Download PDF | The Siege and the Fall of Constantinople in 1453_ Historiography, Topography, and Military Studies
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Preface
Two concurrent themes run throughout our study. One is intimately involved with the sources relating to or purporting to relate to the events linked with the two-month siege and the ultimate fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks led by the Sultan Mehmed JI Fatih, the Conqueror (1444-1446, 1451-1481), on May 29, 1453. Their authenticity or inauthenticity, reliability, and factual accuracy are analyzed, and the various folk themes and stories that relate to this memorable event and its aftermath are scrutinized for their veracity. The second theme is occupied with an analysis of the military planning and operational approaches in the course of the siege. Thus the title and sub-title of our study reflects these two concerns.
The first part, The Pen, evaluates the voluminous sources, some of which have been traditionally accepted as authentic and as absolutely authoritative by various modem historians. In the course of this study, we will point out that the traditional views on these sources may not be as reliable as they have been deemed to be. On the contrary, some belong to the realm of fantasy and produce legends; others, depending on the agenda of the author, seem to fabricate personalities and events. On the other hand, sources that have been despised or considered to be too confusing, and have been further confused by modern historians, include valuable information that has not been utilized thus far.
Thus Chapter 1 is meant to be an introductory unit and attempts to present in an organized fashion the various narratives of the siege that have come down to us. Here we attempt to evaluate the information of each source. To our knowledge no such catalogue exists, detailing the related Quellenforschungen and their accompanying problems, as well as assessing the worth of each narrative. This chapter goes beyond the existing testimonies of eyewitnesses and treats the historiographical tradition that existed in the east after the fall.
Chapter 2 focuses on four narratives that have been neglected by the scholarship on the siege: these include the forgotten Latin narratives of “Riccherio,” Tetaldi, and Pope Pius II, and as well the Slavonic text of Nestor-Iskander, which had been regarded as a confused secondary source composed by an unknown author who was present in the Ottoman camp. We will demonstrate that it is a first-rate source composed by an eyewitness who was with the defenders within the imperial city after his defection from the Ottoman camp and not with the besiegers during the course of the final two months before the fall of Constantinople.
Chapter 4 addresses the thorny matter, which has achieved Homeric proportions in the scholarship of recent centuries, of the evolution of the Chronicon Minus into the celebrated Maius and of all the problems that are associated with this elaboration. Makarios Melissourgos-Melissenos will be discussed, and his various agendas in drastically altering the annual compilation of Georgios Sphrantzes. The elaborator’s dependence upon other non-Greek sources will be demonstrated and his connection to other less well-known chronicles will be pointed out, in the hope of relegating this complicated problem to its proper position within the historiographical corpus of the siege.
Chapter 4 leads us to folk history, to myths, and to legends that immediately appeared in the days following the siege and the sack, and as well in the ensuing centuries, even by scholars. This excursus also brings us to examine some of the more imposing structures still surviving in Istanbul, such as the Church of Hagia Theodosia/Gitil Camii and the thorny problem of its identification and location, or the unimposing areas such as the Vefa Meidan, or even the largely unknown areas even among the current residents of Istanbul such as the square of the Ug bas. These locations are important, as we shall see, for the mythology and legendary accounts associated with them.
The second part of our study, The Sword, addresses the operations of the siege itself, analyzing in a systematic fashion the military situation as it confronted the Byzantines and their allies. Our focus in this analysis is upon the strategy employed by both sides, but especially the Ottoman offense. On this basic point, we find previous research seriously lacking. For reasons that are not sufficiently perceptible, modern historians have neglected Ottoman strategy. They tend to view the siege as a series of isolated incidents, which seem prima facie to be unconnected.
We believe that there was a basic Turkish strategy that evolved during the progression of the siege, as circumstances warranted a change in tactics. Perhaps this strategy vacillated during the course of the siege, as events do not seem to follow a prescribed course of action even in modern warfare. And perhaps at the very end of the siege Ottoman strategy had direction and because of that the Byzantine defenses weakened. It is ultimately the grand strategy of the offense and the defense that concerns our views and us will be summarized in Chapter 11.
