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October 3, 2023 - June 25, 2024
The medieval peoples about to engage in this struggle were intensely superstitious. They believed in prophecy and looked for omens.
the Byzantines, a word first used in English in 1853, exactly four hundred years after the great siege.
The Muslims referred to their adversary as “the despicable infidels,” “the wretched unbelievers,” “the enemies of the Faith”; in response they were called “pagans,” “heathen infidels,” “the faithless Turks.”
history.
April 35, 2017 mjp. St Charles IL
October 2, 2023 mjp. Wauwatosa, WI
In the year 629, Heraclius, “Autocrat of the Romans” and twenty-eighth emperor of Byzantium, was making a pilgrimage on foot to Jerusalem.
Chosroes
Byzantium was not only the last heir to the Roman Empire, it was also the first Christian nation.
The detailed gorgeousness of Orthodoxy was the reversed image of the sparse purity of Islam. One offered the abstract simplicity of the desert horizon, a portable worship that could be performed anywhere as long as you could see the sun, a direct contact with God, the other images, colors, and music, ravishing metaphors of the divine mystery designed to lead the soul to heaven.
To the Byzantines they were just one of an endless succession of peoples beating a path to the great city; their homeland was beyond the Black Sea and stretched as far as China. They were pagan steppe dwellers of the rolling grasslands of Central Asia, from whose epicenter shock waves of nomadic raiders poured out at periodic intervals to ravage the settled peoples beyond. They have left us their word ordu – “horde” – as a memory of this process, like a faint hoofprint in the sand.
Though Saladin himself was a Kurd,
Who knew? 4/26/17 mjp
the high rolling plateau was a landscape that suited these nomads from central Asia with their yurts and two-humped camels.
Islam held Christians to be “People of the Book”; as such they were afforded protection under the law and freedom of worship.
Two years after the sack of Constantinople, a tribal leader called Temuchin succeeded in uniting the feuding nomads of inner Mongolia into an organized war band and received the title Genghis Khan – the Universal Ruler.
Of all Ottoman innovations none was perhaps more significant than the creation of a regular army.
They were organized into infantry units, the Yeni Cheri or Janissaries, and the cavalry, which together comprised the first professional paid army in Europe since the time of the Romans.
A series of earthquakes devastated Constantinople – the dome of St. Sophia collapsed in 1346
He was called Mehmet, Murat’s father’s name, the Turkish form of Muhammad.
The old vizier exploded with anger: You stupid Greeks, I have had enough of your devious ways.
This incident was the start of a process known to history as the Great Schism, which was to inflict deep wounds on Christendom – the anathemas were not rescinded until 1965, but the scars still remain.
No city in the world owed as much to its site as Constantinople.
The man responsible for the land wall, built to define the mature limits of the city, was not the boy emperor Theodosius after whom it was named, but a leading statesman of the early fifth century, Anthemius, “one of the wisest men of the age,” for whose farsightedness the city owed a limitless debt of gratitude.
In line with Roman practice, the towers were not bound to the walls, ensuring that the two structures could each settle at their own rate without breaking apart.
Andronikos the Terrible,
the city always took prudent measures as a matter of state policy to keep its cisterns brimming and its granaries full.
No one knows exactly when the Ottomans acquired guns. Gunpowder weapons probably made their way into the empire through the Balkans sometime around 1400. By medieval standards this was a technology traveling at lightning speed – the first written mention of a gun does not occur until 1313, the first pictorial representation dates from 1326 – but by the end of the fourteenth century, cannon were being widely manufactured across Europe.
Success depended on the ability to mobilize men and equipment quickly and on an impressive scale.
Shock and awe.
For an empire intent on holy war, the Ottomans ruled their vassals with remarkable tolerance: “although they were subjects of the Sultan, he had not compelled them to resign their Christian faith, and they could worship and pray as they wished,” Tetaldi noted.
the counsel of perfection.
??
