Episode 332 - Not with a Whimper but a Bang

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Hello, everyone, and welcome to the History of Byzantium, episode 332.

Not with a whimper, but a bang.

In the year 404 AD, the Praetorian Prefect Anthemius ordered the construction of a new defensive wall along Constantinople's eastern side.

It took nine years to raise a suitable structure across the six-kilometre stretch from the Golden Horn to the Sea of Marmara.

Halfway through their task, the work crews of New Rome were informed, as if to underline the necessity of their labour, that old Rome had just been sacked by the Goths.

Once the walls were finished, they stood as a marvel of Roman engineering.

A triple wall, sporting one hundred and ninety-two towers, now blocked the path of any invader.

The sea flanked them on either side.

The greatest single defensive network in the world had been created.

As Antony Cordellis wrote, Henceforth medieval cities would fall into three categories: unwalled, walled, and Constantinople.

Four centuries later, on the other side of the world, the Chinese discovered the formula for gunpowder, charcoal, sulphur, saltpetre, bang.

Initially, this new concoction was employed as entertainment, fireworks to wow the great and the good, but the potential for its use as a weapon was noted.

Another four centuries pass, and explosives appear on the battlefields of Europe for the first time.

For today, our drumbeat signals the change of perspective from the Emperor to the Sultan.

Constantine XI Palaeologos was born in February 1404, the seventh child of Manuel Palaeologos and Helena Dragash.

He grew up during the long Ottoman Civil War and was then sent to the Peloponnese.

There he learnt to fight and to govern as he and his brothers eliminated the various Latin lords who still resided in the Morea.

He was humbled after seizing Athens during the Hungarian-led crusade of the 1440s.

Sultan Murad brought a huge army to raid the Peloponnese and reduced Constantine and his siblings to vassalage.

When his brother John died in october fourteen forty eight, Constantine found himself next in line for the throne.

Despite being married three times, John had failed to produce an heir, and Constantine's other older brothers had all predeceased him.

His scheming younger brother Demetrius lobbied for the crown, but their mother and most government officials preferred Constantine.

Sultan Murad also gave his assent, so the forty-three-year-old arrived in Constantinople in March 1449 and dispatched Demetrius to the Peloponnese to join his other brother Thomas.

Constantine had shown initiative and bravery during his time in office, but there was little he could achieve as emperor.

The Romans were surrounded on every side by the Ottomans, who had just put the Hungarian threat to bed for the foreseeable future, while the capital itself was torn between Unionists and anti-Unionists.

Most of those who'd travelled to Italy with the Emperor John wanted to honour the deal they had made with the Pope,

while a few had recanted and joined the anti-Union party, who pointed to the Hungarian dead on the field at Varna as evidence of God's disapproval of the Orthodox capitulation.

Constantine was in a difficult position.

It would have been suicide to join the anti-Unionists.

The Romans were dependent on Latin help to survive, but to persecute them would be disastrous, too.

They would become martyrs, and he would be seen as a Catholic puppet.

With so few people left in the Empire, he couldn't risk alienating anyone.

And so Constantine was not crowned emperor.

His excuse was that he was in search of a new wife, having been twice widowed, and so the coronation could wait until a suitable bride was found, but it seems likely that he avoided holding such a grand ceremony, because through it he would have to confirm or reject the union with Rome, and it would be safer to do neither.

This was not politically problematic, as emperors were proclaimed by consensus rather than by the actual ritual of coronation, but it was symbolic of the paralysis in the city.

Constantine met with both the Unionists and Anti-Unionists and tried to charm them, but they wouldn't move from their positions.

The anti-Unionists had even begun to worship separately from the patriarchal establishment.

The atmosphere in the city's churches was increasingly toxic.

Three years later, the patriarch, Gregorius III, abandoned the city and moved to Rome.

He couldn't find a solution to the crisis and preferred retirement to further conflict.

He didn't officially resign, though, and so no new patriarch was yet appointed.

Again, Constantine chose the path of least resistance to avoid a public discussion on the issue of union.

Mehmet II was born in 1432 at Adrianople, the son of Sultan Murad II and a European slave girl.

He was sent to eastern Anatolia to be educated and learn the basics of governance.

Bizarrely, his father abdicated in 1444, leaving his twelve-year-old son as the reigning sultan.

As we heard in our last episode, Murad quickly returned to fend off the Hungarians, and when he died in 1451, Mehmet was 18 and able to rule in his own right.

Mehmet was a very good student and eager to take charge of the state, and he was absolutely certain what his first objective was, to conquer Constantinople.

