Decline & Fall - Byzantium 03 (74 page)

The Sultan himself remained at Adrianople until the last detachments of his army had arrived from Anatolia; then on
23
March he left with them for the march across Thrace. Medieval armies - particularly if they were carrying siege equipment - moved slowly; but on
5
April Mehmet pitched his tent before the walls of Constantinople, where the bulk of his huge host had already arrived three days before. Determined to lose no time, he at once sent under a flag of truce the message to the Emperor that was required by Islamic law, undertaking that all his subjects would be spared, with their families and property, if they made immediate and voluntary surrender. If on the other hand they refused, they would be given no quarter.

As expected, he received no reply. Early in the morning of Friday,
6
April his cannon opened fire.

Long before the first Turkish soldier was sighted, the people of Constantinople had known that the siege was inevitable. Throughout the previous

1
Urban had previously approached the Byzantine Emperor with the same offer, but Constantine, unable to provide either the money or the raw materials for which he asked, had been obliged to refuse. Had he accepted, we can speculate endlessly on how the course of the next two years might have been altered; but it seems impossible that the fate of Byzantium could have been changed.

winter they had been working - men, women and children, the Emperor at their head - on the city's defences: repairing and reinforcing the walls, clearing out the moats, laying in stores of food, arrows, tools, heavy rocks, Greek fire
1
and everything else that they might need to repel the enemy. Although the main attack was clearly to be expected from the west, the sea walls along the Marmara shore and the Golden Horn had also been strengthened; everyone knew that it was from the Blachernae quarter that the Franks and Venetians had smashed their way into the city during the Fourth Crusade. By the coming of spring preparations were complete. Easter fell on i April. Even on that day of Christian rejoicing the Great Church of St Sophia was avoided by most Byzantines; but all of them, wherever they worshipped and whatever the outcome of the next few weeks or months, could pray for their deliverance in the knowledge that they had done everything they could to prepare for the coming onslaught.

Constantine too had done his best. The previous autumn he had sent further embassies to the West, but as usual to little avail. Three months after the death of Antonio Rizzo, in February
1453
,
th
e
Venetian Senate had finally woken up to the seriousness of the situation and had voted to send two transports, each carrying four hundred men, to Constantinople, with fifteen galleys following as soon as they were ready; but on
2
March they were still discussing the flotilla's organization, on
9
March they passed a further resolution urging the greatest possible speed, and on
10
April they wrote to Rome pointing out somewhat self-righteously that all relief cargoes should reach the Dardanelles by the end of March, after which the prevailing north wind made it difficult for captains to beat their way up the straits. Their own vessels finally left the lagoon on
20
April, by which time three Genoese ships, chartered by Pope Nicholas and filled with food and war provisions at his own personal expense, had - as we shall soon see - already reached Constantinople.

Fortunately for the honour of the Serenissima, the Venetian colony in the city - who had given, it must be said, more than enough trouble in the past - responded nobly to the present challenge. The
bailo
1
Girolamo Minotto, had written to his government as early as
26
January begging for a relief expedition, and regularly assured the Emperor that it would arrive before long. Meanwhile he promised every support, and further

1
See
Byzantium: The Early Centuries,
Greek fire had been Byzantium's secret weapon for eight hundred years, and seems to have been as effective in the fifteenth century as it was in the seventh.

undertook that none of the Republic's vessels would leave the harbour without his express permission. Two Venetian merchant-captains, whose ships chanced to have anchored in Constantinople on their way home from the Black Sea, also agreed to remain to give what assistance they could. In all, the Venetians were able to provide nine merchantmen, including three from their colony of Crete. How many men they managed to put at the Emperor's disposal is uncertain. In his vivid eyewitness account of the siege the Venetian naval surgeon Nicolo Barbaro specifically lists sixty-seven 'noble'
1
compatriots who were present, but there was presumably a fair number of commoners as well.

