1453: The Holy War for Constantinople and the Clash of Islam and the West

by Roger Crowley

Constantinople is a city larger than its renown proclaims. May God in his grace and generosity deign to make it the capital of Islam. Hasan Ali Al-Harawi, twelfth-century Arab writer

A complex, triple collar of walls, studded with closely spaced towers and flanked by a formidable ditch, it stretches from the Horn to the Marmara and seals the city from attack. This is the thousand-year-old land wall of Theodosius, the most formidable defense in the medieval world. To the Ottoman Turks of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries it was “a bone in the throat of Allah” – a psychological problem that taunted their ambitions and cramped their dreams of conquest. To Western Christendom it was the bulwark against Islam. It kept them secure from the Muslim world and made them complacent.

Looking down on the scene in the spring of 1453 one would also be able to make out the fortified Genoese town of Galata, a tiny Italian city state on the far side of the Horn, and to see exactly where Europe ends. The Bosphorus divides the continents, cutting like a river through low wooded hills to the Black Sea. On the other side lies Asia Minor, Anatolia – in Greek literally the East. The snowcapped peaks of Mount Olympus glitter in the thin light 60 miles away.

In the 1,123 years up to the spring of 1453 the city had been besieged some twenty-three times. It had fallen just once – not to the Arabs or the Bulgars but to the Christian knights of the Fourth Crusade in one of the most bizarre episodes in Christian history.

The land walls had never been breached, though they had been flattened by an earthquake in the fifth century. Otherwise they had held firm, so that when the army of Sultan Mehmet finally reined up outside the city on April 6, 1453, the defenders had reasonable hopes of survival.

It is a tale of human courage and cruelty, of technical ingenuity, luck, cowardice, prejudice, and mystery. It also touches on many other aspects of a world on the cusp of change: the development of guns, the art of siege warfare, naval tactics, the religious beliefs, myths, and superstitions of medieval people. But above all it is the story of a place – of sea currents, hills, peninsulas, and weather – the way the land rises and falls and how the straits divide two continents so narrowly “they almost kiss,” where the city is strong, defended by rocky shores, and the particular features of geology that render it vulnerable to attack. It was the possibilities of this site – what it offered for trade, defense, and food – that made Constantinople the key to imperial destinies and brought so many armies to its gate. “The seat of the Roman Empire is Constantinople,” wrote George Trapezuntios, “and he who is and remains Emperor of the Romans is also the Emperor of the whole earth.”

The Ottoman Empire in 1453 was already a multicultural creation that sucked in the peoples it conquered with little concern for ethnic identity. Its crack troops were Slavs, its leading general Greek, its admiral Bulgarian, its sultan probably half Serbian or Macedonian.

They had come to conquer the Greek-speaking inhabitants of Constantinople, whom we now call the Byzantines, a word first used in English in 1853, exactly four hundred years after the great siege. They were considered to be heirs to the Roman Empire and referred to themselves accordingly as Romans.

Constantinople was the front line in a long-distance struggle between Islam and Christianity for the true faith. It was a place where different versions of the truth had confronted each other in war and truce for 800 years, and it was here in the spring of 1453 that new and lasting attitudes between the two great monotheisms were to be cemented in one intense moment of history.

It was quickly realized by the Muslim general Maslama that the walls of the city were invulnerable to siege machines; this time there was to be a total blockade.

What actually ensued for the Arabs was an unimaginable catastrophe that unfolded in inexorable stages. According to their own chroniclers, Leo managed to deceive his enemies by an extraordinary diplomatic double-cross that was impressive even by the standards of the Byzantines. He persuaded Maslama that he could get the city to surrender if the Arabs both destroyed their own food stores and gave the defenders some grain. Once done, Leo sat tight behind the walls and refused to parley. The tricked army was then subjected to a winter of freak severity for which they were ill prepared. Snow lay on the ground for a hundred days; the camels and horses started to perish in the cold. As they died, the increasingly desperate soldiers had no option but to eat them. The Greek chroniclers, not known for their objectivity, hinted at darker horrors. “It is said,” wrote Theophanes the Confessor a hundred years later, “that they even cooked in ovens and ate dead men and their dung which they leavened.” Famine was followed by disease; thousands died in the cold. The Arabs had no experience of the surprising severity of winters on the Bosphorus: the ground was too hard to bury the dead; hundreds of corpses had to be thrown into the sea.

