivid but often implausible. In this account Mehmet had Baltaoglu stretched on the ground and delivered the hundred strokes himself ‘with a golden rod weighing five pounds, which the tyrant had ordered to be made so that he might thrash people’. Then one of the Janissaries, keen to gain further credit from the sultan, smashed him on the head with a stone and gouged out his eye. The story is colourful and almost certainly untrue but it reflected the popular Western view of Mehmet the Eastern tyrant, barbaric in his opulence, sadistic in his pleasures, unquestioningly served by a slave army.

Having made an example of his admiral, Mehmet called an immediate meeting of his inner council to discuss Constantine’s peace offer of the preceding day. In the speed of events, initiatives were starting to overlap each other out of any sequence. Confronted by a significant setback and the first stirrings of dissent, the question was simply whether to continue with the siege or to seek favourable terms.

There were two factions in the Ottoman high command that were engaged in their own long-running struggle for survival and power under the sultan’s volatile rule. On the one side was the chief vizier, Halil Pasha, an ethnic Turk of the old Ottoman ruling class who had been vizier under Murat, Mehmet’s father, and who had steered the young sultan through his turbulent early years. He had witnessed the crisis years of the 1440s and the Janissary revolt against Mehmet at Edirne and he was cautious about the chances of survival for Mehmet in the case of humiliation at the Greek walls. During the whole of the siege Halil’s strategy was undermined by the taunts of his opponents, who nicknamed him ‘the friend of the infidel’, the lover of Greek gold.

In opposition were the new men of Ottoman power: a group of ambitious military leaders who were largely outsiders – converted renegades from the sultan’s ever-expanding empire. They had always repudiated any peace policy and encouraged Mehmet’s dreams of world conquest. They attached their fortunes to the capture of this city. Foremost amongst them was the second vizier Zaganos Pasha, a Greek convert, ‘the one who was most feared and had the most voice and authority’, and who was a leading military commander. This faction had a strong backing from religious leaders, proponents of holy war, such as the learned Islamic scholar, Ulema Ahmet Gurani, Mehmet’s formidable tutor, and Sheikh Akshemsettin, who represented the long-cherished Islamic fervour to take the Christian city.

Halil argued that the opportunity should be taken to withdraw honourably from the siege on favourable terms: that the failed naval encounter revealed the difficulty of capturing the city and the possibility of a relieving Hungarian army or Italian fleet increased as the campaign dragged on. He voiced his conviction that the apple would one day fall into the sultan’s lap, ‘as the ripe fruit falls from the tree’, but that this golden fruit was not ripe yet. By imposing a punitive peace settlement, that day could be hastened. He proposed the demand of a massive 70,000 ducats as a yearly tribute from the emperor to lift the siege.

The war party strenuously opposed this line. Zaganos replied that the campaign should be pursued with intensified vigour, that the arrival of the Genoese ships only underlined the need for a decisive blow. It was a key moment. The Ottoman command recognized that their fortunes had reached a critical point but the intensity of the debate also reflected awareness amongst the leading viziers that they were arguing for their influence with the sultan, and ultimately their own survival. Mehmet sat on his dais above the debate whilst the rivals jockeyed for position, but by temperament and inclination he was always of the war party. The council decided by a clear majority to continue the campaign. An answer was sent back to Constantine that peace could only result from an immediate surrender of the city. The sultan would cede the Peloponnese to Constantine and compensate his brothers who currently held it. It was an offer designed to be refused and it duly was. Constantine had his own awareness of the obligations of history and stood in the shoes of his father. When the Ottomans were at the gates in 1397 Manuel II had been heard to
murmur: ‘Lord Jesus Christ, let it not come to pass that the great multitude of Christian people should hear it said that it was in the days of the Emperor Manuel that the City, with all its sacred and venerable monuments of the Faith, was delivered to the infidel.’ In this spirit, the emperor would fight to the last. The siege went on, while the war party, feeling the growing pressure of events, resolved to intensify the conflict.

Three miles away the assault on the city continued regardless, propelled by an integrated plan of attack that was secret to all but Mehmet and his generals. A huge bombardment of the land walls, which had commenced the day before, continued without ceasing throughout the night and into the day of the military council. The Ottoman fire was concentrated on the wall near the St Romanus Gate in the Lycus valley, the section of the defences that both sides knew to be most vulnerable.

Under incessant gunfire, a major tower, the Bactatinian, collapsed and several yards of outer wall fell with it. A sizeable breach had been effected and the defenders were suddenly exposed. ‘This was the start of fear of those in the city and in the fleet,’ recorded Nicolo Barbaro. ‘We did not doubt that they wanted to make an all-out attack right away; everyone generally believed that they would soon see Turkish turbans inside the city.’ What demoralized the defenders was again the speed with which the Ottoman guns could demolish apparently redoubtable defences when sufficient firepower was concentrated on a single spot. ‘For such a big stretch of the wall had been ruined by the bombardment that everyone thought himself lost, considering how in a few days they had destroyed so much of the wall.’ It seemed obvious to the defenders looking out from the gaping hole that a concerted attack at this point ‘with only ten thousand men’ would result in certain loss of the city. They waited for the inevitable assault but Mehmet and all the military command were at the Double Columns debating the future of the campaign and no order was given. In comparison to the fragmented volunteer nature of the Christian defence that relied heavily on individual initiative, it seemed that the Ottoman troops only responded to central directives. Nothing happened to press home the advantage of the guns and the defenders had time to regroup.

