In the early morning of April 21st, the irregular troops, who, with the exception of the general assaults, had until then just been sent out to fill up trenches, received an order to assemble at Galata. Mihajlovic had a bad feeling about this, but tried not to think about it too deeply. News about the sea battle had reached the Serbian soldiers, who had been filling trenches the whole day. Of course they couldn’t say so openly, but it was the first uplifting news they had heard in a long time.
As usual they weren’t told why they were supposed to assemble in Galata, but they assumed it must have been to repair the ships damaged in the battle. Mihajlovic had his troops fall into formation, checked that all were present, and then they headed towards Galata around the tip of the Golden Horn.
When Mihajlovic and his men arrived at the Bosphorus, he was struck by the odd fact that the Sultan and all of his top ministers were there, far away from the main encampment where they should have been. He didn’t have time to indulge his speculations, however, as the commanders of all of the irregular units were called up one after the other to receive their assignments for the day and quickly get to work. Mihajlovic’s Serbian forces were assigned to a section of the hills rising from the Bosphorus.
Their first task was to repair and fortify the road that ran alongside and slightly apart from the Genoese settlement’s wall. The road had been there already for a long time and had been used for the Ottoman soldiers’ comings and goings, but for some reason it now needed further, special leveling, more so than was necessary in order to be used only by people and horses. That finished, they used timber brought by another group of soldiers to begin constructing a pair of rails. It occurred to Mihajlovic, as he oversaw the work, that these rails could be used to transport the Great Cannon.
Just as they were finishing the rails, the Sultan appeared with his ministers in tow to carry out an inspection; they watched as a platform with metal wheels was pushed along the wooden rails, and also checked to be sure that the ground under the rails was firm. The last time Mihajlovic had seen the Sultan at such close range was at their meeting in Adrianople. He wondered if Mehmed would recognize him, but the Sultan didn’t even glance at the Serbian commander standing next to the rails: all he cared about was the proper completion of the work. After the inspection report was delivered, he followed the road further uphill to the next work station without looking back.
The next day, the 22nd, the irregulars were called up even before daybreak and ordered to assemble at the same place as the day before. A completely different task awaited them at the Bosphorus, however. Mihajlovic looked around trying to figure out what they were going to be ordered to do. And then he saw. It appeared that the Turkish Sultan, his junior by a few years, wasn’t using the rails to transport the Great Cannon: he was using them to transport his fleet overland into the Golden Horn. The young Serbian knight was more than just surprised; he was nearly trembling with fear.
Mehmed had no shortage of men or material, and he never hesitated to exploit them to the hilt. The wooden rails were completely covered with animal lard. The wheeled platforms were linked together, and resting atop them was a ship that had been pulled out of the sea. The sails were at full mast—a favorable wind blowing from the water up the hill was actually helping push the boat along. Most of the work, however, was being done by two rows of oxen that were managing to pull this unimaginably heavy boat. Large numbers of men were pushing the boats from behind as they inched their way up the hill. The highest point of the Galata Hills was sixty meters above sea level; once the boat reached the peak, oarsmen would get on board and then the boats would slide down an identical set of rails into the Golden Horn.
Once the first of the lighter ships had made it to the top of the hill, the cannon positioned along the east wall of the Genoese settlement fired off one round after another; this would distract the ships inside the Golden Horn towards the boom. At the same time, the Turkish marching band began wildly banging their drums and blowing their trumpets so that the Genoese inside the settlement walls wouldn’t hear the ships sliding into the water.
When the first boat was successfully pulled to the top of the hill, loud cheers and clapping erupted not only from the Turkish soldiers, but from the Greek Orthodox soldiers from East Europe as well. The prevailing mood was not one of warfare but rather of pleasant sport, skillfully executed. Seventy more ships, one after the other, followed the first.
