Decline & Fall - Byzantium 03 (77 page)

It was early morning, with the waning moon high in the sky. The siege of Constantinople was over. The walls were strewn with the dead and dying, but of living, able-bodied defenders there was scarcely a trace. The surviving Greeks had hurried home to their families, in a desperate attempt to save them from the rape and pillage that was already beginning; the Venetians were making for their ships, the Genoese for the comparative security of Galata. They found the Golden Horn surprisingly quiet: most of the Turkish sailors had already left their ships, terrified lest the army should get the best of the plunder. The Venetian commander, Alvise Diedo, encountered no resistance when he set his sailors to cut through the thongs attaching the boom to the walls of Galata; his little fleet, accompanied by seven Genoese vessels and half a dozen Byzantine galleys, then swung out into the Marmara and thence down the Hellespont to the open sea. All were packed to the gunwales with refugees, many of whom had swum out to them from the shore to escape the fate that awaited those who remained.

They were well-advised to do so, for that fate was horrible indeed. By noon the streets were running red with blood. Houses were ransacked, women and children raped or impaled, churches razed, icons wrenched from their golden frames, books ripped from their silver bindings. The Imperial Palace at Blachernae was left an empty shell. In the church of St Saviour in Chora the mosaics and frescos were miraculously spared, but the Empire's holiest icon, the Virgin Hodegetria, said to have been painted by St Luke himself,
1
was hacked into four pieces and destroyed. The most hideous scenes of all, however, were enacted in the church of the Holy Wisdom. Matins were already in progress when the berserk conquerors were heard approaching. Immediately the great bronze doors were closed; but the Turks soon smashed their way in. The poorer and more unattractive of the congregation were massacred on the spot; the remainder were lashed together and led off to the Turkish camps, for their captors to do with as they liked. As for the officiating priests, they continued with the Mass as long as they could before being killed at the high altar; but there are among the Orthodox faithful those who still believe that at the last moment one or two of them gathered up the most precious of the patens and chalices and mysteriously disappeared into the southern wall of the sanctuary. There they wi
ll remain until the day Constanti
nople becomes a Christian city once again, when they will resume the liturgy at the point at which it was interrupted.

Sultan Mehmet had promised his men the three days of looting to which by Islamic tradition they were entitled; but after an orgy of violence on such a scale, there were no protests when he brought it to a close on the same day as it had begun. There was by then little left to plunder, and his soldiers had more than enough to do sharing out the loot and enjoying their captives. He himself waited until the worst excesses were over before entering the city. Then, in the late afternoon, accompanied by his chief ministers, his imams and his bodyguard of Janissaries, he rode slowly down the principal thoroughfare, the Mese, to St Sophia. Dismounting outside the central doors, he stooped to pick

1
Its normal home was the church of St Mary at Blachernae, next to the palace; but it had been transferred to a church even nearer the walls, the better to inspire the defenders.

up a handful of earth which, in a gesture of humility, he sprinkled over his turban; then he entered the Great Church. As he walked towards the altar, he stopped one of his soldiers whom he saw hacking at the marble pavement; looting, he told him, did not include the destruction of public buildings. He had in any case already decided that the church of the Holy Wisdom should be converted into the chief mosque of the city. At his command the senior imam mounted the pulpit and proclaimed the name of Allah, the All-Merciful and Compassionate: there was no God but God and Mohammed was his Prophet. The Sultan touched his turbaned head to the ground in prayer and thanksgiving.

Leaving the Great Church, he crossed the square to the old, ruined Palace of the Emperors, founded by Constantine the Great eleven and a half centuries before; and as he wandered through its ancient halls, his slippers brushing the dust from the pebbled floor-mosaics - some of which have survived to this day - he is said to have murmured the lines of a Persian poet:

The spider weaves the curtains in the palace of the Caesars;

The owl calls the watches in the towers of Afrasiab.
1

He had achieved his ambition. Constantinople was his. He was just twenty-one years old.