The following spring a large Arab fleet arrived with food and equipment to relieve the stricken army but failed to reverse the downward spiral of fortune. Warned of the dangers of Greek fire, they hid their ships on the Asian coast after they had unloaded. Unfortunately some of the crews, who were Egyptian Christians, defected to the emperor and revealed the position of the fleet. An imperial force of fire ships fell on the unprepared Arab vessels and destroyed them. A parallel relief army dispatched from Syria was ambushed and cut to pieces by Byzantine infantry. Meanwhile Leo, whose determination and cunning seem to have been indefatigable, had been negotiating with the pagan Bulgars. He persuaded them to attack the infidels outside the walls; 22,000 Arabs were killed in the ensuing battle. On August 15, 718, almost a year to the day from their arrival, the armies of the caliph lifted the siege and straggled home by land and sea.

Byzantium had buckled but not collapsed under the onslaught of Islam. Constantinople had survived through a mixture of technological innovation, skillful diplomacy, individual brilliance, massive fortifications – and sheer luck: themes that were to be endlessly repeated in the centuries ahead.

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. It blunted the first powerful onslaught of Islamic jihad that reached its high watermark fifteen years later at the other end of the Mediterranean when a Muslim force was defeated on the banks of the Loire, a mere 150 miles south of Paris.

For Islam itself the significance of resounding defeat at Constantinople was rather more theological than military. In the first century of its existence there had been little reason to doubt final victory for the Faith. The law of jihad dictated inevitable conquest. But under the walls of Constantinople, Islam had been repulsed by the mirror image of its own faith; Christianity was a rival monotheism with a matching sense of mission and desire to win converts. 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.

Byzantium had proved the most obdurate of enemies, and Constantinople itself remained for Muslims both a scar and a source of deep longing. Many martyrs had perished at its walls, including the Prophet’s standard-bearer Ayyub in 669. Their deaths designated the city as a holy place for Islam and imparted a messianic significance to the project of its capture.

So huge was the architecture of the conflict between Islam and Byzantium that no Muslim banners would be unfurled again before the city walls for another 650 years – a span of time greater than that separating us from 1453 – but prophecy decreed that they would return.

Once the land walls had been built in the fifth century, the city was virtually impregnable to attack as long as siege equipment was limited to the power of catapults.

Within the twelve miles of perimeter wall, Constantinople rose on a series of steep hills that afforded natural vantage points over the surrounding sea, while on the east side the inlet of the Golden Horn, shaped like a curved antler, provided a safe deep-water harbor.

The only drawback was the barrenness of the promontory, a problem that Roman water engineering would solve with an elaborat...

The prosperous city that arose in this place was an expression of imperial splendor, ruled by a Roman emperor and inhabited by Greek-speaking people. Constantine laid out a grid of colonnaded streets, flanked by porticoed public buildings, great squares, gardens, columns, and triumphal arches that were both pagan and Christian. There were statues and monuments looted from the classical world (including the fabulous bronze horses perhaps made for Alexander the Great by the Greek sculptor Lysippos, now the icon of Venice), a hippodrome to rival that of Rome, imperial palaces and churches “more numerous than days of the year.” Constantinople became a city of marble and porphyry, beaten gold and brilliant mosaics, whose population at its height topped 500,000. It astounded the visitors who came to trade or pay homage to the emperors of the eastern Roman Empire. Barbarians from benighted Europe gazed open-mouthed at “the city of the world’s desire.”

Byzantium was not only the last heir to the Roman Empire, it was also the first Christian nation. From its founding, the capital city was conceived as the replica of heaven, a manifestation of the triumph of Christ, and its emperor was considered God’s vice-regent on earth.

The detailed gorgeousness of Orthodoxy was the reversed image of the sparse purity of Islam.

