Decline and fall byzan.., p.55
Decline & Fall - Byzantium 03, page 55
part #3 of Byzantium Series
24
The Fall
[1448-53]
Have ye heard of a city of which one side is land and the two others sea? The Hour of Judgement shall not sound until seventy thousand sons of Isaac shall capture it.
The Prophet Mohammed, according to ancient Islamic tradition
John VIII Palaeologus had died childless. His first wife had succumbed to the plague at the age of fifteen; his second he had refused even to look at; his third he had dearly loved, but she too had failed to present him with an heir. Admittedly he had five brothers - too many, as it turned out, since they were endlessly squabbling among themselves and he had proved totally incapable of keeping them in order - of whom the first, Theodore, had predeceased him by four months and the second, Andronicus, had died young in Thessalonica. Of the three survivors - Constantine, Demetrius and Thomas — John had formally nominated Constantine as his heir; but Demetrius, who was consumed by ambition and had already made one unsuccessful bid for the throne after his brother's return from Florence six years before, immediately hurried from Selymbria to Constantinople to claim the succession. As self-proclaimed leader of the anti-unionists - and recognized as such by George Scholarius - he enjoyed a certain popularity in the capital and might well have achieved his objective had it not been for his mother, the Empress Helena; but she at once declared Constantine the rightful Emperor, simultaneously asserting her right to act as Regent until he should arrive from the Morea. Thomas, the youngest of the brothers, who had reached Constantinople in mid-November, gave her his full support; and Demetrius, seeing that he was beaten, finally did likewise. Early in December the Empress sent George Sphrantzes to the Sultan's court to obtain his approval for the new basileus.
Meanwhile two envoys had sailed for the Morea with powers to invest Constantine as Emperor. Clearly they could not perform a coronation, nor was there any Patriarch at Mistra; the ceremony which was held there on 6 January 1449 was almost certainly a purely civil one, consisting of a public acclamation followed by a simple investiture. Such a procedure had at least one perfectly valid historical precedent: Manuel Comnenus had been similarly invested by his father John II in the wilds of Cilicia. But on that occasion, and even when - as with John Cantacuzenus in 1341 - a coronation had taken place outside the capital, it had been thought proper to have the Emperor crowned by the Patriarch of Constantinople in St Sophia as soon as this was practicable. With Constantine XI Dragases - he always preferred to use this Greek form of his Serbian mother's name - no such full ecclesiastical coronation ever occurred. How could it have? The Orthodox Church, since the Council of Florence, was in schism. The Patriarch Gregory III, a fervent unionist, was not recognized - and was indeed execrated as a traitor - by well over half his flock. Constantine himself, though he played down the issue as much as he could, had never condemned the union; if by upholding it he could increase even infinitesimally the chances of Western aid it was, he felt, his duty to do so. But the price was high. The anti-unionists, who continued vehemently to proclaim the folly of seeking salvation from Western heretics rather than from the Almighty, refused to pray for him in their churches. Without a coronation in St Sophia he had no moral claim on their loyalties, or on those of any of his subjects; yet any such coronation would have caused widespread riots and might even have triggered off a full-scale civil war.
When Constantine Dragases first set foot as Emperor in his capital on 12 March 1449 - it is a sad reflection on the state of the Empire that he had been obliged to travel from Greece in a Venetian ship, there being no Byzantine vessels available - this whole impossible situation was immediately clear to him; yet Pope Nicholas V, who had succeeded Eugenius in 1447, was either unwilling or unable to accept it. Ever since ecclesiastical union had first been mooted, the Papacy had insistently refused to see the difficulties involved on the Byzantine side; and Nicholas was no less blind than his predecessors. When in April 1451, in yet another attempt to convince him, Constantine sent to Rome a long and detailed statement by the anti-unionist leaders, he only urged the Emperor to be firm with his opponents: if they spoke against the union or showed any disrespect for the Church of Rome of which they were now members they must be properly punished. Meanwhile, he continued, Patriarch Gregory - who had resigned in despair a short time before must be reinstated; and the decree of the Council of Florence must be properly proclaimed in St Sophia and celebrated with a Mass of Thanksgiving. In May 1452 he finally lost patience and dispatched Cardinal Isidore of Kiev as Apostolic Legate to settle the matter once and for all.