It was a little before noon. A sentry atop the wall facing the Golden Horn suddenly let out a heart-stopping shout. When his comrades came running to see what was the matter, he couldn’t even find the words to explain it: he could only scream and point his finger in front of him. The lookouts on the ships in the Golden Horn noticed it at around the same time. They could only gape, speechless, at what they saw: one ship after another sliding into the Golden Horn, all flying the red and white star and crescent. They looked like nothing more than toy boats sliding down a chute. When they hit the water, however, the oars immediately began moving. The ships, once afloat, even maneuvered to form a protective fence in the water for the ones that were following suit. It seemed to take no time at all for every one of the ships to make it into the water. For the dumbfounded onlookers, at least, the entire process seemed to pass in an instant. Some of them wondered whether this was not some kind of waking dream or hallucination; however, the fleet that was heading west toward the tip of the Golden Horn before their eyes was very much a reality.
Within moments, the same people who had felt such a wonderful sense of solidarity from the sea victory of two days before were blaming one another for the misfortune that had materialized. The Genoese said, “The Sultan must have heard from some Venetian in his camp about how, fifteen years ago in northern Italy, the Venetians carried their fleet overland from the Po River to Lake Garda. No doubt that’s where he got the idea!”
The Venetians didn’t remain silent in the face of such charges. “Unlike you, at least, we’re quite clear about our position towards the Sultan. Do you really think the Sultan would allow a declared enemy to approach him? Yet it is a fact, is it not, that the Sultan has secret agents among the Genoese in Galata? If the Sultan indeed knew of a strategy that we resorted to in 1438, he must have heard it from one of the Italians in the Turkish camp, either that classicist or the attending physician Iacopo da Gaeta. Maybe some Genoese went to him looking all loyal and passed on the information.
“Furthermore, how is it humanly possible that this construction work was going on right outside of your walls and not a single person noticed it? We can only conclude that you knew about this all along and yet didn’t inform us!”
The Greeks merely looked on, trying to suppress their laughter. These “Latins” who had boasted that only their great naval power could defend the Golden Horn had had their confidence shaken. This gave the Greeks a certain satisfaction, despite everything.
Admiral Trevisan paid no attention to the rancor aboard his ship. He had realized the enormity of the situation even before all of the Turkish boats had entered the water. He immediately sent a messenger to Ambassador Minotto, who agreed with Trevisan’s estimation and sent another messenger to the Emperor requesting an immediate emergency meeting of the war council. The imperial court, however, had become accustomed to a more leisurely pace of doing things and ordered the meeting to be held the next morning.
Trevisan, who was responsible for the overall naval defense of the city, decided not to wait until the next morning but rather to assume the authority of supreme commander and do what needed to be done. For the time being that meant sending a fast galley to keep an eye on the movements of the Turkish ships that had dropped anchor deep in the Golden Horn. He also ordered the Christian fleet lined up along the boom to prepare themselves not only for an attack from the front, as they had up until this time, but to be ready as well for a possible attack from the rear. They could no longer feel secure just because they were in the Golden Horn.
The scout ship reported that the Turks now had artillery set up not only outside the east wall of the Genoese settlement, but also on the shore of the Golden Horn where the Turkish fleet was now anchored. If the defenders came anywhere near the Turkish fleet, the cannons would immediately fire in their direction. The Genoese in Galata could hardly be at ease knowing that they were now hemmed in by Turkish cannons from the east and west. Boats anchored at the settlement’s docks would now have to be under guard around the clock.
That night a meeting to consider countermeasures, attended only by Venetians, went late into the night.
The war council convened the next morning, April 23rd, at the Church of Saint Mary’s. The Greeks were represented by the Emperor, Phrantzes, and the main Byzantine ministers from Megadux Notaras on down. On the Venetian side were Minotto, Trevisan, Captains Diedo, Coco, and four other ship captains. With the exception of Minotto, they were all men of the sea and coolly saw the latest development as a problem to be dealt with, nothing more. Also present was Cardinal Isidore in his capacity as the Pope’s representative. The only Genoese who had been invited was Giustiniani, head of the ground forces.
The members of the council put forward a number of proposals. One of the Greeks suggested that they join forces with the Genoese: a joint assault on the Turks would surely prevail, he offered. Most of those present felt it highly unlikely, however, that the Genoese would forsake their neutrality in the course of one day and join their alliance. The situation called for swift measures, and so such a strategy was deemed inappropriate.
