When the city fell, Phrantzes, along with the Greek soldiers around him, was surrounded and captured by the advancing Ottoman army. He had been on his way back to the Emperor after having checked on the reserve forces as ordered. His unassuming personality, his unimposing physique, and the fact that he wasn’t wearing garments suitable to his station all led the Turkish soldiers to mistake him for a commoner. There was no way for them to guess that he was not only the Minister of Finance, but also one of the Emperor’s closest confidants.
He was thrown in with the soldiers, who were made to form two columns like the other captives. They were taken to the Ottoman encampment outside of the city. There they were split into groups, and Phrantzes spent the next month penned together with other Greeks like domesticated animals outside of the tent of the Turkish soldiers who had become their new masters.
On June 22nd, Mehmed entrusted the administration of his recently conquered city to a minister and returned to Adrianople. Phrantzes was thrown in with a long train of captives who were sent along with Mehmed as part of his caravan. The number of prisoners sent with him was so large that when the Sultan’s white horse at the head of the train had disappeared over the horizon, the people at the end of the caravan were still within the city walls.
During this period, Phrantzes’s foremost concern was the location of the Emperor’s remains. Word that the Emperor had heroically died in battle quickly spread among the prisoners and was doubted by no one, but not a single person could say with certainty where his body was. Somehow Phrantzes could not bring himself to believe that the head in Mehmed’s possession actually belonged to the Emperor, yet, chained as he was to the other prisoners, there was no way for him to go and see the head for himself. Phrantzes, however, could take comfort in the fact that the emperor whom he had served with such devotion, who had secretly hoped to die, could meet his end in a heroic manner befitting the last emperor of the Byzantine Empire.
The whereabouts of his wife and children, his second concern, were also difficult to ascertain. Yet since all of the captives had similar worries, an information-sharing network quickly fell into place and news was there to be had if one paid sufficient attention. Phrantzes soon learned that his wife had become the property of some Turk. After he arrived in Adrianople, he found out that both his son and daughter were among the young slaves whom the Sultan had handpicked to serve in his palace.
Phrantzes become a slave of the Sultan’s head groom. His first order of business was to find some way to buy his freedom back. Greeks in the still Greek-controlled Peloponnese as well as those in Turkish-controlled lands spared no effort to aid their enslaved brethren in Constantinople. After eighteenth months of servitude, Phrantzes was finally able to buy back his freedom with money borrowed from one of those free Greeks. Next he sought to free his wife and, with the help of a number of people familiar with Phrantzes’s long years of devoted service, was able to do so.
But the fate of his children, as he later learned, was a truly pitiful one. His daughter died soon after being placed in the Sultan’s harem. His son, only eighteen years old, was put to death after resisting the Sultan’s advances.
There was no longer any reason or need for Phrantzes and his wife to remain in the Ottoman-ruled land; they went to the Peloponnese to seek the protection of the Emperor’s younger brother Thomas Paleologos. Phrantzes served there in Thomas’s court until 1460, when Mehmed conquered that region as well and he and Thomas were forced to flee to the Venetian-owned island of Corfu. He continued to serve as a member of Thomas’s court-in-exile, traveling to all of the Italian principalities, but mainly Rome and Venice, as Thomas’s ambassador. In 1468, perhaps prompted by the death of his wife, he entered a monastery and spent the remaining years until his death in 1477 writing his Chronicle. This document, given Phrantzes’s privileged position, became the most important historical document of the last days of the Byzantine Empire.
Chief Minister Notaras, whom Phrantzes secretly resented as the source of so many of his beloved Emperor’s difficulties, suffered a different sort of drama.
When he was captured along with the rest of the ministers, his identity was obvious to all. Rumor had it that Notaras had come before the Sultan offering money and treasure; whether this was true or not, it is a fact that the Sultan showed leniency at first toward him and the other ministers; he even visited Notaras’s ailing wife. Thus the high Byzantine nobles began to nurse some hopes for a brighter future. But somebody seems to have whispered in the Sultan’s ear that Notaras had a young son of truly exceptional beauty, and it was only a matter of time before the Sultan sent a messenger asking for the son to be brought to him.
At this point, Notaras, a member of the imperial family, suddenly seemed to remember that he had noble Byzantine blood in his veins. He flatly refused the conqueror’s order. The Sultan’s response was swift: they were all beheaded. Notaras appealed to the soldiers who were to carry out the punishment to kill his young son first so that the boy would not have to witness his own father’s death. After the boy and his cousin of the same age were killed, Notaras presented his own neck. Mehmed saw this turn of events as an opportunity to liquidate all of the remaining Byzantine ministers and did so. In actuality, Mehmed had intended from the very beginning to do away with the entire Byzantine ruling class: it had just been a matter of when.
Notaras’s wife, who had become the highest ranking lady of the Empire after the Empress-Mother’s death, fell ill and died as she was being sent to Adrianople. The only remaining survivor in Notaras’s family was his daughter, who had been sent before the siege to Venice with most of the family’s wealth.
