The city was now completely invested. Menaced from all sides, the
defenders were not sufficient in numbers to guard the many approaches.
Yet the daily fighting was desperate, for the Moslems were inspired by
the certainty of success, while the Christians were nerved with the
energy of despair. To end the siege Mahomet designated a time for a
combined assault from sea and land.
As the fatal day dawned, numberless hordes moved towards the walls.
The great ditches were soon filled with the dead bodies of thousands
of the least serviceable soldiers, who had been driven from behind by
the lances of the trained bands, that they might thus worry the
patience and exhaust the resources of the brave defenders, without
taxing the best of the Moslem troops. The carcasses of the slain made
a highway for the living, over which they poured against the gate of
St. Romanus. The four grim towers toppled beneath the pounding of
great stone balls hurled from the cannon of Urban. The defenders were
driven off the adjacent walls by the storms of bullets and arrows that
swept them. At the critical moment the Janizaries, unwearied as yet by
watching or fighting, twelve thousand strong, as compact a mass
beneath the eye of the Sultan as the weapon he held in his hand, moved
to where the breach was widest.
"The spoil to all! A province to him who first enters!" cried the
Sultan, waving his iron battle mace. Hassan, the giant, first mounted
the rampart, and fell pierced with arrows and crushed with stones. But
through the gap his dying valor had made in the ranks of the foe first
rushed the company of Ballaban.
In vain did the people crowd beneath the dome of St. Sophia, grasping
with hopeless hope an ancient prophecy that at the extreme moment an
angel would descend to rescue the city. Alas! only the angel of death
came that day; and to none brought he more welcome news than to the
Emperor,--"Thy prayer is answered; for thou hast fallen where the dead
lie thickest!" Near the gateway of St. Romanus, where he had met the
first of the invaders, under the piles of the dead, gashed by sabre
strokes and crushed beneath the feet of the victors, lay the body of
Constantine Palæologus, the noblest of the Cæsars of the Eastern
Empire!
The Turks placed his ghastly head between the feet of the bronze
horse, a part of the equestrian statue of Justinian, where it was
reverently saluted even by the Moslems, who paused in the rage of the
sack to think upon the virtue and courage of the unfortunate monarch.
Captain Ballaban had pressed rapidly through the city to the doors of
St. Sophia. The oaken gates flew back under the axes of the Moslems.
Monks and matrons, children and nuns, lords and beggars were crowded
together, not knowing whether the grand dome would melt away and a
legion of angels descend for their relief, or the vast enclosure would
become a pen of indiscriminate slaughter. The motley and helpless
misery excited the pity of the captors. Ballaban's voice rang through
the arches, proclaiming safely to those who should submit. That he
might the better command the scene, he made his way to the chancel in
front of the grand altar. It was filled with the nuns, repeating their
prayers. Among them was the fair Albanian. Her face was but partly
toward him, yet he could never mistake that queenly head. She was
addressing the Sisters. Holding aloft the bright shaft of a stiletto,
she cried,--
"Let us give ourselves to heaven, but never to the harem!"
Ballaban paused an instant. But that instant seemed to him many
minutes. As, under the lightning's flash, the whole moving panorama of
the wide landscape seems to stand still, and paints vividly its
prominent objects, however scattered, upon the startled eye of the
beholders; so his mind marvellously quickened by the excitement, took
in at once the long track of his own life. He saw a little child's
hand wreathing him with flowers plucked beside a cottage on the
Balkans; a lovely captive whose face was lit by the blazing home in a
hamlet of Albania; a form of one at Sfetigrade lying still and faint
with sickness, but radiant as with the beginning of transfiguration
for the spirit life; and the queenly being who was borne in the
palanquin through the gate of Phranza. But how changed! How much more
glorious now! Earthly beauty had become haloed with the heavenly. He
never had conceived of such majesty, such glory of personality, such
splendor of character, as were revealed by her attitude, her eye, her
voice, her purpose.
"But now," thought he, "the descending blade will change this utmost
sublimity of being into a little heap of gory dust!"
All this flashed through his mind. In another instant his strong hand
had caught the arm of the voluntary sacrifice. The stiletto, falling,
caught in the folds of her garments, and then rang upon the marble
floor of the chancel. Morsinia uttered a shriek and fell, apparently
as lifeless as if the blade had entered her heart.
The Janizary stood astounded. A tide of feeling strange to him poured
through his soul. For the first time in his life he felt a horror of
war. Not thousands writhing on the battle field could blanch his cheek
with pity for their pangs: but that one voice rang through and through
him, and rent his heart with sympathetic agony. Her cry had become a
cry of his own soul too.