The Byzantines lived their spiritual life with an intensity hardly matched in the history of Christendom. The stability of the empire was at times threatened by the number of army officers who retired to monasteries, and theological issues were debated on the streets with a passion that led to riots. “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.” Was Christ one or many? Was the Holy Spirit descended just from the Father or from the Father and the Son? Were icons idolatrous or holy? These were not idle questions: salvation or damnation hung on the answers. Issues of orthodoxy and heresy were as explosive as civil wars in the life of the empire, and they undermined its unity just as effectively.

The world of Byzantine Christianity was also strangely fatalistic. Everything was ordained by God, and misfortune on any scale, from the loss of a purse to a major siege, was considered to be the result of personal or collective sin.

None of the besieging armies that camped outside the land walls could break down these physical and psychological defenses. The technology to storm the fortifications, the naval resources to blockade the sea, and the patience to starve the citizens were not available to any would-be conqueror.

The empire, though frequently stretched to breaking point, showed remarkable resilience. The infrastructure of the city, the strength of the empire’s institutions, and the lucky coincidence of outstanding leaders at moments of crisis made the eastern Roman Empire seem to both its citizens and its enemies likely to continue forever.

People recognized in Islam an irreducible counterforce, something qualitatively different from other foes; their own prophecies about the Saracens – as the Arabs came to be known in Christendom – articulated their forebodings about the future of the world.

For nearly sixty years the city became the “Latin Empire of Constantinople,” ruled by the count of Flanders and his successors. The Byzantine empire was dismembered into a scattered collection of Frankish states and Italian colonies, while a large part of the population fled to Greece. The Byzantines established a kingdom in exile at Nicaea in Anatolia and were relatively successful in barring further Turkish incursions. When they recaptured Constantinople in 1261, they found the city’s infrastructure close to ruin and its dominions shrunk to a few dispersed fragments.

No one knows the true origins of these people, whom we now call Ottomans. They emerge from among the anonymous wandering Turkmen sometime around 1280, a caste of illiterate warriors living among tents and woodsmoke, who ruled from the saddle and signed with a thumbprint and whose history was subsequently reconstructed by imperial myth-making.

Andronikos III at Pelekanos, ending all Byzantine attempts to support its remaining Anatolian cities. They fell in quick succession – Nicaea in 1331, Nicomedia in 1337, Scutari the following year. Muslim warriors were now able to ride their horses to the sea’s edge on their own lands and look out across the Bosphorus at Europe.

When the emperor John Cantacuzenos invited Orhan’s war band across the Dardanelles in the 1350s to help in the interminable civil wars of the Byzantine state, Muslims set foot in Europe for the first time since 717.

In 1359 an Islamic army appeared outside the city walls for the first time in 650 years.

The speed of the Ottoman advance seemed nothing short of miraculous – as if ordained by God. By geography, custom, and luck, the Ottomans were best placed to prosper from the disintegration of the Byzantine state. The early sultans, living close to their men and to nature, were attentive to circumstance and possibility in the shifting political environment around them. Where the Byzantines were hidebound by a thousand years of ceremony and tradition, the Ottomans were quick-witted, flexible, and open.

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.

No attempt was made to convert Christians, who formed the bulk of the population, to Islam – in fact it was largely thought undesirable by a dynasty with a taste for empire. Under sharia law it was not possible to tax Muslims as heav...

Most startling of all for Westerners, they paid no attention to succession through marriage. Where the Byzantine emperors, like all the ruling houses of Europe, went to exhaustive lengths to secure dynastic marriages and legitimate succession through approved bloodlines, the Ottomans hardly bothered. A sultan’s father would naturally be the previous sultan, but his mother might be a concubine or a slave, possibly not a born Muslim, and from one of a dozen subject peoples. This genetic inclusiveness was to provide the Ottomans with extraordinary resources.

Of all Ottoman innovations none was perhaps more significant than the creation of a regular army.

The enthusiastic bands of gazi warriors were too undisciplined to fulfill the now growing ambitions of the Ottoman sultans; besieging well-defended cities required patience, methodology, and a particular set of craft skills. Toward the end of the fourteenth century Sultan Murat I formed a new military force, comprised of slaves captured from the Balkan states. A levy of Christian youths was taken at regular intervals, converted to Islam, and taught Turkish. Removed from their families, these new recruits owed their loyalty only to the sultan. They were his private force: the “slaves of the Gate.” They were organized into infantry units, the Yeni Cheri or Janissaries, and the ca...

