The Grand Turk: Sultan Mehmet II - Conqueror of Constantinople and Master of an Empire (14 page)

This was the only defeat suffered by the Venetians during the first month of the war, and by September they had taken all of the Turkish-held fortresses in the Morea except for Mistra, Patras and Corinth. When news of these victories reached Rome, Pope Pius praised the Venetians ‘who alone keep watch, who alone labour, who alone come to the aid of the Christians’. But before the year was over a Turkish force under Mahmut Pasha broke through the Hexamilion, the ancient defence wall across the Isthmus of Corinth, and went on to recapture Argos, penetrating into the heart of the Morea before winter set in.

On 12 September 1463 Venice entered into an anti-Turkish alliance with King Matthias Corvinus of Hungary. At the end of September Corvinus led an army of 4,000 troops into Bosnia and attacked Jajce, which surrendered after a siege of three months. By the end of the year more than sixty places in Bosnia surrendered to the Hungarians without a struggle, and in Hercegovina Duke Stephen Vukčić regained possession of his duchy when the Ottoman forces withdrew.

Mehmet was infuriated by the Hungarian invasion, but during the winter of 1463-4 he was incapacitated in Istanbul with a painful attack of gout, which was to plague him for the rest of his days. His Jewish physician Maestro Iacopo eventually managed to alleviate his condition, so that by the spring he was able to lead an expedition into Bosnia to regain the places captured by the Hungarians.

The first place that Mehmet attacked was Jajce, which he put under siege on 10 July 1464. But the Hungarian garrison resisted fiercely, withstanding more than six weeks of constant bombardment and repeated attacks by the Turkish infantry. After learning that King Matthias Corvinus was encamped north of the Savas with a large army, Mehmet finally lifted the siege on 24 August and withdrew to Sofia. Corvinus chose not to risk coming up against Mehmet’s army, and, instead of proceeding to Jajce, he marched his troops to the Turkish-held town of Zvornik (Izvornik) on the river Drina, which he put under siege.

Meanwhile, in the late spring of 1464 the Venetians sent a fleet into the northern Aegean under the command of Orsato Giustinian and occupied the island of Lemnos. The fleet then sailed to the harbour of Mytilene on Lesbos, putting the Turkish-held fortress under siege. When news of the Venetian attack reached Mehmet he sent a fleet to Lesbos under the command of Mahmut Pasha, and when Giustinian learned of this he lifted the siege and sailed away. Mahmut Pasha refrained from pursuing the Venetians and returned with the fleet to Istanbul, after which he went on to Sofia to join Mehmet.

Mehmet then sent an army of 40,000 men under Mahmut Pasha to relieve the Turkish garrison at Zvornik, while he himself returned to Edirne. When the Hungarians learned of the approach of the Ottoman army they lifted the siege of Zvornik and fled, many of them being cut down by the advance guard of the pursuing Turks.

Mahmut Pasha then returned to Edirne with the Ottoman army in December 1464, leaving the Hungarians in control of Jajce and a few other strongholds in the north. The rest of Bosnia remained in the hands of the Ottomans, and when Stephen Vukčić died in 1466 Mehmet annexed Hercegovina. Stephen’s son Sigismund was taken into the Ottoman service and became a Muslim, reaching high rank as Hersekzade Ahmet Pasha and marrying a granddaughter of Mehmet.

After his conquest of Hercegovina, Mehmet garrisoned the fortresses he had conquered, after which he returned with his army to Edirne. One of these fortresses was at Zvečaj, where Constantine Mihailović was given command of fifty janissaries. Mihailović describes how he was finally liberated from the Turks when Matthias Corvinus recaptured Zvečaj and Jajce. ‘And King Matyas, having taken Jajce with a treaty, immediately marched back with the Hungarians at Zvečaj, and we also had to surrender… And I thanked the Lord God that I had thus got back among the Christians with honor. And thus did King Matyas take Jajce and also Zvečaj.’

Meanwhile, preparations were being made for the crusade organised by Pope Pius II, who apparently thought of enrolling the exiled despot Thomas Palaeologus as a crusader and restoring him to his despotate in the Morea. The Venetian Senate was totally opposed to this, since one of the main reasons they were going to war was to make the Morea part of the republic’s maritime empire. Thus Doge Cristoforo Moro wrote to Lodovico Foscarini, the Venetian ambassador in Rome, instructing him to do whatever he could to dissuade the Pope from sending Thomas Palaeologus to the Morea in his crusade.

