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July 25 - August 16, 2019
The failure of Islam to take the city in 717 had far-reaching consequences. The collapse of Constantinople would have opened the way for a Muslim expansion into Europe that might have reshaped the whole future of the West; it remains one of the great “What ifs” of history.
Constantinople had defined the front line in a long-running struggle between two closely related versions of the truth that was to be pursued for hundreds of years. In the interim, Muslim thinkers were forced to recognize a practical change in the relationship between the House of Islam and the House of War; the final conquest of the non-Muslim world would have to be postponed, perhaps until the end of the world. Some jurists conceived of a third state, the House of Truce, to express postponement of final victory. The age of jihad seemed to be over.
“O what a splendid city, how stately, how fair, how many monasteries therein, how many palaces raised by sheer labour in its broadways and streets, how many works of art, marvellous to behold: it would be wearisome to tell of the abundance of all good things; of gold and silver, garments of manifold fashion and such sacred relics. Ships are at all times putting in at this port, so that there is nothing that men want that is not brought hither.”
“we knew not whether we were in Heaven or earth. For on earth there is no such splendour and beauty, and we are at a loss how to describe it. We only know that there God dwells among men.”
“The city is full of workmen and slaves who are all theologians,” reported one irritated visitor. “If you ask a man to change money he will tell you how the Son differs from the Father. If you ask the price of a loaf he will argue that the Son is less than the Father. If you want to know if the bath is ready you are told that the Son was made out of nothing.”
In truth the Byzantines often preferred their settled Muslim neighbors, proximity with whom had bred a certain familiarity and respect over the centuries following the initial burst of holy war: “we must live in common as brothers, although we differ in customs, manners and religion,” a patriarch in Constantinople once wrote to a caliph in Baghdad.
An oblique note of jealousy crept into the reports sent back to the small towns of Normandy and the Rhine: “since the beginning of the world,” wrote the marshal of Champagne, “never was so much riches seen collected in a single city.” It was a vivid temptation.
“Oh city, city, eye of all cities,” howled the chronicler Nicetas, “you have drunk to the dregs the cup of the anger of the Lord.” It was a typical Byzantine response; but whether the agent of this disaster was human or divine, the consequences were the same: Constantinople was reduced to a shadow of its former greatness.
The laws of Islam required mercy to conquered peoples, and the Ottomans ruled their subjects with a light hand that seemed frequently preferable to European feudalism.
Of all Ottoman innovations none was perhaps more significant than the creation of a regular army.
The Ottoman makeup was a unique assemblage of different elements and peoples: Turkish tribalism, Sunni Islam, Persian court practices, Byzantine administration, taxation, and ceremonial, and a high-flown court language that combined Turkish structure with Arabic and Persian vocabulary. It had an identity all of its own.
Constantinople was the first European city to experience the Black Death:
Europe was divided, poverty-stricken, wracked by its own internal disputes, weakened by the Black Death. The armies themselves were lumbering, quarrelsome, ill-disciplined, and tactically inept, in comparison with the mobile and well-organized Ottomans, unified around a common cause. The few Europeans who saw them up close could not but profess a sneaking admiration for “Ottoman order.”
After 350 years the defeat at Varna extinguished the appetite in the West for crusading; never again would Christendom unite to try to drive the Muslims out of Europe.
The key traits of his mature character were already in place: the later tyrant who was also a scholar; the obsessive military strategist who loved Persian poetry and gardening; the expert at logistics and practical planning who was so superstitious that he relied on the court astrologer to confirm military decisions; the Islamic warrior who could be generous to his non-Muslim subjects and enjoyed the company of foreigners and unorthodox religious thinkers.
All these pictures contain a note of steady authority, the natural abrogation of power by “God’s shadow on earth,” that assumes the world sits in his hand too naturally to be called arrogance, but there is a chilly melancholy too that recalls the cold and dangerous childhood years.
A strong sense of responsibility for the Byzantine inheritance ran through his character; he spent a lifetime trying to shore it up.
Constantine had handed him an invaluable pretext for breaking his own word when the time was right.
The issue was coming closer to home: a vote in the Senate in August to abandon Constantinople to its fate was easily defeated but resulted in no more decisive counteraction.
It is far better for a country to remain under the rule of Islam than be governed by Christians who refuse to acknowledge the rights of the Catholic Church.
The people were profoundly antipapist: they were accustomed to equate the pope with the antichrist, “the wolf, the destroyer”;
Constantine XI was a soldier rather than a theologian, and his view of the union was strictly pragmatic. He was obsessed by only one thing – saving the city whose ancient past had been put in his care.
