1453

“In the name of Allah the most Beneficent, the most Merciful: this letter is from Muhammad, the slave of Allah, and His Apostle, to Heraclius, the ruler of Byzantines. Peace be upon the followers of guidance. I invite you to surrender to Allah. Embrace Islam and Allah will bestow on you a double reward. But if you reject this invitation you will be misguiding your people.”

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It was quickly realized by the Muslim general Maslama that the walls of the city were invulnerable to siege machines; this time there was to be a total blockade. The seriousness of his intentions was underlined by the fact that his army brought wheat seed with them. In the autumn of 717 they plowed the ground and planted a food supply outside the walls for harvesting the following spring. Then they settled down to wait. A foray by the Greek fire ships had some success but failed to break the stranglehold. Everything had been carefully planned to crush the infidels. What actually

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by the standards of the Byzantines. He persuaded Maslama that he could get the city to surrender if the Arabs both destroyed their own food stores and gave the defenders some grain. Once done, Leo sat tight behind the walls and refused to parley. The tricked army was then subjected to a winter of freak severity for which they were ill prepared. Snow lay on the ground for a hundred days; the camels and horses started to perish in the cold. As they died, the increasingly desperate soldiers had no option but to eat them. The Greek chroniclers, not known for their objectivity,

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mixture of technological innovation, skillful diplomacy, individual brilliance, massive fortifications – and sheer luck: themes that were to be endlessly repeated in the centuries ahead. Not surprisingly under the circumstances, the Byzantines had their own explanation: “God and the all-holy Virgin, the Mother of God, protect the City and the Christian Empire, and … those who call upon God in truth are not entirely forsaken, even if we are chastised for a short time on account of our sins.”

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The failure of Islam to take the city in 717 had far-reaching consequences. The collapse of Constantinople would have opened the way for a Muslim expansion into Europe that might have reshaped the whole future of the West; it remains one of the great “What ifs” of history. It blunted the first powerful onslaught of Islamic jihad that reached its high watermark fifteen years later at the other end of the Mediterranean when a Muslim force was defeated on the banks of the Loire, a mere 150 miles south of Paris.

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Constantinople had defined the front line in a long-running struggle between two closely related versions of the truth that was to be pursued for hundreds of years. In the interim, Muslim thinkers were forced to recognize a practical change in the relationship between the House of Islam and the House of War; the final conquest of the non-Muslim world would have to be postponed, perhaps until the end of the world. Some jurists conceived of a third state, the House of Truce, to express postponement of final victory. The age of jihad seemed to be

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So huge was the architecture of the conflict between Islam and Byzantium that no Muslim banners would be unfurled again before the city walls for another 650 years – a span of time greater than that separating us from 1453 – but prophecy decreed that they would return.

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Barbarians from benighted Europe gazed open-mouthed at “the city of the world’s desire.” The reaction of Fulcher of Chartres who came in the eleventh century is typical of many that ring across the ages: “O what a splendid city, how stately, how fair, how many monasteries therein, how many palaces raised by sheer labour in its broadways and streets, how many works of art, marvellous to behold: it would be wearisome to tell of the abundance of all good things; of gold and silver, garments of manifold fashion and such sacred relics.

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as effectively. The world of Byzantine Christianity was also strangely fatalistic. Everything was ordained by God, and misfortune on any scale, from the loss of a purse to a major siege, was considered to be the result of personal or collective sin. The emperor was appointed at God’s bidding, but if he were overthrown in a palace coup – hacked to death by plotters or stabbed in his bath or strangled or dragged along behind horses or just blinded and sent into exile – (for imperial fortunes were notoriously unstable), this was God’s will too and betokened some hidden sin. And because fortune was foretold, the Byzantines were superstitiously obsessed with prophecy. It was common for insecure emperors to open and read the Bible at random to get clues to their fate; divination was a major preoccupation, often railed against by the clergy, but too deeply ingrained to be expunged from the Greek soul. It took some bizarre forms. An Arab visitor in the ninth century witnessed a curious use of horses to report on the progress of a distant army campaign: “they are introduced into the church where bridles have been suspended. If the horse takes the bridle in its mouth, the people say: ‘we have gained a victory in the land of Islam.’ [Sometimes] the horse approaches, smells at the bridle, comes back and does not draw near any more to the bridle.” In the latter case, the people presumably departed in gloomy expectation of defeat.

