In the course of the fourteenth century the main forum of
crusading warfare in the eastern Mediterranean became Constantinople and the
Balkans, a shift prompted by the remorseless rise of the Ottoman Empire. The
Ottomans were a nomadic tribe from northwestern Asia Minor who had emerged
under the leadership of Osman, a frontier warlord, at the very start of the
fourteenth century. Their origins are somewhat hazy but early on the presence
of large numbers of ghazis (volunteers dedicated to the holy war who fought in
the expectation of booty and who were treated as martyrs on their death) and
Sufi mystics gave them a strong religious drive. A series of victories against
Muslim and Byzantine Christian opponents convinced them that God was on their
side. By the middle of the century they had established a strong territorial
base in northwestern Anatolia and begun to push through the Dardanelles and
into southeastern Europe. In 1389 the Ottomans destroyed a Serbian army at
Kosovo, another battle that has remained strong in modern regional
consciousness. The immensity of the Turkish threat began to concentrate minds
in Catholic Europe in a way not seen for decades. Coupled with a rare window of
peace in the Hundred Years War, and inflamed by the crusading enthusiasm of
John of Nevers, son of the duke of Burgundy, and Marshal Boucicaut, this
generated a substantial army ready to turn back the Ottoman menace. Boucicaut’s
biographer evoked the spirit in which the French nobility joined the crusade:
“he [John of Nevers] was then in the full flower of youth, and wanted to follow
the path sought by the virtuous, that is to say, the honour of knighthood. He
considered that he could not use his time better than in dedicating his youth
to God’s service, by bodily labour for the spreading of the faith . . . several
young lords wanted to go along, to escape boredom and employ their time and
energies on deeds of knighthood. For it really seemed to them that they could
not go on a more honourable expedition or one more pleasing to God.” The
results of the expedition were, however, catastrophic.
In July 1396 the French linked up with King Sigismund of
Hungary at Buda and a combined army of perhaps fifteen to twenty thousand men
began to march down the Danube intent upon the recovery of Nicopolis, a strong
defensive site in Bulgaria. After this the crusade planned to move on to
Constantinople and relieve the city from a siege led by Sultan Bayezid I
(1389–1402), known as Yilderim, or Thunderbolt. Early successes lulled the
Christians into a sense of complacency and as they blockaded Nicopolis their
camp became a scene of indiscipline and licentiousness; Bayezid, meanwhile, had
gathered his troops and was approaching fast. On September 25 the two sides met
in battle. The French impetuously hurled themselves against Bayezid’s infantry
and light cavalry who were carefully positioned at the top of a hill. Stakes in
the ground tore the crusaders’ horses to pieces, but although they fought on
foot, so great was their momentum that they succeeded in cutting their way up
past the Turkish infantry to face the light cavalry. At this point they
discovered Bayezid’s trap: waiting on the other side of the hill, fresh and
rested, were his heavy cavalry. The Ottomans charged and the crusaders, from
being convinced of their success, collapsed: “the lion in them turned into a
timid hare,” commented one contemporary. Thousands of men were killed or taken
prisoner, an earlier massacre of Turks was avenged by the summary execution of
countless Christians, and Count John and Marshal Boucicaut were imprisoned. The
debacle of Nicopolis was a massive blow to crusading morale in western Europe
and it gave the Turks free access to continue their conquest of the Balkans. In
1402 their momentum was briefly stalled by defeat at the hands the Turcoman
ruler Timur (also known as Tamerlane) at the Battle of Ankara, and a period of
dynastic infighting checked their progress further, but within a couple of
decades they were looking to expand again.