Capturing cities required human sacrifice. The enthusiasm and expectation whipped up for the assault – and the willingness to fill up ditches with trampled corpses – had a limited time frame. Unexpected setbacks could quickly tip morale; among such a condensed body of men, rumor, dissent, and disaffection could ripple through the tents like wind over the grasslands, and even the well-organized camps of the Ottomans were prey to typhus if they tarried too late in the summer.
The trebuchet had been enormously influential in the Muslim capture of crusader castles three hundred years earlier. Now it looked merely like a device from another age.
Priming powder was poured into the touchhole and all was ready. On April 12 lighted tapers were put to the touchholes of the sultan’s guns along a four-mile sector, and the world’s first concerted artillery bombardment exploded into life.
If there is any single moment in the history of warfare at which an authentic sense of awe at the exponential power of gunpowder could be palpably felt, it is here in the accounts of the firing of the great guns in the spring of 1453. The taper ignited the powder: And when it had caught fire, faster than you can say it, there was first a terrifying roar and a violent shaking of the ground beneath and for a great distance around, and a din such as has never been heard. Then with a monstrous thundering and an awful explosion and a flame that illuminated everything round about and scorched it,
...more
The Greek chroniclers struggled to convey what they saw, or even to find a vocabulary to describe the guns. “No ancient name exists for this device,” declared the classically minded Kritovoulos, “unless someone refers to it as a battering ram or a propeller. But in common speech everyone now calls it an apparatus.”
Like a "deice."
Gallipoli, “homeland of defenders of the faith,” was a talismanic city for the Ottomans and an auspicious point of departure. It was here that they had gained their first foothold in Europe in 1354 after a fortuitous earthquake.
It was to be another fifty years before the Venetians devised an effective ship-killing gun that could be mounted on a galley.
By the 19th they had reached the Dardanelles where they fell in with a heavy imperial transport, laden with a cargo of corn the emperor had purchased from Sicily and commanded by an Italian, Francesco Lecanella.
Corn?
Baltaoglu was close enough now to hear and ignore his sultan’s bellowed instructions.
The problem of the chain had to be solved.
It is still puzzling to understand how the Christians failed to hear of such a substantial piece of engineering through the intelligence portal of Galata or via Christian soldiers in the Ottoman camp.
It is typical of Mehmet’s secretiveness and deep planning that truth will never be known, but all the chroniclers are in agreement that suddenly, on the morning of April 22, the ships rolled one by one into the Galata basin. The whole operation was a strategic and psychological masterstroke, brilliantly conceived and executed.
Impalement, especially as a means of demoralizing besieged cities, was a widely practiced shock tactic that the Ottomans had learned in the Christian Balkans. They themselves later suffered one of the most infamous atrocities of history in this manner: reportedly 25,000 of them died on the stakes of Vlad Dracul on the Danubian plains in 1461.
A new commander, Dolfin Dolfin,
Mining, although laborious, was one of the most successful techniques for bringing down walls, and had been profitably employed by Muslim armies for hundreds of years.
it was their bounden duty
the vision of a cross that had appeared to Constantine the Great before the crucial battle at the Milvian Bridge
Huge belief was placed in the supernatural powers of the Mother of God. Her most holy icon, the Hodegetria, “the one who shows the way,” was a talisman credited with miraculous powers.
Sometime around the start of 1453 the volcanic island of Kuwae, 1,200 miles east of Australia, literally blew itself up. Eight cubic miles of molten rock were blasted into the stratosphere with a force two million times that of the Hiroshima bomb. It was the Krakatoa of the Middle Ages, an event that dimmed the world’s weather.
It has been estimated that in the Middle Ages a besieging army of 25,000 men, a third the size of that at Constantinople, must transport 9,000 gallons of water and 30 tons of fodder a day to provision itself.
Though perhaps few would have shared the optimism of the Podesta of Galata who declared that “victory was assured,” they were not without confidence in their ability to weather one final storm.
blindly trusting in the miraculous power of prayer.