Cardinal Isidore, so deeply hated by the anti-unificationists that he and Notaras could barely exchange words at the war council meetings, was also captured by the Ottoman soldiers. A bandage covering a wound to his head partially hid his face, and he had exchanged his resplendent armor for a beggar’s rags; thus the Ottoman soldiers who captured him had no idea that he was the second-most wanted man in Constantinople, the envoy of the Pope. Hearsay had it that the hapless beggar with whom Isidore had exchanged clothes was immediately beheaded upon capture.
Isidore’s luck continued to hold out. The Turkish soldiers who owned him and his fellow captives were in a hurry to get some money, so they took him and their other slaves to the Genoese settlement in Pera for a quick sale. He was thus spared the ordeal of the forced march to Adrianople. The Genoese man who bought this group of slaves and immediately set them free apparently had no idea that the Isidore was among them. Isidore spent the next eight days in Galata in hiding, moving from house to house, but things became even more dangerous for him when the Sultan demanded that Pera surrender and it too came under Turkish control.
Disguised as a low-class Greek, the cardinal boarded a Turkish boat bound for Asia Minor. After a very arduous journey from Asia Minor, he finally arrived at the Genoese colony of Fochea. Some of the residents there recognized him, to his great distress: although the region was nominally under Genoese control, it was surrounded by Ottoman territory. He decided he would have to flee yet again. He hired a small boat, and succeeded in reaching the Genoese-controlled island of Chios. Knowing that he could still be recognized at any time, he sought refuge aboard a Venetian ship that was about to set sail for Crete. Only upon reaching Crete was he able, for the first time, to feel at ease. Crete was far from the Ottoman lands and it was a colony of Venice, the only country that had made its anti-Ottoman position crystal clear.
He spent approximately six months on Crete. Here he wrote two letters to the Pope, one to his good friend Bessarion, one to the Doge of Venice, and one addressed to all Catholic believers. In these letters he described the circumstances surrounding Constantinople’s conquest in great detail.
He is believed to have returned to Rome by way of Venice at the end of November of that year. He worked tirelessly to bring about an anti-Turkish crusade but died in 1463, ten years after the fall of Constantinople, without ever seeing that wish become a reality.
Unlike Notaras, who resisted unification with the Catholic Church only passively, Georgios had fought it tooth and nail. He too was taken captive when the city fell. All of the Ottoman troops knew that the churches and monasteries possessed great wealth, and Georgios’s own monastery certainly didn’t escape thorough pillaging. His monks followed his orders not to resist, and quietly handed themselves over to their captors.
Along the way to Adrianople, Georgios tried to encourage and give comfort to his wretched fellow prisoners. Despite his threadbare clothing, his noble manner and majestic physique commanded respect. Perhaps for this reason the Turkish soldiers granted his request to be unbound so that he could minister last rites to those who could carry on no longer.
Because the soldiers didn’t know exactly what position Georgios occupied, it took a long time for Mehmed to find him, despite the fact that he had actively tried all possible means to do so. When Mehmed finally found him, serving as a slave in the home of a wealthy Turk, he summoned him immediately.
Mehmed’s campaign for Constantinople had not merely been some rash, youthful bid to accomplish something his father had failed to do. His ambition was to expand his empire to encompass the Byzantine Empire in all of its former glory—in other words, to occupy the entire eastern Mediterranean. This would not be possible unless the crossroads of that region, namely Constantinople, were his, and that, more than anything, was why he had so desperately wanted “that city.”
Mehmed had decided to make Constantinople, not Adrianople, the capital of the empire he was to build. The administration of such a large metropolis could not be left only to Turks who had no experience of such things—he needed Greeks as well, Greeks well versed in the ways of the eastern Mediterranean.
Yet, for the Sultan to be able to give them this kind of authority, he had to be sure that the Greeks would understand themselves to be his subjects. As long as they were willing to submit to Turkish rule, they would be rewarded with the recognition of their Greek Orthodox faith and the guarantee of their safety and freedom. Mehmed was certain that the one person who could help him make this mutual understanding a reality was Georgios.
When Georgios appeared before him, the Sultan asked him—indeed, it was less an order than a plea—to become the Patriarch of Constantinople. This, in effect, meant that Georgios would become the spiritual leader of all Greeks. Given the circumstances, Georgios was understandably reluctant, but in the end he decided to accept this very difficult duty. He and Mehmed the Second reached an agreement that Constantinople’s Greeks would enjoy the same rights as Greeks in territories previously taken by the Turks: as long as they accepted Turkish sovereignty and periodically allowed young boys to be drafted into the Janissaries, they would be granted religious autonomy and their freedom and personal safety would be guaranteed.
Georgios served as the Patriarch from January 1454 to the spring of 1456. During this time one church after another was converted into a mosque and even the patriarch’s own church was moved several times. In the midst of all this, he worked tirelessly for the benefit of those Greeks who had been forcibly relocated to Constantinople, and he wrote many appeals and letters of counsel to those who continued to hold their Orthodox beliefs even while living under Turkish rule. Mehmed, who greatly respected the depth of Georgios’s learning, visited him often. An explanation of Christianity’s fundamental principles that Georgios had prepared for the Sultan was soon translated into Turkish.