This part begins with Chapter 5, which consists of our detailed survey of the existing walls, gates, and defensive and contiguous structures. Over the years it became evident to us that the numerous modern studies of the siege, even by the most eminent scholars and respected authors, display unfamiliarity with the ancient remains. Consequently, we spent a great deal of time surveying the walls, gates, and adjacent structures, even in neighborhoods such as Sulu Kule, which are seldom if ever visited by scholars. We investigated the surviving remains before they were extensively renovated and thus became lost to the scholar interested in the topography of the siege of 1453.
Chapter 6 treats the imperial court’s intensive diplomatic activities on the eve of the siege, while Chapter 7 considers the preparations of the Porte, its erection of the Bosphoros Castle, and the intense preparations for building bombards to level the land fortifications.
Chapter 8 considers the Golden Horn sector and, as will become apparent, this section had no important offensive value, but was utilized by the Ottoman forces to weaken the protection at the land walls. The main focus of the Turkish offensive strategy was to compel the defenders to spread thin their troops, both along the land and sea walls. Otherwise, the sea walls came under no immediate or direct threat. The naval focus of the sultan must thus be viewed as secondary to the land operations of his main army.
Chapter 9 deals with the adjustments in offensive strategy of the sultan as the siege ran its course. It is mainly as a result of these changes, recommended by the Ottoman high command, that we may infer the overall grand strategy of the sultan in the siege.
Chapter 10, albeit rather late in this study, addresses the general questions and assumptions often raised by scholars concerning Mehmed II’s strategy for the siege and conquest of the imperial city. As will become evident, the sultan’s approach was to vary his strategies, often dictated by circumstances as they evolved over a two-month period.
Chapter 11 contains our conclusions based on the evidence at hand and as we have interpreted it in the previous chapters. In some ways, these conclusions come as a surprise, given the confident statements, albeit insupportable by the available authentic evidence, of scholars that are often encountered in the accounts on the siege.
To these chapters we have added “Appendices” presenting a journal of the events linked to the siege (Appendix 1), a compilation of texts addressing the execution of the grand duke, Loukas Notaras (Appendix II), and the notorious incident of the Kerkoporta, over which scholars have spilled much ink needlessly (Appendix II1). Appendix IV, however, considers another oversight in the various investigations of the siege period.
As we will have occasion to observe, the compilation of a prosopography of the participants in the siege and the sack of Constantinople has become imperative. There has never been any systematic study of the defenders, aggressors, and survivors, and there is no basic list of participants available to scholarship. We present for the first time an essential, if limited, tool for scholars investigating the siege. This first step for the eventual compilation of a workable prosopography of the defenders is based on available texts.
While we do not wish to criticize in detail the various approaches to the siege by our predecessors, whose views will be examined and evaluated in due course within the appropriate sections of our study, we should stress that what has been produced thus far in scholarship is not, we believe, very satisfactory.
The limitations imposed on any investigation of the siege have tended to assert themselves and have often led investigators in the wrong direction and to arrive at simplistic conclusions. Some of these limitations can be attributed to a lack of direct access to the sources that are not easily located and lack translation, as they are written in more than a handful of languages and are difficult to comprehend, even by the standards of the fifteenth century, and by an inferior and unsatisfactory publication of the texts.
In addition, the lack of familiarity with the topography of the land and sea fortifications, the actual ruins of the land walls and the little that survives of the sea walls, and most significantly the failure of personal inspection of the areas under siege have simply complicated the difficult task of previous investigators. Their results present an inconclusive picture or an inadequate understanding, leading them into the historiographical traps as they emerged over the centuries.
The last two centuries have witnessed an immense increase in our knowledge of the expansion of the Ottoman Turks into the Greco-Byzantine/Frankish Levant, as new or neglected manuscripts and contemporary testimonies have been steadily discovered. Yet the scholarly views on this subject have been hardly modified, in spite of the new archaeological discoveries and the new manuscript sources that have become available to scholarship. And so if one were to read the story of the siege and fall of Constantinople as it has been told and retold a number of times in the last two hundred years, one would be hard pressed to discover any new insights into this monumental event in the various studies, aside from the literary talents of each author.