The Turks’ prime target was clearly Constantinople, in part
because of its immense wealth and importance to Christianity, in part because
it lay directly between Ottoman lands in Anatolia and their possessions in the
Balkans. The Greeks had regained the city from the Latins in 1261, but only a
pale shadow of past glories survived; that said, it did survive blockades and
sieges from 1394 to 1402 and in 1442. So great was the Ottoman menace that
Emperor John VIII was persuaded to grasp the nettle of Church unity and in 1439
he led a delegation to Florence where, after centuries of division, the union
of the Catholic and Orthodox—with the former as the senior partner—was finally
proclaimed. This provoked outrage among some of the Greeks: “We have betrayed
our faith. We have exchanged piety for impiety.” John, however, received the
reward he was after with a new crusade in 1444. This saw another heavy defeat
for the Christians at the town of Varna on the west coast of the Black Sea (in
modern-day Bulgaria) when Ottoman troops, fighting under the banner of jihad,
entirely crushed their opponents.
In 1451, Mehmet II, known to posterity as Mehmet the
Conqueror, became sultan at the age of seventeen (he had held the title briefly
between 1444 and 1446). Two years later this remarkable character struck
Christendom an enormous blow with the capture of Constantinople. He was a
brave, secretive, and utterly ruthless man; he was also a scholar and a superb
strategist. He is described as having a hooked nose and fleshy lips, or “a
parrot’s beak resting on cherries” as a poet so colorfully expressed it. Two
actions early on in his sultanate—one a combination of the private and the
political, the other strategic—give a sense of the man. First, as soon as he
became ruler, he ordered his infant half-brother to be drowned in his bath (the
perpetrator was then executed for murder); thus he enshrined fratricide as a
means of preventing civil war. Secondly, he commissioned the construction of
the castle of Bogaz Kesa, the Throat-Cutter, a few miles east along the
Bosporus. This fine fortress (known today as Rumeli Hisari) has four large and
thirteen smaller towers and was completed in a matter of months, testimony to
the superbly efficient Ottoman war machine. As the name of the castle suggests,
it was designed to block the passage of Christian shipping along the Bosporus
and thereby to close the net around Constantinople.
Within the city, Emperor Constantine IX (1449–53) viewed
these developments with understandable trepidation. He appealed to the West for
help, but other than some support from the Venetians, who still retained an
interest in Constantinople long after their part in the 1204 conquest, no major
forces arrived. The Genoese held a colony at Galata, just across the Golden
Horn, and while they professed neutrality, their men and shipping also came to
play a vital role in the defense of the city. Even with such limited outside
assistance the sheer strength of Constantinople’s fortifications made it a
formidable site. The emperor commanded ditches to be cleared while the
dilapidated outer walls were restored and covered with huge bales of cotton and
wool to try to cushion them from cannon fire. He also ordered the fabrication
of a huge boom, made from massive sections of wood and iron links, to span the
Golden Horn and protect the more vulnerable walls on the inlet—the area where
the Fourth Crusade had broken into the city. Contemporaries indicate the
defenders’ great faith in this construction and their confidence that, in
conjunction with the mighty city walls, it would enable them to endure once
more.
It is interesting to compare the two great sieges of 1204
and 1453. Aside from the obvious contrast of the latter episode being Muslim
against Christian, rather than Catholics versus Orthodox, the size of the
opposing forces was strikingly different. In 1204 the crusaders were massively
outnumbered by the Byzantines; in 1453, however, the Christian troops in
Constantinople totaled perhaps ten thousand. Notwithstanding the defensive
efforts of the citizenry—and even monks were pressed into service—in military
terms, at over eighty thousand men (plus tens of thousands of laborers) the
Ottoman army was a vastly bigger fighting force, mighty enough for a Venetian
eyewitness to describe the defenders as “an ant in the mouth of a bear.” The
1453 siege was also more multifaceted with a significant part of the fighting
taking place on water. During the earlier campaign the besieging Venetians had
enjoyed almost a free hand at sea, but in 1453 an Ottoman fleet of up to four
hundred ships frequently tussled with a small but powerful Genoese and Cretan
force based around the defensive boom. Finally, technology had moved on: by
1453 the emergence of gunpowder (during the late thirteenth century) meant that
cannon came to play a hugely prominent role in the later campaign.