After resigning as Patriarch, Georgios entered a monastery at Mount Athos, where he lived from the summer of 1456 to 1457. But unable to refuse Mehmed’s persistent requests, he served as Patriarch a second time from 1460 to 1464. In 1465 he was finally able to return to the monastic life he had been longing for. He died in 1472 a simple monk. By that time Constantinople’s many church steeples had been replaced with minarets.
He also left a historical document, “A Letter to Believers about the Siege of Constantinople.”
It is probably safe to say that the next four hundred years (until the Greeks gained their independence from Turkish rule in the nineteenth century) were proof enough that Georgios’s insistence on purity and unity of belief, even if it meant the destruction of their country, was far more effective in maintaining the resilience of Greek Orthodox believers than Isidore’s policy of religious compromise for the purpose of saving the country. For those of us who oppose fanaticism, it is rather depressing that it should not be reason, but fanaticism which excludes it, that effectively maintains strong faith, but it is alas true that such examples are legion.
The Greek Orthodox believers differed from other fanatical Christians such as the early believers who gladly martyred themselves in the jaws of lions, or the Japanese Christians who died rather than become apostates, in that they were willing to compromise in those things which were not essential to their belief while refusing to compromise at all in those things that were. It was this particular mix that allowed them successfully to maintain their faith through four centuries of occupation. Georgios, for his part, seemed to understand from the beginning that, although they were Muslims, the Turkish people were tolerant of other religious beliefs.
Georgios’s pupil Ubertino, who revered his teacher but who still, in the end, behaved like a Westerner, was also one of those taken prisoner. He had been defending Pegae Gate; he knew that he would be saved if he could make it to the Venetian boats in the Golden Horn and proceeded in that direction, but was surrounded and captured by a Turkish contingent on the way. The soldiers who captured him also desired quick cash, and so he was sold to a Florentine merchant in Galata. The merchant agreed to let him go on the understanding that Ubertino’s parents would reimburse the man upon Ubertino’s return to Italy.
Now a free man again, Ubertino boarded a ship bound for Italy which, unfortunately, was attacked by pirates en route. He was taken prisoner once again, and would either be sold or spend the rest of his days as a galley slave. He was saved, however, when the pirates’ ship was attacked by the Knights of Saint John and he was taken by the Knights to their base on the island of Rhodes. After spending a short time on Rhodes, he returned to Venice by way of Crete, made a very brief stop in his hometown of Brescia, and then proceeded to Rome where he had been summoned to serve as Cardinal Capranica’s secretary.
He seems to have spent about three years in Rome. During this time he composed a lengthy epic with the title of “Constantinopolis.” As a scholar of antiquity, he felt compelled to leave a record of his powerful impressions of the empire, and the civilization, that he had seen destroyed before his eyes. After his service in Rome, he returned to his home town and lived a quiet life as a teacher of Greek philosophy, translator, and poet. He is believed to have died in 1470.
Although he had no interest in ancient civilizations whatsoever, and no special interest in the question of religious unification, Tedaldi shared with the other “eyewitnesses” a desire to tell others of his experience of Constantinople’s historically momentous fall.
The Florentine merchant, who was paradoxically saved by the fact that he had forgotten that he couldn’t swim, boarded a boat leaving the Venetian naval base at Negroponte six days after the city’s collapse. While the Venetians consulted with one another over their next course of action, Tedaldi passed his days telling his tale to a Frenchman who happened to be staying in Negroponte.
This Frenchman quickly translated Tedaldi’s story into French and sent it to the Archbishop of Avignon. This document quickly spread around France, where the Crusading spirit was strong, and became a rallying point for the pro-Crusade faction across Europe, earning the endorsement even of Pope Nicolo V. Tedaldi became better known in France than in his native Italy. Fifteen years later, in 1468, Tedaldi’s chronicle, which had been concise but rather crude in literary terms, was reworked into a proper history and came to be considered the pre-eminent historical work in France concerning the fall of Constantinople.
Although we know that he arrived in Venice on June 4th and departed for Florence on July 5th of 1453, no historical records remain of what became of him afterwards. In all likelihood he spent the rest of his days in the city of his birth, perhaps chuckling to himself every now and then at the fact that he was now a celebrity in France.
The Venetian and Cretan convoy that had left Constantinople at full speed couldn’t feel completely safe from possible Ottoman pursuers until they had docked at Negroponte on the morning of the sixth day after their departure. Although the nearest base had been Tenedos, it was not very well protected, and Diedo had chosen instead to make for the safe port at Negroponte. He wasn’t aware that Admiral Longo’s fifteen-ship fleet was docked in Tenedos.
Although Negroponte was probably equal in importance to the other Venetian bases at Corfu, Modone, and Crete in terms of maintaining Venice’s naval superiority in the eastern Mediterranean, it had the distinction of being the first line of defense against the Ottomans. But the fleet there was resting quietly in the harbor as though it had only to be given an order to come to Constantinople’s rescue.
The news, of course, was that Constantinople had fallen. Admiral Loredan, supreme commander of the Negroponte fleet, heard the story in detail from Diedo and the other escaped survivors. He immediately dispatched a swift messenger ship to Venice to relay the news.