The defenders also included a Genoese contingent. Many of them came, as might have been expected, from the colony at Galata - which, in the event of a Turkish victory, seemed to have little hope of survival; but in addition there was an honorable group from Genoa itself, consisting of young men who, appalled by the pusillanimity of its government - which had promised Constantine just one ship - had determined to fight for Christendom. Their leader, Giovanni Giustiniani Longo, was a member of one of the Republic's leading families and a renowned expert in siege warfare. He arrived on
29
January with a private army of seven hundred, including a mysterious engineer whose name, Johannes Grant, strongly suggests Scottish origins. Finally there was a single elderly Spanish grandee — Don Francisco de Toledo, who claimed descent from the Comneni - and
a small party of Catalans, mostl
y permanent residents in the city but also including a few sailors who had voluntarily joined their ranks. These signs, such as they were, of international solidarity must have given the Emperor some encouragement, but another severe blow was in store for him: on the night of
26
February seven Venetian ships - all but one of them from Crete - slipped secretly out of the Golden Horn and down the Hellespont to the island of Tenedos, carrying with them some seven hundred Italians. Only a few days before their captains had sworn a solemn oath to remain in the city. To Constantine, the loss of so many potential defenders - effectively offsetting Longo's contribution of just a month before - was little short of catastrophic; but the faithlessness of those whom he had believed to be his friends was, perhaps, more wounding still.

1
The word 'noble' needs some explanation here. The Venetian nobility was based (for obvious reasons) not on feudal land tenure but on the antiquity of the individual families. Towards the end of the Republic's history it was occasionally possible for
nouveau-riche
families to buy their way into this nobility; but in the
fifteenth century it was strictl
y limited to members of those families listed in the 'Golden Book', published some hundred and fifty years before.

Now and only now was it possible for the Emperor to make a precise assessment of the resources available to him for the defence of his capital. Moored in the Golden Horn were eight more Venetian vessels (including three Cretan), five Genoese and one each from Ancona, Catalonia and Provence, together with the ten which were all that remained of the Byzantine navy - a total of twenty-six, pitiable in comparison to the armada of the Sultan. But it was only when he came to assess his available manpower that Constantine realized the full gravity of his situation. Towards the end of March he ordered his secretary Sphrantzes to make a census of all able-bodied men in the city, including monks and clerics, who could be called upon to man the walls. The final figure was worse than he could have imagined:
4,983
Greeks and rather less than two thousand foreigners. To defend fourteen miles of walls against Mehmet's army of a hundred thousand, he could muster less than seven thousand men. These figures, he told Sphrantzes must on no account be revealed: only God could save the city now.

On Monday,
2
April, when the look-outs reported the first advance parties of Turks on the western horizon, the Emperor ordered the gates of the city to be closed, the bridges over the moats destroyed and the great chain stretched across the entrance to the Golden Horn from a tower just below the Acropolis (on what is now Seraglio Point) to another on the sea walls of Galata. There was nothing more to be done but to pray - and to await the final onslaught.

The walls in which Byzantium put its trust during that fateful spring of
1453
ran from the shores of the Marmara to the upper reaches of the Golden Horn, forming the western boundary of the city. They were already more than a thousand years old. Known as the Theodosian Walls after the Emperor Theodosius II in whose reign they were built, they were in fact completed in
413
when he was still a child; their true creator was his Praetorian Prefect Anthemius, who for the first six years of his reign was his guardian and Regent of the Eastern Empire. Unfortunately, only thirty-four years later in
447,
no fewer than fifty-seven of Anthemius's towers were toppled by a violent earthquake - at the very moment moreover when Attila the Hun was advancing on the capital. Reconstruction had begun at once, and within two months the fortifications had been completely rebuilt, with an outer wall and moat added. Attila turned back when he saw them — as countless other enemies of Byzantium were to do over the centuries that followed - and no wonder; for in terms of medieval
siege warfare the Land Walls of
Constantinople were indeed impregnable. Any attacking army had first to negotiate a deep ditch some sixty feet across, much of which could be flooded to a depth of about thirty feet in an emergency. Beyond this was a low crenellated breastwork with a terrace behind it about thirty feet wide; then the outer wall, seven feet thick and nearly thirty feet high, with ninety-six towers at regular intervals along it. Within this wall came another broad terrace, and then the principal element of the defence, the great inner wall, about sixteen feet thick at the base and rising to a height of forty feet above the city. It too
had ninety-six towers, alternati
ng in position with those of the outer wall. The result was probably the most elaborate bastion ever constructed in the Middle Ages. Only at the northern end, where the walls ran up against the imperial Palace of Blachernae, did a single bulwark replace the triple, but this was itself considerably strengthened by the enormously thick wall of the palace itself and was further protected by a moat, first constructed by John Cantacuzenus and recently redug by some of the galley crews.