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neighbors. Booty was a raison d’être, cities their enemy. Their use of the composite bow and the mobile tactics of horse warfare gave them a military superiority over settled peoples that the Arab historian Ibn Khaldun saw as the key process of history. “Sedentary people have become used to laziness and ease,” he wrote. “They find full assurance of safety in the walls that surround them, and the fortifications that protect them. The Bedouins have no gates and walls. They always carry weapons. They watch carefully all sides of the road. They take hurried naps only … when they are in the saddle. They pay attention to every faint barking and noise. Fortitude has become a character quality of theirs, and courage their nature.” It was a theme that would soon re-echo in both the Christian and the Islamic worlds.

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Where the Byzantine emperors, like all the ruling houses of Europe, went to exhaustive lengths to secure dynastic marriages and legitimate succession through approved bloodlines, the Ottomans hardly bothered. A sultan’s father would naturally be the previous sultan, but his mother might be a concubine or a slave, possibly not a born Muslim, and from one of a dozen subject peoples. This genetic inclusiveness was to provide the Ottomans with extraordinary resources.

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Of all Ottoman innovations none was perhaps more significant than the creation of a regular army. The enthusiastic bands of gazi warriors were too undisciplined to fulfill the now growing ambitions of the Ottoman sultans; besieging well-defended cities required patience, methodology, and a particular set of craft skills. Toward the end of the fourteenth century Sultan Murat I formed a new military force, comprised of slaves captured from the Balkan states. A levy of Christian youths was taken at regular intervals, converted to Islam, and taught Turkish. Removed from their families, these new recruits owed their loyalty only to the sultan. They were his private force: the “slaves of the Gate.” They were organized into infantry units, the Yeni Cheri or Janissaries, and the cavalry, which together comprised the first professional paid army in Europe since the time of the Romans. It was to play a critical role in the development of the Ottoman state. This was a custom drawn straight out of the Ottomans’ own history: the Turks themselves had been enrolled as military slaves at the frontiers of the Islamic world. It had been their passport to advancement. But to Christians watching the process from afar, it evoked

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Identity was primarily religious: the Ottoman sultans came to describe themselves in increasingly ornate terms as Lords of Islam, their empire as the Refuge of the Faith or the Defended Lands, their people as either Muslims or Ottomans. The Ottoman makeup was a unique assemblage of different elements and peoples: Turkish tribalism, Sunni Islam, Persian court practices, Byzantine administration, taxation, and ceremonial, and a high-flown court language that combined Turkish structure with Arabic and Persian vocabulary. It had an identity all of its own.

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for “Ottoman order.” The French traveler Bertrandon de la Brocquière observed in the 1430s: They are diligent, willingly rise early, and live on little … they are indifferent as to where they sleep, and usually lie on the ground … their horses are good, cost little in food, gallop well and for a long time … their obedience to their superiors is boundless … when the signal is given, those who are to lead march quietly off, followed by the others with the same silence … ten thousand Turks on such an occasion will make less noise than 100 men in the Christian armies … I must own that in my various experiences I have always found the Turks to be frank and loyal, and when it was necessary to show courage, they have never failed to do so.