After several days, the escapees from the siege continued their journeys back to their respective homes, leaving only the most severely wounded in Negroponte. The Cretan ships continued south to Crete, while the two Venetian vessels capable of withstanding the voyage began their three-week journey back to Venice. Diedo was once again in command, and Nicolo was sailing aboard his ship. Tedaldi was aboard the second vessel.
The two Venetian ships spent a day at the port of Modone at the southern tip of the Peloponnese peninsula, where they encountered a ship carrying pilgrims from Brandenburg to Palestine. These people would bring to the Holy Land the painful news that the last stronghold of Christendom in a sea of Muslims, the Byzantine Empire, had fallen.
Loredan’s messenger boat arrived in Venice on June 29th. Western Europe thus didn’t learn the momentous news of Constantinople’s fall until a full month after the fact. The Venetian government immediately dispatched swift couriers to the Vatican, the King of Naples, Genoa, Florence, the King of France, the Holy Roman Emperor in Germany, the King of Hungary, and others to inform them of this outcome. For Genoa and Venice, which stood to lose their Black Sea trade, and for the Pope, who had just recently decided to send Constantinople more financial assistance, the news came like a bolt out of the blue. Nobody had believed that such a strongly fortified city could collapse so quickly.
Diedo, Nicolo, Tedaldi, and the other eyewitnesses arrived in Venice five days after Loredan’s messenger boat. Diedo was immediately summoned before the ruling council to deliver a detailed report. Soon after that he had to deliver the same report to the Senate and answer questions from the floor. At this stage all they knew in terms of the human costs were the number of those killed in battle. No doubt Diedo had already prepared his report during the three-week journey from Negroponte to Venice: such reports were invariably expected of commanding officers involved in significant events, even merchant captains. Only when the Venetian government had received Diedo’s report was it in a position to take concrete measures in response.
Venice decided, characteristically, to combine a hard and a soft strategy. The hard strategy was to send a messenger to Negroponte ordering Admiral Loredan to place the entire fleet under his command on emergency alert. They also ordered him, along with Longo’s fleet of fifteen ships, to patrol the Aegean Sea. Venice would thus show its determination to fight to the bitter end to maintain control of the Aegean in the event that the Ottoman fleet sailed south to claim it. The ports at Corfu, Modone, and Crete were also placed on alert. Although the Venetian shipyards were in the midst of constructing seventeen new galley warships, the Senate felt this to be insufficient and ordered an additional fifty to be built. 52,500 ducats were set aside for this expenditure.
That said, a commercial nation such as Venice survived on the basis of trade. They couldn’t afford to be too unyielding. The special envoy Marcello, whom they had sent to travel with Admiral Loredan to negotiate with the Byzantines, was now ordered to try to do the same with the Ottomans. He was ordered to proceed to Adrianople in all haste, where he was authorized to give the Sultan a goodwill gift of 1,200 ducats. He was also instructed to tell the Sultan that those Venetians who had participated in the defense of Constantinople had done so as individuals; Venice, as a state, had no intention of violating its treaties with the Ottoman Empire, and its government deeply regretted the actions of those individuals.
Marcello was told that Venice’s most pressing need at the moment was to restore trade relations with the Ottoman Empire to their previous, favorable conditions. If that meant keeping silent about the enormous losses Venice suffered because of the siege—the numerous dead, of course, as well as the loss of the warehouses, the merchant center, the cargo of their merchant vessels captured in the Golden Horn, altogether worth an estimated 400,000 ducats—then so be it.
Thus the Venetian government effectively swept the sacrifices of its citizens under the rug for the greater good of the nation—but at the same time, they recompensed those citizens for their sacrifices in a way that made it clear to them that they hadn’t been forgotten.
Five days after deciding to send the Sultan the goodwill gift, the Senate told Ambassador Minotto’s son that he could board the Alimonda, then setting sail for Constantinople, to search for his father. If Ambassador Minotto were one of those taken captive, the Senate promised to pay for his liberation. This suggests that, until July 17th, the Venetian government did not know that he had died.
The next day, the Senate ordered payments to the children of Captain Coco, who had died in the night raid upon the Turkish fleet. These included a pension for each of his sons and a dowry for his daughter.
The record of the Senate meeting for August 28th shows that Ambassador Minotto’s daughter was awarded a dowry of 1,000 ducats, to be reduced to a stipend of 300 ducats in the event that she didn’t marry and entered a nunnery instead. Minotto’s wife and son, whom he had sent away on a Venetian ship right before the city fell, were each awarded yearly pensions of 25 ducats.
Finally, two months after the city fell, the Venetian government learned that Minotto had been beheaded along with one of his sons and seven of the leading citizens of the Venetian settlement. Mehmed had not forgiven the Venetian settlement for flying its flag and defying him.
The families of the seven other victims did not receive lifetime pensions, however. Although Minotto was a member of the nobility, he was not from a wealthy family, whereas the other seven were. The nobile who guided Venetian society were given a great many rights, but they also had responsibilities: the first of these was to fight for Venice with no thought of the sacrifices involved.
Given this ethos of responsibility, it goes without saying that the Senate did not forget the families of the common sailors who died in Constantinople but were neither wealthy nor noble. If one reads the Senate records from the time that word of the defeat reached Venice to the end of that year, one sees that they are littered with notices of pensions being paid to the families of those who were confirmed dead, and ransom payments to release those who had been taken prisoner. The Senate record for December 10th contains the first mention of Admiral Gabriele Trevisan since the city’s collapse: the record for that day shows that the Senate ruled to give Trevisan’s family 350 ducats to help them pay for his ransom and freedom.