1
The author is unknown.

Epilogue

The news of the conquest of Constantinople was received with horror throughout Christendom. As the refugees spread westward they carried the epic story with them; and the story lost nothing in the telling. The one point on which few could agree was the fate of the last Emperor of Byzantium. Inevitably, there were rumours that he had escaped; but the vast majority of sources - including Sphrantzes, who was his closest friend and with whom he would certainly have communicated had he survived - record with apparent certainty that he was killed during the conquest of the city. According to Cardinal Isidore, who had escaped disguised as a beggar and found his way to Crete, Constantine's body had been identified after his death and his head had been presented as a trophy to the Sultan, who had heaped insults on it and carried it back in triumph to Adrianople; and various versions of the cardinal's story were widely disseminated.

One of the most interesting accounts of the fall, written almost immediately after the events it describes, is that of a Venetian from Euboea named Nicolo Sagundino. He had been taken prisoner by the Turks after their capture of Thessalonica in
1430,
and had subsequently served as interpreter at the Councils of Ferrara and Florence; later still he had represented the Serenissima on several diplomatic missions, so he should be a fairly reliable witness - though his version, like all the others, can be based only on hearsay. On
25
January
1454
in Naples, in the course of a formal oration to King Alfonso V of Aragon, he gave a detailed account of Constantine's death because, he said, it deserved to be remembered for all time. According to his account, after Giovanni Giustiniani Longo had been wounded he told the Emperor that Byzantium was lost and urged him to escape while he could; Constantine refused to hear of such a suggestion and accused him of cowardice; he himself insisted on dying in the defence of his Empire. Advancing to the breach in the wall, he found that the enemy were already through it and, determined not to be taken alive, asked his companions to kill him; but none of them had the cou
rage to do so. Only then did he
throw off everything that might have identified him as Emperor and plunge forward, sword in hand, into the melee. He was cut down almost at once. After the fighting was over the Sultan, who had wanted him captured alive, ordered a search to be made for the body. When it was finally found he ordered the head to be impaled on a stake and paraded round the camp. Later he had it sent, together with twenty handsome youths and twenty beautiful virgins, to the Sultan of Egypt.

There is also a story, told by a certain Makarios Melissenos, a sixteenth-century Metropolitan of Monemvasia, who compiled the extended version of the chronicle of George Sphrantzes, according to which the Turkish soldiers searching for the Emperor's body eventually recognized it by the imperial eagles engraved, or possibly embroidered, on his greaves and boots. This is slightly at variance with the reports of Constantine having divested himself of all identifiable clothing, but such clothing may have been limited to the garments he could easily dispense with; he is unlikely to have had any alternative footwear immediately available, and he could hardly have fought barefoot. Melissenos adds that the Sultan ordered that the body should be given a Christian burial, a detail suggested by no other authority; but his work dates from over a century after the conquest and must be treated with caution. Would Mehmet, one wonders, really have allowed the Emperor a tomb, or even a simple grave, which would inevitably have become a place of pilgrimage and a focus for pro-Byzantine feeling in the city?

Such considerations notwithstanding, there is still perhaps the faintest possibility that the Emperor's body - or one believed to be his - might have been concealed by the faithful and buried secretly some time afterwards. We can dismiss Melissenos's claim that it found its final resting-place in St Sophia. Nor is it true that in the nineteenth century the Ottoman government provided the oil for the last Emperor's tomb near what is now Vefa Meydani; this story - totally without foundation but zealously propagated among the tourists of the time - almost certainly originated with the proprietor of the local coffee-shop. In the extremely improbable event that such a tomb exists at all, the most likely location for it is the church of St Theodosia - now a mosque and better known as Gul Camii - where, according to an old tradition, Constantine was buried in a small chamber concealed in the south-east pier. There is indeed such a chamber there, accessible by a narrow stair that leads up inside the pier itself. Within it is a coffin, and on the lintel of the doorway is a Turkish inscription reading 'Tomb of the Apostle, Disciple of Christ - Peace be unto him'. But the tradition, old as it is, comfortably postdates the conquest; the coffin is covered, as is usual in the Islamic world, with a green cloth; and there is another equally persistent tradition among the local people that it belongs to a Muslim holy man named Gul Baba. Of all the countless stori
es relating the fate of Constanti
ne XI Dragases, by far the most probable is also the simplest: that the corpse was never identified, and the last Emperor was buried anonymously with his fellow-soldiers in a common grave.