For the first time he realized the dignity of woman's character. This
woman was not even wounded. She had fallen beneath the stroke of a
thought, a sentiment, a woman's notion of her honor! The women he had
known had no such fatal scruples. Other captive beauties soon became
accustomed to their new surroundings. Many even offered to buy with
their charms an exchange of poverty for the luxuries of the harem of
Pashas and wealthy Moslems. Was this a solitary woman's tragedy of
virtue? Or was it some peculiar teaching of the Christian's faith that
inspired her to such heroism? However it came, the man knew that with
her it was a mighty reality; this instinct of virtue; this sanctity of
person.
And this woman was his dream made real! A celestial ideal which he had
touched!
The man's brain reeled with the shock of these tenderer and deeper
feelings, coming after the wildness of the battle rage. He grasped the
altar for support. The blood seemed to have ceased to bound in his
veins, the temples to be pulseless; a band to have been drawn tightly
about his brain so as to paralyze its action. He felt himself falling.
A deathly sickness spread through his frame. He was sure he had
fainted. He thought he must have been unconscious for a while. Yet
when he opened his eyes, the soldier near him was in the same attitude
of dragging a nun by her wrists as when he last saw him. Time had
stood still with his pulses. He shuddered at the cruelty on every
side, as the shrieks from the high galleries were answered by those in
distant alcoves and from the deep crypt. He watched the groups of old
men and children, monks and senators, nuns and courtesans, tied
together and dragged away, some for slaughter, some for princely
ransom, some for shame.
The building was well emptied when the Sultan entered.
He at once advanced to the altar and proclaimed:
"God is God; there is but one God, and Mahomet is the apostle of God!"
"But whom have we here, Captain Ballaban?"
"Your Majesty, I am guarding a beautiful captive whom I would not have
fall into the hands of the common soldiers; I take it, of high
estate," replied the Janizary, knowing that such an introduction to
the royal attention alone could save her from the fate which awaited
the unhappy maidens, most of whom were liable to be sold to brutal
masters and transported to distant provinces.
The Sultan gazed upon the partly conscious woman, and commanded,----
"Let her be veiled! Seek out a goodly house. Find the Eunuch Tamlich."
Ballaban shuddered at this command, and was about to reply, when his
judgment suggested that he was impotent to dispute the royal will
except by endangering the life or the welfare of his captive.
The safest place for her was, after all, with the maidens who were
known to be the choice of the Sultan, and thus beyond insult by any
except the imperial debauchee.
Mahomet II. gave orders for the immediate transformation of the
Christian temple of St. Sophia into a Mosque. In a few hours
desolation reigned in those "Courts of the Lord's House," which, when
first completed, ages ago, drew from the imperial founder, the remark:
"Oh, Solomon! I have surpassed thee!" and which, though the poverty of
later monarchs had allowed it to become sadly impaired, was yet
regarded by the Greek Christians as worthy of being the vestibule of
heaven.
The command of the Sultan: "Take away every trace of the idolatry of
the infidel!" was obeyed in demolishing the rarest gems of Christian
art to which attached the least symbolism of the now abolished
worship. The arms were chiseled off the marble crosses which stood out
in relief from the side walls, and from the bases of the gigantic
pillars. The rare mosaics which lined the church as if it were a vast
casket--the fitting gift of the princes of the earth to the King of
Kings--were plastered or painted over. The altar, that marvellous
combination of gold and silver and bronze, conglomerate with a
thousand precious stones, was torn away, that the red slab of the
Mihrab might point the prayers of the new devotees toward Mecca. The
furniture, from that upon the grand altar to the banners and mementoes
of a thousand years, the donations of Greek emperors and sovereigns of
other lands, was broken or torn into pieces. There remained only the
grand proportions of the building--its chief glory--enriched by
polished surfaces of marble and porphyry slabs; the superb pillars
brought by the reverent cupidity of earlier ages from the ruined
temple of Diana at Ephesus, the temple of the Sun at Palmyra, the
temple on the Acro-Corinthus, and the mythologic urn from Pergamus,
which latter, having been used as a baptismal font by the followers of
Jesus, was now devoted to the ablutions of the Moslems.
From St. Sophia the Sultan passed to the palace of the Greek Cæsars.
"Truly! truly!" said he "The spider's web is the royal curtain; the
owl sounds the watch cry on the towers of Afrasiab," quoting from the
Persian poet Firdusi, as he gazed about the deserted halls. He issued
his mandate which should summon architects and decorators, not only
from his dominions, but from Christian nations, to adorn the splendid
headland with the palatial motley of walls and kiosks which were to
constitute his new seraglio.
The considerateness of Ballaban led him to select the house of Phranza
as the place to which Morsinia was taken. The noble site and
substantial structure of the mansion of the late chamberlain commended
it to the Sultan for the temporary haremlik; and the familiar rooms
alleviated, like the faces of mute friends, the wildness of the grief
of their only familiar captive.