There is no record of exactly when Trevisan returned to Venice, but in the naval records of the following autumn, his name is listed among those admirals on the front lines against the Ottomans. The given name Gabriele was very common in the Trevisan family, however, so it is possible that the entry referred to somebody else.
There are no records of what happened to Nicolo after he returned to Venice. In all likelihood, he resumed the practice of medicine. All Venetian vessels on long voyages, including merchant vessels, were required to have a physician on board, and the name Nicolo Barbaro appears quite a few times in the registers of high-ranking officers aboard these ships. The name Nicolo Barbaro was also quite common, however, so it isn’t unthinkable that these records indicated somebody else, especially since the registers do not specify in what capacity that person served aboard ship. Nicolo did, however, write a Journal of the Siege of Constantinople.
This work records everything from the circumstances leading up to the siege to most of the major events that occurred during the siege itself, as well as Nicolo’s own personal observations. It is believed that he assembled the book from his daily notes as well as from factual information that only became available once he had returned to Venice.
The Journal was the first document that allowed posterity to know precisely what happened during the siege from day to day. Although other eyewitness reports did describe most of the major events, they did not specify what day exactly these events occurred, making it impossible for those who weren’t there, even contemporaries of the event, to piece together the exact chronology.
Another thing that makes Nicolo’s Journal indispensable for historians, and far superior to other eyewitness reports, is its sheer accuracy. If one wants to know, for example, the Turks’ troop strength, one will find the most reliable figures in the journals of this Venetian doctor who wasn’t even part of the force defending the landward wall.
Yet this chronicle, the most accurate and cool-headed account of the siege to be produced, was virtually neglected; it received far less attention than Cardinal Isidore’s letters, which terrified the Vatican, or Ubertino’s extended epic, which was touted among Roman intellectuals, or Tedaldi’s narrative, which became a tool in France for fanning the spirit of would-be crusaders. Until it was recognized as an important historical document and placed in Venice’s Marciana Library in 1837, it lay more or less untouched in the Barbaro family archives. When Gibbon capped off his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in 1783 with an account of Constantinople’s fall, he didn’t even know of the existence of Barbaro’s Journal and had to make do with Greek sources.
Diedo’s report to the Venetian Senate no longer exists. However, it stands to reason that Nicolo must have played a significant role in its composition; the two went to Galata together after Constantinople had fallen, and spent three weeks together on the way to Negroponte, during which time no doubt Diedo was beginning to draft his report. It is reasonable to assume, at the least, that the objectivity and accuracy of Nicolo’s observations were well known to Venice’s leadership. Although there are maybe two or three facts that Nicolo misremembers, and perhaps a few flashes here and there of anti-Genoese sentiment, his Journal of the Siege of Constantinople remains the single most reliable account of the last days of the Byzantine Empire. Given the unremitting ambiguity of the Genoese’s actions during the siege, Nicolo’s indignation is well within the tolerable limits for a record of this sort—indeed, it rather adds to the liveliness of the work.
Giustiniani had fought bravely at the front; despite his youth, and the fact that he was a mercenary fighting for gain, he had been the only Genoese to win the honest respect of both the Venetians and the Greeks, who, in general, harbored very mixed feelings about the Genoese. Whatever respect he had earned from them, however, was erased by his cowardice in the battle’s last hours.
He received treatment to his wounds after being taken back to his own ship. His vessel escaped the Golden Horn along with the others and, like them, remained outside the boom until nightfall for any remaining stragglers. During that time he couldn’t have failed to notice the strange atmosphere that descended upon the city when the wall was breached, or the other Western ships, still trapped inside the Golden Horn, that were attacked and plundered by the Turkish fleet.
Although his mercenaries continued to revere him despite what he had done, the sailors aboard the ship, also Genoese, couldn’t hide their perplexity at his shameful conduct. This appears to have wounded the once-proud commander even more than the Turkish arrows. Three days after setting out from Constantinople, Giustiniani died aboard ship.
For another Genoese, Magistrate Lomellino of Galata, the days after the fall were made hellish by a combination of anxiety and powerlessness.
On May 29th, as soon as word arrived that the Ottoman troops had breached the city wall, Lomellino sent a messenger to the Sultan to plead for recognition of Galata’s neutrality. Mehmed agreed to meet with the messenger, but said nothing. Two days later, the Sultan summoned a representative from Galata and ordered the settlement to surrender. For the sake of appearances the representative sealed a peace treaty with Zaganos Pasha stipulating that the settlement would be governed by a council of elders chosen by the citizens. But since any and all actions were subject to Turkish approval, this was tantamount to surrender. The following day Lomellino went himself to sign the treaty. The day after that, a Turkish regiment arrived to tear down the settlement’s walls while the people of the settlement simply looked on in silence. For two hundred years the Genoese had enjoyed a privileged place among the Western traders in Constantinople; in an afternoon the wall that symbolized their glory was demolished without a trace, save for one tower at the highest point in the settlement.
