Church bells rang out in celebration throughout Constantinople. The new sultan, Mehmed II, was only nineteen years old, and when the emperor sent ambassadors to congratulate him on his accession, the sultan swore by the Prophet and the Koran that he would devote himself to peace with the empire for as long as he lived. Western powers nervous after the defeat of the Hungarian Crusade eagerly persuaded themselves to believe him. The young sultan, however, was a mass of contradictions. A poet and a scholar fluent in several languages, he was also an unstable tyrant capable of bestial cruelty. A brilliant organizer and strategist, he was so superstitious that he wouldn’t attack without the blessing of an astrologer. Despite this hesitancy, however, there was a touch of Machiavellian decisiveness about him. On becoming sultan, he had strangled his infant half brother to avoid a potential threat, distracting the child’s mother by inviting her to dinner. When the poor woman returned home and found her infant dead, she was given no time to grieve; instead, she was immediately married off to one of Mehmed’s officers. In the sultan’s mind such brutality was the only way to prevent a civil war, and he would later famously explain to his sons that fratricide was in the best interests of “world order.” This example of the new sultan’s character passed unheeded by the West. Europe and Byzantium were studiously looking the other way, happy to believe that peace between Islam and the empire was possible. They were soon to be disillusioned.
Mehmed II only managed to restrain himself for a matter of months before deciding to break his oath. Sending his engineers to the narrowest point of the Bosporus, where Asia is separated from Europe by only seven hundred yards, he crossed the thin sliver of water and set about demolishing the Byzantine town he found occupying the site. There on the spot where two thousand years before the Persian king Xerxes had crossed with his massive army to meet the doomed Spartan king Leonidas, Mehmed built a fortress. His grandfather had built a similar castle on the Asian side to command the straits, and now the two structures would effectively cut off Constantinople from the Black Sea. It was a blatant act of war, and the sultan didn’t bother to disguise his intentions. When Constantine sent emissaries to remind Mehmed that he was breaking his oath and to implore him to at least spare the neighboring villages, Mehmed had the ambassadors executed.
As the walls of the new fortress rose ever higher, a young Hungarian named Urban entered Constantinople and offered his services to the emperor. A specialist in the design and firing of cannons, he offered to start producing guns for the Byzantines. Constantine XI was delighted. He’d seen the deadly new weapons firsthand at the Hexamilion and knew the terrifying power of these deafening monstrosities that could shatter stone and level walls. But there was simply no money to employ the young man. Somehow a stipend was scraped together to keep Urban in the city, but even that was soon exhausted, and the increasingly destitute Hungarian left to offer his services to the Turks.
Mehmed was only too happy to welcome Urban, and after showering him with gifts, he asked the Hungarian if his cannons could bring down a city wall. Urban knew full well what wall the sultan was referring to, and since he had spent long hours surveying Constantinople’s famous defenses, he promised to make a cannon that would demolish the very gates of Babylon. Setting to work immediately, he soon produced a bronze monster that could fire a six-hundred-pound stone ball, and the delighted sultan had it mounted in his new fortress, announcing that any ship wishing to pass would have to stop and pay a toll. The Venetians protested that this would completely cut off trade on the Bosporus, but the sultan was in deadly earnest. When a Venetian ship tried to run the straits, Mehmed had it blasted out of the water. Dragging the shell-shocked crew from the waves, he had them executed, and then impaled their captain, mounting the corpse on the bank as a public warning.
The sultan was pleased with his new weapon, but he wanted a bigger one and ordered Urban to build a cannon more than twice as large. The Hungarian went back to his foundry and cast a twenty-seven-foot-long behemoth that could hurl a fifteen-hundred-pound granite ball more than a mile. This, Mehmed knew, was the key to a quick knockout blow to Constantinople that would allow him to conquer the city before the West would have a chance to organize a relief Crusade. The only problem now was transporting the great gun the 140 miles from the foundry in Adrianople to the walls of Constantinople. Carpenters and stonemasons were sent scurrying ahead, leveling hills and building bridges, while a team of sixty oxen and two hundred men pulled the cannon across the Thracian countryside at the lumbering pace of 2.5 miles per day. Mehmed himself set out with his army on March 23, 1453. Constantinople’s doom was now at hand.