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February 1451 Mehmet settled into the royal palace at Edirne. His first act was startling and decisive. When he died, Murat had left behind an infant son by another wife – Little Ahmet. A few days later, while the mother was paying an official visit to the throne room to express her grief at his father’s death, Mehmet dispatched a minion, Ali Bey, to the women’s quarters to drown Little Ahmet in the bath. The next day he executed Ali Bey for the crime, then married the distraught mother off to one of his nobles. It was an act of ruthless intelligence that carried the struggle for power in the Ottoman court to its logical conclusion: only one could rule, and to avoid the fractious possibilities of civil war, only one could survive – to the Ottomans this seemed preferable to the endless struggles that sapped the lifeblood of Byzantium. Instantly Mehmet had clarified the practice of Ottoman succession, which he was later to codify as a law of fratricide: “whichever of my sons inherits the sultan’s throne, it behooves him to kill his brother in the interest of the world order. Most of the jurists have approved this procedure. Let action be taken accordingly.” Henceforth execution was to stalk the succession as a dreadful certainty. It would reach its apogee with the sultanate of Mehmet III in 1595, when nineteen coffins containing the bodies of his brothers were carried out of the palace. Despite this, the fratricide law failed to prevent civil wars: with it came preemptive acts of rebellion by frightened sons, a consequence that would return to haunt Mehmet. In Constantinople the circumstances surrounding Little Ahmet’s death should have provided a

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Back in Constantinople ambassadors were hastily dispatched to Edirne to present their respects to the young sultan and seek reassurance. They were pleasantly surprised by the reception. Mehmet exuded sweet reasonableness. He is said to have sworn by the Prophet, the Koran, “and by the angels and archangels that he would devote himself to peace with the City and the Emperor Constantine for his whole life.” He even granted the Byzantines an annual sum from the tax revenues of some Greek towns in the lower Struma valley that legally belonged to Prince Orhan, the Ottoman pretender.

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It was a classic ploy. Throughout its history, the exploitation of dynastic rivalry among adjacent states had been a cornerstone of Byzantine diplomacy. It had frequently offset periods of military weakness and earned Byzantium an unenviable and unequaled reputation for cunning. The Ottomans had had a prior taste of these tactics under Constantine’s father, Manuel II, when the dynasty had almost collapsed in a civil war shrewdly promulgated by the emperor, an episode of which Mehmet was keenly aware. Constantine evidently saw Orhan as a golden card, perhaps the only card left, and decided to play it. Under the circumstances it was a serious blunder – and almost inexplicable, given the knowledge of seasoned diplomats such as Sphrantzes about the politics of the Ottoman court. It may simply have been dictated by the state of the imperial finances rather than any realistic expectation of stirring up insurrection, but it confirmed for the war party at the Ottoman court all the reasons why Constantinople must be taken. It was a proposal almost calculated to destroy Halil’s attempts at peacekeeping – and to endanger the vizier’s

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supported the union; only a fraction of the clergy and people did – they believed that union had been forced on them by the treacherous Franks and that their immortal souls had been imperiled for base and materialistic motives. The people were profoundly antipapist: they were accustomed to equate the pope with the antichrist, “the wolf, the destroyer”; “Rum Papa,” the Roman Pope, was a popular choice of name for city dogs. The citizens formed a volatile proletariat: impoverished, superstitious, easily swayed to riot and disorder.

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help or Latin union; let us be rid of the worship of the unleavened.” Despite Gennadios, it seems that a begrudging decision was taken by the frightened populace to accept the Council of Florence, at least temporarily. (With true sophistry, the Byzantines had a time-honored escape clause for such an action: the Doctrine of Economy, which permitted the temporary acceptance of an unorthodox theological position to ensure survival – it was an approach to spiritual matters that had repeatedly infuriated the Catholic Church.) Cardinal Isidore for his part judged that the moment was ripe to enforce

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walls, and gestured the size of the stone he had in mind. Orban’s reply was emphatic: “If you want, I can cast a cannon of bronze with the capacity of the stone you want. I have examined the walls of the city in great detail. I can shatter to dust not only these walls with the stones from my gun but the very walls of Babylon itself. The work required to make the gun, I can fully carry out, but,” he added, keen to limit his guarantee, “I don’t know how to fire it and I cannot guarantee to do so.” Mehmet ordered him to cast the cannon, and declared that he would see to its firing afterward.

