A State Unwilling to Defend Itself
In the history of the world, hardly any state seemed to deserve decline as much as the Eastern Roman Empire. It lacked the will to defend itself, and it could not persuade its quarrelsome, argumentative Greeks that fighting and dying for the homeland was sweet and honorable. It therefore sent no help to the Christian armies at Maritsa, at Kosovo or at Nicopolis. In 1379 it even equipped twelve thousand soldiers for the sultan, and it was Byzantine troops, under John VII Palaiologos, who forced the city of Philadelphia in Asia Minor to surrender to the Ottoman Turks (1390).
By the time Bayezid resumed the siege of Constantinople (1402), nothing remained of the empire except its capital. The sultan's writ ran on both shores of the Sea of Marmara and across nearly all of Asia Minor and the Balkans. He held the Dardanelles and moved at will between his two capitals, one in Asia and one in Europe.
The Reprieve of Tamerlane
The last hour of the besieged city seemed to have struck. Starving Greeks let themselves down the walls and gave themselves up to the Turks to be fed. Then, out of the Muslim East, an unlikely savior of Christendom appeared: Tamerlane, who meant to check the growing boldness of the Ottoman state. As the Tatar host surged westward, Bayezid abandoned the siege and hurried back to gather his forces in Anatolia. The Turkish and Tatar armies met at Ankara (1402); Bayezid was defeated and taken prisoner. The Ottoman flood receded for a generation, and it seemed that God had at last answered the cry of the Christians.
Under the wise rule of Manuel II the empire recovered most of Greece and part of Thrace. But Sultan Mehmed I reorganized the Turkish army once more, and Murad II, after a great defeat, led it to brilliant victories.
A Divided Christendom
Muslim soldiers were still inspired by the belief that those who died for Islam went to paradise. The book adds, with some irony, that if no paradise existed it hardly mattered, since the beautiful Greek women of the conquered lands would serve the purpose. The Christians had no such consolations to offer, and they were divided among themselves.
Greek Christians and Roman Catholics detested one another. When the Venetians in Crete seized Greek-rite Christians and put them to death because they refused to recognize the Church of Rome and the papacy, Pope Urban V joined Petrarch in congratulating the Venetian ruler for defending the one true Church (1350, as the book dates it). The common people and lower clergy of the Eastern Empire opposed every attempt to reunite Greek and Latin Christianity, and one Byzantine noble declared that he would rather see a turbaned Turk in Constantinople than a red-hatted Roman cardinal.
Most Balkan states and provinces hated their neighbors more than they hated the Turks. Some preferred to submit to the Muslims, because the poll tax the Turks demanded was far lighter than the taxes of Christian rulers, because no one was punished for heresy, and because the Turks allowed four wives.
Murad II, Hunyadi and the Balkan Resistance
In 1422 Sultan Murad II renewed the attack on Constantinople, but a revolt in the Balkans forced him to lift the siege. John VIII Palaiologos then ruled in relative quiet by paying the Turks a heavy annual tribute. Murad reconquered Greece, Salonica and most of Albania. Serbia, under George Branković, resisted bravely, and a combined army of Serbs and Hungarians under János Hunyadi defeated Murad at Kunovica (1444). Branković ruled Serbia until his death at ninety (1456). After his victories at Varna and in the second battle of Kosovo (1448), Murad made a peace treaty with Emperor Constantine XI Palaiologos, returned to Adrianople, and died (1451).
Mehmed the Conqueror Prepares
Mehmed II, called the Conqueror, came to the Ottoman throne at twenty-one. He honored the treaty Constantine had signed and sent his nephew Orhan to be raised at the Byzantine court, perhaps also as a spy. When other Muslim powers threatened his position in western Asia, he took his army across the Bosporus and left his European lands in the care of his vizier Khalil Pasha, known for his friendliness to the Christian empire.
Constantine, whose judgment unfortunately did not equal his courage, told the vizier that unless the allowance for the sultan's nephew were doubled, the empire would set Orhan up as a claimant to the Ottoman throne. He seems to have thought the upheaval in Asia was a good chance to weaken the Turks in Europe, but he failed to secure allies in the West or the South. Mehmed made peace with his Muslim rivals and with Venice, Wallachia, Bosnia and Hungary. Back in Europe he built a strong fortress on the Bosporus above Constantinople, which guaranteed his army's free passage between the two continents and put the Black Sea trade under his control.
For eight months he gathered troops, weapons and supplies. He hired Christian metalworkers to cast the largest cannon yet seen, capable of hurling balls weighing 360 kilograms (the book's figure) against the enemy's walls. In July 1452 he declared war, and with 140,000 men (the book's figure) he laid siege to Constantinople for the last time.
The Fall of the City
With the resolve of despair, Constantine prepared the defense. His soldiers numbered no more than seven thousand, equipped with small cannon, spears, bows, burning torches and clumsy firearms that shot small lead balls the size of walnuts. He slept little at night and supervised the repair of damage the Ottoman guns inflicted each day. Even so, the walls crumbled more each day under the bombardment of warships and enormous cannon.
On May 29 the Turks fought their way across a ditch filled with their own dead and poured through the breaches into the terrified city. The cries of the dying were lost in the wail of trumpets and war drums. In the end the Greeks fought bravely. The young emperor struck with his sword everywhere in the battle, and the nobles at his side died to the last man defending him. When the Turks surrounded him he cried out: "Is there not one Christian to cut off my head?" He cast off his royal robe, fought like an ordinary soldier, and vanished among his small, broken force. No trace of him was ever found.
Sack and Conversion of Hagia Sophia
The victorious Turks killed thousands until the people stopped resisting, and then plundered the city they had hoped for through many years. Every able adult among the defeated was taken as booty, and the sack spared no one, nuns included. Lords and subjects, stripped of the clothing that showed their rank, woke to find themselves equal in slavery.
The looting was not without limit. When Mehmed II saw a Muslim destroying the marble paving of Hagia Sophia out of religious zeal, he struck the man down with his sword and declared that all buildings must be preserved, so that the sultan might in due time take their materials himself.
After certain changes and purifications Hagia Sophia became a mosque. Every Christian sign in it was removed, and its mosaics lay forgotten under a white coat of plaster for five hundred years. On the day of the conquest, or the following Friday, a muezzin climbed the highest minaret and called Muslims to prayer to the God of victory. Mehmed II performed the Islamic rite in the most celebrated house of Christian worship.
Consequences for Europe
The fall of Constantinople made every European king tremble. The barrier that had shielded Europe from the floods of Asia for more than a thousand years was broken. The faith and state that the crusaders had hoped to drive back into the heart of Asia now advanced over the corpse of the Eastern Empire, through the Balkan lands, to the very gates of Hungary. The papacy, which had hoped to bring Greek Christendom under Rome, now watched in fear as millions in southeastern Europe turned to Islam. The trade routes once open to western merchant ships had fallen into foreign hands and could be closed by heavy tolls in peacetime and by cannon in war.
Byzantine art, driven from its birthplace, found refuge in Russia, while its influence and grandeur vanished in the West. The migration of Greek scholars to Italy and France, begun in 1397, now quickened and enriched Italy with the legacy of ancient Greece. In one sense nothing was lost: only what had to die, died. The Eastern Roman Empire had completed its role in world history and made way for another, in humanity's heroic yet bloody, noble yet base, progress.