Pius himself took the cross in the basilica of St Peter in Rome on 18 June 1464. That same day, although he was very ill, Pius left for Ancona on the Adriatic, where he was to meet the Venetian fleet with Doge Cristoforo Moro, as well as contingents of Catalan, Spanish, French and Saxon crusaders. Pius and his party, which included six cardinals, was joined at Spoleto by the Ottoman pretender Calixtus Ottomano, whom the Pope may have wanted to send off on the crusade. The papal party finally arrived in Ancona on 19 July, where they were put up at the episcopal palace to await the arrival of the doge and his fleet. But the doge was reluctant to leave Venice, giving his age and poor health as an excuse, and only after being pressured by the Senate did he finally set sail in a flotilla of a dozen Venetian galleys, arriving in Ancona on 12 August. By then Pius had contracted pneumonia, as the Milanese ambassador wrote in a letter to Sforza on 1 August, noting that the Pope’s physicians ‘indicate that, if he puts to sea, he will not live two days’. Pius finally passed away on 15 August, and three days later the doge left with the Venetian fleet and returned to Venice, for the crusade was now over.

The cardinals who had been with Pius in Ancona rushed back to Rome, where a conclave was held on 29 August to elect a new Pope. On the first vote the conclave elected the Venetian Pietro Barbo, who the following day was consecrated as Pope Paul II.

Although the new Pope was a Venetian, he had not been on good terms with the government of his native city. Nevertheless, he tried to avoid a break with the Serenissima for fear that the republic should make peace with the Turks, which would end all possibilities for Paul to carry on with his predecessor’s crusading policy The Venetian
bailo
in Istanbul, Paolo Barbarigo, had an interview with Mahmut Pasha in February 1465, in which the grand vezir expressed surprise that Venice was still persisting in war with the Ottomans, implying that peace terms might be a possibility. The Venetians were interested in peace, but they knew that Mehmet would propose only terms that the republic could never accept, such as the loss of the Morea and other possessions of its maritime empire.

On 16 May 1465 the Pope appealed to the Signoria, the Venetian government, to contribute to the war effort being made by the Hungarians against Sultan Mehmet, the ‘common enemy and calamity of Christians’. The Signoria responded on 1 June, acknowledging the need to support the Hungarians against the Turks, but asking to be excused from contributing to the war effort, for ‘many and grave difficulties are arising which make it so hard for us that we cannot see how action can be taken on your wish and our own desire, which is always attendant upon a pontiff’s wish’.

Although the Italian rulers and other Christian princes were reluctant to support another crusade, the Pope did manage to give significant financial support to the Hungarians, and a contemporary observer notes that in 1465 alone Paul sent King Matthias Corvinus some 80,000 ducats. But this was a paltry sum compared to what Venice was spending, as the Senate informed Paul on 26 September 1465, noting that the annual expense to the republic of maintaining her army and navy in her war against the Turks, which she fought almost alone, was 700,000 ducats, which exceeded her entire income from maritime trade.

Then in the early spring of 1465 Venice was suddenly faced with the threat of war with another powerful Muslim ruler, the Mamluk
soldan
(sultan) of Egypt, az-Zahir Saif-ad-Din Khushkadam. This came about when Venetian galleys carrying Egyptian merchants from Alexandria to Rhodes were attacked and captured by the Knights of St John. The Mamluk sultan threatened Venice with war unless the merchants were released and compensated, and several years of negotiations were necessary before the matter was finally resolved peacefully.

Venice continued to fight on against Mehmet on several fronts, as the Senate noted in their response to an appeal for aid from an envoy of the Albanian leader Skanderbeg, who was still holding out against the Turks in his mountain fortress at Kruje. Expressing their gratitude for Skanderbeg’s valorous defence of Kruje, the Senate went on to say ‘and as to the money he asks for, we certainly wish that we could satisfy [him] to the fullest extent of his desire, but we must inform him that we have been incurring huge and intolerable expenses both on land and at sea, and not only in Albania and Dalmatia, but in the Morea, Negroponte, and other points in the east’.

Then Venice had an unexpected respite, when Mehmet decided to rest himself and his army before going on with his march of conquest. Kritoboulos writes of this hiatus in his chronicle of the events of the year 1465, when Mehmet first moved in to his new palace of Topkapı Sarayı on the First Hill of Istanbul.

