Amazing Tales for Making Men Out of Boys (36 page)

It must have seemed to those proponents of holy war that this city with its elemental defenses of stone, sea and fire would never fall to them. By the time Mehmet and his great army loomed over the city like the promise of bad weather, the Muslim dream of taking Constantinople for Islam was seven centuries old. Think about that. Imagine a wish sparking among us today like a flame—and being kept burning until some time in the 28th century. What kind of wish would that have to be?

The city walls stood as defiant as ever—but the flame of holy war burned brightly in their shadow. This latest contender, Mehmet, was Bayezit’s great-grandson and as determined to take the city as any Sultan or Caliph before him. In 1452 he began to make the final moves toward what he believed was his destiny and his purpose upon the Earth. He made his plans carefully and well.

Utterly isolated on the land, Constantinople was by now a city that depended upon the sea for its survival. Ships brought everything from food supplies to the munitions of war, and Mehmet understood that domination of the waterways was key to any hope of conquest. He already had a castle on the Asian side of the Bosphorus, in Anatolia, built by his great-grandfather toward the end of the 14th century. But with jaw-dropping efficiency he now organized the construction of one on the European side. Between April and August 1452 the “Throat Cutter” was built—complete with walls over 20 feet thick and 50 feet high. Constantine and his Byzantines could only look on with wonder and dread at this demonstration of logistical prowess. Stone cannonballs from Mehmet’s artillery could be sent hurtling across the Bosphorus from either side, into the hulls of any ships daring to try to pass through the straits without his permission.

What Constantine needed was help from the Christian West. As he saw it, any differences between the “Orthodox” Christians of Byzantium and their “Latin” Christian brothers and sisters in Rome
should be set aside for the greater good of the Church. There had been attempts over the years to heal the Great Schism of 1054—when the family had torn itself apart over the details of their beliefs—but hardliners on both sides could find no real forgiveness in their hearts. The divide separating Rome from Constantinople was much greater than the Bosphorus, and would not be bridged.

Good news, slight though it was given the scale of the threat, came in January. Toward the end of that month, two Genoese ships arrived from the Mediterranean carrying 700 armed men. Their leader was the charismatic and experienced warrior Giovanni Giustiniani Longo, who had chosen to weave his fate into that of the city. A handful of others answered the call and made their way through the gates into the last redoubt of Christian empire in the East, but as 1453 dawned Constantinople stood alone in the face of the holy warriors of Islam.

The city’s population placed unshakable faith in two shields–their religion and their wall. By the time spring approached, however, both were compromised. Divided from their brothers and sisters in Rome by blinkered stubbornness on both sides, they were cut off from the mighty military resources of western Europe. Faithful prayers bring comfort, but armored knights have a more straightforward application in time of siege. Worse still, time itself had caught up with the Wall of Theodosius.

For 1,000 years it had been beyond the limitations of any military technology brought to bear upon it. Attackers first of all faced an outer ditch—the fosse—brick-lined and 60 feet wide. Those who made it across ran then into the shadow of the outer wall, 25 feet high and manned by soldiers raining down arrows, crossbow bolts, boulders, Greek fire and anything else that came to hand. Beyond that first wall lay a level terrace 60 feet wide—a killing field for the use of defenders on both the outer wall and now the inner wall. This final obstacle was the greatest of all—40 feet high and, like
the outer wall, reinforced with massive towers—providing huge advantage for those manning its battlements.

Massed armies, longbows and crossbows, great siege engines, catapults and trebuchets—all had been tried and all had broken upon it. But lumbering in the wake of the army that approached the city this time was a weapon that would test the ancient defenses anew. In the years and months before this latest campaign, Mehmet had commissioned and assembled some of the greatest heavy artillery pieces the world had yet seen. The wall had been tested before by primitive Arab cannons—in the time of Mehmet’s father, Murat I—and had passed with flying colors. In recent years, however, the technology for producing both gunpowder and the guns themselves had come on apace. One of the pieces hauled laboriously through the Thracian countryside toward Constantinople in the spring of 1453 was nearly 30 feet long, with a barrel big enough for a grown man to crawl inside and hunker down in. The black powder the gunners carried now was greater too—more powerful than anything that had been brought to bear upon the city’s land walls before.