This was a custom drawn straight out of the Ottomans’ own history: the Turks themselves had been enrolled as military slaves at the frontiers of the Islamic world. It had been their passport to advancement. But to Christians watching the process from afar, it evoked rigid horror: with different images of slavery, the prospect of turning captured Christian children against Christ...

This notion of “the Turk” was seized on early in the West. It was largely a European construct, a term matched to Western identities that was hardly used by the Ottomans. They considered it derogatory. Instead, they chose titles that were neither ethnic nor territorial and reflected both their noma...

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.

The rising arc of the Ottomans was mirrored by a corresponding and unhalted decline in the fortunes of Byzantium. The factors that went to make the years after 1300 “the calamitous century” in Europe played out in the eastern empire too. Fragmentation, civil war, population decline, and impoverishment stalked Constantinople. There were telling symbolic moments. In 1284, the emperor Andronikos took the suicidal decision to abolish the imperial navy. The workless sailors defected to the Ottomans and helped them build a fleet. Sometime around 1325 the emperors of the House of Palaiologos adopted the double-headed eagle as their emblem; it did not, as has sometimes been supposed, represent a mighty empire that looked both east and west, but rather symbolized a division of authority between two quarrelsome emperors of the same family. The eagle was prophetic. The years 1341 to 1371 were wracked by a ruinous sequence of civil wars, invasion of imperial territory by both the Ottomans and the powerful Serbian state, religious controversy, and plague.

Constantinople was the first European city to experience the Black Death:

The population shrank to little more than 100,000. A series of earthquakes devastated Constantinople – the dome of St. Sophia collapsed in 1346 – and the city “of pure gold” became increasingly destitute and forlorn, its inhabitants prone to religious pessimism. Travelers to the city remarked on the melancholy appearance of the place. Ibn Battutah saw not a city, but thirteen villages separated by fields. When the Spaniard Pero Tafur visited, he found even the emperor’s palace “in such a state that both it and the city show well the evils which the people have suffered and still endure … the city is sparsely populated … the inhabitants are not well clad, but sad and poor, showing the hardship of their lot,” before adding with true Christian charity, “which is, however, not as bad as they deserve, for they are a vicious people, steeped in sin.” The city was shrinking inside its walls like an old man in the clothes of his youth, and its emperors were paupers in their own house. At the coronation of the emperor Jo...

into Europe continued unchecked. In 1362 they virtually encircled Constantinople from the rear when they took the city of Adrianople – Edirne in Turkish – 140 miles to the west, and moved their imperial capital into Europe. When they shattered the Serbs in battle in 1371, the emperor John was isolated from all Christian support and had little option but to become a vassal of the sultans, contributing troops on demand and seeking permission for imperial appointments. The advance of t...

The next fifty years were to see three Crusades against the infidel, all led by the Hungarians, the most threatened state in Eastern Europe. They were to be the swan song of a united Christendom.

The boy revealed an extraordinary intelligence coupled with an iron will to succeed. He developed fluency in languages – by all accounts he knew Turkish, Persian, and Arabic, as well as spoken Greek, a Slavic dialect, and some Latin – and became fascinated by history and geography, science, practical engineering, and literature. A remarkable personality was starting to emerge.

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 sovereign, the Grand Turk Mehmet Bey is a youth … well-built, of large rather than medium stature, expert at arms, of aspect more frightening than venerable, laughing seldom, full of circumspection, endowed with great generosity, obstinate in pursuing his plans, bold in all undertakings, as eager for fame as Alexander of Macedon. Daily he has Roman and other historical works read to him. He speaks three languages, Turkish, Greek and Slavic. He is at great pains to learn the geography of Italy … where the seat of the pope is and that of the emperor, and how many kingdoms there are in Europe. He possesses a map of Europe with the countries and provinces. He learns of nothing with greater interest and enthusiasm than the geography of the world and of military affairs; he burns with desire to dominate; he is a shrewd investigator of conditions. It is with such a man that we Christians have to deal … Today, he says, the times have changed, and declares that he will advance from east to West as in former times the Westerners advanced into the Orient. There must, he says, be only one empire, one faith, and one sovereignty in the world.