The siege began on April 6. Mehmet’s engineers had constructed
a massive palisaded rampart that ran from the Sea of Marmara to the Golden Horn
while a similar structure overlooked the city from the Galata side. With siege
guns and catapults the Turks soon began to bombard the “queen of cities.” Teams
of workmen had strengthened roads and bridges to allow the transportation of
several colossal cannon—one required sixty oxen to pull it—from their base at
Edirne, 250 miles to the northwest. Most of the firepower concentrated on the
gates of Saint Romanus (now known as the Topkapi Gate) and Charisus, both
toward the middle of the land walls. The Turks’ largest gun burst, but one of
the others remained a monstrous piece of weaponry, capable of firing a shot of
almost 550 kilograms. Mehmet had over fourteen batteries of cannon, most of
which could launch balls of between 100 and 200 kilograms. Day after day these
machines generated a lethal hail of stone that crashed and smashed against the
walls of Constantinople, splintering its defenses and demoralizing the defenders.
Mehmet was canny enough to continually reposition his cannon to best advantage,
and at times he triangulated three guns on a single point to maximize their
effect. The Byzantines had artillery of their own but these were far smaller
devices and used mainly against troops and siege engines; lack of powder and
shot were further restrictions on the Christians’ firepower: by contrast,
Mehmet’s biggest cannon consumed 1,100 pounds of gunpowder a day! A
contemporary noted: “He devised machines of all sorts . . . especially of the
newest kind, a strange sort, unbelievable when told of but, as experience
demonstrated, able to accomplish everything.”
Nicolò Barbaro, a Venetian eyewitness, described the
debilitating effect of living in continuous anticipation of a major assault.
Such tensions were increased by a series of night attacks, usually heralded by
the harsh cracking and snapping of castanets, but all were successfully
resisted. On April 20, however, the Christians scored an unexpected victory.
The appearance of three large Genoese vessels bearing papally sponsored troops
and supplies prompted a sea battle. Mehmet’s admiral engaged the galleys but
the greater size of the Genoese boats gave them a crucial advantage over the
oared Turkish ships and the Christians used their superior height to pour down
arrows and small-arms fire onto their enemy. As Mehmet watched from the shore
he grew increasingly enraged at the lack of progress and, famously, he mounted
his horse and plunged into the sea to bellow inaudible advice to his admiral.
Once the wind turned, the Christian vessels were able to reach the safety of
the boom and this duly opened to bring them sanctuary. The defeat was a massive
blow to Ottoman pride and caused consternation in the Muslim camp. Mehmet was
beside himself with rage and summoned the admiral to answer for this
failure—the sultan was said to have wanted to execute the man, but his
colleagues persuaded their ruler that the loss of rank and a flogging would
suffice.
The Christians’ continued trust in the boom seemed well
placed, but Mehmet was not to be resisted. Because he could not break the
barrier the sultan devised a quite brilliant way to—literally—get around it. As
we saw with Reynald of Châtillon’s transportation of kit-form ships from Kerak
down to the Red Sea in 1182, it was possible to move vessels overland. Others
had followed his example; more recently the Venetians had shifted galleys from
the River Adige to Lake Garda. Mehmet accomplished something similar, although
on a jaw-dropping scale. His engineers constructed a shallow trench that ran
from the shore of the Bosporus, up over the steep hill (through the modern
Taksim Square) and then down to the Golden Horn. This carefully crafted ditch
was then covered in boards and greased, allowing ships to be laboriously hauled
up the slope and then eased downhill behind the boom and into the heart of the
Christian harbor. An incredible seventy-two vessels made this journey and once
back in the water their sails were rerigged and they could threaten the weakest
walls of Constantinople. The creation of a pontoon bridge to link up the troops
near Galata with those by the land walls was another sign of technical flair
and a hint that a major assault was brewing.