Capturing the city had been on the Ottoman to do list for a very long time.

Three different attempts had been made to besiege it, but each had failed because of the immense logistical challenge which it presented.

Mehmet firmly believed that now was the time to strike.

His father had neutralized the main pockets of resistance to Ottoman rule, and the recent failure of the Varna Crusade made it unlikely that the Latins would rouse themselves for another campaign.

The stakes were high for the young Sultan, though.

This was going to be the first major campaign of his reign.

His legitimacy was on the line.

He'd already had power yanked away from him once, and if this siege failed, it would be a black mark against him.

Mehmet had learnt from history, though.

Previous sieges had failed for a number of reasons.

External enemies striking from east and west, Ottoman pretenders popping up to destabilize the succession, and most significantly, Christian control of of the sea.

This prevented the Turks from reaching the vulnerable sea walls and allowed supplies to reach the Romans.

The Sultan immediately attended to these potential issues.

He had his baby brother strangled soon after learning of his father's death.

Then he greeted every envoy who came to meet him warmly, confirming all of his father's peace treaties.

Finally, he ordered the construction of a huge fleet.

Later that year, the Emir of Karaman tried to take advantage of Mehmet's youth by seizing fortresses in central Anatolia.

The Sultan swiftly took them back, but instead of launching a punitive raid, he pushed for peace.

The Emir accepted, giving Mehmet hope that his eastern front had now been secured for the next few years.

On his way back to the Bosphorus, he was met by two parties demanding favours from him, one that emphasized the potential vulnerability of his position, and the other that confirmed him in his mission.

The first were his janissaries.

The men who guarded his bedchamber were demanding a bonus to celebrate his accession to the throne.

The Sultan had little choice but to pay them.

If this borderline mutiny angered him, then we can only imagine his mood when the next set of envoys arrived.

You see, the Romans were holding a great-grandson of Bayezid under comfortable house arrest at the request of the Ottoman authorities.

The Turks paid the Romans a stipend to keep him there and away from imperial politics.

Since Mehmet was new on the throne and handing out peace deals willy-nilly, the Romans decided to push their luck.

They asked if Orhan's allowance could be doubled, you know, to make sure his guards don't accidentally, I don't know, help him start a civil war.

They had poked the wrong bear.

Mehmet sent them home without an answer, but they soon got one.

The Sultan and a small army arrived to the north of Constantinople in spring 1452.

They moved to the coast, about ten kilometers north of the city, and began to lay waste to the fields and vineyards along the shore.

The locals fled to Constantinople, and the mood in the city plummeted as the Romans realized what this meant.

You see, the next step in the Sultan's plan was to build a new fortress on the European side of the Bosphorus.

During his eight-year siege of Constantinople, Bayezid had built one on the Asian side, and now Mehmet wanted another just across the water.

The goal was to place cannons in both in order to fire on ships travelling south from the Black Sea.

The Romans received most of their grain from that direction.

If this plan was successful, the Ottomans would essentially be able to close the Bosphorus, shutting down a major source of aid for the Romans.

This decision was not without consequence, though.

To close the shipping lanes would deny access to the Venetians and Genoese, both of whom had major interests in the Black Sea.

When the Sultan's work crews arrived at the construction site, alarm bells rang across the Mediterranean.

Constantine quickly sent envoys to the Sultan, laden with gifts, and Mehmet beheaded them.

Those who shouted that the end times had come seemed less foolish than they once had.

The Vasilevs was under no illusions about how serious the situation was.

He began making frantic preparations for the siege he knew was coming.

He gathered all the grain he could from the surrounding countryside, he had weapons stockpiled, and he sent engineers to begin patching up the walls and clearing the moat.

He also discreetly conducted a survey of the population of his capital to learn how many men could be pressed into service on the walls when the Turks arrived.

The answer he got was deeply concerning.

His officials came back with the number 4,773.

Constantinople was not the city it had once been.

The population had dwindled to somewhere between 25 and 40,000 people.

A good size for a European city, but a far cry from an imperial capital.

The construction of the new fortress along the Bosphorus had encouraged more people to flee, leaving the emperor dangerously short of manpower.

The census simply confirmed what he already knew.

Without help from the Latins, the city was as good as lost.

Constantine dispatched a stream of begging letters and envoys headed for the courts of Western Europe.

Help must be sent immediately, or it will be too late.

Mehmet now toured the land walls of Constantinople so that he could see for himself what he had already been studying on paper.

Meanwhile, the castle on the Bosphorus was complete by September and still stands today.