Under cover of darkness Giustiniani and his men set about making running repairs to the damaged wall. ‘These repairs were made with
barrels filled with stones and earth, and behind them there was made a very wide ditch with a dam at the end of it, which was covered with strips of vine and other layers of branches drenched with water to make them solid, so that it was as strong as the wall had been.’ This stockade of wood, earth and stones continued to be effective, smothering the force of the giant stone balls. Somehow these ad hoc repairs were undertaken in the face of continuous fire from ‘their huge cannon and from their other cannon, and from very many guns, countless bows and many hand guns’. Barbaro’s account of the day closes with a final haunting image of the enemy, swarming and alien, a glimpse of horror to the ship’s doctor: the ground in front of the wall ‘could not be seen, because it was covered by the Turks, particularly Janissaries, who are the bravest soldiers the Great Turk has, and also many of the Sultan’s slaves, who could be recognised by their white turbans, while the ordinary Turks wore red turbans’. Still no attack came. It was apparent that good luck – and ‘our merciful Lord Jesus Christ, who is full of compassion’ – had spared the city that day.

Events on 21 April seem suddenly to speed up and overlap each other, as if both sides recognized a moment of significant intensity. For the defenders it was a process of continuous reaction; without the resources to make sorties, they could only watch from within the triangle of the ancient walls, trust in the firmness of their fortifications and wait, rushing to each particular crisis, plugging gaps – and quarrelling. Blown back and forth by hope and despair, by rumours of attack and relieving armies, they worked ceaselessly to hold the line and they looked west for the smudge of approaching sails.

Mehmet seems to be have been spurred into a frenzy of activity by the events of these days. The failure of his navy, the fear of relief, the pessimism of his troops: these were the problems which occupied him on the 21st. He moved restlessly around the perimeter of the city, from the red and gold tent to the Double Columns to his troops above Galata, analyzing the problem in three dimensions, viewing the ‘golden fruit’ from different angles, turning it over in his mind. His desire for Constantinople went back to his childhood. From his first distant views of the city as a boy to his nocturnal ramblings through the streets of Adrianople in the winter of 1452 the city was an obsession that had informed his intense preoccupation with Western treatises on siege warfare, the preliminary studies of the terrain, the detailed
sketches of the walls. Mehmet was incessant in its pursuit: asking questions, garnering resources and technical skills, interrogating spies, storing information. The obsession was linked to secrecy, learned young in the dangerous world of the Ottoman court, which made him keep plans close to himself until they were ripe. On being asked once about a future campaign, Mehmet is reputed to have refused a direct answer and replied: ‘Be certain that if I knew that one of the hairs of my beard had learned my secret, I would pull it out and consign it to the flames.’ His next move was to be similarly guarded.

The problem, he reasoned, was the chain that guarded the entrance to the Horn. It barred his navy from pressurizing the city from more than one side and allowed the defenders to concentrate their meagre forces on defending the land walls, diminishing his huge numerical advantage. Ottoman guns had destroyed Constantine’s defensive wall across the Isthmus at Corinth in a week, but here, although the great cannon had certainly blasted holes in Theodosius’s ancient structure, progress had been slower than he had hoped. Seen from the outside, the defensive system was too complex and many-layered and the ditch too deep for quick results. Furthermore Giustiniani had proved to be a strategist of genius. His marshalling of limited manpower and materials had been highly effective: earth had succeeded where stone had failed and the line had held – just.

Closed, the Horn provided a safe anchorage for any relieving fleet and constituted a base for naval counter-attack. It also lengthened the line of communication between the different parts of Mehmet’s army and his navy, as troops were forced to make a long detour around the top of the Horn to pass from the land walls to the Double Columns. The problem of the chain had to be solved.

No one knows for certain where Mehmet came up with the idea, or how long he had been developing it, but on 21 April he accelerated an extraordinary solution to the chain. If it could not be forced, he reasoned, it must be bypassed, and this could only be done by bodily transporting his fleet over land and launching it into the Horn beyond the defensive line. Contemporary Christian chroniclers had their own ideas about the origin of this strategy. Archbishop Leonard was clear: yet again it was the know-how and advice of perfidious Europeans; Mehmet was prompted ‘by the recollections of a faithless Christian. I think that the man who revealed this trick to the Turks learned it from a Venetian strategy at Lake Garda.’ Certainly the Venetians had
carried galleys from the River Adige into Lake Garda as recently as 1439, but medieval campaigns are littered with other precedents, and Mehmet was a keen student of military history. Saladin had transported galleys from the Nile to the Red Sea in the twelfth century; in 1424 the Mamluks had taken galleys from Cairo to Suez. Whatever its origin it is certain that the scheme was already well under way before the 21st; events merely emphasized its urgency.

Mehmet had one further reason for attempting this manoeuvre. He felt it was important to pressurize the Genoese colony on the other side of the Horn at Galata, whose ambiguous neutrality in the conflict was the source of complaints by both sides. Galata traded profitably with both city and besiegers. In the process it acted as a membrane through which materials and intelligence passed to and fro. There were rumours that the citizens of Galata circulated openly in the Ottoman camp by day, supplying oil to cool the great guns and whatever else could be sold, then slipped across the Horn at night to take their place on the walls. The boom was secured within the walls of Galata and could not be tackled directly, as Mehmet was anxious not to seek open warfare with the Genoese. He was aware that direct hostilities could risk the dispatch of a powerful fleet from the mother city. At the same time he recognized that the natural sympathies of the citizens of Galata were with their fellow Christians; Giustiniani himself was Genoese. The arrival of the relieving Genoese ships had also probably tipped the balance of sympathy, as Leonard of Chios recognized: ‘The people of Galata had been acting very cautiously … but now they were anxious to provide both weapons and men, but only in secret, lest the enemy, who was just feigning peace towards them, should find out.’ The double life of the Genoese community meant, however, that information could pass both ways, and this was soon to have tragic consequences.