Decline & Fall - Byzantium 03 (75 page)

Shortly afterwards that same stretch of water saw another, far more fateful engagement. The three Genoese galleys hired and provisioned by the Pope, having been delayed by the weather in Chios, finally arrived off the Hellespont. There they were joined by a heavy Byzantine transport with a cargo of corn from Sicily, made available by Alfonso of Aragon. In his anxiety to mass the strongest possible naval force outside Constantinople, Mehmet had ill-advisedly
left the straits unguarded, and
the ships were able to make their way without hindrance into the Marmara. The moment they appeared on the horizon - it was early in the morning of Friday,
20
April — the Sultan rode around the head of the Golden Horn to give his orders personally to his admiral. On no account were they to reach the city. The must be captured or, if capture proved impossible, sunk.

Baltoglu prepared at once to attack. His sailing ships were powerless against the fresh southerly breeze; but the biremes and the triremes — several of which were armed with light cannon - were immediately mobilized and in the early afternoon the great fleet bore down upon the four approaching ships. Overwhelmingly outnumbered, to the casual onlooker these would have seemed to have little chance; but the steadily strengthening wind was in their favour, and the growing swell made the heavy Turkish vessels hard to manage. The others, moreover, had the advantage of height. Once again the Turkish captains, finding themselves virtually defenceless against the unremitting deluge of arrows, javelins and other projectiles that rained down upon them whenever they came within range, were forced to watch in impotence while the four galleys advanced serenely towards the Golden Horn. But then, just as they reached the entrance, the wind dropped. Acropolis Point, where the Horn, the Bosphorus and the Sea of Marmara meet, has been known since the days of antiquity for the strength and variety of its currents; and as the sails of the Christian ships flapped desultorily in the sudden calm, the crews felt themselves swept northward towards the Galata shore.

The advantage was now with the Turks. Baltoglu, still wary of coming in too close, brought his heavier armed vessels as near as he dared and opened fire with his cannon. But it was no use. His guns lacked the necessary elevation; the balls all fell short. A few flaming missiles landed on the Christian decks, but the fires were extinguished before they did any serious damage. Desperate now - for he knew that with the Sultan in his present mood failure could be fatal - he gave the order to advance and board. His own flagship bore down upon the imperial transport, ramming it in the stern. The Genoese in their turn were quickly surrounded; the crews continued to loose their showers of arrows, but with thirty or forty Turkish vessels milling around each of theirs there was a limit to what they could achieve. It was, once again, the superior height of their ships that saved the day. Grappling and boarding an enemy ship can never have been easy; to do so when that ship stood substantially higher in the water than that of her attackers, making it necessary for them to climb up the side in the face of heavy resistance from above, was almost impossible; and the Genoese sailors were equipped with huge axes with which to lop off the heads and hands of all who made the attempt. Inevitably, too, the Turkish oars became increasingly entangled, making the ships themselves an easy prey.

The imperial transport, meanwhile, was still in difficulties. Fortunately she was well provided with Greek fire, and consequently able to give a good account of herself; but though she managed to repel boarders she could not shake herself free of the Turkish flagship, and was moreover running short of arrows and other weapons. Seeing her trouble, the Genoese captains somehow manoeuvred their ships alongside and lashed all four vessels together, till they stood like a great sea-girt castle amid the chaos and confusion that surrounded them. The crews, now united in a single body, fought like heroes; but it was clear that they could not do so for ever against an enemy that had an apparently limitless number of vessels to throw against them, and the courage that they showed seemed more and more to be the courage of despair. Then, just as the sun was setting, the wind got up again. The Christian sails billowed out, and the great floating fortress began to move again, slowly but inexorably, towards the entrance to the Horn, splintering any Turkish ship in its path. Baltoglu, who had been severely wounded in the eye by a projectile - hurled, it was said, from one of his own ships - realized that he was beaten; in the gathering darkness he could only order his fleet back to its anchorage. A few hours later in the dead of night, the boom was opened and the four ships slipped quietly into the Golden Horn.