On April 28 the Christians attempted to seize the upper hand
with a bid to destroy the main Ottoman fleet. They filled transport ships with
sacks of flammable materials—cotton and wool—to set the Turkish boats ablaze,
but the flotilla’s commander, “a man eager to win honour in this world,” raced
ahead of the escort vessels and drew the full weight of enemy firepower. The
Turks scored a direct hit on only their second shot and “quicker than ten
paternosters” the ship sank with all hands to ruin the Christian offensive.
Soon the Ottomans regained the initiative and in mid-May heavy bombardment of
the gates of Saint Romanus and the Caligaria (near the Blachernae Palace in the
north) called for the most desperate resistance.
Around this time the Turks started to use yet another
stratagem to break into the city—a contingent of specialist Serbian miners
began to dig a series of shafts in a bid to get under the walls and to provide
an entry point into Constantinople. As usual with Mehmet’s armies the scale of
these works was immense—one of the tunnels was over half a mile long—but one
night the defenders heard the sound of digging and their own mining expert, a
Scotsman named John Grant, located the shaft. He dug out a countermine, set
fire to the Turks’ supports, and caused them to collapse and suffocate the
attackers.
Throughout the siege, the Turkish artillery continued to
pound away at the walls, parts of which were now filled with a patchwork of
earth, rubble, and timber barricades. Barbaro noted the demoralizing effect of
the mighty cannon: “One was of exceptional size . . . and when it fired the
explosion made all the walls of the city shake and all the ground inside, and
even the ships in the harbour felt the vibrations of it. Because of the great
noise, many women fainted with the shock which the firing of it gave them. No
greater cannon than this one was ever seen in the whole pagan world and it was
this that broke down such a great deal of the city walls.” A strange fog caused
consternation in the Christian camp when what should have been a full moon
appeared as a slim, three-day moon, an event seen as a dire omen because a
famous prophecy foretold that Constantinople would fall when the planet gave a
sign.
Meanwhile Mehmet considered his next move. Some of his inner
circle argued in favor of a peaceful solution and they suggested that
Constantine could hand over his city in return for control of the Morea. The
Byzantine emperor’s response was curt: “God forbid that I should live as an
emperor without an empire. As my city falls, I will fall with it.” Rumors of an
approaching Venetian fleet and plans for a Hungarian relief force to march to
Constantinople probably underlay Constantine’s continued resistance. By the
same token, however, fear of this imminent crusade pushed Mehmet into action.
Like Saladin before the Battle of Hattin, the sultan’s campaign had built up so
much momentum that he needed to bring it all to the boil or else risk losing
support of his own people. The danger of running out of supplies—his enormous
army had been outside Constantinople for over fifty days and had utterly
stripped the countryside of food—was another important consideration.
On May 26 the sultan ordered preparations to be made for the
final assault. Huge fires were lit throughout the Turkish camp and the men
fasted by day and feasted by night. Mehmet went among his men to raise morale
and the imams told stirring stories of the jihad and of Islamic heroes of the
past. The prospect of taking Constantinople had a profound spiritual resonance
with Muslims because a well-known Hadith promised the capture of the city. The
prophecy had powerful eschatological overtones and claimed this would be a
definitive Muslim victory, surpassing all others and representing the
penultimate defeat of Christianity before the final Armageddon. Here, then, was
a chance to fulfill that centuries-old destiny—and with a leader named Mehmet,
the Turkish form of Muhammad. Encouraged by these portents, the Ottoman
encirclement of Constantinople grew ever tighter. The troops brought up two
thousand scaling ladders, they filled in the ditches, and the bombardment
intensified further until, in Barbaro’s words, “it was a thing not of this
world.” The defenders knew their supreme test was about to come and while
Emperor Constantine deployed his troops as best he could, the clergy paraded
relics and led prayers and processions around the city.
