Constantinople: The Last Great Siege, 1453 (31 page)

Thereafter it became a game of cat and mouse fought out in the dark under horrific conditions. The following day ‘at the hour of Compline’ the defenders discovered a tunnel into the city near the Calegaria Gate, which they intercepted. They burned the miners alive with Greek fire. A few hours later telltale vibrations indicated yet another mine near by, but this one proved harder to intercept. However, the pit props collapsed of their own accord and killed all the miners inside.

The Saxon miners were indefatigable. Not a day went by without underground warfare. Each time, Giacomo Tetaldi recalled, ‘the Christians dug counter-mines, and listened, and located them … they suffocated the Turks in their mines with smoke, or sometimes with foul and evil-smelling odours. In some places they drowned them with a flood of water, and often found themselves fighting hand to hand.’

While the tunnelling continued, Mehmet’s engineers contrived another remarkable and totally unexpected initiative in the world above. At daybreak on the morning of 19 May, the watchers on the wall near the Charisian Gate stirring themselves for another day looked out over the distant sea of enemy tents – and were staggered by what they saw. Ten paces in front of them and positioned on the lip of the ditch was an enormous tower, ‘overtopping the walls of the barbicans’, that had somehow appeared from nowhere overnight. The defenders were amazed and mystified by how the Ottomans had managed to erect this structure so rapidly, which had been wheeled forward from the enemy lines in the dark and now overtopped the ramparts. It was built on a framework of stout beams covered with camel skins and a double layer of hurdles to protect the men inside. Its lower half had been filled with earth and embanked with earth on the
outside ‘so that shots from cannon or handguns could not harm it’. Each storey inside was connected by ladders that could also be used to bridge the gap between the tower and the wall. Overnight a huge body of men had also constructed a covered causeway from it back to the Ottoman lines ‘half a mile long … and over it two layers of hurdles and on top of them camel skins, by means of which they could go from the tower to the camp under cover, in such a way that they could not be harmed by bullets or crossbow bolts or by stones from small cannon’. Armed men rushed to the wall to view the incredible sight. The siege tower was almost a throwback to the era of classical warfare, though it seemed to Archbishop Leonard to be a device ‘such as the Romans could scarcely have constructed’. It had been designed specifically to fill in the troublesome ditch in front of the wall. Inside the tower, teams of men were excavating earth and hurling it out through small openings in the protective screen into the ditch in front. They kept at it all day: while from the higher storeys archers shot a covering fire of arrows into the city, ‘it seemed, from sheer high spirits’.

It was a signature project for Mehmet – conceived in secret on a grand scale and executed, like the transportation of the ships, with extraordinary speed. Its psychological impact was profound. The resourcefulness and the resources of the besieging army must have struck the defenders like a recurring nightmare. Constantine and his commanders hurried to the battlements to confront yet another emergency, ‘and when they saw it they were all struck down with fear like dead men, and they were continuously concerned that this tower might cause them to lose the city because it overtopped the barbicans’. The threat from the tower was palpable. It was closing up the ditch in front of their eyes, and the covering fire from its archers made it difficult to mount any response. By nightfall the Ottomans had made remarkable progress. They had filled the ditch with logs, dried branches and earth. The siege tower, pushed from within, moved further forward and closer to the wall. The panicky defenders decided that immediate action was imperative – another day under the shadow of the overhanging tower could prove fatal. After dark, packed barrels of gunpowder were prepared behind the walls and rolled off the ramparts towards the tower, with fuses sputtering. There was a series of huge explosions: ‘suddenly the earth roared like great thunder and lifted up the siege turrets and the men to the clouds, like a mighty storm’. The tower cracked and exploded: ‘people and logs fell from high’. The
defenders hurled barrels of burning pitch down on the wounded groaning below. Advancing out from the walls they massacred any further survivors and burned the bodies along with other siege equipment that had been drawn up nearby: ‘long battering rams and wheeled ladders, and waggons with protective turrets on them’. Mehmet observed this failure from a distance. Furious, he withdrew his men. Similar towers which had been advanced at other points along the wall were also withdrawn or burned by the defenders. The siege towers were evidently too vulnerable to fire and the experiment was not repeated.

Underground the tunnel war intensified. On 23 May the defenders detected and entered yet another mine. As they advanced down the narrow shaft by the flickering light of flares, they found themselves suddenly face to face with the enemy. Hurling Greek fire, they brought down the roof, burying the miners, but managed to capture two officers and bring them back to the surface alive. The Greeks tortured these men until they revealed the location of all the other workings; ‘and when they had confessed, their heads were cut off, and their bodies were thrown from the walls on the side of the city where the Turkish camp was; and the Turks, when they saw their men thrown from the walls, became enraged and felt great bitterness towards the Greeks and us Italians’.

The following day the silver miners changed their tactics. Instead of passing straight under the walls to create passageways into the city, they turned their tunnel sideways on reaching the wall to run directly under it for a distance of ten paces. The tunnel was propped on timbers and prepared for firing with the aim of collapsing a section of wall. The work was only just discovered in time; the intruders were repulsed and the wall was bricked up again underneath. It caused great disquiet in the city. On 25 May one last attempt was made to repeat this operation. The miners again managed to prop a long section of wall ready for firing before being intercepted and repulsed. In the eyes of the defenders it was the most dangerous of any of the tunnels to be found and its discovery signalled the end of the tunnel war. The Saxon miners had worked ceaselessly for ten days; they had constructed fourteen tunnels but Grant had destroyed them all. Mehmet acknowledged the failure of both towers and mines – and kept the guns firing. 

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Away to the west of Constantinople, far from the sound of firing and the night attacks, another small but significant drama was being played out. In one of the island harbours of the eastern Aegean a sailing ship was rocking at anchor. It was the Venetian brigantine that had slipped away from the city. During mid-May it swept the archipelago, looking for signs of a rescue fleet. The crew found nothing. They had received no positive reports from passing vessels. They now knew that there were no ships. In fact the Venetian fleet was off the coast of Greece cautiously seeking information about Ottoman naval intentions, whilst the galleys that the Pope had ordered from Venice were still under construction. The crew fully understood the implications of their situation. On deck a heated debate was in progress about what to do next. One sailor made a strong case for sailing away from the city and back to ‘a Christian land, because I know very clearly that by this time the Turks will have taken Constantinople’. His companions turned to him and replied that the emperor had entrusted them with this task, and that it was their bounden duty to complete it: ‘and so we want to return to Constantinople, if it is in the hands of the Turks or the Christians, if it is to death or to life, let us go on our way’. The democratic decision was taken to return, whatever the consequences.

The brigantine swept back up the Dardanelles on the south wind, reassumed its Turkish disguise and approached the city shortly before daybreak on 23 May. This time the Ottoman fleet was not deceived. They had been patrolling attentively, fearing the arrival of Venetian galleys, and took the small sailing boat for their outrider. They rowed forward to intercept but the brigantine outstripped them and the boom opened to let it back in. That day the crew went to make their report to the emperor that they had found no fleet. Constantine thanked them for returning to the city and ‘began to weep bitterly for grief’. The final realization that Christendom would send no ships snuffed out any hopes of rescue; ‘and seeing this the Emperor decided to put himself in the hands of our most merciful Lord Jesus Christ and of his Mother Madonna Saint Mary, and of Saint Constantine, Defender of his City, that they might guard it’. It was the forty-eighth day of the siege.