The Sultan had
watched every moment of the battl
e from the shore, occasionally in his excitement riding his horse out into the sea until his robes were trailing in the water. He was famous for the violence of his rages; such was his fury when he saw the humiliation of his fleet that those around him began to fear for his health, and indeed his sanity. The next day he summoned Baltoglu, publicly vilified him as a fool and a coward and ordered his immediate execution. The unfortunate admiral gained a reprieve after a deputation of his subordinate officers had testified to his courage; but he was bastinadoed and deprived both of his public offices and his private possessions — which Mehmet distributed among his beloved Janissaries. He was never heard of again.

The Byzantines, that fateful Friday, had been luckier than they knew. The arrival of the Genoese ships had
brought the Sultan round to the
Double Columns. He was still there on the following day, when his cannon brought down a huge tower, the Bactatinian, on the Land Walls above the Lycus valley, and reduced to rubble much of the outer rampart at that point. Had the besiegers mounted an immediate assault, Constantinople might have fallen more than five weeks earlier than it did; but Mehmet was not there to give the order, and the opportunity was missed. That night the Greek engineers rebuilt the damaged section of the wall, and by the following morning it stood as firm - or almost as firm - as ever.

The Sultan, however, had other preoccupations. The fiasco he had recently witnessed had focused his attention on a single objective: somehow, he must gain control of the Golden Horn. The idea had been in his mind since the beginning of the siege, when he had set his engineers to work on a road running behind Galata, from a point near the Double Columns on the Marmara shore over the hill near what is now Taksim Square and down to the Golden Horn at Ka
simpas
a. Iron wheels had been cast, and metal tracks; his carpenters, meanwhile, had been busy fashioning wooden cradles large enough to accommodate the keels of moderate-sized vessels. It was a herculean undertaking; but Mehmet had enough men and materials to make it a possible one. On
21
April the work was complete; and on Sunday morning, the
22nd,
the Genoese colony in Galata watched dumbfounded as some seventy Turkish ships were slowly hauled, by innumerable teams of oxen, over a two-hundred-foot hill and then lowered gently down into the Horn.

Their consternation was, however, nothing to that of the Byzantines, who had known nothing of the Sultan's plan and found it hard to believe the evidence of their own eyes. Not only was their only major harbour no longer secure; they now had three and a half more miles of wall to defend, including the section breached by the Crusaders in
1204.
A week later they made a determined effort to destroy the Turkish ships; but the Turks, forewarned by one of their agents in Galata, were ready for them. In the ensuing battle only one Turkish vessel was sunk, while fifty of the Christians' best sailors were killed; another forty who had swum ashore were executed on the spot, within sight of the city. The Greeks, in revenge, brought their own
260
Turkish prisoners down to the shore and beheaded them before the eyes of their compatriots across the Horn. Thenceforth, no quarter was given or expected.

Even then, it was some time before the Emperor recognized the full significance of Mehmet's achievement. Encouraged by the
bailo
Minotto, he still had hopes of the long-awaited relief expedition from Venice; but now, even if such an expedition were to arrive, how could it be received in safety? Gradually, too, he came to see the full extent of the treachery shown by the Genoese of Galata. A few of them, admittedly, had rallied to their compatriot Giovanni Giustiniani Longo and were doing heroic work along the walls; but the majority had not lifted a finger to assist - far less to save - their Christian brethren. It might have been impossible for them to sabotage the Sultan's preparations to move his ships overland into the Golden Horn; but could not at least some warning have been sent or signalled? The truth of the matter was, as Cons
tanti
ne well knew, that the Genoese had never liked the Greeks and felt absolutely no loyalty towards them. The Christian religion should have been a bond, particularly since the two Churches had been theoretically reunited; but to most Genoese (as to most Venetians) trade remained paramount. The important thing was to end up on the winning side, and there was no doubt in anyone's mind which that side was to be.

