The Rise of the Crescent Moon and Fall of Constantinople

On the night of May 22nd 1453, a crescent moon rose over the still waters of the Bosphorus. The people of the ancient city of Constantinople, the last vestige of the might and splendor of the Roman Empire, looked on in terror. In the Turkish camp, the hundreds of thousands of troops under Sultan Mehmet II - not yet “The Conqueror” – mustered outside the city walls looked up at the sky and launched into jubilant celebration. The Byzantine Emperor Constantine, in his palace on the Sea of Marmara, must have recognized the import of this portent. A centuries-old prophecy, dating back to the Empire’s most glorious days, held that the city would not fall until the full moon conferred a sign. What should have risen as a full moon that night, ascended as a slender sliver. Less than six days later the city’s defenses would fail, the last Greek Emperor would lay slain, and the churches and citizens of the city would endure three days of rape and pillage before calm would settle on the beleaguered city.

The young Sultan Mehmet had bold and deep-rooted ambitions, inherited from his father Murad, to capture the city of Constantinople. The former magnificence of the dazzling metropolis glimmered like a tarnished jewel straddling the continents of Europe and Asia, beguiling all who caught a glimpse. Sultan Mehmet saw in the decaying gem an opportunity for personal glory, but also for renovation. Mehmet’s fixation on Constantinople was one born of his sense of entitlement. The putrefying Byzantine dynasty gave the storied city a stench that was not becoming of its illustrious past. Mehmet believed that Constantinople deserved a rejuvenation of its old glory, and designed to impose that grandeur upon it. The crescent moon that rose above the Bosphorus that night signified to both sides that fate was the third party in the battle for Constantinople, and destiny was an accessory to Mehmet’s plans. The driving momentum behind the Ottoman’s rise was evident in the very stars themselves.

Mehmet had come to the throne two years previously, in February 1451, and immediately set out to subdue an Ottoman vassal state in Anatolia. Mehmet quickly proved himself a forceful leader with his quick victory and subsequent suppression of a mutiny by the Janissary corps, who demanded a cash bonus following the campaign. Sources inside the Ottoman court describe how Mehmet had already become consumed with the goal of capturing Constantinople. To Mehmet, and other powerful figures in the Ottoman regime, the continued sovereignty of a Christian city at the heart of the Muslim states of the Balkans and Near East was intolerable, especially in light of the Byzantine Emperors propensity for meddling in internal Ottoman power struggles. At the beginning of March 1452, Mehmet dispatched heralds to every governor in his empire, commanding each to bring an army to the Bosphorus to prepare for the final assault on Constantinople. The Sultan traveled to a spot on the Black Sea six miles from the city walls and began construction on a massive fortress, named the Rumeli-Hisari, where he awaited the ripening of his plans. The fortress was complete by August of that year, and together with a smaller castle built on the opposite side of the strait, effectively closed off passage between the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. By September, approximately 50,000 men were encamped around the fortress.

Constantinople was already a dying city, in the throes of a prolonged and terminal decline lasting at least two centuries. Visitors describe a melancholy and moribund air enveloping the metropolis. From the close of the 12th century, the city’s population had declined from more than a million to less than a hundred thousand. The Byzantine Emperors faced challenges from both east and west. Slavic princes and Italian dukes seized territories, chunk by chunk, throughout the Balkans and Greek isles. In 1205, the Fourth Crusade occupied and looted the city instead of traveling through to Jerusalem, founding a Catholic Latin state that lasted several decades before the Greek Palaeologus dynasty was restored. At the same time, the newly ascendant Ottoman Turks rose up from the east, and captured the fertile Anatolian plains that had provided the majority of the Empire’s agricultural produce and a preponderance of its military conscripts. The Turks’ power and influence spread from Asia across into Europe, as they grew bolder in their assaults on Greek territories. In 1347, an outbreak of the Black Death left a third of the Empire’s population dead. The same year, at the coronation of Emperor John VI, spectators observed that the jewels in the Emperor and Empress’s diadems were actually made of glass. By the time of the Ottoman conquest, the Byzantines possessed an empire in name only, and the Imperial capital’s erstwhile splendor was markedly tarnished. The Imperial Palace still lacked roof tiles, melted down and sold by the previous emperor. Large tracts within the city walls were left unpopulated and reduced to rustic parkland.