Although Venice was said to have lost 400,000 ducats because of the city’s fall, the Genoese settlement lost at least 500,000 ducats; if one includes the loss of real estate, the number begins to exceed a million ducats. The Venetians had moved the bulk of their eastern Mediterranean trade to Alexandria to avoid sparking off a trade war with Genoa; Genoa on the other hand had everything invested in its Black Sea and Constantinople trade. When the Byzantine Empire collapsed, it dealt a fatal blow to Genoa’s economy.
Genoa’s troubles didn’t end there: Mehmed conquered Caffa in 1475 and the Ottoman empire took control of the island of Chios in 1566, effectively shutting Genoese traders out of the eastern Mediterranean. After a fashion, then, it was the young Turkish autocrat’s extraordinary lust for conquest that drove the excellent seafarers of Genoa to turn their attention first to the western Mediterranean and then to the Atlantic Ocean.
Magistrate Lomellino, who was an honest if indecisive man, experienced his own personal misfortunes as well. The nephew to whom he wished to leave his business was taken prisoner by the Ottomans and converted to Islam. Indeed, to continue doing business in the city such a conversion was a practical necessity, and quite a few Genoese merchants went through with it. The steadfast Christians who didn’t convert, many of whom were Lomellino’s friends and the very soul of the Genoese settlement, were enslaved, and Lomellino lost quite a few night’s sleep trying to figure out ways to raise the money to liberate them as soon as possible. This of course made it even more difficult to face his own nephew, who through his apostasy had proven himself a sore disappointment and unworthy heir. Lomellino, who was far past sixty, now had absolutely nothing keeping him in Galata.
When word arrived that his replacement, who had been supposed to arrive even before the siege began, had made it as far as Chios, Lomellino left Galata. After briefing his successor in Chios in late September, he boarded a ship returning home to Genoa. There are no accurate records of what became of him afterwards. However, a very long letter that he wrote while at Chios to his younger brother still survives. In it, he describes the siege as it was witnessed by the Galatians, the difficult position that the Genoese settlers had been thrown into, and the unstinting manner in which the settlers had done everything reasonably possible to aid Constantinople. However, he also reached the conclusion that, in the end, he, the other Galatians, and the countries of Western Europe had all underestimated Mehmed the Second. And now they were paying the price for it.
It took only two years to show that the sacrifice made by the Greek Orthodox Serbian soldiers who fought alongside the Turks had been made in vain. As thanks for the 1,500 horsemen that Serbia sent in response to his request, the Sultan conquered Serbia in 1455. Mihajlovic, who had been serving in the southern city of Novo Brodo, was taken prisoner by the advancing Ottoman forces and, along with his two younger brothers, was sent to serve in a Turkish regiment in Asia Minor. Seeing no other way to survive, he converted to Islam and joined the Janissaries. Still only twenty-five years old, he was no doubt seen as militarily useful. He remained in the Janissaries for eight years. During this period the Ottoman army, carried along by the momentum of its victory against Constantinople, carried out Mehmed’s expansionist policies with hardly any credible resistance. Mihajlovic spent these days fighting as part of the Ottoman army’s advancing front line.
In 1463, while fighting in Bosnia, he and his regiment found themselves surrounded by the superior forces of the Hungarian King Matthias Corvinus, who was the only highly regarded Christian ground commander in all the fighting against the Turks. Seeing this as the perfect opportunity to regain his freedom, Mihajlovic immediately surrendered himself to the Hungarian army. That year he also converted back to Christianity.
He continued his life as a soldier but, unable to return to his subjugated homeland, he joined the Hungarian army at their urging. He took part in various battles alongside the Hungarians, in Hungary, Bosnia, Moravia, and Poland. He appears to have written his Memoirs while living in Poland, in the period from 1490 to 1498, by which time the once youthful Serbian cavalryman was already over sixty years old. As a nod to his peculiar life history, the work is also known as the Memoirs of a Janissary.
It often happens that some turning point, some momentous event, completely changes the way in which a person is perceived. Mehmed the Second, who had been written off as immature and wildly ambitious, as one who would be lucky even to maintain the territory secured by his father, became the hero of a generation. Giacomo de Languschi, who served as Marcello’s deputy during the eight-month-long negotiations to repair Venice’s relations with the young victor, recorded the following impressions:
“Sultan Mehmed, twenty-two years old, has a well-proportioned physique and is somewhat taller than average. Raised as a warrior, his manner is coercive rather than cordial. He rarely smiles. He is judicious and free from any blinding prejudice. Once he decides upon a course of action, he follows it through, and does so with great boldness.
“He aspires to the glory of Alexander the Great; every day he has Ciriaco d’Ancona and another Italian read to him from Roman history. He enjoys the histories of Herodotus, Livius, Curtius, etc., the lives of the popes, critical biographies of the emperors, and tales of the kings of France and the Lombard kings. He speaks Turkish, Arabic, Greek, and Slavic, and is quite knowledgeable about Italian geography. He possesses a color map of Europe which indicates all the national boundaries as well as the region where Aeneas lived, where the Pope resides, and where the emperors have their palaces.