Constantine XI had done what he could to prepare—clearing out moats, repairing walls, and laying in provisions. He’d seen what the Turks did to conquered cities and understood that there was little chance of survival. One last hope remained: His brother John VIII had promised to join the churches, but an official service celebrating the union had never occurred. Now the pope sent a cardinal promising aid if the decree was formally read in the Hagia Sophia, and the emperor didn’t hesitate. In a poorly attended service held in the great church, the officiating priest declared that the Orthodox and the Catholic churches were officially joined. The heavens, he proclaimed, were rejoicing.
The mood in the city was far from jubilant, but with certain annihilation approaching, there were no riots or public outcries. Two hundred archers had come with the cardinal, and there was the faint hope that perhaps more would arrive after the union was made official. Most of the population simply avoided the ceremony altogether and refused to enter any church “contaminated” by the Latin rite. They wouldn’t add to the gloom by rioting, but they wouldn’t abandon their traditions, either. That Easter, the Hagia Sophia sat strangely quiet and empty as the population drifted away to find churches that still maintained the Greek rite. Five days later, on April 6, the Turks arrived.
The Republic of Venice promised to send a navy to repel the Turks, but no ships were seen on the horizon, and even the most optimistic began to realize that Venetian aid was all words and no action. The appeal to the West had been in vain, and now an Ottoman army that seemed as numerous as the stars was at hand. Looking bitterly down on that vast sea of their enemies and knowing that the Latin Mass was being proclaimed in their beloved Orthodox churches, the Byzantines could ruefully reflect that they had paid the price of union without reaping its reward. The Venetians in the city all gallantly vowed to stay and help, but the gesture was spoiled when a short time later seven galleys carrying hundreds of desperately needed men fled the city under the cover of night. The only bright spot was the arrival of the brilliant siege expert Giovanni Giustiniani from Genoa with a private army of seven hundred highly trained soldiers. He had come to gallantly defend the city his namesake, Justinian, had once ruled, but his grand gesture couldn’t dispel a terrible sense of foreboding. Added to Constantine’s meager force, the Genovese brought the number of defenders to just under seven thousand men. These had to be spread over twelve and a half miles of land walls and defend the city from some eighty thousand Ottoman troops. Tension and worry hung thickly over the city, but there was no time to brood. Mehmed rode up to the gates as soon as he arrived and demanded an instant surrender. Receiving no reply, he opened fire on April 6.
The great gun roared, spitting flame, smoke, and a stone ball that made the thousand-year-old Theodosian wall shudder. For ten centuries, those walls had thrown back endless arrays of would-be conquerors, but the age of brick and mortar had passed, and the ancient defenses were subjected to a bombardment unprecedented in the history of siege warfare. The main cannon needed time to cool between each firing and could only be discharged seven times a day, but the sultan had other guns that could take up the slack. Stone balls mercilessly slammed into the walls, shattering the brick and occasionally bringing down whole sections. By the end of the first day, a large part of the outer wall was reduced to rubble, and the sultan ordered an assault. Constantine threw himself into the breach, somehow repulsing the successive attacks, and when night fell Giustiniani devised a way to repair the walls. Driving wooden stakes into the collapsed rubble to provide a loose form, he heaped the broken brick and stone into a makeshift wall. The next day, when the firing resumed, the rubble absorbed the cannonballs better than the solid walls and remained more or less intact. Taking heart, the defenders fell into a steady rhythm. By day, they would do their best to stay out of the way of the stone balls raining death all around them; by night, when the guns were at last silenced, they rushed out to repair the damage.