Constantine Palaeologus sleeps now. He has joined that select company of heroic monarchs who, like Arthur or Alexander, are supposed to return someday to revive and defend their nations. He is the Marble King, rescued by an angel, turned to stone, and placed beneath the Golden Gate of the walls of Constantinople, where he waits, sleeping, until that day he will awake, take up his sword, and chase the Turks from the city.
The historical Constantine—who ruled as the eleventh Roman or Byzantine emperor by that name—did not have the honor of reviving a nation. He was fated for a very different role, that of doomed hero, in the final defense of Constantinople. Constantine exited the stage only shortly after his entrance, at that moment when the civilized world was finally stripped of the security that had been, for ten thousand years, provided by city walls. For his part in that drama, Constantine was uniquely qualified. Prior to assuming the throne, he had served the Empire as Despot of the Morea, the title then given governors of the Peloponnesus. In that capacity, he had reconstructed the old wall that formerly sealed off the peninsula at the isthmus of Corinth. Despite its unimpressive dimensions, the Corinthian barrier was the grandfather of all European border walls, originally constructed during the Mycenaean era and later rebuilt several times by the Greeks or Romans. Justinian had added towers to it in the sixth century. More recently, Constantine’s own father, the theologically minded Manuel II, had personally overseen repairs. None of these earlier builders had ever faced anything like what came crashing down on Constantine and the wall in 1446: fifty thousand Turkish troops, armed with cannons and catapults. Within weeks, the Turks had broken through, ravaged the Peloponnesus, and forced the future emperor to pay tribute to the Ottoman sultan.
In 1449, Constantine assumed the Byzantine throne, just in time to defend another set of walls against a far larger force. He was forty-three at the time of his coronation, middle-aged and seasoned, stoically prepared to assume his life’s work as defender of a lost cause. He would soon prove himself worthy of ranking with the likes of Leonidas at Thermopylae or Travis at the Alamo, although the empire Constantine was defending was hardly worth the effort. Fifteenth-century Byzantium was a shriveled thing, imperial in name only, having already surrendered most of its territory. The Holy Lands, along with North Africa, had fallen to the initial surge of Islamic armies out of Arabia and been traded back and forth by crusaders, Mongols, and Turks ever since. Asia Minor had held out somewhat longer. It was not lost until the eleventh century, when it fell to the Muslimized former steppe peoples who gave their name to Turkey. The Eastern European provinces, meanwhile, had fallen under the sway of various minor powers. By Constantine’s day, all that remained of the old Empire were some islands, a few Greek cities on the Black Sea coastline, the ravaged Peloponnesus, and Constantinople.
The capital, like the state it governed, retained little more than a historical claim on its former grandeur. Early fifteenth-century visitors invariably commented on the city’s vacant and dilapidated condition. Nearly all the magnificent buildings of Justinian, save the massive domed Church of Hagia Sophia, had gone to ruin. Only the great Theodosian Walls, which had been repaired and augmented after the siege of 1432, recalled the glorious past of the city once called the New Rome.
Inside its thousand-year-old walls, Constantinople had functioned for fully seven hundred years as a strategic command center in a great clash of civilizations. During the Dark Ages, the Byzantines had, along with the Franks, been one of only two Western powers capable of arresting the onslaught of Islam. Time and again, the emperors had rallied their financially depleted and plague-ravaged state to stave off disaster. Time and again, the caliphs and sultans had made Constantinople their chief goal, driving huge armies to the very gates of the city, where the walls would always stymie them, foiling their dreams of achieving a conquest prophesied in Muslim lore.
The ambition of conquering Constantinople was passed down from caliph to sultan, Arab to Turk. The twelve-year-old Mehmed II, already a sultan, experienced an early disappointment when his impetuous plan to take the Byzantine capital was rejected by his elders. The desire for Constantinople turned to obsession for the young monarch. A few years later, when a nervous adviser sought to soothe the sultan with a plateful of gold coins, Mehmed spurned the offering. “Only one thing I want,” he said. “Give me Constantinople.”