“He has an extraordinary desire to rule and shows the greatest possible interest in geography and the military arts. In his negotiations with us he is very skilled at asking leading questions.
“A very formidable character, one whom we Christians must now be prepared to face.”
This “formidable” young man was not only extremely gifted, but also had a standing army of over 100,000 men ready to do his bidding at all times. There wasn’t a single polity in Europe at the time that could assemble an army of that size.
The power of his great cannon also didn’t fail to catch the attention of Europe’s ruling lords. Of course Europe had cannons of its own; one hundred and fifty years earlier, Venice had begun attaching them to its warships. But Mehmed was the first to recognize, and exploit, such a cannon’s full military potential. There could be no more effective demonstration of that potential than blasting through the three layers of Constantinople’s wall, which was the strongest of the time. In reality of course, the cannons did not accomplish this—the defenders were simply too few to defend anything other than the stockades and the outer wall. The inner wall, the strongest of the three, was left more or less unscathed. At the time, however, there were very few people informed enough to know that. The popular image was one of cannons demolishing all three of Constantinople’s walls, and that image seeped into every corner of Europe. The following year, the Venetian Senate took the lead by announcing plans for large-scale production of massive cannons, and soon the other countries of Europe, not wishing to fall behind, announced similar intentions, all of which pushed the technology forward. Needless to say, techniques of wall construction also underwent a revolution around the same time.
City walls throughout Europe, be it in the west or the east, as well as those found in the Middle East, can roughly be separated into two categories: those built before the widespread use of large-sized cannons and those built after. The difference is noticeable at a glance. Those built before are high and relatively thin, while those built after are much thicker and not as high: they seem rooted in the ground, with the lower half of the wall built at a slight slant into the ground. The slant was thought to lessen, even if only somewhat, the impact of projectiles fired directly at the wall. The first such walls were fashioned by the two parties that were the first to throw themselves into the Turks’ line of fire—the Knights of Saint John on Rhodes, and the Republic of Venice.
The new weapons also completely undercut the importance of the heavily armored knights who had been the professional warriors of the medieval period. Practically anybody, once taught the basics, could fire a cannon. Skills for which one had to have some innate ability and that required years of practice to perfect, such as riding a horse or properly thrusting a spear in order to pierce armor—such skills were no longer necessary. Knights, once the glory of medieval battlefields, now had to step aside in favor of groups of amateurs, artillerymen and foot soldiers thrown into massive formations effective solely because of their sheer size.
A difference in weaponry was not the only thing dividing the medieval and early modern periods. Though Halil Pasha and Mehmed had been at odds over whether to take Constantinople or leave it be, history bore out the validity of Mehmed’s choice for the Ottoman Empire’s future.
Taking the capital of the Byzantine Empire gave the Turks a claim to all of the lands once ruled by that empire. It gave the conquerors a sense of justification. In strategic terms, Constantinople was both a crossroads and a pivot point—by controlling it the Turks were able to consolidate their territories in Asia and the Balkans, and thus make their empire a continuous whole.
Three days after the city’s fall, Halil Pasha, who had been the former Sultan’s right hand and a son of one of the most famous Turkish families, was put in prison. Forced to join the procession of Greek captives to Adrianople, he spent another twenty days in prison there until he was executed by beheading. His crime: “secretly aiding the Byzantines.”
Mehmed didn’t waste any time making use of this new city to project his power on both land and sea. Constantinople’s churches were steadily converted into mosques; construction began on the Topkapi palace; not only Turks, but Greeks and Jews were forced to move to the city to repopulate it; and preparations began for the official transfer of the capital of the Ottoman Empire from Adrianople to Constantinople. Meanwhile, the military wasn’t given even a moment’s rest to savor their victory.
Two years after Constantinople’s conquest, the Turks took Serbia. The following year, 1456, they conquered Bosnia. Poland and Hungary became the front line against the Turkish advance.
In 1460 the Peloponnese peninsula, which had just barely held out under the leadership of the Emperor’s younger brothers, also fell to the Turks. One of the brothers, Thomas Paleologos, fled to Rome, to the Pope.
Trebizond, which also bore traces of Byzantine imperial rule, fell in 1461. The Turks now ruled the entire southern coast of the Black Sea.
In 1463 the Ottoman Empire, which had been exclusively a land power, extended out into the sea. Their goal was the island of Lesbos in the Aegean. A massive army sailed in from the coast of Asia Minor, and Lesbos, a Genoese holding for over two hundred years, fell immediately into Ottoman hands.
In 1470 the Turks, moving further south down the Aegean, tried to attack the Venetian naval base in Negroponte. This attack instigated a war between Venice and the Ottoman Empire that lasted more than ten years.
In 1473 the Ottoman army reached toward Persia and enjoyed a triumphant victory over the Persian army. The Venetians, who had hoped that the Turks would be weakened by having to fight on two fronts simultaneously, were stymied.
In 1475, the Turks sent a large army across the Black Sea to conquer Caffa. With this victory, the entire Black Sea was firmly under Ottoman rule, and Genoese traders received a final blow from which they would never recover. The Turks, on the other hand, now had inroads into the Crimea.