The second proposal was to send an army to Galata to destroy the cannons the Turks had positioned there, and then set fire to the Ottoman ships in the Golden Horn. This was dismissed by most of the assembled as unrealistic. Zaganos Pasha’s army was encamped in the hills above Galata. Simply to launch a credible attack on such a force would require far more men than the city’s defenders could spare.
The third proposal came from Captain Coco, a man who was said to know every single sea lane in the Black Sea. He insisted that their only option was to attack at night with a small number of ships drawn from the cream of their fleet: draw close to the Turkish boats and torch them. He even volunteered to lead this attack, which he acknowledged amounted to a suicide mission. There were no objections from the Byzantine side. Trevisan put forth that a mission calling for such secrecy and speed could indeed be carried out by Venetians and Venetians only, and all gave their assent. They agreed not to inform the Genoese about the attack, and set the time for the night of the following day, the 24th.
In the end, though, word somehow leaked out to the Genoese. The morning of the 24th, they pressed into the Venetian merchant center and made their case to Trevisan: they felt it was unjust to be made into pariahs in this fashion and asked to be allowed to take part. After their naval victory against the Turks, their self-confidence had soared to new heights. The Emperor had often said that if the two great seafaring states, the Venetians and the Genoese, were to join forces they would make a supremely formidable fighting force: he urged Trevisan to grant their request. Trevisan didn’t have the authority to go against the Emperor’s wishes. He decided to allow the Genoese to contribute a boat to the attack force.
That afternoon, however, the Genoese sailors complained that they wouldn’t be able to prepare an appropriate vessel by sundown. They insisted that the attack be postponed for four days, until the 28th. The Venetian side had no choice but to accept this. Coco was outraged, and insisted that at a time like this, when even a moment could mean the difference between life and death, that the Venetians should go it alone as originally planned. This too, was impossible, however, as the Genoese were not the type of people who would quietly allow the Venetians to set off without them.
And yet, the more people who knew about the secret plan, and the longer they postponed carrying it out, the greater the chance that their cover would be blown. And when word of the plan reached a Genoese living in the settlement who worked for the Sultan, that was precisely what happened.
At a little past midnight on April 28th, a group of ships secretly set out into the Golden Horn from a dock on the Constantinople side. A light breeze was blowing, and the moon was obscured by clouds. Leading the attack force, according to plan, were two large ships, one Venetian and one Genoese. Both ships had bales of cotton and wool on both sides to protect them from enemy cannon fire. Behind them were two Venetian battle galleys. Trevisan was aboard the galley to the right side. These four ships actually served to hide the three smaller galleys that accompanied them, sliding across the water with oars in perfect rhythm. Captain Coco was aboard one of these three ships, which would play the main role in the attack. The three light galleys (fuste) were accompanied by even smaller boats that were packed with pine resin, sulfur, oil, and other combustibles. Their only navigational guides in the dark were the white sheets stretched across the stern of each ship. The two large vessels in front proceeded slowly and quietly. The forty oarsmen of the two galleys immediately following them rowed in unison with such perfect control that hardly a wave was formed on the water’s surface.
Immediately after leaving port, they saw something like a flash of light from one of the towers inside Galata; they suspected it might be a signal to the Turkish forces, but the boats of the Turkish fleet inside the Golden Horn didn’t react at all to this possible signal, so the Italians decided to continue forward. Their plan was to sneak up on the enemy ships, toss their combustibles on board, ignite them, cut the enemy ships’ anchors, and then escape. If a battle broke out, the four large ships would fulfill their function.
When they came almost within reach of their target, the light galley under Coco’s command, propelled by 72 oarsmen, began to overtake the four ships in the lead, as though Coco was becoming impatient about the larger ships’ rate of progress. Once it had come to the head of the formation, it continued with unabated speed right towards the enemy.
Cannon fire suddenly erupted from the facing shore. Deafening blasts followed one another in quick succession. The third shot struck a direct hit on Coco’s ship, which was immediately engulfed in flames and quickly sank. The other two fuste were in no position now to set the enemy fleet on fire, and instead retreated into the protective shadow of the two large ships at the vanguard.