In the face of the juggernaut Constantine held firm. He was more than enough of a soldier to understand how grave was the threat facing his city—but like the soldier he was, he prepared to fight. He put Giustiniani in charge of the walls—repairing any gaps or weak points, sealing the gates, destroying all bridges across the fosse and seeing to it that the available fighting men were dispersed along its length to the greatest effect.

Cut off from supplies coming via the Black Sea and the Bosphorus, Constantine had sent ships to the Greek islands of the Aegean to collect whatever foodstuffs were available. Like Mehmet, Constantine too had heavy artillery, and gunpowder and shot were stockpiled in the arsenals. Another ancient defense was set in place once more—a massive chain stretched across the mouth of the Golden Horn
between Constantinople on one side and the Venetian city of Galata on the other. Now no enemy ships could enter that waterway in hope of breaching the walls on the less stoutly defended northeast side of the city.

Easter Sunday came and went, taking with it countless muttered prayers to the Virgin. It wasn’t salvation that arrived next day but the enemy, filing onto the rolling terrain beyond the walls in endless procession. Where before there had been one city, now there were two—one of stone and one of canvas. As dictated by the Islamic code of war, messengers approached as far as the fosse and said the city would be spared the customary three days of sacking if it would surrender now. The response was polite but curt: there had never been nor ever would be any surrender by the Christians of Constantinople.

By the second week of April, Mehmet’s guns were in position, ranged in batteries in front of perceived weak points in the Wall of Theodosius. On April 12 they opened fire for the first time—and to devastating effect. According to eyewitnesses whole sections of the wall were flattened like grass. A structure that had defied all comers for a millennium—which was, to the medieval world, as permanent as a mountain range—had finally been made vulnerable.

Effective though the guns were, the heat and force generated by firing them put almost unbearable stresses on the bronze of the barrels. To avoid the risk of them cracking—or even exploding—they had to be allowed to cool down for an hour or more after every firing. While Mehmet fretted and paced behind the guns, demanding to know why it was taking so long, Giustiniani used the breaks in the bombardment to effect hurried repairs. Inadvertently he stumbled upon the perfect remedy. The earthen ramparts he used to plug the gaps proved far more resistant to the heavy guns than any wall of stone. While stone shatters, heaped earth absorbs the cannonball and its impact.

Unable to smash the walls down quickly enough, Mehmet turned his attentions to rushing the gates. He had his men attempt to fill in the fosse—using any materials available—but withering fire from the defenders on the outer wall turned such work into a suicide mission. The corpses of the attackers were piled high. Miners were set to work then, digging tunnels toward the walls. They hoped to light fires beneath the foundations and cause their collapse—but again the would-be invaders were thwarted. Behind the battlements and fighting on the Christian side was a Scot called John Grant. He was an experienced soldier and had faced the threat posed by tunneling many times before. By listening for the telltale sounds of digging—and watching for ripples on carefully placed bowls of water—he could detect the vibrations of the miners at work. By digging their own tunnels from above, the defenders could break in on the enemy miners—and then it was hellish hand-to-hand fighting in the near darkness to drive them off.

Behind the walls the emperor moved among his people. Tirelessly he patrolled the battlements, urging his soldiers on when fatigue was their greatest foe. He prayed with them in their churches, he waited with them through the hours of darkness and he fought with them through the days. Survivors would say later he was always visible, always with some knot of defenders as they stood in the face of the rising tide.

Mehmet looked next to the sea in search of the crucial breakthrough. While his gunners blasted, his infantrymen struggled and died hopelessly at the fosse and his miners scrabbled in the dirt and the dark, his ships set sail. Commissioned and built for the campaign, this fleet of galleys was yet another innovation Mehmet could bring to bear against the Christians. He sent them now against the Byzantine ships defending the chain across the Golden Horn—but while more numerous than the defenders, the Muslim seamen were less skilled. Warfare waged at sea is something learned and passed down over
centuries, and for men of the desert there was much knowledge to be acquired before they could tackle a people who had sailed trading ships on the world’s oceans for generations. It seemed Mehmet was to be thwarted on the sea as well as on the land.