A couple of hours before daybreak on May 29 a volley of
artillery fire announced the start of the attack. The principal focus was the
damaged area near the Saint Romanus Gate, although in the course of the day
Ottoman forces also engaged the remainder of the land walls and the defenses
along the Golden Horn. First to be sent forward were Christian prisoners and
subject peoples—the most expendable of all Mehmet’s troops. The defenders’
crossbowmen and light artillery duly slaughtered most of these hapless souls—in
any case, had they retreated, then Mehmet’s Janissaries, his crack troops, had
orders to kill them. A second, more organized division made a further foray
although they too were driven back. All of this drained the defenders’ energy
and resources—it also left the Janissaries fresh and rested, waiting for their
turn to move. As Mehmet himself watched, these professional warriors advanced
with disconcerting slowness toward the Saint Romanus Gate and, unusually for
Muslim armies, without musical accompaniment. This sinister new assault was
fiercer than ever—they were “not like Turks, but like lions,” related Barbaro.
Still the Christians held them off, but the city resounded with the chaos of
battle, the Turks “firing cannon again and again, with so many other guns and
arrows without number and shouting from these pagans, that the very air seemed
to be split apart.” For all the Christians’ valor they were doomed, “since God
had made up his mind that the city should fall into the hands of the Turks.”
The Janissaries at last got a foothold in the Saint Romanus
barbican but their determination was colored with good fortune too. Several
accounts describe the Genoese commander, John Giustiniani Longo, being wounded,
although reports of his reaction vary. Some claim that he sought medical help,
although in doing so, he caused the emperor to believe he was deserting his
post. Barbaro, admittedly a hostile Venetian, suggested that Longo had
retreated, shouting “The Turks have got into the city!,” which made everyone
abandon hope. This panic, in turn, gave the Janissaries the chance to make a
proper opening in the main walls and from there they poured into the city. In
the early morning light the flags of Venice and the emperor were torn down and
Ottoman banners began to appear on the skyline of Constantinople. As the
Christians lost heart, the Genoese and the Venetians attempted to fight through
to their vessels on the Golden Horn and flee. While the Italians rushed out,
Ottoman troops poured in from every side and for one day the city was given
over to the sack. Across Constantinople, the Turks wrought havoc, killing
indiscriminately, whether young or old, male or female, healthy or infirm.
Women, girls, and nuns were ravaged and many thousands of Christians were
captured to be ransomed or sold as slaves. Barbaro luridly conveys the savagery
of the moment: “The blood flowed in the city like rainwater in the gutters
after a sudden storm, and the corpses of Turks and Christians were thrown into
the Dardanelles, where they floated out to sea like melons on a canal.” They
tore an inestimable amount of booty from the great religious institutions, as
well as from private houses and from merchants. Just as in 1204, the mighty
sanctuary of the Hagia Sophia was ripped open and plundered, and Leonard of
Chios claimed the Turks “showed no respect for the sacred altars or holy
images, but destroyed them, and gouged the eyes from the saints . . . and they
stuffed their pouches with gold and silver taken from the holy images and
sacred vessels.” Crucifixes were paraded in a mocking procession through the
Muslim camp and very soon the Hagia Sophia was turned from a church into a
mosque.
The death of Constantine himself is shrouded in mystery.
Some writers claimed that as the final onslaught began the emperor begged his
courtiers to kill him and when they refused he charged into the fray and died
under a hail of scimitars and daggers. Muslim sources indicate that he was
close to the walls on the Sea of Marmara, looking to escape by boat, when he
was slain by troops unaware of his true identity. Yet once the battle was over
Sultan Mehmet did not try to eradicate a Christian presence from his new
capital; for a start he realized that the city needed its local population to
survive and prosper and soon Muslims, Christians, and Jews mingled freely
enough, although the latter two remained subject groups who paid a poll tax
according to Islamic law. The sultan even appointed a new Orthodox patriarch,
which shows a broad sense of tolerance too.
The loss of Christendom’s greatest city provoked outrage in
the West, not least because of the apparent indifference of the major ruling
powers. Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini (later Pope Pius II) wrote: “For what
calamity of the times is not laid at the door of the princes? All troubles are
ascribed to the negligence of rulers. ‘They might,’ said the populace, ‘have
aided perishing Greece before she was captured. They were indifferent. They are
not fit to rule.’”
