The final siege of... «Europe: A History»

The final siege of Constantinople began on 2 April 1453, Easter Monday, and lasted for eight weeks. The twenty-year-old Sultan, Mehmet II (r. 1451–81), handsome and secretive, was eager to attack, having been frustrated as a boy, when his plan for a campaign against the Walls had been rejected. The bachelor Emperor, Constantine XI Palaeologos (r. 1448–53), still optimistically searching for a bride, awaited him without illusions. Preparations had been thorough. The cities of Thrace and the Black Sea coast were ravaged to prevent assistance. A fleet of triremes and transport barges was assembled at Gallipoli. A castle was built at the narrowest point of the Bosporus at Rumeli Hisar. A 26-ft (7.9-m) bronze cannon, hurling stone shot of 12 hundredweight (609 kilos) each, had been specially cast by the Sultan’s Hungarian engineer, and was pulled from Adrianople by 60 oxen. Inside the city, weapons were collected and money raised to pay the troops. Outside the walls, the ditches were deepened and the moat by the Blachernae Gate flooded. Embassies were duly sent to Venice, to the Vatican, to France and Aragon. A company of 700 men arrived under Giovanni Giustiniani Longo, a Genoese captain who was given command of the land walls. On the day that the first Turkish detachments came into view, a procession of migrating storks flew over the Straits. The city gates were closed. A great iron chain was stretched across the entrance to the Golden Horn. Only 7,000 defenders stood to arms against the onslaught of 80,000.

The progress of the siege at first gave encouragement to the defenders, though the impaling of Christian prisoners in view of the Walls was calculated to cause panic. On 12 April a naval attack on the boom failed. The great cannon, firing once every seven minutes from sunrise to sunset, day after day, reduced large sections of the outer wall to rubble. But the gaps were filled at night with wooden stockades. On 20 April an imperial transport flotilla fought its way into the harbour. Turkish mining operations were betrayed. But then, in a masterstroke, the Sultan ordered his fleet of galleys to be dragged overland behind Pera and into the Golden Horn. The City lost its harbour. From then on, the defenders had only three options: victory, death, or conversion to Islam. On 27 April an ecumenical mass was celebrated in St Sophia, for Greeks and Italians, Orthodox and Catholics. ‘At this moment, there was Union in the Church of Constantinople.’ The decisive assault was launched about half-past one in the morning of Tuesday, 29 May, the fifty-third day of the siege. First came the bashi-bazouk irregulars, then the Anatolians, then the Janissaries: The Janissaries advanced at the double, not rushing in wildly… but keeping their ranks in perfect order, unbroken by the missiles of the enemy. The martial music that urged them on was so loud that the sound could be heard between the roar of the guns from right across the Bosphorus. Mehmet himself led them as far as the fosse, and stood there shouting encouragement… Wave after wave of these fresh, magnificent and stoutly armoured men rushed up to the stockade, to tear at the barrels of earth that surmounted it, to hack at the beams that supported it, to place their ladders against it… each wave making way without panic for its successor. Just before sunrise, Giustiniani took a culverin shot on his breastplate and retired, covered in blood. A giant janissary called Hasan was slain after mounting the stockade; but he showed it was possible. A small sally-port, the Kerkoporte, was left open by retreating Greeks, and the Turks swarmed in. The Emperor dismounted from his white Arabian mare, plunged into the fray, and disappeared. Constantinople was sacked. Gross slaughter and rapine ensued. St Sophia was turned into a mosque: The muezzin ascended the most lofty turret, and proclaimed the ezan or public invitation … The imam preached; and Mohammed the Second performed the namaz of thanksgiving on the great altar, where the Christian mysteries had so lately been celebrated before the last of the Caesars. From St Sophia, he proceeded to the august but desolate mansion of a hundred successors of the great Constantine… A melancholy reflection on the vicissitudes of human greatness forced itself on his mind, and he repeated an elegant distich of Persian poetry. ‘The spider has woven his web in the Imperial Palace, and the owl hath sung her watch-song on the towers of Afrasiab’. The Roman Empire had ceased to exist.