Once cannons were mounted on the battlements, it gave the Turks theoretical control over ships passing through the straits.

Since this was seen as Constantinople's lifeline, the fortress became known colloquially as the Throat Cutter.

By November the garrison had their cannons loaded and ready to fire.

Their ships would sail out and inform anyone travelling south that they must stop and pay a toll or face the consequences.

Most complied.

but on the 10th of November, two Venetian merchant vessels approached the fortress.

The Venetians had enjoyed tax-free trading in the Bosphorus for centuries now, and they weren't about to change their ways.

The ships sailed on, the cannons opened fire, but missed their target.

Two weeks later, another Venetian merchant carrying grain to Constantinople tried to run the gauntlet.

This time a cannonball over hundred pounds in weight passed straight through its timbers.

The ship sank.

The crew swam ashore and were taken to the Sultan.

He had them beheaded and their captain impaled.

War was coming to the Italian merchant republics, whether they liked it or not.

Mehmet then headed back to Adrianople to oversee preparations for the largest military campaign in Ottoman history.

To make sure that no help would come from the Peloponnese, the Sultan ordered an army to attack Constantine's brothers.

The Turks stormed through the countryside, disrupting the harvest and scattering the people.

The response in the west was muted.

Constantine's ambassadors offered everything they could to elicit aid.

Trading privileges were promised to any Italian or Dalmatian city that would send help.

King Alfonso of Aragon was offered the island of Lemnos, while Janko Hunyadi, the Hungarian general, was offered the remaining towns of Thrace if he could muster some crusading spirit.

The Pope, Nicholas V, was not as sympathetic as the Emperor had hoped.

He was well aware that the union pronounced at Florence had not yet been celebrated in Constantinople.

He wrote to the Vasilevs warning him that the Ottomans were God's punishment for Greek disobedience.

He agreed to send a cardinal to oversee the implementation of church union, and only then would he begin to organize a relief effort.

Of course, the Romans spoke to the Venetians and Genoese as well.

Both maritime republics were deeply conflicted.

Their business model depended on the exploitation of Roman lands with no trade duties imposed.

So they had every incentive to protect their safe harbour on the Golden Horn, not to mention their trade posts in the Black Sea, which the Ottomans were now threatening.

Many Italians also felt that they had a religious duty to protect a great Christian city from the Muslims.

As corporate entities, though, both states were pragmatic.

If the Ottomans wanted Constantinople, they would eventually take it.

Declaring war was a bad, long-term move.

Better to maintain a neutral stance to protect their profits.

They did understand that the more land Mehmet gobbled up, the less likely he was to play nice with them, but war was always going to be the more expensive option.

Both states moved slowly and cautiously.

They forwarded the Roman pleas to the French, Spanish, and Hungarians, hoping that they would do the work for them, while debating internally exactly how to respond.

In the end, Genoa would declare its neutrality, desperate to protect the status of Galata, its colony on the Golden Horn, while the Venetians, with great foot dragging, offered to help the Romans.

The Venetian Senate debated whether to simply abandon Constantinople to its fate, but the motion was rejected.

The leading Venetian captain of the eastern Mediterranean, Gabriella Trevisan, was ordered to travel to the Golden Horn immediately, but was only authorized to stay if the city was directly threatened.

Constantine was left to sweat, unsure of what aid would reach him by spring, which was when he expected an attack to begin.

In early December the papal legate arrived with two hundred gunners and crossbowmen in tow.

This was Cardinal Isidore, who was quite an interesting figure.

He was a Roman, and had spent his early career in the Peloponnese.

He was eventually made the Metropolitan of Kiev and enthusiastically supported church union in that role.

Unfortunately, the Russians did not, and he was thrown in jail.

He was eventually released and promoted to be a cardinal by the Pope.

He used money the pontiff had given him to hire Italian mercenaries as he made his way to Constantinople, and the hope was that these 200 men were the vanguard of a much larger Allied force that would come to the city's rescue.

In the meantime, though, they were here to enforce church union.

Constantine had no choice but to comply.

On the 12th of December, the Emperor and Isidore, standing in for the absent patriarch, entered the Achia Sophia to celebrate the reunion of eastern and western churches.

The decrees of union, as recited at Florence, were read again.

The anti-unionists boycotted the ceremony and argued that the great cathedral was now tainted.

It was in this atmosphere that one of our historians wrote the famous line, It would be better to see the turban of the Turks reigning in the centre of the city than the Latin mitre.

Though the quote is probably fictitious, it does capture the mood of the moment.