The mystery that surrounds his body is almost equalled by that which concerns his sword. There is, in the Royal Armoury of Turin, a magnificent weapon engraved with Christian symbols and bearing a Greek dedication to an Emperor Constantine. Presented to the Armoury as part of a collection by a nineteenth-century ambassador to the Sublime Porte, it was examined in
1857
by the French scholar Victor Langlois, who identified it
1
as being unquestionably the sword of Constantine, which had come from Sultan Mehmet's tomb. He does not explain, however, how the sword was extracted from the tomb, nor why there should have been another sword, said to have been presented to the Emperor by Cardinal Isidore in
1452,
preserved throughout the nineteenth century in Constantinople. There was, moreover, a third sword, very similar to the other two, which was presented by the Greek community of Constantinople to Prince Constantine, heir to the Greek throne, for his coming of age in
1886.
This too seems to have been considered by some to have been the Emperor's, although an Athenian newspaper of the time emphasizes that the claim cannot be proved.
2

Thanks to his position and the dramatic circumstances in which he met his end, Constantine Dragases was the sort of man around whom legends inevitably arise, to the point where he himself becomes a legendary figure. It is right and proper that he should be so; besides, after nearly five and a half centuries, we can no longer hope to separate the man from the myth. All the historian can do is record such facts as are known, and indicate the broad areas of speculation. He can point the way to the labyrinth; but he knows that it can never be penetrated.

*

1 'Me
moire sur le sabre dc Cons
tantin XI Dracoses, dernier empereur grec de
Constantinople',
Revue de l’Orient et de l’
Algirie et des Colonies,
Paris
1858;
also 'Notice sur le
s
abre de Constantin XI, dernier e
mpereur de Constantino
ple, conserve a l’Armeria Reale
de Turin',
Revue archeologique,
14:1, 1857.

2
All this information - and much else - I have taken from
The Immortal Emperor,
by Professor D. M. Nicol, which gives by far the fullest account of the aftermath of the fall of Constantinople available in English.

Not all the nobility of Byzantium suffered the fate of their Emperor. The passenger-list of one of the Genoese ships that escaped from the Golden Horn on
29
May bears the names of six members of the house of Palaeologus, John and Demetrius Cantacuzenus, two Lascaris, two Comneni, two Notaras and many membe
rs of other families only slightl
y less distinguished. They were taken to Chios, where some of them settled; others found their way by various routes to the Morea, Corfu, the Ionian Islands or Italy, where Venice soon became the chief city of the Byzantine diaspora. For some years already it had been the home of Anna Palaeologina Notaras, daughter of the
megas dux
(or Grand Duke) Lucas Notaras, and her niece Eudocia Cantacuzena; thirty years after the fall these two ladies were the centre of a numerous Greek refugee community.

All those members of Byzantine noble families who had neither perished in the siege and its aftermath nor managed to escape to the West were brought before the Sultan on the day after the conquest. Most of the noble ladies he freed at once; only the loveliest of their daughters - and a number of their sons - did he keep for his own delectation. Among the men he found Notaras himself and nine other former ministers, all of whom he personally redeemed from their captors and released. But his benevolence did not last long. Only five days later, in the course of a banquet, it was whispered in his ear that Notaras's third son, then aged fourteen, was a boy of striking beauty. Mehmet at once ordered one of his eunuchs to fetch him from his home and, when the eunuch returned to report that the furious
megas dux
was refusing to let him go, sent a group of soldiers to arrest both father and son, together with a son-in-law, the son of the Grand Domestic Andronicus Cantacuzenus. Brought into the Sultan's presence, Notaras still stood firm, whereupon Mehmet commanded that all three should be beheaded on the spot. The
megas dux
asked only that the two boys should meet their fate first, lest the sight of his own death should weaken their resolution. A moment later, as they lay dead before him, he bared his own neck.