The Grand Turk: Sultan Mehmet II - Conqueror of Constantinople and Master of an Empire (7 page)

The Venetian colony in Constantinople offered their complete support to Constantine. The Venetian
bailo
, or governor, Girolamo Minotto, assured the emperor that his people would share fully in the defence of the city, and he would make sure that none of the Venetian ships in the harbour left without his permission. The vessels were armed as warships, and two of their captains, Gabriele Trevisano and Alviso Diedo, agreed to serve as commanders in the defence of the city. Among the Venetians under their command was Niccolo Barbaro, a ship’s doctor, whose diary gives the most complete eyewitness account of the siege of Constantinople.

The only other significant reinforcements came on 29 January 1453, when two large ships arrived from Genoa with 700 troops under the command of Giovanni Giustiniani-Longo. Constantine immediately put Giustinani in command of the city’s defences, while the local Venetians placed their ships at the emperor’s disposal. But then on 26 February six Venetian ships sailed away from Constantinople in defiance of the orders of their local council, taking with them 700 men, so that Constantine had no net gain in manpower. This left the defenders with twenty-six fighting ships in the Golden Horn, ten of them Byzantine, five Venetian, five Genoese, three from Crete, one from Ancona, one from Catalonia, and one from Provence, all together about a fifth the size of the Ottoman fleet.

The troops under Giustiniani’s command were hardly enough to man Constantinople’s defence walls, which stretched for some twelve miles around the city on both its landward and seaward sides. The original land walls of Theodosius II extended for more than four miles between the Marmara and the Golden Horn. The stretch of walls across the Lycus valley was known as the Mesoteichion, literally the ‘Middle of the Walls’, which had always been considered the most vulnerable because it could be fired down upon by guns on the ridges to either side.

The main line of defence in the Theodosian fortifications was the inner wall, which was about 5 metres thick at its base and rose to a height of 12 metres above the city. This wall was guarded by ninety-six towers, 18 to 20 metres high, separated by an average interval of 55 metres. Between the inner and outer walls there was a terrace called the
peribolos
, which varied from 15 to 20 metres in breadth, its level about 5 metres above that of the inner city. The outer wall, which was about 2 metres thick and 8.5 metres in height, also had ninety-six towers, alternating in position with those of the inner wall. Outside the walls there was a terrace called the
parateichion
, bounded by a counterscarp nearly 2 metres high that separated it from the fosse, a ditch some 10 metres deep and 20 metres wide. The northernmost stretch of walls, from the Palace of the Porphyrogenitus down to the Golden Horn, was a later construction that replaced the original Theodosian fortifications there. It consisted of a single line of walls, more massive than the original fortifications, and with higher and more closely spaced towers, part of it including the outer walls of the Blachernae Palace.

The Theodosian walls were pierced by 10 gates and a few small posterns, virtually all of which are still in existence. Five of the gates were public entryways and the other five were principally for the use of the military, the two types alternating with one another in position.

The sea walls extended along the shores of both the Golden Horn and the Sea of Marmara. The walls along the Horn were 10 metres high and were protected by 110 defence towers at regular intervals, pierced by sixteen gates. The walls along the Marmara were 12-15 metres high, studded with 188 towers regularly spaced, and with thirteen gates.

Mehmet had by then built up a formidable artillery through the efforts of Urban, who cast a huge cannon twice as large as the one used at Rumeli Hisarı. This cannon, named for its maker, could fire a 1,200 pound stone ball more than two feet in diameter as far as a mile, as Urban demonstrated to the sultan at Edirne in January 1453. A month later Mehmet began moving his artillery forward, with Urban pulled on rollers by a team of sixty oxen. A team of engineers went ahead to improve roads and build bridges, and by March Urban and the other big guns of Mehmet’s artillery had reached a point five miles from Constantinople.

Constantine knew that Mehmet’s navy would try to penetrate into the Golden Horn, which could be closed by a huge chain floating on wooden buoys attached to a boom. One end of the chain was fixed to a tower in the sea walls below the First Hill of Constantinople, while the other was attached to a fortress known as the Castle of Galata, which stood on the shore at the confluence of the Golden Horn and the Bosphorus. Some of the defending warships were assigned to pull the boom across the entrance to the Golden Horn when the siege began, thus protecting the city from direct assault on that side.