Thus, while Sir Steven Runciman composed a popular account of the siege of 1453 that has remained in print for almost forty years since its first edition, there are severe limitations to his approach, and his narrative does not differ substantially in outlook or interpretations from the earlier studies of numerous worthy predecessors, such as father and son A. D. and J. H. Mordtmann, A. G. Paspates, E. Pears, or G. Schlumberger. Our observations also apply to the book by D. Stacton/D. Dereksen. He does not possess Runciman’s literary skills or familiarity with the sources, which he could not or did not read in the original languages, but relied on the few, albeit inaccurate and flawed, translations in existence.
The only modern scholar whose work demonstrates the availability of sources, and not all, by any means, is K. M. Setton. Their modern accounts may differ in details and in the literary talent that each author possesses, but they can hardly be said to offer new insights and new interpretations. Scholarship is always careful to move slowly in modifying transmitted pictures. As small changes in the form of additions and corrections accumulate, in time new syntheses become imperative. We would go so far as to submit that our basic conception of the siege, the fall, and the sack is still predicated on the interpretations that the nineteenth-century scholars placed on these monumental events.
The nineteenth-century investigators, researchers, and historians in general, we are reminded, were in many ways motivated by concerns that differ considerably from those of modern scholarship. Thus the scholars of that century could not break free from the restraints that their own period had placed upon them. This was an era characterized by nationalistic archetypes and sweeping generalizations, as the “new” nations in southeastern Europe, free at last of the Ottoman yoke, were struggling to survive and were desperate to discover and to isolate, in the events of the past, historical precedents to justify and sanction their new-found liberties.
In addition, western European scholars still viewed the Ottoman Turkish Empire as “the sick man” of Europe. Furthermore, under the immense influence of Edward Gibbon, the Greco-Byzantine civilization of the Middle Ages was largely seen as a monolithic theocratic state that showed some sparks of heroism in its final chapters only when the inevitable decline of the Ottoman Turks had arrived.
Against such a backdrop, the “causation” of the fall focused on the “degenerate” character of the Greeks, who refused to fight against the Ottoman aggressor. At the same time, the triumphal victory of the Turks over Constantinople was attributed to the advances in western military technology that had been imported by the Turkish forces, such as artillery and the enormous bombards of Mehmed II that supposedly leveled the ancient land fortifications of Constantinople and thus delivered the city to him.
We believe that the time has arrived to discard or to modify radically such simplistic views. Scholarship is obligated to produce new and authoritative analyses of events that may result in surprisingly fresh syntheses. While this is not the proper place to argue in favor of such an approach, the texts presented in this volume would militate in its favor. Even a cursory reading of our texts, for instance, demonstrates that the supposed ace of Mehmed II, that is, his bombards operated by gunpowder, was a failure.
The bombards, in fact, achieved very little in the siege of 1453, played a negligible role in the siege of Negroponte, and failed miserably in the siege of Rhodes. The Ottoman victory in 1453 must be attributed to other factors. The Ottoman bombards were too cumbersome, could not be aimed effectively, and failed to reduce to rubble the mighty land fortifications of Constantinople. We should recall that the art of effective deployment of artillery pieces was still in its infancy and that the bombards of the quattrocento were still employed as battering rams or as stone-throwing catapults.
The science of ballistics was still far in the future and unperfected. The effect of bombards was mainly psychological and was felt more by the non-combatants than by the professionals, who must have observed, at least in the course of the siege, the strategic and tactical limitations of Ottoman artillery. The immediate cause of the fall of Constantinople in 1453 must be attributed to the withdrawal of Giustiniani and his disciplined band of condottieri, and to the ensuing panic among the remainder of the defenders. The Turks did not breach the land walls. Their defenders in the vicinity of the Gate of Saint Romanos and the Pempton abandoned the ancient fortifications. In the end, the enemy overran this critical sector in the defense of the imperial city.
Similarly, in a later period, the fall of Negroponte/Khalkis in Euboea can be reasonably attributed to the failure of the Venetian commanders to provide effective aid to the besieged, who probably perished in bewilderment, seeing their fleet simply standing by and idly watching the conflict. Immensely more important, more significant, and more effective to operations during the sieges in the Levant of the quattrocento were the activities of “renegades,” spies, potential traitors, and the existence of fifth columns within the cities under siege.