At the beginning of the 15th century, the Emperor Manuel II embarked on a tour through the courts of Western Europe in order to shore up Christian support for the Byzantines in what promised to be troubling years ahead. Manuel was forced to rush back to his capital at news that the Ottoman sultan Bayezit was marching on the city, but chance saved it from destruction when Timurlane the Tartar laid siege to the Ottoman capital at Ankara, razing it to the ground in 1402. The Kings of France and England had received the Greek Emperor with pomp and deference, but his expedition had been a failure. Though his pleas for succor were met with pity, no aid was forthcoming. Quarrel and resentment colored the relationship between the Catholic Church in Rome and the Orthodox Church in Constantinople. Dogmatic disagreements played an increasingly divisive role in the relationship between Western and Eastern Christianity, and stuck a wedge between the Christians on either side of the Adriatic. The Byzantine Emperors, perceiving the mounting power of the Ottomans, aimed to bolster their position by ironing out these doctrinal differences and entering into a union with the Western Church. After years of stalled negotiations, the union of the Churches was made at the grand church of Hagia Sophia in December of 1453. This pageantry would, however, do little to save the city. The incense smoke merely obscured the inevitable as the ringing of church bells sounded the death knell of Christian Constantinople.

Within the city, public sentiment ran strong against the Union. The citizens of Constantinople treated the Hagia Sophia “as if it were a synagogue. There were no offerings, no sacrifices, no incense.” The Megas Doux, Loukas Notaras, is said to have declared that he would rather see a Turkish turban ruling over the city than a cardinal’s hat. Emperor Constantine may have hoped that the feelings of confederacy and obligations of Christian brotherhood brought about by the union would bring military reinforcements to his city from the Christian kingdoms of Europe, but little help came. Feelings about the Union in the west were no less heated than inside the city. Latin contemporaries looked at what they perceived to have been the Greek’s impure motives in entering into the Union as provoking God’s ire and bringing his wrath down upon the city.

In the spring of 1453, Mehmet left his capital at Edirne, where he had spent the previous winter, and returned to his camp with the intent of taking Constantinople. A fleet of three hundred Turkish ships had gathered. Though the Greeks had only about thirty vessels, they had strung a massive chain across the harbor, equipped their galleys with battering rams, and lined them up behind the margin to close up the mouth of the Bosphorus. The enterprising Mehmet ordered eighty of his ships rolled across greased timbers from the Bosphorus, behind Pera and into the Golden Horn. Enormous cannons were also wheeled overland, and in the beginning of March, heavy bombardment began on the city’s walls. For the next three months, the walls and towers that had long kept the city safe were assailed and battered. Among the Turkish artillery were the largest guns yet built, testament to the technical expertise of the Ottomans. By April, the number of Mehmet’s soldiers had swelled to over 150,000.

The Greek forces were dwarfed in number, but resolute. The Megas Doux stood guard over the harbor with four hundred horsemen, who could be dispatched anywhere in the city where they might be needed. Giovanni Giustiniani, a Genoese noble who had arrived in the city with seven hundred men in January, as one of the few foreigners to answer Emperor Constantine’s entreaties for aid, took an informal position of command over the city’s defenses. The daily pounding by the Turkish cannon had brought down several sections of wall and a tower of the gate of Saint Romanus on the outer Theodosian Walls, which had been considered unassailable and kept the city secure since their construction more than a thousand years before. The Emperor became convinced of the hopelessness of his situation, and deigned to seek accord with the Sultan. Constantine sent out an embassy to the Ottoman camp with instructions to offer Mehmet an extravagant yearly tribute, and proffer to submit to whatever terms the Sultan might vouchsafe in order to spare the city. Mehmet is said to have replied with austerity:

It is impossible for me to withdraw. Either I shall capture the city, or the city shall capture me, alive or dead. If you are willing to leave it, I shall allow you to live at peace in the Peloponnese, and I shall give your brothers other provinces to rule over, and we shall be friends. But if you prevent me from entering in peace, and I have to fight my way in, I shall put you and all your nobles to the sword, and I shall give all the rest of your people to my soldiers, to be their slaves; and for myself I shall keep only the city.