Some amongst the anti-Unionists felt that a Turkish takeover would at least preserve them from Latin domination, while there were plenty of others who felt subservience to Rome was obviously preferable to becoming slaves of the sultan.

At this point, true independence seemed impossible.

Now that the churches were united, Constantine had to confront the Venetians resident in his capital.

He desperately needed their support if he was going to make it through this.

Without their ships, the Romans could not hope to hold the Golden Horn.

Cardinal Isidore worked with him as they sat down for a tense meeting with the Italians.

The Venetian Ba'ilo, the community's leader, Girolimo Minotto, was in favour of openly joining the Byzantine cause.

His people were settled in Constantinople, after all, and they had friends and family amongst the Roman population.

At a crucial gathering a few days later, the leading Venetians in the city voted in favour of fighting.

And it wasn't just the resident Italians who joined in.

Gabriele Trevisan, under strict orders not to get Venice involved in war if he could avoid avoid it, agreed to stay.

The Bailo then made a courageous decision.

He ordered the various merchant ships which were in the city on business to stay and join the fight.

Initially he urged them to volunteer.

They had seen the Ottoman guns in the bosphorus.

Their livelihoods were on the line.

He asked them to help defend their brothers and sisters who lived in the city, as well as stressing their Christian duty.

But in the legalistic world of Venice the final decision was made for them.

Minotto ordered them to remain, under threat of a heavy fine should they attempt to leave.

Everyone wrote home to explain the situation to the Senate, and to beg for more help.

Debate over the details of this decision continued over Christmas and well into January.

The Vasilevs agreed to pay the expenses of the merchant crews, which was fair, though finding cash was going to be a major issue for the rest of the siege.

There was also a heated debate about what to do with the goods which the merchant ships were carrying.

The Romans wanted it unloaded and placed in warehouses in Constantinople, but the sailors balked at this.

In the end, their captains kept their goods on board, but swore oaths to the Emperor that they would not flee.

This was a huge relief for Constantine.

The sea walls remained the most vulnerable point in the city, as the Venetians knew all too well.

Their ships would now patrol the horn, while their spare men would be sent to serve as infantry.

This decision was also crucial for the historical record, since one of the men who stayed behind was Niccolo Barbaro.

Barbaro was serving as a crossbowman and possibly a medic on one of the merchant vessels, and he kept a diary of the siege, a day-by-day account of what the Venetians did to defend Constantinople.

It's a vital source for what you're about to hear.

Up at Adrianople, the new year heralded the beginning of a mass call-up of Ottoman troops.

The Janissaries ran the army, but below them were regular soldiers from across the Balkans and Anatolia, as well as the Sultan's vassals, mostly allied Christians who trudged reluctantly to Thrace.

Joining them were volunteers, mercenaries of all faiths and nomads from the plateau, all drawn by the promise of the riches which lay inside the great city.

As I am sure you know, Mehmet was also investing heavily in artillery.

Gunpowder had arrived in Europe around the middle of the thirteenth century.

Clumsy cannons, bombs, and handguns had all followed, and the intense competition between states had led to the rapid development of new weapons and tactics.

By the thirteen seventies cannons had made it to the Balkans and had become a feature of sieges, while, as we saw last episode, the Hungarians had already developed battlefield artillery by the 1440s.

The Ottomans were actually well behind the French and English, for example, who'd happily been blowing one another up during the Hundred Years' War,

but they had used cannons without much success against the walls of Constantinople during Murad's siege of 1422.

Mehmet now demanded the creation of a full artillery battery that could be unleashed against the ancient defences.

This included handguns or harquebuses for the Janissaries, small caliber cannons, and large mortars.

These heavy, short-barreled guns threw stone balls high into the air,

and most of these pieces seemed to have been cast by European engineers who had the necessary expertise and were handsomely rewarded for doing so.

Famously, Mehmet commissioned a monster cannon of unprecedented size, promoted to him by a Hungarian called Orban.

We are told that he had offered his services to Constantine, but the emperor did not have the cash to spare, and so Orban turned up at Adrianople, promising to build a huge cannon which could put a dent in the Roman land walls.

The shot from my cannon, he supposedly said, could reduce even the walls of Babylon itself.

The expense was huge, and the danger that the cannon would shatter after firing was great, but three months later Orban was ready to test it.

The population of Adrianople were warned about the impending experiment, and good thing they were, since the resulting explosion was heard for miles around, and clouds of smoke filled the air.

The test was successful, though.

The cannon ball it fired travelled a thousand paces and embedded itself deep into the earth.

The Sultan smiled.