In late summer 1452, Mehmed took his army to the very walls of Constantinople, where Constantine Palaeologus could only watch helplessly while the sultan and his engineers spent three days studying the fortifications. At least the walls remained formidable. Fourteen miles in circumference, they still enclosed every side of the triangular city. The two longer sections faced water: the Sea of Marmara to the south and the inlet known as the Golden Horn to the north. Both of these sides were essentially impregnable. Attacking the southern Sea Walls would have required an enemy to make an amphibious landing in full view of the defenders. Meanwhile, the walls facing the Golden Horn had been made even more secure by a massive chain that could be dragged across the opening of the inlet, closing it to Turkish ships. The Land Walls, roughly facing west, were also forbidding. They retained all the elements of their original Theodosian design: a massive dry moat, which could be flooded, a stout initial barricade, and, inside them, two sets of successively higher walls, dubbed the Outer and the Inner.
In the ten thousand years since city walls had first made their appearance in prehistory, the techniques for attacking them had advanced only glacially. Late medieval armies had at their disposal essentially the same tactics and tools that were employed by the ancients. They could attempt to take a wall by direct assault, but this was no easy task. The defenders had to be driven from their positions, usually with arrows and slingstones, and then the walls scaled on rickety ladders that had been hastily set up on the uneven ground around the base of the fortifications. Alternatively, an attacking army might attempt to smash the gates with battering rams, or it might employ one of several stone-throwing devices of dubious accuracy, the onager, mangonel, catapult, ballista, and trebuchet. Undermining was another common tactic: tunneling beneath a city’s walls, then filling the mine with flammable materials and setting a fire that burned away the tunnel’s wooden props, causing the mine to collapse and caving in the walls above. Finally, an attacker might employ a siege tower, a sort of clumsy forerunner to the tank—wooden, three stories high, shielded with hides, and mounted on wheels that allowed it to be rolled directly against a wall, where it could provide a protected platform for weapons crews, miners, or climbers.
All these siege techniques were fraught with danger. Mines collapsed on the sappers. Ladders slipped, broke, or could be pushed away. Battering-ram crews were exposed to enemy fire. Stone-throwing onagers received their name (which means “wild ass”) because they kicked like mules and could kill or injure an unwary attendant as easily as a foe. Siege towers were often set on fire, could be undermined, and generally required soldiers to work in exposed conditions while preparing a lane for the tower or constructing a causeway across a moat. The walls of Constantinople had defeated all these tactics many times in its history.
In the fifteenth century, Mehmed had all the traditional tools of siegecraft at his disposal and another one, besides. A Hungarian foundryman had defected to the Turks. Initially, this expert in bronze manufacturing, whose name is given only as Orban, had offered his services to Constantine, but the money-strapped emperor couldn’t meet his salary demands. The Hungarian promptly shopped his services to the sultan. There the mercenary foundryman faced some initial skepticism. Some hard questions were asked at the job interview. But when Orban boasted he could manufacture a cannon capable of shattering Constantinople’s walls to dust, that was good enough for Mehmed. The sultan furnished his brash new employee with a lavish salary and provided him with men and materials to set up his foundry in a city just over one hundred miles northwest of Constantinople: Adrianople. The City of Hadrian.
In all the folklore of sleeping kings, there are no myths of a risen Hadrian. The great Roman wall builder was too unpopular. Now out of the city that bore his name would arise not a ghost or a resurrected emperor but a monster, a war machine unlike any other the world had ever seen: a pulverizer of walls.
* * *
Cannons had debuted on the battlefield only a short while earlier, if one discounts the steam-powered version invented by Archimedes during the Second Punic War. The Chinese first applied gunpowder as a propellant, and in the thirteenth century that technology had spread quickly from China into the Islamic world and eventually into Europe. The early gunpowder cannons were mostly ineffective against walls and were more often put to use defending them than destroying them. In fact, in 1396, the Byzantines had used the newfangled weapons to drive away an earlier army of Turks from Constantinople. A half-century later, the boastful Orban, loyal only to the gold in his purse, set himself to building cannons capable of destroying the walls of Constantinople. When he was done, he had revolutionized cannons, warfare, and the manner in which civilized people had lived for ten thousand years.