The Turkish Sultan’s stony-hearted proposal was no overture to Constantine, who could not give up the city without the loss of all honor and dignity. The Emperor could not however, have anticipated a magnanimous response. The cards were stacked in the Turk’s favor, and time was against the Greeks. The Ottoman blockade, which only a few audacious ships had been able to penetrate, deprived the city of much needed food, supplies, and reinforcements. With both sides determined that they were left with no option but to play through to battle, the final weeks of the siege began in earnest.

On May 16th, defenders along the city’s defenses heard noises from below, and discovered that the Turks had tunneled nearly half a mile under the foundations of the city’s walls. The Megas Doux and Emperor were informed, and work was begun on their own tunnel. When the Greeks intercepted the infiltrators’ mine, they cast fire into it, burning the tunnel’s foundations and burying the Turks inside under a mountain of earth. The meager forces of the Greeks and their Italian allies pinned their hopes on the strength of their defenses, which despite the constant pummeling received from the Turkish guns, had been repaired daily with earthworks and the tumbled stones.

Looking to the city’s east on the night of May 22nd, the dark sky and cobalt water displayed two perfect crescent moons. The city’s defenders lamented this ill omen, while the Turks, massed in their camp outside the city’s walls, rejoiced. Mehmet ordered torches to be lit throughout every tent and every ship in the fleet, and for the men to howl and yell. The effect in the city was one of great dread and dismay. Mehmet determined that the city’s walls had been damaged enough to launch his final assault. The Greek defenders took their places: the Emperor and Guistiniani with three thousand men, between the outer and inner walls by the breach in the gate of Saint Romanus, the Megas Doux in the palace with five hundred men, and the same number of archers and crossbowmen along the sea walls and ramparts. Before dawn on the morning of the 29th of May, the Sultan himself rode out with a contingent of his elite janissary corps and launched his general attack at the gate of Saint Romanus. Mehmet ordered forward throngs of troops, upon which the defenders hurled heavy rocks and flaming sulfur. Countless Turks were killed, but Mehmet did not intend on giving the Greeks a chance to rest and kept up the onslaught in a determination to broach the walls. At sunrise, the popular Giovanni Guistiniani, fighting near the frontlines on the battlements, was wounded by an arrow in the side. When the other defenders noticed the wounded Guistiniani and let down their guard, the Turkish attackers seized on this lull and climbed onto the walls. Panic seized the Christians. As the Greek and Italian defenders retreated back toward the inner walls, the Turks swarmed over the ramparts and seized control of them. After the breaching of the walls, the Turks’ appreciable advantage of numbers overwhelmed the defenders. The victorious and euphoric Ottomans ran through the city, plundering its remaining riches, raping its women, and carrying gold, jewels and captives back to their camp. The Ottoman navy made landfall behind the city to try to capture their share of loot, and some defenders and inhabitants were able to escape by sea. However, most people left within the city were either killed, or captured and sold into slavery. The Emperor was killed too, under uncertain circumstances. Blood flowed through the city’s streets like water during a storm and the corpses of Greeks and Turks alike filled the Dardanelles straits, floating out to sea like rotten melons.

After the orgy of death and destruction that followed the opening of the city’s gates, Mehmet undertook a massive project of reconstruction designed both to restore the city’s former splendor and to Turk-ify it. When Mehmet first rode into the city, he toured the great buildings and bazaars with his retinue, ending at the Hagia Sophia. The largest cathedral in the world and seat of the Orthodox Christian faith, the Hagia Sophia had deteriorated to the point where only its dome was left intact. Constantinople became known by its Turkish name Istanbul, meaning “the city.” Mehmet ordered the construction of the opulent Topkapi Palace, and an enormous Grand Bazaar, but his restoration and conversion of the Hagia Sophia into a mosque was his most important project. The brilliant gold mosaics depicting Byzantine royals and Christian saints were plastered over, minarets were constructed, and the Ayasofya - as it became known - became the centerpiece of the glorious Ottoman Renaissance that flowered in the ancient city, until the thrust of fortune abandoned the Turks, and the Ottoman Empire fell into its own decline five centuries later.