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shrunken city. One eyewitness was astonished to see a ball strike a church wall and fall apart like dust. According to others, the ground was shaken for two miles around and even the galleys tied up safely in the harbors within the Golden Horn felt the explosions transmitted through their stout wooden hulls. The sound of gunfire was heard in Asia, five miles away across the Bosphorus. At the same time the trebuchets, with their more looping arc of fire, hurled rocks onto the roofs of houses behind the walls and onto parts of the imperial palace. The psychological effects of artillery bombardment on the defenders were initially even more severe than its material consequences. The noise and vibration of the massed guns, the clouds of smoke, the shattering impact of stone on stone dismayed seasoned defenders. To the civilian population it was a glimpse of the coming apocalypse and a retribution for sin. It sounded, according to one Ottoman chronicler, “like the awful resurrection blast.” People ran out of their houses beating their chests, crossing themselves and shouting “Kyrie Eleison! What is going to happen now?” Women fainted in the streets. The churches were thronged with people “voicing petitions and prayers, wailing and exclaiming: ‘Lord, Lord! We moved far away from You. All that fell upon us and Your holy City was accomplished through righteous and true judgements for our sins.’ By the flickering light of their most sacred icons their lips moved in the same unceasing prayer: ‘Do not betray us in the end to Your enemies; do not destroy Your worthy people; and do not take away Your

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In the first wave, a Janissary called Murat led the assault, slashing fiercely at Giustiniani, who was only saved from death by a Greek jumping down from the wall and cutting off his assailant’s legs with an axe. A second wave was led by one Omar Bey, the standard bearer of the European army – and was met by a substantial contingent of Greeks commanded by their officer Rhangabes. In the slashing, hacking confusion, the two leaders squared up to each other in single combat in front of their men. Omar “bared his sword, he attacked him and with fury did they slash at each other. Rhangabes stepped on a rock, grasped his swords with two hands, struck him on the shoulder, and cut him into two, for he had great strength in his arms.” Infuriated at the death of their commander, the Ottoman troops encircled Rhangabes and cut him down. Like a scene from the Iliad, the two sides surged forward to try to seize the body. The Greeks were desperate to gain control of the corpse and piled out of the gates, “but they were unable and suffered many losses.” The Ottomans cut the mutilated body to pieces and drove the Greek soldiers back into the city. For three hours the battle raged on, but the defenders successfully held the line. As the fighting died down, the cannon started to open up again to prevent the breach being filled, and the Ottomans launched a second

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away and burned the bodies daily, but the ditches were still choked with rotting corpses. The slaughter risked contaminating water supplies: “the blood remained in the rivers and putrefied in the streams, giving off a great stench.” Within the city the people turned increasingly to the churches and the miracle-working power of their icons, preoccupied by sin and the theological explanation for events. “Thus one could see throughout the entire city all the people and the women who came in miraculous procession to the churches of God with tears, praising and giving thanks to God and to the most pure Mother of God.” In the Ottoman camp the hours of the day were marked out by the call to prayer; dervishes went among the troops enjoining the faithful to hold fast and remember the prophecies of the Hadith: “in the jihad against Constantinople, one third of Muslims will allow themselves to be defeated, which Allah cannot forgive; one third will be killed in battle, making them wondrous martyrs; and one third will be victorious.”

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The following day, probably May 26, a deputation of priests and ministers went to Constantine to express their forebodings. The mysterious light was duly described, and they tried to persuade the emperor to seek a safer place from which to mount effective resistance to Mehmet: “Emperor: weigh all of what has been said about this city. God granted the light in the time of Emperor Justinian for the preservation of the great holy church and this city. But in this night, it departed for heaven. This signifies that God’s grace and generosity have gone from us: God wishes to hand over our city to the enemy … we beseech you: Leave the city so that we will not all perish!” From a mixture of emotion and sheer exhaustion, Constantine collapsed to the ground in a dead faint and remained unconscious for a long time. When he came around, his response was unchanged: to leave the city would be to invite immortal ridicule on his name. He would remain and die with his subjects if need be. He furthermore ordered them not to spread words of discomfort among the people: “do not allow them to fall into despair and weaken their effort in battle.” Others responded differently.