These were far from invulnerable. The two of them got hit multiple times, and although the fires they started struck fear into the hearts of the sailors who scrambled to put them out, in the end the ships were saved from being sunk by the protective bales along their sides. The galleys, on the other hand, hadn’t taken such precautions since they were too low to the water. The Turks’ barrage focused on Trevisan’s galley, almost as if they knew that none other than the Western fleet’s commander was aboard. Two of their shots finally scored direct hits, which sent the mast flying and tilted the boat violently to its left side. Water started to enter the hull. Trevisan ordered the crew to board the lifeboats. Within moments the crew, including Trevisan, was rescued by their companion vessels. Dawn began to break as a battle began between the Western ships and the Turkish fleet that had arrived to finish the rout. The battle lasted for over an hour, but ended in a stalemate with both sides returning to their respective ports.
Forty members of Coco’s crew were able to swim to shore, where they were seized by Ottoman troops. Mehmed ordered that they be taken to a spot where they could be butchered in clear view from the Constantinople city wall. In retaliation, the Christian forces took 260 Turkish prisoners who had been captured inside the city, lined them up along the wall, and beheaded every last one.
The night raid had been a grave failure. The Venetians had lost one of their galleys and one of their speedboats, in addition to almost ninety of their finest sailors. Coco was among those presumed dead at sea.
What darkened their mood more than anything, however, was the prospect that the Ottoman fleet would continue to occupy the Golden Horn. The only time that Constantinople had fallen, 250 years earlier, it had been at the hands of the army of the Fourth Crusade, which had taken control of the Golden Horn and successfully breached the wall from sea. It was fair to say that controlling the Golden Horn was the key to conquering the city.
This was not to say that complete control of the Golden Horn had already been ceded to the Turks. They would have a difficult time defeating the superior sailors of Genoa and Venice, regardless of their greater numbers. But a poisonous tension had arisen between the Venetians, some of whom insisted that the raid had been betrayed by the Genoese and many of whom quietly suspected as much, and the Genoese, who countered that the true cause of the failure was Coco’s reckless desire for fame.
The last day of April saw Mehmed do something that would banish the idle hopes of those who had been trying to tell themselves that the Turkish ships, though they had made it into the bay, would accomplish nothing more. Mehmed had the fleet inside the Golden Horn construct a floating pontoon that connected Constantinople and Pera. It was constructed out of over fifty pairs of empty barrels tied together. Above them were beams supporting thick, sturdy planks. The bridge was five hundred meters long, enough to span the narrow interior portion of the bay, and wide enough to fit five soldiers across. Platforms holding cannons were jutting out from the bridge at regular intervals.
Even to a non-expert such as Nicolo, the purpose of this floating bridge was clear. Not only would it speed up communication between the main encampment, on the one hand, and Zaganos Pasha’s army and the fleet at the Double Columns on the other, but, more importantly, it made it possible to fire upon the stretch of the city wall facing the Golden Horn, which only had one layer. Since the defenders had felt secure in their control of the Golden Horn until this point, they had only placed lookouts and nothing more along this wall. That would certainly have to change. Yet they were already short of men; the ground commanders racked their brains trying to figure out where those additional defenders would come from. The only silver lining was that the Turks had not yet figured out how to fire their cannons from the bridge with any lethal degree of accuracy, which somewhat lessened the urgency of the situation.
That said, the Venetians and Genoese, sea-faring people both, knew only too well that to have anything less than perfect control of the coastal waters was to be in a very compromised position. This eased some of the tension between them. The number of small boats carrying relief supplies from Pera to Constantinople under cover of night, and the number of Galata residents who volunteered to fight alongside the defenders, increased substantially. When Venetian ships docked at Galata’s ports to escape enemy cannon attack, the unpleasant awkwardness that had greeted them before was gone. The Venetians for their part stopped denouncing the Genoese. Though good fortune often brings people together, it must be said that misfortune can do the same.