The first step for Orban and his workers was to form an enormous mold, twenty-seven feet long, out of clay, hemp, and linen. The finished mold was laid in a pit and packed tightly all around so that it could withstand the strain of being filled with tons of molten metal. Once casting started, the foundrymen toiled under hellish conditions. The air stank from noxious fumes. Workers resorted to prayers and superstitions to ward off explosions. The great furnaces radiated heat, the great bellies rising to over a thousand degrees Celsius. They were maintained at that infernal temperature for three days as workers pumped ceaselessly on bellows to feed oxygen to the fire. For fuel, they used charcoal, stoking the fire with shovelful after shovelful from a mountainous pile, taller than the foundry itself. The great cauldron they fed with hundreds of pieces of bronze scrap. Where had they acquired such an enormous quantity of expensive scrap metal? Old church bells? The weapons of long-dead soldiers? Two thousand years before Orban, the great walled cities of the classical world had produced countless magnificent bronze statues. They have nearly all vanished now, a misfortune of having been made of a useful, reusable metal, which, unlike iron, doesn’t rust. How many of those old statues, having been melted down and recast many times, were now tossed into Orban’s bubbling cauldron?
It took Orban and his crew three months to cast the great bronze cannon, and when it was complete, Mehmed ordered a test. The cannon shot an enormous stone ball, more than seven feet in circumference, a distance of over a mile. A team of sixty oxen and two hundred men subsequently began dragging the cannon to Constantinople. Ahead of them, Mehmed had another 250 men making the usual preparations for war: building bridges—in this case, structures sturdy enough to allow the massive bombard to be transported to its position outside the city, where it could roar and thunder and throw its mighty stones.
In Constantinople, the anxious residents worked diligently on their walls, making last-minute additions and repairs. There was no surplus of labor for the task, or for the defense of the city. The great capital’s population had dwindled to perhaps fifty thousand souls. Much like the Empire itself, the city was hardly more than a paltry vestige of its former self. Constantine had his secretary conduct a census. He counted just under five thousand able-bodied men and two hundred foreigners. The numbers were sobering: placed evenly around the wall’s entire fourteen-mile circuit, a force of five thousand men would have left undefended gaps of sixteen feet between every two soldiers.
Hadrian had already made his cameo; now it was Justinian’s turn. In January 1453, a company of seven hundred Genoese mercenaries arrived by boat, led by their young captain, Giustiniani (the Italian form of Justinian). The thirty-four-year-old had personally organized and paid for the mission, the only Western aid that the Christian capital would receive. Constantine put great stock in Justinian’s reputation. The two would work in concert to orchestrate the defense of the city. Upon assessing the defensive potential of the various fortifications, they elected to place all their men on the Outer Wall—technically, the middle section of the triple-layered Theodosian fortifications. The defenders would have few guns and would be unable to make much use of their own cannons, for fear the recoils might damage the fortifications on which they were mounted. Stationed outside the Inner Wall, they would be fighting with their backs to the gates.
The great city was defended by a motley array of forces. All around the fourteen miles of walls, some guarding sea, some land, Constantine stationed in small companies the pitiful numbers he had at his disposal. A cardinal commanded two hundred men in one sector; an archbishop headed the defense of another. One stretch of wall was guarded by Greek Orthodox monks, another by the entourage of a pretender to the Turkish throne. Venetian traders and Genoese mercenaries took responsibility for the most critical areas. Greek troops and townspeople covered the rest, but their pitifully small numbers meant that any real hope of surviving the siege depended on the bricks and cement of the walls holding out until relief finally arrived from the West.
A force reportedly numbering three hundred thousand or even four hundred thousand men was bearing down on the city. When it arrived, Constantine sent out his Venetian troops in their colorful uniforms to parade in front of the walls in a pathetic attempt to intimidate the sultan.
