in this great and general attack, the military judgment and astrological
knowledge of Mahomet advised him to expect the morning, the memorable
twenty-ninth of May, in the fourteen hundred and fifty-third year of the
Christian Êra. The preceding night had been strenuously employed: the
troops, the cannons, and the fascines, were advanced to the edge of the
ditch, which in many parts presented a smooth and level passage to the
breach; and his fourscore galleys almost touched, with the prows and
their scaling-ladders, the less defensible walls of the harbor. Under
pain of death, silence was enjoined: but the physical laws of motion
and sound are not obedient to discipline or fear; each individual might
suppress his voice and measure his footsteps; but the march and labor
of thousands must inevitably produce a strange confusion of dissonant
clamors, which reached the ears of the watchmen of the towers. At
daybreak, without the customary signal of the morning gun, the Turks
assaulted the city by sea and land; and the similitude of a twined or
twisted thread has been applied to the closeness and continuity of their
line of attack. [57] The foremost ranks consisted of the refuse of the
host, a voluntary crowd who fought without order or command; of the
feebleness of age or childhood, of peasants and vagrants, and of all
who had joined the camp in the blind hope of plunder and martyrdom. The
common impulse drove them onwards to the wall; the most audacious to
climb were instantly precipitated; and not a dart, not a bullet, of
the Christians, was idly wasted on the accumulated throng. But their
strength and ammunition were exhausted in this laborious defence:
the ditch was filled with the bodies of the slain; they supported the
footsteps of their companions; and of this devoted vanguard the death
was more serviceable than the life. Under their respective bashaws and
sanjaks, the troops of Anatolia and Romania were successively led to the
charge: their progress was various and doubtful; but, after a conflict
of two hours, the Greeks still maintained, and improved their advantage;
and the voice of the emperor was heard, encouraging his soldiers to
achieve, by a last effort, the deliverance of their country. In that
fatal moment, the Janizaries arose, fresh, vigorous, and invincible.
The sultan himself on horseback, with an iron mace in his hand, was the
spectator and judge of their valor: he was surrounded by ten thousand of
his domestic troops, whom he reserved for the decisive occasion; and
the tide of battle was directed and impelled by his voice and eye. His
numerous ministers of justice were posted behind the line, to urge,
to restrain, and to punish; and if danger was in the front, shame and
inevitable death were in the rear, of the fugitives. The cries of fear
and of pain were drowned in the martial music of drums, trumpets, and
attaballs; and experience has proved, that the mechanical operation of
sounds, by quickening the circulation of the blood and spirits, will
act on the human machine more forcibly than the eloquence of reason
and honor. From the lines, the galleys, and the bridge, the Ottoman
artillery thundered on all sides; and the camp and city, the Greeks
and the Turks, were involved in a cloud of smoke which could only be
dispelled by the final deliverance or destruction of the Roman empire.
The single combats of the heroes of history or fable amuse our fancy
and engage our affections: the skilful evolutions of war may inform the
mind, and improve a necessary, though pernicious, science. But in the
uniform and odious pictures of a general assault, all is blood, and
horror, and confusion nor shall I strive, at the distance of three
centuries, and a thousand miles, to delineate a scene of which there
could be no spectators, and of which the actors themselves were
incapable of forming any just or adequate idea.
[Footnote 57: Besides the 10,000 guards, and the sailors and the
marines, Ducas numbers in this general assault 250,000 Turks, both horse
and foot.]
The immediate loss of Constantinople may be ascribed to the bullet, or
arrow, which pierced the gauntlet of John Justiniani. The sight of his
blood, and the exquisite pain, appalled the courage of the chief, whose
arms and counsels were the firmest rampart of the city. As he withdrew
from his station in quest of a surgeon, his flight was perceived
and stopped by the indefatigable emperor. "Your wound," exclaimed
PalÊologus, "is slight; the danger is pressing: your presence is
necessary; and whither will you retire?"--"I will retire," said the
trembling Genoese, "by the same road which God has opened to the Turks;"
and at these words he hastily passed through one of the breaches of
the inner wall. By this pusillanimous act he stained the honors of a
military life; and the few days which he survived in Galata, or the Isle
of Chios, were embittered by his own and the public reproach. [58] His
example was imitated by the greatest part of the Latin auxiliaries, and
the defence began to slacken when the attack was pressed with redoubled
vigor. The number of the Ottomans was fifty, perhaps a hundred, times
superior to that of the Christians; the double walls were reduced by the
cannon to a heap of ruins: in a circuit of several miles, some places
must be found more easy of access, or more feebly guarded; and if
the besiegers could penetrate in a single point, the whole city was
irrecoverably lost. The first who deserved the sultan's reward was
Hassan the Janizary, of gigantic stature and strength. With his cimeter
in one hand and his buckler in the other, he ascended the outward
fortification: of the thirty Janizaries, who were emulous of his
valor, eighteen perished in the bold adventure. Hassan and his twelve
companions had reached the summit: the giant was precipitated from the
rampart: he rose on one knee, and was again oppressed by a shower of
darts and stones. But his success had proved that the achievement was
possible: the walls and towers were instantly covered with a swarm
of Turks; and the Greeks, now driven from the vantage ground, were
overwhelmed by increasing multitudes. Amidst these multitudes, the
emperor, [59] who accomplished all the duties of a general and a soldier,
was long seen and finally lost. The nobles, who fought round his person,
sustained, till their last breath, the honorable names of PalÊologus and
Cantacuzene: his mournful exclamation was heard, "Cannot there be found
a Christian to cut off my head?" [60] and his last fear was that of
falling alive into the hands of the infidels. [61] The prudent despair
of Constantine cast away the purple: amidst the tumult he fell by an
unknown hand, and his body was buried under a mountain of the slain.