Constantinople henceforth had neither a fully legitimate emperor nor a patriarch.
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.
Like the city itself, the walls were always there, and for anyone in the eastern Mediterranean, it was assumed they always would be.
Nearly all besieging armies had identified this area as vulnerable, and though none had succeeded, it provided attackers with a vestige of hope.
Mehmet himself ensured that ominous reports of the gun filtered back to Constantinople: it was to be a psychological weapon as well as a practical one.
When it marched, the air seemed like a forest because of its lances and when it stopped, the earth could not be seen for tents. Mehmet’s chronicler, Tursun Bey, on the Ottoman army
Many came who had not been summoned: volunteers and freelance raiders, hangers-on, dervishes and holy men inspired by the old prophecies who stirred the populace with words of the Prophet and the glories of martyrdom.
No army in the world could match the Ottomans in the organization of a military campaign.
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 help the Ottomans received from Christian subjects, mercenaries, converts, and technical experts was a theme of repeated lament for the European chroniclers.
The vicious wars among Italian city-states bred generations of such talented specialists, technical mercenaries who studied city defense as both a science and an art. However, Giustiniani could never have encountered massive artillery bombardment before. The events about to unfold would test his skill to the limit.
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.
At first it seemed to the defenders that the whole history of siege warfare was unraveling in front of their eyes; the Theodosian land wall, the product of two thousand years of defensive evolution, a miracle of engineering devised by human ingenuity and protected by divine blessing, started to collapse wherever it was hit by a volley of well-aimed balls.
Underneath it all, it was quickly clear that in a new age of warfare the Theodosian walls were structurally inadequate.
Ship handling was a craft skill dependent on well-trained crews, so that the outcome of naval encounters rested less on numbers than on experience, determination, and the random luck of winds and currents.
Constantine’s appeal to the West rested on notions that were religious and medieval, but they were directed at states whose motivations were economic – and surprisingly modern.
It was an offer designed to be refused and it duly was. Constantine had his own awareness of the obligations of history and stood in the shoes of his father. When the Ottomans were at the gates in 1397 Manuel II had been heard to murmur: “Lord Jesus Christ, let it not come to pass that the great multitude of Christian people should hear it said that it was in the days of the Emperor Manuel that the City, with all its sacred and venerable monuments of the Faith, was delivered to the infidel.” In this spirit, the emperor would fight to the last.
In comparison to the fragmented volunteer nature of the Christian defense that relied heavily on individual initiative, it seemed that the Ottoman troops only responded to central directives.
They replied, “What is the defence to me, if my family’s in need?”
In an atmosphere charged with foreboding, a move was made to persuade Constantine to leave the city for the Peloponnese, where he could regroup, gather new forces, and strike again. Giustiniani offered his galleys for the emperor’s escape. The chroniclers give an emotional account of Constantine’s response. He “fell silent for a long time and shed tears. He spoke to them as follows: ‘I praise and thank your counsel and all of you, as all of this is in my interest; it can only be so. But how can I do this and leave the clergy, the churches of God, the empire and all of the people? What will the
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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.
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 partial eclipse struck the defenders with the force of prophecy.
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. In a 60-day siege such an army would need to remove one million gallons of human and animal urine and 4,000 tons of solid biological waste. Soon the summer heat would add to the Muslims’ material discomforts and the threat of disease. The clock was ticking on Ottoman resolve.
Technically skillful, personally brave, and utterly tireless in his defense of the land walls, he alone had been able to command the loyalty of both the Greeks and Venetians – to the extent that they were forced to make an exception to their general hatred of the Genoese.
“that all who called themselves Venetians should go to the land walls, firstly out of love for God, then for the good of the city and for the honour of all Christendom and that they should all stand to their posts and be willing to die there with a good heart.”
The dark church, which had been so conspicuously boycotted by the Orthodox faithful, was filled with people, anxious, penitent, and fervent, and for the first time since the summer of 1064, in the ultimate moment of need, it seems that Catholic and Orthodox worshipped together in the city, and the 400-year-old schism and the bitterness of the Crusades were put aside in a final service of intercession.
For fifty-three days their tiny force had confounded the might of the Ottoman army; they had faced down the heaviest bombardment in the Middle Ages from the largest cannon ever built – an estimated 5,000 shots and 55,000 pounds of gunpowder; they had resisted three full-scale assaults and dozens of skirmishes, killed unknown thousands of Ottoman soldiers, destroyed underground mines and siege towers, fought sea battles, conducted sorties and peace negotiations, and worked ceaselessly to erode the enemy’s morale – and they had come closer to success than they probably knew.
In a few hours a thousand years of Christian Constantinople largely disappeared.