* * *
On April 2, 1453, the battle for Constantinople commenced. The emperor drew first blood by launching a small sortie against the Turkish vanguard. Although the mission inflicted many casualties, the futility of the heroic charge gradually became evident when great numbers of Turks began to arrive. Constantine subsequently recalled his troops and ordered them to destroy any bridges over the moats. With the gates of the Inner Wall now locked behind them, the defenders were isolated, as if on an island. Everything depended on the Outer Walls.
Four days later, the sultan had finally put his artillery batteries in place. An unearthly bombardment began. Even at a great distance, the Orban cannon left the defenders dumbstruck. Those who went on to write accounts of the battle struggled to find a word for the awesome new weapon. They searched their classical vocabularies for terms meaning “city taker” or “missile thrower.” Some coined new terms, which translate roughly as “long-range engine” or “stone-throwing engine.” To one, it was simply a “terrible, unprecedented monster.” To the archbishop Leonardo, who fought on the walls, it was bombarda horribilis.
With Mehmed watching intently from his red-and-gold pavilion, the Horrible Bombard crushed whatever it hit, spraying deadly fragments of ball and wall in every direction. After each firing, the Turkish gunners poured gallons of olive oil down the cannon’s mighty gullet to keep the overheated barrel from exploding. It had to cool for more than two hours before being fired again, limiting it to just a few uses each day. Even with these limitations, the great cannon’s impact was breathtaking. Within twenty-four hours an entire section of wall had collapsed. Attacker and defender quickly fell into rhythm. Every day, the Turkish cannoneers would blast away at the walls. Every night, the gates of the Inner Wall would open, allowing townspeople, including women and children, to pour out and assist their husbands, brothers, and fathers in the repair of the walls.
In the area where Orban’s cannon concentrated its fire, the wall was quickly crushed beyond repair. To fill its place, the defenders erected a wooden stockade, resembling the primitive fortifications that prehistoric villagers once placed around their homes. It was all they could do under the circumstances, and the Turks immediately recognized it as the weak spot in the city’s defense. On April 18, the Sultan sent his elite troops, the Janissaries, in a direct attack on the stockade. The Janissaries came mostly from Christian, Eastern European families. Taken from their parents as children, they were raised to be fanatical Muslim warriors and formed the infantry wing of Mehmed’s army. But Giustiniani’s Genoese repelled them, inflicting heavy casualties on the attackers without suffering any losses of their own.
Two days later, the Sea Wall defenders had a bird’s-eye view of an extraordinary event. Three Genoese ships sailed into view, along with a Byzantine vessel, making a dash for the city’s harbor. All carried food, arms, or provisions. At first, it appeared the tiny fleet would race past the blockade, but when the wind died, the current pushed the four ships away from the city and into the teeth of the Turkish navy. Turkish warships, too numerous to count and armed with cannons and soldiers, swarmed the tiny Christian fleet. In the vicious battle that followed, the Christian ships had only the advantage of height, unless pluckiness can be counted in the balance. Under heavy attack, Genoese and Byzantine sailors climbed their masts to hurl projectiles down on their enemies. Thirty and even forty Turkish ships surrounded every Christian vessel, attempting to hook and board them after their cannons had failed to do their job. The Westerners, helpless to escape as long as the wind left them becalmed, used axes to chop at anyone climbing aboard. Onshore, the sultan watched the spectacle, becoming so engrossed that more than once he charged with his horse into the water, as if he might somehow ride to the aid of his armada. To his dismay, all four of the Christian ships survived the onslaught and finally caught a wind that carried them to the safety of Constantinople’s harbor.
The arrival of the emergency supplies provided the beleaguered defenders with a glimmer of hope. Perhaps, they reasoned, flotillas of Western troops were soon to follow. Two days later, even that hope was extinguished. The Turks had found their way around the great chain: they’d placed part of their navy on rollers and dragged the boats over land from the Sea of Marmara to the Golden Horn. With the loss of the Golden Horn, Constantinople no longer possessed a safe harbor that could receive reinforcements. While Venetians and Genoese squabbled over how to address this newest catastrophe, the Horrible Bombard pounded the walls relentlessly. To Italian eyewitness Nicolò Barbaro, it sounded as if the sky would split in two.