After his death, resistance and order were no more: the Greeks fled
towards the city; and many were pressed and stifled in the narrow pass
of the gate of St. Romanus. The victorious Turks rushed through the
breaches of the inner wall; and as they advanced into the streets, they
were soon joined by their brethren, who had forced the gate Phenar on
the side of the harbor. [62] In the first heat of the pursuit, about two
thousand Christians were put to the sword; but avarice soon prevailed
over cruelty; and the victors acknowledged, that they should immediately
have given quarter if the valor of the emperor and his chosen bands had
not prepared them for a similar opposition in every part of the capital.
It was thus, after a siege of fifty-three days, that Constantinople,
which had defied the power of Chosroes, the Chagan, and the caliphs, was
irretrievably subdued by the arms of Mahomet the Second. Her empire only
had been subverted by the Latins: her religion was trampled in the dust
by the Moslem conquerors. [63]
[Footnote 58: In the severe censure of the flight of Justiniani, Phranza
expresses his own feelings and those of the public. For some private
reasons, he is treated with more lenity and respect by Ducas; but the
words of Leonardus Chiensis express his strong and recent indignation,
gloriÊ salutis suique oblitus. In the whole series of their Eastern
policy, his countrymen, the Genoese, were always suspected, and often
guilty. * Note: M. Brosset has given some extracts from the Georgian account
of the siege of Constantinople, in which Justiniani's wound in the
left foot is represented as more serious. With charitable ambiguity the
chronicler adds that his soldiers carried him away with them in their
vessel.--M.]
[Footnote 59: Ducas kills him with two blows of Turkish soldiers;
Chalcondyles wounds him in the shoulder, and then tramples him in the
gate. The grief of Phranza, carrying him among the enemy, escapes from
the precise image of his death; but we may, without flattery, apply
these noble lines of Dryden:--
As to Sebastian, let them search the field;
And where they find a mountain of the slain,
Send one to climb, and looking down beneath,
There they will find him at his manly length,
With his face up to heaven, in that red monument
Which his good sword had digged.]
[Footnote 60: Spondanus, (A.D. 1453, No. 10,) who has hopes of his
salvation, wishes to absolve this demand from the guilt of suicide.]
[Footnote 61: Leonardus Chiensis very properly observes, that the Turks,
had they known the emperor, would have labored to save and secure a
captive so acceptable to the sultan.]
[Footnote 62: Cantemir, p. 96. The Christian ships in the mouth of the
harbor had flanked and retarded this naval attack.]
[Footnote 63: Chalcondyles most absurdly supposes, that Constantinople
was sacked by the Asiatics in revenge for the ancient calamities of
Troy; and the grammarians of the xvth century are happy to melt down the
uncouth appellation of Turks into the more classical name of _Teucri_.]
The tidings of misfortune fly with a rapid wing; yet such was the extent
of Constantinople, that the more distant quarters might prolong, some
moments, the happy ignorance of their ruin. [64] But in the general
consternation, in the feelings of selfish or social anxiety, in the
tumult and thunder of the assault, a _sleepless_ night and morning
[641] must have elapsed; nor can I believe that many Grecian ladies were
awakened by the Janizaries from a sound and tranquil slumber. On the
assurance of the public calamity, the houses and convents were instantly
deserted; and the trembling inhabitants flocked together in the streets,
like a herd of timid animals, as if accumulated weakness could be
productive of strength, or in the vain hope, that amid the crowd each
individual might be safe and invisible. From every part of the capital,
they flowed into the church of St. Sophia: in the space of an hour,
the sanctuary, the choir, the nave, the upper and lower galleries,
were filled with the multitudes of fathers and husbands, of women and
children, of priests, monks, and religious virgins: the doors were
barred on the inside, and they sought protection from the sacred dome,
which they had so lately abhorred as a profane and polluted edifice.