During those first weeks of the siege it seemed the city would hold out as it always had done. Mehmet flung more and more men and ships into the fray—probing for weaknesses on every face of the defenses—and still the defenders defied him. Galled by the failure of his ships, he gazed again toward the mouth of the Golden Horn where that ancient chain barred his path. And then it came to him—if he could not go through it, he would go
around
it. Toward the end of that month of frustrations he set his engineers the task of moving his galleys over land until they could be eased into that crucial waterway at a point beyond the obstruction. As news spread that Mehmet’s galleys were now behind them, and in among them, panic spread through the city’s inhabitants.

Even this breakthrough was not enough. Still Constantine held the line and now deployed his defenders on to the new front of the sea wall overlooking the Golden Horn.

But although the city was bearing the burden of the siege, it was taking a terrible toll. There hadn’t been enough defenders in the first place and their numbers were being winnowed by every attack, every bombardment. Those still alive faced their greatest battle, against fatigue. Rest and sleep were hard to come by for an army with no reinforcements. And here then was the rub. Worse than the fighting and the thunderous bombardment—worse even than the tiredness—was the erosion of hope. This was a people besieged. All they would ever have for the fight was here with them now. Nothing more and no one else was coming to their aid.

There were Muslim breakthroughs, too—when the attackers would make it through some breach or other and grapple for a foothold within the walls. Then the fighting was in the streets and lanes,
through the houses themselves. This was killing and dying face to face by sword and axe. Many times the Muslims came and every time they were cut down to the last man—their mutilated bodies hung later over the battlements by the defenders in a show of bloody defiance.

April had given way to May and still the stalemate dragged on. For Mehmet every passing day made it harder for him to maintain the resolve of his army, great though it undoubtedly was. Every failure dulled his soldiers’ appetite for the siege and as May progressed he, like Constantine, was reaching crisis point. Seeing that final victory—the realization of his destiny—might be slipping through his fingers, he called for one last great effort.

In Constantinople there were rumors and portents all around. Some said a Christian army was on its way from the west—others feared an ancient prophecy that said the empire would begin and end with a man called Constantine.

In the end, the fate of all turned around a gate left unbarred. On May 29, with fighting raging at points all around the city, a company of defenders returned from a sortie beyond the walls. Once inside and no doubt befuddled with fatigue, each thought another had the job of securing the door behind them. And in that moment a handful of the enemy surged through—living long enough to raise the Sultan’s banner from a tower before each was felled. The damage was done. Word spread along the walls like a licking flame.

Inhabitants of the city looked up and saw the dread colors snapping in the breeze.

“The city is fallen,” they cried. “The city is fallen!”

Elsewhere, Giustiniani fell badly wounded. This man who had emboldened all around him had been hurt before in the fight—and had recovered to fight and lead once more. This time his spirit was broken and he called to his followers to take him now to one of the ships in the harbor still readied for flight. After weeks of
stubborn resistance, the defense began to collapse like wet sand before an incoming tide.

Hearing word of the rout—then seeing it with his own eyes as men around him broke and thought about following Giustiniani—Constantine cried out to the remnants of his army, urging them to hold fast. It was too late. The thrilling sight of their banner flying within the walls brought the Ottoman forces on like a wave. Where before the defenders had fought to turn them back, now they ran. Thousands of enemy soldiers were inside the defenses within minutes and this time they would not be denied.

And what of Constantine at the last? It is a legend that has survived to tell his fate. Muslim and Christian alike looked up from the mud and blood of the last square feet of the Byzantine Empire and saw him high on the battlements. He cast off the last remnants of his imperial garb, stooped and freed a sword from the dead hand of a defender. Then as the thousands watched he leapt clear of the walls, out and down into the enemy horde. In that frozen moment he had jumped clear, too, of the tainted legacy of the many lesser emperors who had gone before him. In that space between the earth and the sky he was a good soldier.