On May 7, the sultan launched a new land assault on the city. Thirty thousand troops, including crews with battering rams, stormed the city amid a chorus of cries so loud that it could be heard dozens of miles away. As before, the attackers were driven off. Five days later, the same hideous sound was raised—augmented by a cacophonous array of drums, cymbals, fifes, trumpets, lutes, and pipes. Once again, the defenders, with the help of some Venetian soldiers who had previously been stationed on the boats, drove off the attack. The stress of the siege now widened latent divisions among the defenders. Italian authors were particularly critical of the Greeks, with one echoing the traditional warrior’s criticism of wallers: the Greeks, he said, were poor fighters who preferred plowing fields to manning their battle stations.
Underneath the no-man’s-land between the lines, attacker and defender now played an ancient game of cat and mouse in the dark. Turkish and Greek sappers tunneled with fantastic speed, the one attempting to evade detection, the other to find and destroy. By May 16, the Turks had nearly reached the Kaligaria Gate, before vigilant defenders found their work and destroyed it. A second mine was destroyed on May 22 and a third on May 23. In all, seven mines were eventually found and destroyed, while the incessant cannonade rumbled on.
The sultan made use of every tool in the trade of siegecraft. In a single night, his men constructed a towering siege engine and rolled it against the walls. From this high perch, the Turks volleyed arrows over the battlements, terrifying the Constantinopolitans. The next night, intrepid defenders snuck out and blew up the causeway beneath the siege tower. The huge war engine collapsed in flames.
The Sea Walls received a scare. The city’s seaside defenders watched with horror as Turkish sailors lashed together their boats to form a pontoon bridge spanning the Golden Horn. For the defenders of Constantinople, as for countless people before them, there was nothing more comforting than a wall, or more terrifying than a bridge. Greek and Italian chroniclers alike recalled the tale of the Persian king Xerxes bridging the Hellespont during his famous invasion of Greece. The thinly manned northern walls had now been made vulnerable to assault.
In the Turkish camp, expectations of victory—and plunder—soared. On Sunday, May 27, and Monday, May 28, the massive host prepared for a final attack with drums, shouts, and fire. For the Turkish soldiers, the racket and hubbub was a stimulant, exciting their mental state and producing surges of testosterone while they awaited their marching orders. To Nicolò Barbaro, behind the walls, it sounded as if their shouts came straight from hell.
The heroes of Constantinople spent their final days much as they had spent their final weeks: in hunger, unable to leave their positions. Those who had homes in the city worried that their families had run out of food.
Inside the walls, the Christians held a final religious procession in the dimming hope that divine intercession might yet rescue them from certain doom. The emperor addressed the throngs, with words to the effect that he was proud of the valiant deeds of the defenders and that they shouldn’t lose heart just because part of their walls had been battered down. It was a short speech, but a brave one, cinematic in its own way, and inspiring—the kind of valedictory we expect from our heroes.
On Tuesday, May 29, in the dark hours of early morning, Mehmed launched his final assault. As if the roar of battle weren’t enough, every church in the city rang its bells to wake up the sleeping. In the first wave, Mehmed sent in his most dispensable troops—fifty thousand Christian slaves and mercenaries. Like Xerxes at Thermopylae, he ordered them followed by men with whips, who lashed at anyone attempting retreat. Charging with their ladders, the attackers suffered heavy losses, and after two hours of fighting, Mehmed ordered their retreat. The cannons resumed their daily barrage, until Mehmed ordered a second assault, this time made by fifty thousand untrained Turks of the sort who had poured into his camp in hopes of booty.
