Istanbul_ The Collected Traveler_ An Inspired Companion Guide - Barrie Kerper [16]
Mehmed (Muhammad) II invested the city with the largest force it had yet faced: an estimated 100,000 troops deployed to landward, the Ottoman fleet massed offshore. Against this: a scant 8,000 to man the walls, and a few ships behind the chain across the Golden Horn.
Why so few defenders? Stripped of the lands that gave it food and fighters, Constantinople was a skeleton, and divided against itself. The West had finally promised help—but at a fearful price: submission of Byzantium’s Holy Orthodox Church to the Church of Rome. The pope’s emissary presided over a Te Deum in a nearly empty Hagia Sophia to sighs of dismay. “Better the Turkish turban than the Latin miter!” ran the popular sentiment. Still, they had the invincible walls. Optimists quoted the old saying: the city would stand until ships sailed over land, a manifest impossibility.
The thunder of Mehmed’s attack on April 11, 1453, shook the invincibility of those walls. Ramparts shattered under the barrage of bronze cannon, the largest the world had ever seen. The smallest of the sultan’s 67 guns fired a 200-pound stone shot. The biggest, three feet in bore, hurled a 1,200-pound ball. Sixty oxen were needed to draw it from Edirne, preceded by road and bridge builders and flanked by 10,000 cavalry. Fortunately for the defenders, the Basilica, as Mehmed called it, took so long to clean and load that it could fire only seven times a day.
Filling breaches in the ramparts by night, the defenders beat back assault after assault. Turkish sappers were countermined and slaughtered underground. When four ships made it through the Turkish gantlet into port, the furious sultan gave his admiral a hundred lashes.
Seven weeks: Still the city held. Advisers urged Mehmed to raise the siege.
Give up his dream? Never! The impetuous sultan would press the siege to victory.
If he could get a flotilla inside the Golden Horn, the Byzantines would have to thin out to defend that side too. His engineers built a log slipway over the hill between the Bosporus and the Golden Horn. Brute force—man and beast bending to the ropes—inched some seventy ships over the crest.
Dismaying sight! Descending to the Golden Horn, canvas bellying to the breeze, were “ships sailing over the land!”
It is May 28. For the last time the setting sun glints on the cross atop Hagia Sophia. This evening, as on all others, the tireless Constantine attends holy services and checks the guards on the walls, though his courtiers have begged him to flee. Day by day anxious eyes have scanned the horizon for relief that does not come. Now the city is one, the thin line of soldiers determined to sell their lives dearly.
For several evenings the Turkish lines have blazed from the Sea of Marmara to the Golden Horn, the din of trumpets, drums, shouts driving a deep wedge of terror into the night. Tonight, in sultry air, the lines fall ominously silent.
Two hours after midnight men on the wall hear a rustle: the Turks moving 2,000 scaling ladders into the moat and up to the walls.
Flames roaring from cannon mouths signal the attack. Batteries concentrate on St. Romanos Gate. Here the emperor takes the point of greatest danger beside the Genoese captain, Giustiniani (Italian for Justinian), whose 700 men have fought valiantly.
Turkish archers, musketeers, slingers rain deadly fire on the parapets. Turks swarm up the ladders but are hurled back. Heavy infantry attack through breaches pounded by the cannon. Defenders repel them. Mehmed commits his elite Janissaries. Hand-to-hand battle seesaws. Then Turks discover a lightly guarded sally port in the moat. They pour through. “The Turk is in the city!” The emperor