Their confidence was founded on the prophecy of an enthusiast or
impostor; that one day the Turks would enter Constantinople, and pursue
the Romans as far as the column of Constantine in the square before St.
Sophia: but that this would be the term of their calamities: that an
angel would descend from heaven, with a sword in his hand, and would
deliver the empire, with that celestial weapon, to a poor man seated at
the foot of the column. "Take this sword," would he say, "and avenge the
people of the Lord." At these animating words, the Turks would instantly
fly, and the victorious Romans would drive them from the West, and from
all Anatolia as far as the frontiers of Persia. It is on this occasion
that Ducas, with some fancy and much truth, upbraids the discord
and obstinacy of the Greeks. "Had that angel appeared," exclaims the
historian, "had he offered to exterminate your foes if you would consent
to the union of the church, even event then, in that fatal moment, you
would have rejected your safety, or have deceived your God." [65]
[Footnote 64: When Cyrus suppressed Babylon during the celebration of
a festival, so vast was the city, and so careless were the inhabitants,
that much time elapsed before the distant quarters knew that they were
captives. Herodotus, (l. i. c. 191,) and Usher, (Annal. p. 78,) who has
quoted from the prophet Jeremiah a passage of similar import.]
[Footnote 641: This refers to an expression in Ducas, who, to heighten the
effect of his description, speaks of the "sweet morning sleep resting on
the eyes of youths and maidens," p. 288. Edit. Bekker.--M.]
[Footnote 65: This lively description is extracted from Ducas, (c. 39,)
who two years afterwards was sent ambassador from the prince of Lesbos
to the sultan, (c. 44.) Till Lesbos was subdued in 1463, (Phranza,
l. iii. c. 27,) that island must have been full of the fugitives of
Constantinople, who delighted to repeat, perhaps to adorn, the tale of
their misery.]
Chapter LXVIII: Reign Of Mahomet The Second, Extinction Of Eastern Empire.--Part IV.
While they expected the descent of the tardy angel, the doors were
broken with axes; and as the Turks encountered no resistance, their
bloodless hands were employed in selecting and securing the multitude of
their prisoners. Youth, beauty, and the appearance of wealth, attracted
their choice; and the right of property was decided among themselves by
a prior seizure, by personal strength, and by the authority of command.
In the space of an hour, the male captives were bound with cords, the
females with their veils and girdles. The senators were linked with
their slaves; the prelates, with the porters of the church; and young
men of the plebeian class, with noble maids, whose faces had been
invisible to the sun and their nearest kindred. In this common
captivity, the ranks of society were confounded; the ties of nature were
cut asunder; and the inexorable soldier was careless of the father's
groans, the tears of the mother, and the lamentations of the children.
The loudest in their wailings were the nuns, who were torn from the
altar with naked bosoms, outstretched hands, and dishevelled hair; and
we should piously believe that few could be tempted to prefer the vigils
of the harem to those of the monastery. Of these unfortunate Greeks,
of these domestic animals, whole strings were rudely driven through the
streets; and as the conquerors were eager to return for more prey, their
trembling pace was quickened with menaces and blows. At the same hour, a
similar rapine was exercised in all the churches and monasteries, in
all the palaces and habitations, of the capital; nor could any place,
however sacred or sequestered, protect the persons or the property of
the Greeks. Above sixty thousand of this devoted people were transported
from the city to the camp and fleet; exchanged or sold according to the
caprice or interest of their masters, and dispersed in remote servitude
through the provinces of the Ottoman empire. Among these we may notice
some remarkable characters. The historian Phranza, first chamberlain
and principal secretary, was involved with his family in the common lot.
After suffering four months the hardships of slavery, he recovered his
freedom: in the ensuing winter he ventured to Adrianople, and ransomed
his wife from the _mir bashi_, or master of the horse; but his two
children, in the flower of youth and beauty, had been seized for the
use of Mahomet himself. The daughter of Phranza died in the seraglio,
perhaps a virgin: his son, in the fifteenth year of his age, preferred
death to infamy, and was stabbed by the hand of the royal lover. [66] A
deed thus inhuman cannot surely be expiated by the taste and liberality
with which he released a Grecian matron and her two daughters, on
receiving a Latin doe From ode from Philelphus, who had chosen a wife in
that noble family. [67] The pride or cruelty of Mahomet would have
been most sensibly gratified by the capture of a Roman legate; but the
dexterity of Cardinal Isidore eluded the search, and he escaped from
Galata in a plebeian habit. [68] The chain and entrance of the outward
harbor was still occupied by the Italian ships of merchandise and war.