The Emperor, meanwhile, had had other problems to consider, among the most pressing of which was that of the succession. He was now in his middle forties, and twice widowed. Both his marriages had been happy, but neither had proved fruitful. His first wife, Maddalena Tocco, had died in November 1429, after little more than a year of marriage; his second, Caterina Gattilusio - daughter of the Genoese lord of Lesbos -whom he had married in 1441, had survived for only a few months before dying at Palaiokastro on Lemnos, where she and Constantine together had been temporarily cut off by a Turkish fleet. Clearly he must now find a third. Various possibilities were explored. In the West there was a Portuguese princess, who happened also to be the niece of King Alfonso of Aragon and Naples; Isabella Orsini, daughter of the Prince of Taranto, was also considered. In the East, it seemed that either the ruling family of Trebizond or that of Georgia might be able to furnish a suitable bride. The Emperor's old friend George Sphrantzes was accordingly sent off to these last two courts to take diplomatic soundings.
It was while Sphrantzes was in Trebizond, in February 1451, that he heard of the death of Murad II. Immediately, a new idea came to him. The Sultan's widow Maria - in Turkish, Mara - was the daughter of old George Brankovich; although she and Murad had been married for fifteen years she had borne him no children, and it was generally believed that the marriage had never been consummated. She was, however, the stepmother of her husband's son and successor, the nineteen-year-old Mehmet, who was known to be energetic and ambitious and a sworn foe of Byzantium. If she were now to become its Empress, what better way could there be of keeping the boy under proper control? When the idea was put to the Emperor he was distincdy intrigued. The Palaeologi were already connected with the house of Brankovich, Constantine's niece Helena - daughter of his brother Thomas - having married Maria's brother Lazar. An ambassador at once sped off to Serbia to consult the parents of the intended bride. George and his wife were delighted, and readily gave their consent; the only opposition came from Maria herself, but her refusal was absolute. Years before, she explained, she had sworn an oath that if ever she escaped from the infidel she would devote the rest of her life to celibacy, chastity and charitable works. No amount of argument would induce her to change her mind - and subsequent events, it must be admitted, were fully to justify her decision. Poor Sphrantzes was sent back to Georgia to continue negotiations there, and these were soon successfully completed; but the proposed marriage never took place, and Constantine was to remain single for the rest of his short life.
Surprisingly little was known in Constantinople - and even less among the Christian peoples of the West - about the inscrutable young prince who had recently succeeded to the Ottoman throne at Adrianople. Born in 1433, Mehmet was the third of Murad's sons. He had had an unhappy childhood. His father had made no secret of his preference for his two elder half-brothers Ahmet and Ali, both children of well-born mothers, whereas Mehmet's own mother had been merely a slave-girl in the harem, and probably (though we cannot be sure) a Christian to boot. At the age of two he had been taken to Amasa, a province of northern Anatolia of which his fourteen-year-old brother was Governor; but Ahmet had died only four years later and the six-year-old Mehmet had succeeded him. Then, in 1444, Ali had been found strangled in his bed, in circumstances still mysterious. Mehmet, now heir to the throne, was summoned back urgently to Adrianople. Hitherto his education had been largely neglected; suddenly he found himself in the care of the greatest scholars that could be found and with them, over the next few years, laid the foundations of the learning and culture for which he was soon to be famous. At the time of his accession he is said to have been fluent not only in his native Turkish but in Arabic, Greek, Latin, Persian and Hebrew.
Twice, in the last six years of his life, Sultan Murad had abdicated the throne in favour of his son; twice his Grand Vizier Halil Pasha had prevailed upon him to resume the reins of government. Young Mehmet, he reported, was arrogant and self-willed, ever bent on going his own way and apparently determined to ignore the Vizier's advice. On one occasion he had adopted the cause of a fanatical Persian dervish, and had been enraged when the fellow was finally apprehended and burnt at the stake; on another he had ignored dangerous disturbances on the Greek and Albanian frontiers in favour of some crack-brained scheme to attack Constantinople. After Murad's second reluctant return to power he gave up all thoughts of retirement and settled down once again in Adrianople, banishing his unsatisfactory son to Magnesia in Anatolia; and it was there that news was brought to Mehmet that his father had died, on 13 February 1451, of an apoplectic seizure.