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earlier crisis meeting after the naval defeat on April 21. Once again the old Turkish vizier, Halil Pasha, rose to speak. He was cautious, fearful of the consequences of the young sultan’s rashness, and the risk of provoking Christendom into a united response. He had witnessed the vicissitudes of fortune under Mehmet’s father and knew the dangers of an uneasy army. He spoke with passion for peace: “your power, which is already very great, you can increase more by peace than by war. For the outcome of war is uncertain – more often you see adversity rather than prosperity accompany it.” He raised the specter of an advancing Hungarian army and an Italian fleet and urged Mehmet to demand heavy penalties from the Greeks and lift the siege. Again Zaganos Pasha, the Greek convert, argued for war, pointing out the huge discrepancy in forces, the daily

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There is a fable about Mehmet’s methods of conquest told by the Serbian chronicler Michael the Janissary. In it, the sultan summoned his nobles and ordered “a great rug to be brought and to be spread before them, and in the centre he had an apple placed, and he gave them the following riddle, saying: ‘Can any of you take up that apple without stepping on the rug?’ And they reckoned among themselves, thinking about how that could be, and none of them could get the trick until (Mehmet) himself, having stepped up to the rug took the rug in both hands and rolled it before him, proceeding behind it; and so he got the apple and put the rug back down as it had been before.”

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following in the footsteps of the companions of the Prophet killed at the first Arab siege of Constantinople. Their names were passed from mouth to mouth: Hazret Hafiz, Ebu Seybet ul-Ensari, Hamd ul-Ensari, and above all Ayyub, whom the Turks called Eyüp. The holy men reminded their listeners, in hushed tones, that to them fell the honor of fulfilling the word of the Prophet himself: The Prophet said to his disciples: “Have you heard of a city with land on one side

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those who are ready to sacrifice their lives for the love of God is extremely small. On the other hand, if they glimpse the possibility of winning booty they will run towards certain death.” For them too, there was encouragement in the Koran: “God has promised you rich booty, and has given you this with all promptness. He has stayed your enemies’ hands, so that He may make your victory a sign to true believers and guide you along a straight path.”

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candles and reverberated with the rising and falling notes of the liturgy. Constantine took part in the service. He occupied the imperial chair at the right side of the altar and partook of the sacraments with great fervor, and “fell to the ground, and begged God’s loving kindness and forgiveness for their transgressions.” Then he took leave of the clergy and the people, bowed in all directions – and left the church. “Immediately,” according to the fervent Nestor-Iskander, “all clerics and people present cried out; the women and children wailed and moaned; their voices, I believe, reached to heaven.” All the commanders returned to their posts. Some of the civilian population remained in the church to take part in an all-night vigil. Others went to hide. People let themselves down into the echoing darkness of the great underground cisterns, to float in small boats among the columns. Above ground, Justinian still rode on his bronze horse, pointing defiantly to the east.

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There is no certainty of victory in war, even when the equipment and numerical strength that cause victory exist. Victory and superiority in war come from luck and chance. Ibn Khaldun, fourteenth-century Arab historian

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Tell me please how and when the end of this world will be? And how will men know that the end is close, at the doors? By what signs will the end be indicated? And whither will pass this city, the New Jerusalem? What will happen to the holy temples standing here, to the venerated icons, the relics of the Saints, and the books? Please inform me. Epiphanios, tenth-century Orthodox monk, to St. Andrew the Fool for Christ

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Muslim faith was heard in the city” and in a moment of piety Mehmet coined a new name for the city: Islambol – a pun on its Turkish name, meaning “full of Islam” – that somehow failed to strike an echo in Turkish ears. Miraculously Sheik Akshemsettin also rapidly “rediscovered” the tomb of Ayyub, the Prophet’s standard-bearer who had died at the first Arab siege in 669 and whose death had been such a powerful motivator in the holy war for the city.