In 1479, Mehmed sent his troops to the southwest and eventually succeeded in subduing the Albanians, who were highly skilled at mountain guerilla warfare. All of the Balkans, with the exception of a base held by the Venetians on the coast of Greece, was now under Turkish control.
The Ottoman Empire attacked Italy for the first time in 1480, landing at the southern city of Otranto. The Pope, imagining Saint Peter’s Square overrun with Muslims, must have surely passed some sleepless nights during this period. The Sultan’s sudden death the following year and the subsequent withdrawal of the Ottoman forces prevented his nightmares from becoming a reality.
Mehmed the Second died on May 3, 1481, immediately after leading an expeditionary army across the Bosphorus into Asia. He was forty-nine years old. It is said that he was planning to attack Syria, Mecca, and Egypt. Europe celebrated the death of this “enemy of Christendom” by lighting torches and setting off fireworks. The churches were thronged with believers offering their thanks up to God.
“Mehmed the Conqueror” as he came to be called did not necessarily see all of his military adventures meet with success. The siege of Belgrade was a failure and the island of Rhodes also held out against the Turks. Despite that, during the reigns of his grandson Selim and Selim’s successor Suleiman the Great, not only did Belgrade and Rhodes fall, but so did Syria and Egypt, all pieces falling into place in the master plan that Mehmed had originally drawn. Just as importantly, the Ottoman Empire didn’t collapse immediately after “the Conqueror’s” death. Mehmed the Second, who lived approximately twenty years longer than Alexander the Great, didn’t merely conquer new territories: he had the time to bring them firmly under his control and establish the social institutions that would truly absorb them into the empire. The Ottoman Empire would reach its apex in the mid-sixteenth century under the reign of Suleiman, and it would continue to exist until the beginning of the twentieth century. His enterprise would probably never have been possible had Constantinople never been conquered.
Tursun served as Mehmed’s page until 1460, when he was appointed as a secretary in the Ottoman cabinet, or divan, serving first as the finance minister for the Ottoman Empire’s Asian territories, then performing the same function for the empire’s European territories, after which he seems to have entered a quiet retirement. The exact date of his death is uncertain, but it appears to have been around 1499. Mehmed had died eighteen years earlier and the Ottoman Empire was still in the reign of Mehmed’s son, Beyazid.
Now adorned with the honorific title Bey, the former palace page left behind a work of history, most likely begun during the years of his retirement, entitled A History of Sultan Mehmed the Conqueror, which was completed in 1487. It is one of the oldest historical works that the Turks possess.
For Europeans, especially for those Western Europeans who felt themselves to be the descendants of ancient Rome, the fall of Constantinople was a shock beyond words. Of course the Italian maritime states and the Vatican were aware of how weak the Byzantine Empire had become in its last days, as were Hungary and the other nations of Eastern Europe. Even people in countries less intimately tied to the Byzantine Empire knew that it had been undergoing a slow decline for centuries. The testimony of returning Crusaders that the Byzantine Empire was wholly on the defensive in the face of the Muslim onslaught had had centuries to seep through to the far corners of Europe. Furthermore, the sight of Greek scholars forsaking their homeland to live in the West and Byzantine Emperors appealing to Western rulers for military aid was one to which Europeans had already been well accustomed.
And yet, for the Byzantine Empire to be completely wiped off the face of the earth took them by surprise, and filled them with inexplicable gloom.
Even after the fall of the Roman Empire, there had been no shortage of rulers in Europe who had appropriated the title “Emperor” for themselves. Yet these men were either Franks, who had been known to the Romans as “Gauls,” or they hailed from the even more “barbaric” hinterlands the Romans had called “Germania.” Even if they called themselves the “Holy Roman Emperor” or wore the black embroidered double-headed eagle, they did not possess the same kind of power possessed by the Roman emperors of antiquity. Western Europeans knew this. They knew it, and never hesitated to take any opportunity to resist these so-called emperors. For these people, the true heir and continuation of the empire established by the Romans was the Byzantine Empire, even if it did happen to be ruled by Greeks. Furthermore, the Byzantine Emperor shared with them the Christian faith that the Roman emperors obviously had not. Thus, as far as Europeans were concerned, only the emperors of the Eastern Roman Empire were fully worthy of the title of emperor in every way.
And now, all of that was gone. After one of the imperial princesses of the Paleologos family married the Grand Duke of Moscow, Russia came to call itself the “Third Rome.” If the Orthodox Church had moved its Patriarchy to Moscow, this would have made more sense. Western Europeans, who had denied such recognition to French and German emperors, were not inclined to accept such a claim from a Russian simply because he had married a Byzantine princess and decided to wear a white, double-headed eagle as his symbol. With the collapse of the Byzantine Empire, Europeans felt for the first time that they had been cut off from the womb of their civilization, ancient Rome.
This sense of bereavement may explain why they were so much more receptive to emotional accounts and poems of Constantinople’s fall than to the accurate, objective reportage of somebody like Nicolo Barbaro. Rather than concern themselves with the sweeping revolution the event had brought about, they no doubt chose to lament what they had lost. The white, double-headed eagle had been cleaved in half by the crescent sword.
The last emperor of the Roman Empire, riding his white steed, his crimson cloak flowing in the wind, was now somewhere on the other side of the horizon.