The Rise of the Crescent Moon, Pt. 1

On the night of the 22nd of May 1453, a crescent moon rose over 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 more than 160,000 troops of Sultan Mehmet II - not yet “The Conqueror” - massed outside the city walls saw the moon as well, and launched into jubilant celebration. The Byzantine Emperor Constantine, in his palace on the Sea of Marmara, most likely recognized the import of this portent: a prophecy 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 fall, 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 the capture of Constantinople. He had come to the throne two years previously, in February 1451, and immediately set out to subdue an Ottoman vassal state in Anatolia. Mehmet proved himself a forceful leader with this victory, and subsequent suppression of a small mutiny by the Janissary corps, who demanded a cash bonus following the campaign. Sources in the court describe how Mehmet has 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 in the center of the Muslim states of the Balkans and Near East was intolerable, especially because the Byzantine Emperor provided shelter and aid to rival claimants to the Ottoman throne. Mehmet traveled to a spot on the Black Sea six miles from the city walls, and in March 1452 began construction of a massive fortress, which was called Rumeli-Hisari. It was completed by August of that year, and together with another 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, and 250 Ottoman ships lay at anchor along the Asian coast. The Greeks strung a massive chain across the harbor, and lined up galleys equipped with battering rams along the line to guard the mouth of the Bosphorus.

Constantinople was already moribund, a city that had been ebbing for generations. In 1205, the Fourth Crusade, instead of passing through the city, captured and looted it, creating a Latin Catholic state, which lasted several decades before the Greek regime was restored. At the time of the Ottoman conquest the Imperial Palace still lacked roof tiles, from the Crusader’s sack of the city. Its population had been declining steadily, so that large tracts within the city walls were unpopulated and reduced to rustic parkland. In 1347 the Black Death left a third of the Empire’s population dead. The same year, at the coronation of Emperor John VI, the jewels in the Emperor and Empress’s diadems were made out of glass. Meanwhile, the Ottoman Turks steadily increased their power and influence from Anatolia across into Europe, growing bolder in their assaults on Greek territories.

At the beginning of the 15th century, the Emperor Manuel II embarked on a tour of the courts of Western Europe to shore up Christian support for the Byzantines in what promised to be troubling years ahead. Quarrel and resentment colored the relationship between the Catholic Church in Rome and the Eastern Church in Constantinople. Dogmatic disagreements played an increasingly divisive role in the relationship between Western and Eastern Christianity. The Byzantine Emperors, sensing the mounting power of the Ottomans, aimed to bolster their position by entering into a union with the Western Church and ironing out their doctrinal differences. After years of stalled negotiations, the union of the Churches was made at the grand church of St. Sophia in Constantinople in December of 1453. Greek public sentiment however, ran strong against the Union, and feelings on the other side seem to have been no less tepid. 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 to the encircled city. Latin contemporaries looked at what they perceived to have been the Greek’s impure motives in entering into this failed union as resulting in God’s ire, as cause for him to punish the city.

In the spring of 1453, Mehmet left his capital at Edirne, where he had spent the previous winter, intent on taking Constantinople. In April, Mehmet had ships rolled across land and into the harbor of Constantinople. Enormous cannons where wheeled overland, and starting in the beginning of March, heavy bombardment began of the city’s walls. For the next three months the walls and towers that had long kept the city safe were assailed and battered. Giovanni Giustiniani, a Genoese noble who had come to the city with 700 men several months previously, took an informal position of command over the city’s defenses.