Easter Sunday was celebrated on 1 April, and on the following day an advance guard of Ottoman soldiers came into sight. A small force of defenders went out from the walls and ‘killed some of them and wounded a few’, according to Kritoboulos. ‘But after encountering a larger force in a counter-attack from the [Ottoman] army, they took refuge in the City, closed the gate, and did not sally forth again but simply guarded the City.’

According to the diary of Niccolo Barbaro, the chain was put in place on 2 April, and he reports that on that same day Constantine assigned Venetian commanders to each of the four most strategic gates in the land walls. Three days later sentinels on the Theodosian walls spotted the Turkish army approaching across the downs of Thrace, and Constantine ordered his commanders to take up the positions that had been assigned to them. Constantine himself was in command of the best Greek troops along the Mesoteichion, where he expected Mehmet to concentrate his attack.

Barbaro notes that an hour before sunrise on 5 April Sultan Mehmet ‘came before Constantinople with about one-hundred and sixty-five thousand men and encamped about two and a half miles from the walls of the city’. (Modern scholarship puts the number at about half that.) He goes on to write that two days later Mehmet ‘moved with a great part of his forces to within about a quarter of a mile from the walls, and they spread in a line along the whole length of the city walls from the Sea of Marmara to the Golden Horn’.

Mehmet set up his red and gold tent outside the Gate of St Romanus, about midway along the Theodosian walls, directly opposite the Mesoteichion. He then reviewed the whole army and assigned his commanders to their various positions. The sultan himself, assisted by Halil Pasha, took command in the Lycus valley, the sector facing the Mesoteichion, with the janissaries and other elite units in front, along with the giant cannon Urban and other heavy guns, while the
azaps
and
başıbozuks
were held in reserve behind. Along the southern stretch of the land walls, from the Lycus valley to the Marmara, were the regular Anatolian troops under Ishak Pasha. Ishak was assisted by Mahmut Pasha, a descendant of an aristocratic Byzantine family living in Serbia, who had been captured by the Ottomans as a youth and converted to Islam when he joined the service of Murat II. Along the northern stretch of walls, from the Lycus valley to the Golden Horn, were the regular European troops under Dayı Karaca Pasha, who had several heavy guns to bombard the single line of walls that protected the Blachernae Palace. Zaganos Pasha was given command of a large contingent of troops on the hills above the northern side of the Golden Horn, around the upper reaches of which a road had been built so that he could communicate with the rest of the army. Meanwhile, the Ottoman fleet under Süleyman Baltaoğlu had anchored off Diplokionion (Beşiktaş), two miles up the European shore from the Golden Horn.

As soon as his forces were in place Mehmet sent emissaries into the city under a flag of truce, offering terms of surrender to the defenders. According to Kritoboulos, Mehmet said ‘that if they were willing to deliver over the City and themselves to him with agreements and solemn oaths they might live with their wives and children and all their belongings in safety, suffering no evils and carrying on their business in peace’. But the offer was rejected, and the answer given to Mehmet’s emissaries was that the Greeks ‘were willing to make another sort of treaty, but they would not surrender the City to him’.

The following day, 6 April, Mehmet’s artillery began bombarding the city, concentrating their fire on the stretch of walls between the Sixth and Seventh Hills, where the river Lycus flows into the city in a deep valley. By sunset that day the bombardment had damaged a section of the fortifications by the Gate of Charisius, on the Sixth Hill, and the following day a section of wall collapsed in ruins, but the defenders managed to repair it during the night. Mehmet decided to defer further bombardment until his entire artillery park was in place and ready, particularly the huge Urban, and in the interim he ordered his sappers to begin undermining the weaker section of walls in the Lycus valley, while his labour battalions began filling in the great fosse in front of the walls.

All Mehmet’s artillery was in place by 11 April, when he ordered the bombardment of the city to resume, a barrage that was to continue without interruption for the remainder of the siege. The heaviest damage was done by Urban, which could be fired only seven times a day, but each one of its giant cannon balls smashed the curtain walls and towers that it struck, killing the defenders who manned them. Each night the defenders worked ceaselessly to repair the damage to the fortifications, joined by the townspeople, including women and children.