A NEW CRUSADE? THE FEAST OF THE PHEASANT
Within a year of Mehmet’s triumph, Duke Philip the Good of
Burgundy, one of the most powerful men in Europe, made lavish promises to
launch a crusade to recover Constantinople and to drive back the infidel. The
forum for this was the Feast of the Pheasant (February 1454), an event
saturated with chivalric behavior and another superb, if slightly late, example
of the intimate connection between noble display and crusading. The year 1453
had also marked the end of the Hundred Years War and this seemed the perfect
moment to respond to the catastrophe in the East. Philip’s father had led the
forces defeated at Nicopolis in 1396 and although held prisoner for six months
he had received a hero’s welcome on his return. Philip summoned the Burgundian
nobility to the city of Lille in northern France to attend a sumptuous banquet
and to hear his plans. Thirty-five artists were employed to decorate the chamber
and, to ensure that the world knew of this splendid occasion, the duke ordered
official accounts of the feast to be distributed. The report noted:
There was even a chapel on the table, with a choir in it, a
pasty full of flute players. A figure of a girl, quite naked, stood against a
pillar . . . she was guarded by a live lion who sat near her. My lord duke was
served by a two-headed horse ridden by two men sitting back to back, each
holding a trumpet. . . . Next came an elephant . . . carrying a castle in which
sat the Holy Church, who made piteous complaint on behalf of the Christians
persecuted by the Turks, and begged for help. Then two knights of the Order of
the Golden Fleece brought in two damsels . . . these ladies asked my lord duke
to make his vow. It was understood that if the king of France would go on the
crusade, the duke would go.
Philip’s vow was made “to God my creator and to the most
virgin His mother, and to the ladies, and I swear on the pheasant. . . . If the
Grand Turk would be willing to do battle with me in single combat, I shall
fight with him with the aid of God and the Virgin mother in order to sustain
the Christian faith.” This entrancing combination of revelry and unrestrained
excess shows an almost total absorption of crusading into the chivalric ethos.
The contrast between the cavorting of naked women and the impassioned preaching
of a man such as Bernard of Clairvaux is self-evident, yet the Holy Church was
said to be delighted by Philip’s promise—as well it might, given that many of
the guests soon followed his example and assumed the cross too.
Two months later Philip repeated his intention at Regensburg
where he spoke of his Christian duty and of “the crisis in which Christianity
finds itself. If we wish to keep our faith, our liberty, our lives, we must
take the field against the Turks and crush their power before it becomes any
stronger.” Centuries of crusading hyperbole had preceded this statement, but it
was a rare occasion when the gravity of the threat seemed to match the claims
being made. Philip pushed ahead with his plans and engaged in serious and
extensive preparations that included the manufacture of new pennons and
banners, as well as signing up over five hundred gunners: an indication that
Mehmet’s use of heavy artillery had been noticed in the West. Mehmet heard
about the crusade and riled the duke with use of his spectacular title: “true
heir of King Alexander and Hector of Troy, sultan of Babylon,” and he promised
to do to Philip’s army the same as his predecessor had done to the duke’s
father at Nicopolis. By the summer of 1456, however, the duke’s enthusiasm had
begun to wane. His stipulation that the king of France should crusade remained
unfulfilled as national rivalries became ever more important in frustrating the
chances of holy war.
Mehmet, meanwhile, inspired by his triumph, advanced toward
the Balkan town of Belgrade. In spite of his recent successes the determined
resistance of Hungarian troops led by John Hunyadi and the seventy-year-old
Franciscan friar John of Capistrano held off the Turks for three weeks and
then, in a pitched battle, utterly defeated them. This feat of virtuosity,
achieved without the crowned heads of western Europe, did much to stem the
Ottoman advance for the next fifty years at least. As the fifteenth century
drew to a close, the final large-scale crusading campaign of the medieval
period was about to take place in Iberia.