As if to prove the completeness of his control over Galata, Mehmet now threw a pontoon bridge over the Golden Horn, only a few hundred yards north-west of the Palace of Blachernae. Previously all messengers between his army beyond the walls and his fleet at the Double Columns had been obliged to make a long detour around the top of the Horn; henceforth they would be able to complete the journey in less than an hour. And the bridge had other uses too: broad enough for a regiment marching five abreast, it could also accommodate heavy carts and - on special rafts attached at intervals to the sides - cannon which could be used either to cover the soldiers' advance or to bombard the sea walls of the city.

By the beginning of May the Emperor knew that he could not hold out much longer. Food was running seriously short; fishing, long impossible in the Marmara, was since the arrival of the Turkish ships almost as dangerous in the Golden Horn; more and more of the defenders along the walls were taking time off to find food for their families. Only one hope - and that a faint one - remained: a relief expedition from Venice. It was now more than three months since Minotto had sent his appeal, and no word had come from the lagoons. Was there a fleet on its way, or not? If so, how big was it, and what was its cargo? Most important of all, when would it arrive? On the answers to these questions the whole fate of Constantinople now depended. And so it was that just before midnight on Thursday,
3
May a Venetian brigantine from the flotilla in the Horn, flying a Turkish standard and

carrying a crew of twelve volunteers all disguised as Turks, slipped out under the boom.

On the night of Wednesday the
23
rd it returned, tacking backwards and forwards up the Marmara against a sharp north wind, with a Turkish squadron in hot pursuit. Fortunately, however, Venetian seamanship was still a good deal better than Turkish, and soon after nightfall it succeeded in entering the Horn. The captain immediately sought an audience with the Emperor and Minotto. His news was as bad as it could be. For three weeks he had cruised through the Aegean, but nowhere had he seen a trace of the promised expedition, or indeed of any Venetian shipping. When he realized that it was useless to continue the search, he had called a meeting of the sailors and asked them what they should do. One had advocated sailing back to Venice, arguing that Constantinople was probably already in Turkish hands; but he had been shouted down. To all the rest, their duty was clear: they must report to the Emperor, as they had promised to do. And so they had returned, knowing full well that they would probably never leave the city alive. Constantine thanked each one personally, his voice choked with tears.

By now, too, the omens had begun. For months already pessimists had been pointing out that just as the first Emperor of Byzantinum had been a Constantine born of a Helena, so would the last; but shortly before the full moon on
24
May the portents took a more sinister turn. On the
22nd
there was a lunar eclipse; a day or two later, as the holiest and most precious icon of the Virgin was being carried through the streets in one last appeal for her intercession, it slipped from the platform on which it was being carried. With immense difficulty - for it suddenly seemed preternaturally heavy - it was replaced, and the bearers continued on their way; but they had gone no more than a few hundred yards further when a thunderstorm burst over the city, the most violent and dramatic that anyone could remember. Such was the force of the rain and hail that whole streets were flooded and the procession had to be abandoned. The next morning the people of Constantinople awoke to find their city shrouded in thick fog, something quite unprecedented at the end of May; the same night the dome of St Sophia seemed suffused with an unearthly red glow that crept slowly up from the base to the summit and then went out. This last phenomenon was also seen by the Turks in Galata and at the Double Columns; Mehmet himself was greatly disturbed by it, and was reassured only after his astrologers had interpreted it as a sign that the building would soon be illuminated by the True Faith. For the Byzantines there could be only one explanation: the Spirit of God itself had departed from their city.

Once again, as they had done so often in the past, George Sphrantzes and his fellow-ministers implored the Emperor to leave Constantinople while there was still time, to escape to the Morea and head a Byzantine government in exile until he could lead an army to recover the city, just as his great predecessor Michael Palaeologus had done nearly two centuries before. Such was Constantine's exhaustion that he fainted as they spoke; but when he recovered he was as determined as ever. This was his city; these were his people. He could not desert them now.