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reached Crete with the sailors whose heroic defense of the towers had prompted their release by Mehmet. The news appalled the island. “Nothing worse than this has happened, nor will happen,” wrote a monk. Meanwhile the Venetian galleys reached the island of Negroponte off the coast of Greece and reduced the population to panic – it was only with difficulty that the bailey there managed to prevent a whole-scale evacuation of the island. He wrote posthaste to the Venetian Senate. As ships crisscrossed the Aegean exchanging news, the word spread with gathering speed to the islands and the seaports of the eastern sea, to Cyprus, Rhodes, Corfu, Chios, Monemvasia, Modon, Lepanto. Like a giant boulder dropped into the basin of the Mediterranean, a tidal wave of panic rippled outward all the way to the Gates of Gibraltar – and far beyond. It reached the mainland of Europe at Venice on the morning of Friday, June 29, 1453. The Senate was in session. When a fast cutter from Lepanto tied up at the wooden landing stage on the Bacino, people were leaning from windows and balconies avid for news of the city, their families, and their commercial interests. When they learned that Constantinople had fallen, “a great and excessive crying broke out, weeping, groaning … everyone beating their chests with their fists, tearing at their heads and faces, for the death of a father or a son or a brother, or for the loss of their property.” The Senate heard the news in stunned silence; voting was suspended. A flurry of letters was dispatched by flying courier across Italy to tell the news of “the horrible and deplorable fall of the cities of Constantinople and Pera [Galata].” It reached Bologna on July 4, Genoa on July 6, Rome on July 8, and Naples shortly after. Many at first refused to believe reports that the invincible city could have fallen; when they did, there was open mourning in the streets. Terror amplified the wildest rumors. It was reported that the whole population over the age of six had been slaughtered, that 40,000 people had been blinded by the Turks, that all the churches had been destroyed and the sultan was now gathering a huge force for an immediate invasion of Italy. Word of mouth emphasized the bestiality of the Turks, the ferocity of their attack on Christendom – themes that would ring loudly in Europe for hundreds of years. If there is any moment at which it is possible to recognize a modern sensibility in a medieval event, it is here in the account of reactions to the news of the fall of Constantinople. Like the assassination of Kennedy or 9/11 it is clear that people throughout Europe could remember exactly where they were when they first heard the news. “On the day when the Turks took Constantinople the sun was darkened,” declared a Georgian chronicler. “What is this execrable news which is borne to us concerning Constantinople?,” wrote Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini to the pope. “My hand trembles, even as I write; my soul is horrified.” Frederick…

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peremptorily scolded the Mamluk sultan in Cairo, “to keep the pilgrimage routes open for the Muslims; we have the duty of providing gazis.” At the same time, he declared himself to be “Sovereign of two seas and two lands,” heir to the empire of the Caesars with ambitions to a world domination that would be both imperial and religious: “there must … be only one empire, one faith and one sovereignty in the world.”

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Even the Venetians, with their spies and their endless flow of diplomatic information back to the Senate, were largely unaware of the military capabilities available to Mehmet. “Our Senators would not believe that the Turks could bring a fleet against Constantinople,” remarked Marco Barbaro on the tardiness of the Venetian rescue effort. Nor had they understood the power of the guns or the determination and resourcefulness of Mehmet himself. What the capture of the city underlined was the extent to which the balance of power had already shifted in the Mediterranean – and clarified the threat to a host of Christian interests and nations