On 12 April Baltaoğlu led the largest ships in his fleet in an attack on the chain closing the Golden Horn, which was guarded by the Byzantine and Italian galleons, aided by a reserve force commanded by Grand Duke Notaras. Notaras and his men fought off the attackers in a furious battle at the mouth of the Golden Horn, and at the end of the day Baltaoğlu was forced to break off the assault and lead his fleet back to Diplokionion.

Early in the evening of 18 April Mehmet launched an infantry attack on the Mesoteichion. Giustiniani led the defence, which drove back the attackers after a hard-fought battle of four hours in which some 200 of Mehmet’s soldiers were killed, without any Christian fatalities, according to Barbaro.

Two days later a flotilla of four Christian ships appeared in the Sea of Marmara, and Mehmet ordered Baltaoğlu to sail out with the Turkish fleet to intercept them. After an inconclusive battle the Christian ships eluded the Turkish force, and under the cover of night the Byzantine defenders opened the chain to let them into the Golden Horn. One of the ships was a Byzantine freighter loaded with grain, while the other three were Genoese vessels carrying soldiers, arms, ammunition and food supplies. Mehmet was furious, and ordered his executioner to behead Baltaoğlu. But the admiral’s officers persuaded Mehmet to spare Baltaoğlu, who was stripped of his rank and possessions and, after being bastinadoed, left to spend the rest of his days as a pauper. He was replaced as admiral by Hamza Bey, one of Mehmet’s inner circle.

Mehmet then set in motion an ingenious stratagem that he had devised to get his fleet into the Golden Horn. At the beginning of his siege he had ordered his engineers to build a road that led over the hills from the Bosphorus to the Golden Horn, passing behind the town of Galata. On 22 April Mehmet’s engineers used teams of oxen to drag seventy-two ships on greased rollers up this road and then down to the shore of the Golden Horn at the Valley of the Springs (Kasımpaşa), where they were mounted with guns that had been stored there.

The defenders in Constantinople were shocked by the entry of the Turkish warships into the Golden Horn, which now exposed the northern side of the city to attack. Kritoboulos writes that the Greeks, seeing the Turkish fleet in the Golden Horn, ‘were astounded at the impossibility of the spectacle, and were overcome by the greatest consternation and perplexity. They did not know what to do now, but were in despair.’

The Venetian leaders in Constantinople decided that they would try to set fire to the Turkish fleet in the Golden Horn in a night attack. Early in the morning of 28 April a small flotilla of Venetian ships under Giacomo Coco sailed out of the Neorion harbour, inside the chain on the Constantinople side of the Golden Horn, and headed upstream towards the anchorage of the Turkish fleet on the northern shore. Just as Coco was about to launch his attack the Turkish fleet opened fire and sank his ship, which went to the bottom with all hands aboard.

Another Venetian ship was also sunk, and when some of its crew swam ashore they were captured, after which they were beheaded on Mehmet’s orders. The defenders in Constantinople retaliated by beheading 260 Turkish prisoners of war, both mass executions being carried out in full view of the enemy on opposite sides of the Golden Horn.

Mehmet had now drawn the net tighter, placing cannons on the hills above Galata to fire on the northern side of the city from across the Golden Horn, so that the city was besieged from two sides. Supplies were now dwindling in Constantinople, and in Barbaro’s diary entry for 1-2 May he writes: ‘The city was in great distress because of a growing lack of provisions, particularly of bread, wine and other things necessary to sustain life.’

Girolamo Minotto, the Venetian
bailo
, had written to the Senate in January 1453 urging them to send supplies to Constantinople immediately. The Senate voted on 19 February to send supplies, but two months elapsed before a relief flotilla left from Venice under the command of Admiral Alviso Longo. Longo’s orders were to sail to the isle of Tenedos, just outside the Dardanelles, and to remain there until 20 May, when he would be joined by another Venetian flotilla commanded by Giacomo Loredan, Captain-General of the Sea, after which they would proceed through the straits to Constantinople. Loredan did not leave Venice until 7 May, and in the end neither his flotilla nor that of Longo reached Constantinople; nor did another relief convoy sent by Pope Nicholas.

The Venetians in Constantinople, concerned about the delay, sent off a fast brigantine from the Golden Horn under the cover of night on 3 May, with orders to find the relief convoy from Venice and urge its commander to make haste.