By the morning of Friday, 6 April most of the defenders were deployed along the walls, the Emperor and Giustiniani in command of the most vulnerable section, the so-called
mesoteichion,
which crossed the valley of the little river Lycus about a mile from the northern end and which was clearly the point at which the Sultan intended to concentrate his attack. The sea walls along the Marmara and the Horn were less heavily manned, but their garrisons served the additional purpose of look-outs, keeping a close watch on Turkish ship movements. They reported to the Emperor that the Turkish admiral, a Bulgarian renegade named Suleyman Baltoglu, was not only maintaining a continuous patrol of the Marmara shore - thus effectively sealing the small harbours dotted along it - but was also massing his fleet at the mouth of the Bosphorus opposite the quay known as the Double Columns.
1
Some three days after the siege began he led a number of his heaviest ships to ram the great chain in an attempt to break it; but the chain held.

The Sultan, meanwhile, had subjected the Land Walls to a bombardment unprecedented in the history of siege warfare. By the evening of the first day he had reduced to rubble a section near the Charisius Gate, whence the Mese, Constantinople's central thoroughfare, ran the whole length of the city to St Sophia. His soldiers made repeated attempts to smash their way through, but again and again were forced to retreat

1
The site of the present Dolmabahce Palace.

under a hail of missiles until nightfall sent them back to their camp. By morning the wall had been completely rebuilt, and Mehmet decided to hold his fire until he could bring up more cannon to the spot. To fill in the time he ordered attacks on two small fortresses outside the walls -one at Therapia, a village just beyond his great new castle on the Bosphorus, and one at the little village of Studius. Both fought gallantly, but were ultimately obliged to surrender. The survivors were all impaled - those from Studius within sight of the Land Walls, as a lesson to those watching. Further orders were sent to Baltoglu to capture the Princes' Islands in the Marmara. Only the largest of these, Prinkipo, offered any resistance; the admiral finally put the fortress to the torch, adding sulphur and pitch as fuel to the fire. Those of the garrison who escaped being burned alive were immediately put to death; the civilian population were sold into slavery. The lessons to be drawn from such brutality were plain, as they were meant to be: the Sultan was not to be trifled with.

By
11
April all his cannon were in place and the bombardment resumed, to continue uninterruptedly for the next forty-eight days. Although some of the larger pieces could be fired only once every two or three hours, the damage they did was enormous; within a week the outer wall across the Lycus had collapsed in several places, and although the defenders worked ceaselessly to repair the damage behind makeshift wooden stockades it was already clear that they could not do so indefinitely. None the less, a surprise attack on the night of the
1
8th was courageously beaten off; after four hours' heavy fighting the Turks had lost two hundred men, at the cost — according to Barbaro - of not a single Christian life. At sea, too, the Emperor's ships scored a notable success: a second attempt by Baltoglu on the chain - using this time a number of heavy galleys recently arrived from the Black Sea — proved no more effective than the first. These were also armed with cannon, but they could not achieve sufficient elevation to harm the tall Christian ships - while the Greek, Genoese and Venetian archers, loosing a hail of arrows from their crow's nests, inflicted huge damage on the Turkish vessels and forced them to retreat whence they had come.