They had signalized their valor in the siege: they embraced the moment
of retreat, while the Turkish mariners were dissipated in the pillage of
the city. When they hoisted sail, the beach was covered with a suppliant
and lamentable crowd; but the means of transportation were scanty: the
Venetians and Genoese selected their countrymen; and, notwithstanding
the fairest promises of the sultan, the inhabitants of Galata evacuated
their houses, and embarked with their most precious effects.
[Footnote 66: See Phranza, l. iii. c. 20, 21. His expressions are
positive: Ameras su‚ man˚ jugulavit.... volebat enim eo turpiter et
nefarie abuti. Me miserum et infelicem! Yet he could only learn from
report the bloody or impure scenes that were acted in the dark recesses
of the seraglio.]
[Footnote 67: See Tiraboschi (tom. vi. P. i. p. 290) and Lancelot, (MÈm.
de l'AcadÈmie des Inscriptions, tom. x. p. 718.) I should be curious to
learn how he could praise the public enemy, whom he so often reviles as
the most corrupt and inhuman of tyrants.]
[Footnote 68: The commentaries of Pius II. suppose that he craftily
placed his cardinal's hat on the head of a corpse which was cut off and
exposed in triumph, while the legate himself was bought and delivered as
a captive of no value. The great Belgic Chronicle adorns his escape with
new adventures, which he suppressed (says Spondanus, A.D. 1453, No.
15) in his own letters, lest he should lose the merit and reward of
suffering for Christ. * Note: He was sold as a slave in Galata, according to Von Hammer, p.
175. See the somewhat vague and declamatory letter of Cardinal Isidore,
in the appendix to Clarke's Travels, vol. ii. p. 653.--M.]
In the fall and the sack of great cities, an historian is condemned to
repeat the tale of uniform calamity: the same effects must be produced
by the same passions; and when those passions may be indulged without
control, small, alas! is the difference between civilized and savage
man. Amidst the vague exclamations of bigotry and hatred, the Turks are
not accused of a wanton or immoderate effusion of Christian blood: but
according to their maxims, (the maxims of antiquity,) the lives of the
vanquished were forfeited; and the legitimate reward of the conqueror
was derived from the service, the sale, or the ransom, of his captives
of both sexes. [69] The wealth of Constantinople had been granted by
the sultan to his victorious troops; and the rapine of an hour is more
productive than the industry of years. But as no regular division was
attempted of the spoil, the respective shares were not determined by
merit; and the rewards of valor were stolen away by the followers of the
camp, who had declined the toil and danger of the battle. The narrative
of their depredations could not afford either amusement or instruction:
the total amount, in the last poverty of the empire, has been valued
at four millions of ducats; [70] and of this sum a small part was
the property of the Venetians, the Genoese, the Florentines, and the
merchants of Ancona. Of these foreigners, the stock was improved in
quick and perpetual circulation: but the riches of the Greeks were
displayed in the idle ostentation of palaces and wardrobes, or deeply
buried in treasures of ingots and old coin, lest it should be demanded
at their hands for the defence of their country. The profanation
and plunder of the monasteries and churches excited the most tragic
complaints. The dome of St. Sophia itself, the earthly heaven, the
second firmament, the vehicle of the cherubim, the throne of the glory
of God, [71] was despoiled of the oblation of ages; and the gold and
silver, the pearls and jewels, the vases and sacerdotal ornaments, were
most wickedly converted to the service of mankind. After the divine
images had been stripped of all that could be valuable to a profane eye,
the canvas, or the wood, was torn, or broken, or burnt, or trod under
foot, or applied, in the stables or the kitchen, to the vilest uses. The
example of sacrilege was imitated, however, from the Latin conquerors
of Constantinople; and the treatment which Christ, the Virgin, and the
saints, had sustained from the guilty Catholic, might be inflicted by
the zealous Mussulman on the monuments of idolatry. Perhaps, instead
of joining the public clamor, a philosopher will observe, that in the
decline of the arts the workmanship could not be more valuable than the
work, and that a fresh supply of visions and miracles would speedily be
renewed by the craft of the priests and the credulity of the people. He
will more seriously deplore the loss of the Byzantine libraries, which
were destroyed or scattered in the general confusion: one hundred
and twenty thousand manuscripts are said to have disappeared; [72] ten
volumes might be purchased for a single ducat; and the same ignominious
price, too high perhaps for a shelf of theology, included the whole
works of Aristotle and Homer, the noblest productions of the science
and literature of ancient Greece. We may reflect with pleasure that an
inestimable portion of our classic treasures was safely deposited in
Italy; and that the mechanics of a German town had invented an art which
derides the havoc of time and barbarism.