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cardinals tried to breathe life back into the project of religious Crusades that continued well into the sixteenth century. Pope Pius II, for whom the whole Christian culture was at stake, set the tone when he convened a congress at Mantua in 1459 to unify the fractious nations of Christendom. In a ringing speech that lasted two hours he outlined the situation in the bleakest terms: We ourselves allowed Constantinople, the capital of the east, to be conquered by the Turks. And while we sit at home in ease and idleness, the arms of these barbarians are advancing to the Danube and the Sava. In the Eastern imperial city they have massacred the successor of Constantine along with his people, desecrated the temples of the Lord, sullied the noble edifice of Justinian with the hideous cult of Muhammad; they have destroyed the images of the mother of God and other saints, overturned the altars, cast the relics of the martyrs to the swine, killed the priests, dishonored women and young girls, even the virgins dedicated to the Lord, slaughtered the nobles of the city at the sultan’s banquet, carried off the image of our crucified Saviour to their camp with scorn and mockery amid cries of “That is the God of the Christians!” and befouled it with mud and spittle. All this happened beneath our very eyes, but we lie in a deep sleep … Mehmet will never lay down arms except in victory or total defeat. Every victory will be for him a stepping-stone to another, until, after subjecting all the princes of the West, he has destroyed the Gospel of Christ and imposed the law of his false prophet upon the whole world.

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Despite numerous attempts, such impassioned words failed to provoke practical action, just as the project to save Constantinople itself had failed. The powers of Europe were too jealous, too disunited – and in some senses too secular – ever to combine in the name of Christendom again: it was even rumored that the Venetians had been complicit in the landing at Otranto. However it did reinvigorate deep European fears about Islam. It would be another two hundred years before the advance of the Ottomans into Europe was definitely halted, in 1683, at the gates of Vienna; in the interval Christianity and Islam would wage a long-running war, both hot and cold, that would linger long in the racial memory and that formed a long link in the chain of events between the two faiths. The fall of Constantinople had awakened in Islam and Europe deep memories of the Crusades. The Ottoman peril was seen as the continuation of the perceived assault of Islam on the Christian world; the word Turk replaced the word Saracen as the generic term for a Muslim – and with it came all the connotations of a cruel and implacable opponent. Both sides saw themselves engaged in a struggle for survival against a foe intent on destroying the world. It was the prototype of global ideological conflict. The Ottomans kept the spirit of jihad alive, now linked to their sense

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Islam was rejuvenated. The legend of the Red Apple had enormous currency; after Rome it attached successively to Budapest, then Vienna. Beyond these literal destinations, it was the symbol of messianic belief in the final victory of the Faith. Within Europe, the image of the Turk became synonymous with all that was faithless and cruel. By 1536 the word was in use in English to mean, in the words of the Oxford English Dictionary, “…

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powerful, and better organized Ottoman Empire in the two hundred years after Constantinople, yet the image of its opponent, conceived largely in religious terms at a time when the idea of Christendom itself was dying, was highly partial. The inside and the outside of the Ottoman world presented two different faces, and nowhere was this clearer than in Constantinople. Sad-ud-din might declare that after the capture of Istanbul “the churches which were within the city were emptied of their vile idols, and cleansed from their filthy and idolatrous impurities” – but the reality was rather different. The city that Mehmet rebuilt after the fall hardly conformed to the dread image of Islam that Christendom supposed. The sultan regarded himself not only as a Muslim ruler but as the heir to the Roman Empire and set about reconstructing a multicultural capital in which all citizens would have certain rights. He forcibly resettled both Greek Christians and Turkish Muslims back into the city, guaranteed the safety of the Genoese enclave at Galata, and forbade any Turks to live there. The monk Gennadios, who had so fiercely resisted attempts at union, was rescued from slavery in Edirne and restored to the capital as patriarch of the Orthodox community with the formula: “Be Patriarch, with good fortune, and be assured of our friendship, keeping all the privileges that the Patriarchs before you enjoyed.” The Christians were to live in their own neighborhoods and to retain some of their churches, though under certain restrictions: they had to wear distinctive dress and were forbidden from bearing arms – within the context of the times it was a policy of remarkable tolerance. At the other end of the Mediterranean, the final reconquest of Spain by the Catholic kings in 1492 resulted in the forced conversion or expulsion of all the Muslims and Jews. The Spanish Jews themselves were encouraged to migrate to the Ottoman Empire – “the refuge of the world” – where, within the overall experience of Jewish exile, their reception was generally positive. “Here in the land of the Turks we have nothing to complain of,” wrote one rabbi to his brethren in Europe. “We possess great fortunes, much gold and silver are in our hands. We are not oppressed with heavy