The Sultan himself was greatly exhausted and worn out in body and mind by his continuous and unremitting planning and care and indefatigable labors and dangers and trials, and he needed a time of respite and recuperation. For this reason he knew he ought to remain at home and rest himself and his army during the approaching summer, so that he could have his troops fresher and more enthusiastic for the other undertakings which were ahead.

7

The House of Felicity

The new imperial residence that Mehmet moved into during the winter of 1464-5 came to be known as Topkapı Sarayı, the Palace of the Cannon Gate, from the row of cannons that guarded its marine entrance at the confluence of the Bosphorus and the Golden Horn, where their waters meet and flow together into the Sea of Marmara. Thenceforth the earlier residence Mehmet had built on the Third Hill came to be called Eski Saray, the Old Palace, which continued to be used by the imperial household, though the sultan now clearly preferred the new pleasure dome he had erected on the First Hill, described by Kritoboulos in his first entry for the year 1465.

Both as to view and as to enjoyment as well as in its construction and its charm, it was in no respect lacking as compared with the famous and magnificent old buildings and sites. In it he had towers built of unusual height and beauty and grandeur, and apartments for men and others for women, and bedrooms and lounging-rooms and sleeping-quarters, and very many other fine rooms. There were also various out-buildings and vestibules and halls and porticoes and gateways and porches, and bakeshops and baths of notable design.

Aside from Kritoboulos, there are a number of chroniclers who describe the organisation of Topkapı Sarayı and life in the palace during the first century of its existence, written by men who were intimately acquainted with the Saray through being attached to its service. All of them were foreigners, slaves of the sultan who later retired or escaped from the imperial service.

The earliest of these chroniclers are Iacopo de Camois Promontario, a Genoese merchant who served the Ottoman court in the years 1430-75, and Giovanni-Maria Angiolello of Vicenza, who was captured in 1470 and remained in the Ottoman court until 1483, serving both Mehmet II and his son and successor Beyazit II. Chroniclers from the sixteenth century include Giovanni Antonio Menavino, a Genoese who served as a page in the reign of Beyazit II (r. 1481-1512); Teodoro Spandugino, who came to Pera in the first decade of the sixteenth century; Luigi Bassano da Zara, who lived in Istanbul in the 1530s, and Bernardo Navagero, the Venetian
bailo
, who visited the palace in 1550. Their chronicles give a picture of life in Topkapı Sarayı during the century after the palace was built by Mehmet. Angiolello also describes the Conqueror as he would have appeared in the last decade of his life.

The Emperor Mehmet, who, as I said, was known as the Grand Turk, was of medium height, fat and fleshy; he had a wide forehead, large eyes with thick lashes, an aquiline nose, a small mouth with a round copious reddish-tinged beard, a short, thick neck, a sallow complexion, rather high shoulders, and a loud voice. He suffered from gout in the legs.

Angiolello says that the palace comprised ‘three courts each enclosed by walls’, each one entered through a double gate, the entire complex surrounded by an outer wall ten feet high, underestimating its height by a factor of about three. The outer wall encloses the palace on its landward side, extending from the Golden Horn to the Sea of Marmara, where it connected with the sea walls that extended around the tip of the Constantinopolitan peninsula. The wall built by Sultan Mehmet is still perfectly preserved, looking much the same as it is shown in the Nuremberg woodcut of 1493 by Hartman Schedel, studded with a series of mighty defence towers. The enclosed area coincided with the site of the ancient Greek city of Byzantium, which originally comprised only the First Hill. The main buildings of Topkapı Sarayı were erected on what had been the Byzantine acropolis, or upper city, while the palace gardens were laid out on the slopes leading down to the Golden Horn and the Marmara.

According to Angiolello, the gardens also included fruit orchards, vineyards, game parks and an aviary, as well as a zoological park and botanical gardens.

And here in this garden there are many kinds of fruit tree planted in order, and similarly pergolas with grapevines of many kinds, roses, lilacs, saffron, flowers of every sort, and everywhere there is an abundance of most gentle waters, that is fountains and pools. Also in this garden are some separate places in which are kept many kinds of animals, such as deer, does, roe deer, foxes, hares, sheep, goats and Indian cows, which are much larger than ours, and many other sorts of animals. This garden is inhabited by many sorts of birds, and when it is spring it is pleasant to listen to them sing, and likewise there is a marshy lake which is planted with reeds, where a large number of wild geese and ducks dwell, and in that place the Grand Turk derives pleasure in shooting with his gun.