This specific aspect of warfare has not been exhaustively investigated in modern scholarship and deserves a fresh look. Given the indisputable role played by such individuals as Halil Pasha, the grand vizier of Mehmed II’s Porte, of Loukas Notaras, the “prime minister’ of the imperial administration of Constantine XI, of Tommaso Schiavo and of Luca da Curzola and of their cohorts in Negroponte, of Meister George and of Meligalos and of Sophianos in Rhodes in 1481, we believe that a modern investigation of the importance of intelligence and counter-intelligence operations in siege warfare of the period will produce rewarding results.
The systematic study of the fall of Constantinople and of Byzantine-Frankish Greece, in general, as well as the related expansion of the Ottoman Turks into southeastern Europe, was pioneered by K. Sathas, P. A. Déthier, and S. P. Lampros, in their numerous publications that spanned the latter half of the nineteenth century and the first quarter of the twentieth century.
We have structured this study in the partial belief that their work, while significant, was never brought to a proper conclusion and that their studies and contributions to medieval and Renaissance historiography remain largely inaccessible to English-speaking students. In recent decades our understanding of the monumental events involved in the end of Byzantine Greece and of the expansion of the Ottoman Turks into the Levant and southeastern Europe have been aided and enriched by new and interesting approaches, innovative lines of research, and fresh ways of looking at a fascinating and complicated situation, but the sad fact remains that numerous sources remain inaccessible to the majority of students and scholars. We therefore make no apologies for the unabashedly old-fashioned approach that we have employed in our study.
We, the authors of this study, have engaged in research and study of the material for the siege of Constantinople in 1453, both independently and in collaboration, for over thirty years. In the course of our detailed analyses of sources and accounts, we discovered that there were numerous gaps and flaws in all scholarly attempts to give meaning to this monumental event.
Our research has taken us to numerous libraries in Europe and the United States, and we were compelled to visit and revisit the sites in question countless times. In the process of our research we became dissatisfied and frustrated with the numerous bits of scholarship that have been published on this event. Our collaboration over the course of many years proved an extremely rewarding experience and we present its results here.
We wrote this book from the perspective that previous studies were not inclusive and did not address the problems adequately. We hope that we have taken a small step toward this goal. In truth, if this study had been compiled at the end of the nineteenth century or in the course of the twentieth, our understanding of the siege of 1453 would have been on a more solid foundation. We have tried to remedy this situation and we are hopeful that future studies will contribute substantial material that is pertinent to the siege and its aftermath.
A great deal remains to be done. Further research may reveal additional “sources” and “Jost” accounts. Likewise, additional information may be uncovered in the Ottoman libraries and manuscript collections that have thus far been overlooked. New authoritative editions of well-known texts have become imperative. To cite one significant example, there is the work of Bishop Leonardo Giustiniani, for which there exists no critical edition of this informative and basic account of the siege.
The edition would have to take into consideration all available manuscripts of the quattrocento and their valuable marginalia, which remain for the most part unknown to scholars. As well, a critical edition of the text of Ubertino Pusculo is imperative; and other Slavonic versions of the text of Nestor-Iskander will have to be re-examined and re-evaluated, given the newly acquired status of eyewitness. A compilation of the prosopography of the besiegers will furnish additional information, while more insights will be gained from a complete prosopography of the defenders. Lastly, the field of intelligence and counter-intelligence, double agents, renegades, and downright traitors remains open.
We should add a note in regard to transliteration of names. While we use the accepted form for Christian names that have English equivalents, such as George (exceptions are made for initial citations of prominent Byzantine annalists, hence, Georgios), John, or Constantine, a practice of transliterating other Greek names into English, by-passing the normal transliteration, is observed: thus “Palaiologos” and not “Palaeologus,” “Palaiologan” and not “Palaeologan.” But consistency is elusive. It is more common to encounter “Thessaloniki” and the Latinized “Thessalonica” or the grammatically correct form “Thessalonike.” We should admit that we have been guilty of following the common usage. The same is true for Turkish names and titles. We will encounter “Mehmed” and not the phonetically incorrect “Mehmet” or the pedantic “Mohammed/Muhammad.”