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the palace and into the presence of the sultan, he was so dazzled by the ceremonial that “the sight whereof did make me almost to think that I was in another world.” Visitors had been emitting exactly the same gasps of astonishment since Constantine the Great founded the second Rome and the second Jerusalem in the fourth century. “It seems to me,” wrote the Frenchman Pierre Gilles in the sixteenth century, “that while other cities are mortal, this one will remain as long as there are men on earth.”

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and west. He was forty-nine years old and in poor health. Time and self-indulgence had taken their toll. According to an unflattering contemporary report, he was fat and fleshy, with “a short, thick neck, a sallow complexion, rather high shoulders, and a loud voice.” Mehmet, who collected titles like campaign medals – “The Thunderbolt of War,” “The Lord of Power and Victory on Land and Sea,” “Emperor of the Romans and of the Terrestrial Globe,” “The World Conqueror” – could at times hardly walk. He was affected by gout and a deforming morbid corpulence, and shut himself away from human gaze in the Topkapi Palace. The man whom the West called “the Blood Drinker,” “the Second Nero,” had taken on the appearance of a grotesque. The French diplomat Philippe de Commynes declared that “men who have seen him have told me that a monstrous swelling formed on his legs; at the approach of summer it grew as large as the body of a man and could not be opened; and then it subsided.” Behind the palace walls Mehmet indulged in the untypical pursuits of a tyrant: gardening, handicrafts, and the commissioning of obscene frescoes from the painter Gentile Bellini, recently imported from Venice. Bellini’s famous last portrait, framed in a golden arch and surmounted with imperial crowns, hints at some unappeased essence in the man: the World Conqueror remained to the last moody, superstitious, and haunted.

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surrounded in mystery. The likeliest possibility is that Mehmet was also poisoned, by his Persian doctor. Despite numerous Venetian assassination attempts over the years, the finger of suspicion points most strongly at his son, Bayezit. Mehmet’s law of fratricide had perhaps tempted the prince to make a preemptive – and successful – strike for the throne. Father and son were not close: the pious Bayezit detested Mehmet’s unorthodox religious views – an Italian court gossip quotes Bayezit as saying “his father was domineering and did not believe in the Prophet Muhammad.” Thirty years later Bayezit would in turn be poisoned by his son, Selim “the Grim”; “there are no ties of kinship between princes” goes the Arab saying. In Italy the news of Mehmet’s death was greeted with particular joy. Cannon fired and bells rang; in Rome there were fireworks and services of thanksgiving. The messenger who brought the news to Venice declared, “the great eagle is dead.” Even the Mamluk sultan in Cairo breathed a sigh of relief.

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Sphrantzes and his wife. They ended their days in monasteries on Corfu, where Sphrantzes wrote a short, painful chronicle of the events of his life. It starts: “I am George Sphrantzes the pitiful First Lord of the Imperial Wardrobe, presently known by my monastic name Gregory. I wrote the following account of the events that occurred during my wretched life. It would have been fine for me not to have been born or to have perished in childhood. Since this did not happen, let it be known that I was born on Tuesday, August 30, 1401.” In laconic, strangulated tones Sphrantzes recorded the twin tragedies – personal and national – of the Ottoman advance. Both his children were taken into the seraglio; his son was executed there in 1453. Of September 1455 he wrote: “my beautiful daughter Thamar died of an infectious disease in the Sultan’s seraglio. Alas for me, her wretched father! She was fourteen years and five months.” He lived on until 1477, long enough to see the almost complete extinction of Greek freedom under the Turkish occupation. His testament ends with a reaffirmation of the Orthodox position on the filioque – the issue that had caused so much trouble during the siege: “I confess with certainty that the Holy Ghost does not issue from the Father and the Son, as the Italians claim,

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