[Footnote 69: Busbequius expatiates with pleasure and applause on the
rights of war, and the use of slavery, among the ancients and the Turks,
(de Legat. Turcic‚, epist. iii. p. 161.)]
[Footnote 70: This sum is specified in a marginal note of Leunclavius,
(Chalcondyles, l. viii. p. 211,) but in the distribution to Venice,
Genoa, Florence, and Ancona, of 50, 20, and 15,000 ducats, I suspect
that a figure has been dropped. Even with the restitution, the foreign
property would scarcely exceed one fourth.]
[Footnote 71: See the enthusiastic praises and lamentations of Phranza,
(l. iii. c. 17.)]
[Footnote 72: See Ducas, (c. 43,) and an epistle, July 15th, 1453, from
Laurus Quirinus to Pope Nicholas V., (Hody de GrÊcis, p. 192, from a MS.
in the Cotton library.)]
From the first hour [73] of the memorable twenty-ninth of May, disorder
and rapine prevailed in Constantinople, till the eighth hour of the same
day; when the sultan himself passed in triumph through the gate of St.
Romanus. He was attended by his viziers, bashaws, and guards, each of
whom (says a Byzantine historian) was robust as Hercules, dexterous as
Apollo, and equal in battle to any ten of the race of ordinary mortals.
The conqueror [74] gazed with satisfaction and wonder on the strange,
though splendid, appearance of the domes and palaces, so dissimilar from
the style of Oriental architecture. In the hippodrome, or _atmeidan_,
his eye was attracted by the twisted column of the three serpents;
and, as a trial of his strength, he shattered with his iron mace or
battle-axe the under jaw of one of these monsters, [75] which in the
eyes of the Turks were the idols or talismans of the city. [751] At the
principal door of St. Sophia, he alighted from his horse, and entered
the dome; and such was his jealous regard for that monument of his
glory, that on observing a zealous Mussulman in the act of breaking the
marble pavement, he admonished him with his cimeter, that, if the
spoil and captives were granted to the soldiers, the public and
private buildings had been reserved for the prince. By his command the
metropolis of the Eastern church was transformed into a mosque: the rich
and portable instruments of superstition had been removed; the crosses
were thrown down; and the walls, which were covered with images and
mosaics, were washed and purified, and restored to a state of naked
simplicity. On the same day, or on the ensuing Friday, the _muezin_,
or crier, ascended the most lofty turret, and proclaimed the _ezan_, or
public invitation in the name of God and his prophet; the imam preached;
and Mahomet and Second performed the _namaz_ of prayer and thanksgiving
on the great altar, where the Christian mysteries had so lately been
celebrated before the last of the CÊsars. [76] From St. Sophia he
proceeded to the august, but desolate mansion of a hundred successors of
the great Constantine, but which in a few hours had been stripped of the
pomp of royalty. A melancholy reflection on the vicissitudes of human
greatness forced itself on his mind; and he repeated an elegant distich
of Persian poetry: "The spider has wove his web in the Imperial palace;
and the owl hath sung her watch-song on the towers of Afrasiab." [77]
[Footnote 73: The Julian Calendar, which reckons the days and hours from
midnight, was used at Constantinople. But Ducas seems to understand the
natural hours from sunrise.]
[Footnote 74: See the Turkish Annals, p. 329, and the Pandects of
Leunclavius, p. 448.]
[Footnote 75: I have had occasion (vol. ii. p. 100) to mention this
curious relic of Grecian antiquity.]
[Footnote 751: Von Hammer passes over this circumstance, which is treated
by Dr. Clarke (Travels, vol. ii. p. 58, 4to. edit,) as a fiction
of Thevenot. Chishull states that the monument was broken by some
attendants of the Polish ambassador.--M.]
[Footnote 76: We are obliged to Cantemir (p. 102) for the Turkish
account of the conversion of St. Sophia, so bitterly deplored by Phranza
and Ducas. It is amusing enough to observe, in what opposite lights the
same object appears to a Mussulman and a Christian eye.]
[Footnote 77: This distich, which Cantemir gives in the original,
derives new beauties from the application. It was thus that Scipio
repeated, in the sack of Carthage, the famous prophecy of Homer. The
same generous feeling carried the mind of the conqueror to the past or
the future.]