It took the new Sultan just five days to travel from Magnesia to Adrianople, where he held a formal reception at which he confirmed his father's ministers in their places or, in certain cases, appointed them elsewhere. In the course of these ceremonies Murad's widow arrived to congratulate him on his succession. Mehmet received her warmly and engaged her for some time in conversation; when she returned to the harem she found that her infant son had been murdered in his bath. The young Sultan, it seemed, was not one to take chances.
But he was only nineteen, and in the Western world there was a general feeling that he was still too young and immature to constitute a serious threat as his father had done - a delusion that Mehmet did everything he could to encourage. Within months of his succession he had concluded treaties with John Hunyadi of Hungary, George Brankovich of Serbia and the Doge of Venice, Francesco Foscari; messages of good will had been sent to the Prince of Wallachia, the Knights of St John in Rhodes and the Genoese lords of Lesbos and Chios. To the ambassadors dispatched by Constantine Dragases to congratulate him on his accession he is said to have replied almost too fulsomely, swearing by Allah and the Prophet to live at peace with the Emperor and his people, and to maintain with him those same bonds of friendship that his father had maintained with John VIII. Perhaps it was this last promise that put Constantine on his guard; he seems at any rate to have been one of the first to sense that the young Sultan was not all he seemed, but was potentially very dangerous indeed.
Such a degree of perception was certainly not granted to the leaders of the Karamans of Asia Minor, who in the autumn of 1451 thought to take advantage of Mehmet's youth and inexperience - and of his absence in Europe - by mounting an insurrection against him to restore the local Emirates that they had enjoyed in former times. Within weeks he was in their midst with his army; and they soon had good cause to regret their temerity. For all but those directly concerned, this was a relatively unimportant interlude; but for Byzantium it had important consequences. On his return to Europe Mehmet would normally have taken ship across the Dardanelles; but when it was reported to him that an Italian squadron was patrolling the strait he crossed instead by the Bosphorus, a few miles up from Constantinople at the point where Bayezit had built his castle at Anadolu Hisar. Here the great channel was at its narrowest, and Mehmet decided to build another fortress, immediately opposite his great-grandfather's, on the European side. This would give him complete control of the Bosphorus; moreover it would provide a superb base from which Constantinople could be attacked from the north-east, where the Golden Horn constituted virtually its only line of defence.
There was one small technical objection to the plan: the land on which Mehmet proposed to build his castle was theoretically Byzantine. He ignored it. All the following winter he spent collecting his workforce: a thousand professional stonemasons and as many unskilled labourers as they could employ. In the early spring all the churches and monasteries in the immediate neighbourhood were demolished to provide additional materials, and on Saturday, 15 April 1452 the building operations began.
The reaction in Constantinople can well be imagined. In vain did the Emperor send the Sultan an indignant embassy, to remind him that he was breaking a solemn treaty on which the ink was scarcely dry and to point out that, when Bayezit had wished to build his castle on the Asiatic side, he had had the courtesy to ask the permission of Manuel II even though such permission had not been strictly necessary. The imperial ambassadors were sent back to their master unheard. After a brief interval a second embassy, weighed down with presents, followed the first: would the Sultan not at least spare the neighbouring Byzantine villages? Again the envoys were dismissed without an audience. A week or two later Constantine made one last effort: would the Sultan give his word that the building of his castle did not herald an attack on Constantinople? This time Mehmet had had enough. The ambassadors were seized and executed, the Emperor left to draw his own conclusions.
The vast castle of Rumeli Hisar still stands, essentially unchanged since the day it was completed - Thursday, 31 August - a little beyond the village of Bebek on the Bosphorus shore. Even now it is difficult to believe that its building took, from start to finish, only nineteen and a half weeks. When it was ready the Sultan mounted three huge cannon on the tower nearest the shore and issued a proclamation that every passing ship, whatever its nationality or provenance, must stop for examination. It soon became clear that he meant what he said. Early in November two Venetian vessels coming from the Black Sea ignored the instruction. They managed to escape the consequent cannonade, but a fortnight later a third ship, laden with food and provisions for Constantinople, was less lucky. When it too failed to stop it was blasted out of the water; the crew were executed, the captain - one Antonio Rizzo - impaled on a stake and his body publicly exposed as a warning to anyone else who might think of following his example.