With respect to all the passages cited in a score of languages throughout this work, we have provided our own translations of these passages, unless the name of another translator is cited in an accompanying note. Generally speaking, we have not translated the extensive number of texts cited in the footnotes, unless we believed the language to be rather exotic and the information present to be of substantial significance.
Finally, we should like to note that we have consciously tried, as much as possible but not totally, to avoid redundancy in the use of the adjectival form “Byzantine” or the noun “Byzantium.”
The application of this adjective, in particular, to the Greeks of the Middle Ages dates back to the seventeenth century, when French antiquarians first coined it. It is further unfortunate that Gibbon’s towering influence has colored “Byzantine” with its familiar pejorative dimension. We have, therefore, often employed the term “Greek,” which might not be deemed inappropriate if language and religion were to count as criteria for ethnicity. After all, the common language of the average Greek of the quattrocento did not differ radically from the spoken idiom of the nineteenth century and the citizens of the modern Hellenic Republic could have understood the spoken idiom of Constantine XI’s subjects with relative ease.
Moreover, the religion of the vast majority of modern Greek-speakers remains Orthodox Christianity, which has miraculously survived organized persecutions, forced conversions, and brutal policies during the “Dark Age” of modern Greece. Thus, while one might be charged with anachronism if one were to maintain that the Palaiologan coda of the Greek empire was the seminal form of the modern Greek nation, we feel that it is neither anachronistic nor unnatural to employ the term “Greek” for the Christian Greek-speakers of the late medieval Balkans and of Constantinople in the fifteenth century.
Acknowledgments
Over the course of several decades in the process of accumulating materials, conducting surveys of the land fortifications and other important sites, and the task of presenting our thoughts and efforts in writing, we have received advice and assistance from a large number of colleagues. In presenting this list of scholars and others, if we have overlooked anyone, we apologize for our oversight. Further, we have listed our colleagues in alphabetical order, for the obvious reason that at various stages in our work, we cannot now distinguish how they should be ranked, if at all, in degrees of assistance.
In some instances we agreed with their recommendations, while on other issues we allowed our evidence to lead us in different directions. Thus on the American scene we are especially grateful to John W. Barker, Dr. George Contis, M.D., Slobodan Curtié, George T. Dennis, S.J.t, John V. A. Fine, Jr., Timothy E. Gregory, H. W. Lowry, Stamatina McGrath, Pierre McKay, George P. Majeska, Predrag Mateji¢, Ian Mladjov, David Olster, Robert Ousterhout, Thomas Papademitriou, Claudia Rapp, John Rosser, AliceMary Talbot, and Hannah Thomas. Among our non-American colleagues, we are especially grateful to Haluk Cetinkaya, Matgorzata Dabrowska, Gennadius G. Litavrint, John R. Melville Jones, Maciej Salamon, and Pau! Stephenson.
We are especially grateful to Ian Mladjov, who prepared the four maps for this study. Without his expertise, the portrayal of the areas would have been deficient.
Most of our research was conducted at the Dumbarton Oaks Center for Byzantine Studies in Washington, DC, and the Gennadeios Library in Athens. We are especially indebted to Irene Vaslef, now retired and former chief librarian at Dumbarton Oaks for the Byzantine collection, for her invaluable assistance over the decades. The staff of the Gennadeios Library was most obliging and worked with us in countless ways. Research materials were also acquired from other institutions, both in the United States and elsewhere, and we are appreciative of their staff efforts.
On a number of our visits to Istanbul, our devoted guide was Ismail Boliikbas. He made our research on the land walls fruitful, although we must admit that our repeated visits to the land fortifications did at times wear him out. But especially, he proved to be a devoted friend who recognized our interests and gained access for us to Giil Camii and other important sites in the city that have not been frequented by western scholars. We should also thank Drs. Siimer Atasoy, Isin Demirkent, Engin Akyiirek, and Nurhan Atasoy, the secretariat for the symposium honoring the 550th Anniversary of Istanbul University, May-June 2003, which housed us and made provisions for us to continue our work in Istanbul.
And last but not least, we should recognize that our respective institutions, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and Shepherd University, provided us with substantial financial assistance and other benefits over the course of a number of decades. We are most grateful to them for their interest in and support for our work.
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