The second wave struck all along the walls but was driven back. Even the monks were able to hold off the Turks from behind their intact fortifications. Then the Horrible Bombard struck a death blow, hitting the most vulnerable point on the line. A massive stone ball splintered the makeshift wooden palisade that the Genoese had erected to fill in for a stretch of demolished wall. Throngs of Turks streamed through the gap. For a while, the Genoese repelled them in desperate hand-to-hand combat.
By the time Mehmed launched his third wave, the Christian defenders—hungry, sleep deprived, and shell-shocked after fifty-three days of siege—had exerted themselves in unrelenting physical effort for several hours. Physically, and probably mentally as well, they were completely spent when the sultan’s Janissary troops came screaming down on them. The defenders repelled an initial breakthrough with heavy losses, but the attackers kept coming. Concentrating their efforts on those areas where Orban’s cannon had created breaches, the Janissaries fought as if they were expendable. Some thirty thousand reputedly fell around the Gate of Saint Romanus. The frenzied zealots were the first to penetrate the walls.
Giustiniani, having received a wound, now succumbed to the pressure of combat. In an act that appalled the siege’s chroniclers and forever tarnished his legacy, the Genoese captain begged to be carried to safety. And so this “Justinian” would play his role, just as the spirit of Hadrian had in hosting Orban’s foundry. The emperor begged the young commander to stand his ground, but Giustiniani had no stomach to die for a cause, noble or otherwise. In full view of his men, he was carried through a gate in the Inner Wall and spirited through the streets to the safety of a ship. Disheartened, the entire Genoese corps—the primary defenders of the shattered palisade—abandoned their posts.
The defection of the Genoese confirmed the fate of the city. As Turks poured over the palisade, the remaining defenders were pushed farther and farther back until they were massacred against the city’s great Inner Wall.
Two groups of men—fleeing defenders and charging attackers—now fought to squeeze through the broken Gate of Saint Romanus. It was there that the emperor was last seen, in the company of his noble entourage, furiously fighting to drive the Turks back through the gate. Plunging into the throng of screaming zealots, Constantine Palaeologus exited the realm of history and entered that of myth.
* * *
After the breaching of the walls, there remained only the horror that Constantinopolitans had feared since the days of Theodosius II: the killings, the plundering, the dragging away of tens of thousands of civilians into slavery.
A few survivors scattered to spread the tale. Some wrote lugubrious poems, lamenting the loss of Constantinople, much in the same way the Sumerians had once lamented the fall of Ur. An embarrassed and somewhat self-absorbed Catholic Europe, which never sent the desperately needed aid for which the Byzantines had long pleaded, refused to concede the gravity of the event. Western writers tried to pass it off as the loss of just another city.
Historians see the fall of Constantinople somewhat differently. For most, May 29, 1453, marked a turning point in world history. The Roman-turned-Byzantine Empire had finally come to an end, never again to experience a Lazarus-like revival. The Turks had emerged as a world power. Islam had established a permanent presence in Europe. All these things were important. Perhaps none mattered quite so much as this: that the Turkish sultan and his Horrible Bombard had torn away mankind’s ancient security blanket. For thousands of years, dating back to a time that predates empires and creeds, townspeople had found within their city walls the security to be civilized. They had voluntarily pitched in to build their city walls even while they dreaded the prospect of toiling away on the long walls of some imperial border. City walls were the one constant in the history of civilization. China, at the time of the fall of Constantinople, still had over two thousand walled cities. Worldwide, the total was beyond reckoning. They had all been rendered obsolete.
For some years, military engineers continued to labor over designs that they hoped would extend the usefulness of city walls, and these occasionally proved modestly effective, at least against smaller cannons. But after the fall of Constantinople, the defenders of walls were fighting a losing battle, locked in a contest they couldn’t win. Their enemies were now civilized armies, just like their own, and equally well supplied with engineers, metallurgists, and ballistics experts. The city wall had originated as a defense against a different sort of foe, one equipped mostly with horses, arrows, and courage. That foe had largely disappeared from Europe and would soon be driven to extinction across Eurasia, defeated by an unlikely combination of modern weaponry and barriers so primitive they could hardly be distinguished as walls.