In the West, opinions were hastily revised. The Sultan Mehmet II, it seemed, meant business.
The Sultan's treatment of the luckless Rizzo caused consternation throughout Christendom. Pope Nicholas in particular was horrified. By now he was genuinely eager to help; but he was also powerless, and he knew it. Already the previous March he had instructed the new Western Emperor - Frederick III of Hapsburg, who had come to Rome for his imperial coronation - to send the Sultan a threatening ultimatum. No one, least of all Mehmet, had paid any attention. France was still reeling after the damage suffered in the Hundred Years' War; the crusading enthusiasm of Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy, had been considerably dampened by the memory of how his father John the Fearless had been taken prisoner at Nicopolis; England, rudderless under the holy but half-witted Henry VI, was also recovering from the damage wrought by the conflict with France and rapidly falling into the chaos that would lead, only three years later, to the Wars of the Roses; the Kings of Portugal and Castile were engaged in Crusades of their own; the Kings of Scotland and Scandinavia neither knew nor cared. That left Alfonso of Aragon, since 1443 enthroned in Naples, who asked nothing better; but as Alfonso's avowed motive was to seize the Byzantine throne he was not encouraged.
In the summer of 1452, as the towers of Rumeli Hisar rose ever higher above the narrow strait, the former Metropolitan Isidore of Kiev, now a Roman cardinal and official Papal Legate to the court of Constantinople, sailed for his new post. He was delayed for some time at Naples, while he recruited two hundred archers at the Pope's expense, and eventually arrived with his Genoese colleague Leonard, Archbishop of Mitylene, at the end of October. His instructions were simple; to see that the union of the Eastern and Western Churches, agreed at Florence thirteen years before, was properly implemented at last. The Emperor, he knew, was in full - if cautious - agreement. Even public opinion in the capital, though still divided, seemed to Isidore more favourable than before. The anti-unionists remained strong; but the chief minister and High Admiral, the megas dux Lucas Notaras, was working ceaselessly to extract concessions from them and it was not impossible that a compromise might be reached. A week or two later, the Cardinal was less optimistic: the former George Scholarius - now the monk Gennadius and leader of the dissidents - published a manifesto emphasizing the folly of apostasy at a moment when the Almighty alone could save the Empire, and agreement seemed as remote as ever. But then, in the nick of time, there came the news of the sinking of the Venetian vessel and the fate of its captain; and the pendulum swung yet again.
On Tuesday, 12 December 1452 the Emperor and his entire court, accompanied by Cardinal Isidore and the Archbishop of Chios, attended high mass in St Sophia. The Laetentur Coeli was formally read out, just as it had been at Florence; the Pope and the absent Patriarch Gregory were properly commemorated; and, in theory at any rate, the union was complete. And yet for Isidore, Leonard and their friends it was an empty victory. The service, despite the cardinal's somewhat overdone assurances to the contrary, had been poorly attended; according to Leonard -who was apparently a good deal readier to face facts - even the Emperor had seemed half-hearted and listless, while Notaras had been actively hostile. Afterwards there was no rejoicing; the dissidents too held their peace. Not a word was heard from Gennadius, back in his monastic cell. It was noticed, however, that the churches whose priests had espoused the union - including of course St Sophia itself - were henceforth almost empty; the people might have accepted the inevitable, but they worshipped only where the old liturgy remained unchanged, that the God of the Orthodox Church might still hear their prayers.
In January 1453 Mehmet II summoned his ministers to his presence in Adrianople. Byzantium, he told them, was still dangerous. Weak it might be, but its people were natural intriguers who could yet do the House of Othman much harm if they chose. Moreover they had potential allies far more formidable than they; if they decided that they were no longer capable of defending Constantinople, what was to prevent their entrusting it to the Italians or the Franks, who would do so for them? His own Empire, in short, could never be safe while the city remained in Christian hands, nor in such circumstances would he himself wish to be its Sultan. It must consequently be taken; and now - while its inhabitants were deeply demoralized and hopelessly divided among themselves - was the time to take it. Admittedly it was well defended; but it was by no means impregnable, and previous attempts had failed largely because its besiegers had been unable to prevent the arrival of food and supplies by sea. Now, for the first time, the Turks had naval superiority. If Constantinople could not be taken by storm, it could - and must - be starved into submission.