On the 26th of January, 1453, the Romans got the boost they needed.

Several Genoese ships arrived carrying 700 men under the command of Giovanni Giustiniani Longo.

There remains some debate about his his biography, but he seems to have been born on Chios to one of the Genoese families who now ran the island.

He became a professional condottiero, a mercenary captain, who fought in both Italy and the Aegean.

It's possible he used his position to dabble in piracy, it's possible he was already known to the emperor, and it seems likely that he'd served as one of the chief officers at the Genoese colony of Caffa in the Crimea.

Justiniani responded swiftly to the news of the Ottoman threat.

He'd recruited 300 mercenaries from Chios and Rhodes to add to the 400 Genoese who already served under him.

He financed the mission from his own pocket, though he fully expected to be rewarded for his service.

His men arrived with a good deal of military equipment, including an expert sapper who could direct counter-siege operations.

Given the pausity of his own forces and Gustiniani's experience, Constantine promoted the Condottiero to the rank of protostrator and put him in charge of the city's defences.

As a reward, he gifted him the island of Lemnos to govern, should they all make it out of this alive.

That might sound like quite the promotion for a man who'd only just arrived, but Constantine knew that his own men had nothing like the discipline and experience of Giustiniani's troops.

It would also avoid any potential squabbling or treachery from his own nobility, as well as freeing the emperor up to focus on morale and governance.

Other volunteers drifted into the city over the next couple of months, and were immediately put under Justiniani's command.

On the twenty sixth of February, though, some went the other way.

Seven Venetian merchant ships slipped out of the harbour at night, taking seven hundred people with them.

The wind was on their side, and they escaped the notice of the Turkish fleet gathering at Gallipoli.

It was what the Emperor had feared would happen, and though he was told that no one else would fly the nest, he really couldn't afford to lose any more men.

Spring was approaching.

Every day reports reached him of the monstrous numbers that Mehmet was raising to bring against him, on land and at sea.

Soon reinforcements might not be able to reach the city.

It was only at this point that the Venetian Senate received all the letters from the meetings held in December.

They were still deeply ambivalent about attacking the Ottomans, but they accepted the word of Minotto and Trevisan, and agreed to send help.

Two transport ships were commissioned to carry 400 soldiers each to the Golden Horn.

The men had to be recruited, the ships prepared, and the expedition paid for, of course, and so it was agreed that this relief force would not depart until the 8th of April.

At Adrianople, the Sultan was coming to terms with the sheer scale of the campaign he was about to launch.

He had called up all the soldiers he reasonably could, something in the region of 60,000 men.

They were now eating their way through the storehouses of Thrace.

Pack animals by the thousand were appearing from the hills of the Balkans, and markets were being established along the road towards Constantinople.

More resources were being diverted south to Gallipoli, where sails were being hoisted on the huge new fleet that had been built, while Anatolian units began crossing the bosphorus and camping outside the throat cutter.

Teams of engineers were sent south to reinforce the bridges and roads over which this mass of humanity and their enormous cannons would soon have to travel.

The Sultan's advisers were feeling distinctly nervous about the enormous expense that their young ruler was going to.

By their estimates, there would be over twice as many people outside the walls of Constantinople as there were inside them.

According to Antony Caldellis, as much as 5% of the adult male population of the Ottoman world would soon be in the vicinity, consuming the labour of about a million others.

In other words, this siege had better succeed quickly, or it was going to bleed the state dry.

We might question whether a a twenty-year-old really planned all of this.

Surely the Ottoman high command were the real driving force, but that does not seem to be the case.

Amongst those who opposed the campaign was the Grand Vizier himself, Chandali Halil Pasha.

Halil had been the vizier when Mehmet had briefly ruled a decade earlier, and there was tension between them over how Murad's return to power had been handled.

The Grand Vizier was a cautious man who enjoyed personal investments in trade that passed through Constantinople, and, according to some sources, took regular bribes from the Byzantines to leave them in peace.

The marcher lords of the Balkans were not keen on this plan either.

They enjoyed the freedom which came from the decentralized Ottoman state.

Constantinople was clearly an imperial capital.

They were happy to see it left as a backwater, and resented sending their best men to throw themselves against its walls in the cause of a stronger central government.

The stakes were getting higher and higher for Mehmet, who drove the campaign forward with furious intent.

He demanded that the attack commence as soon as possible.

He sent ahead a scouting force whose job was to neutralize the remaining Byzantine forts in Thrace.

Some surrendered, others resisted.

The Ottomans didn't want to waste time besieging these outposts, so they simply left a few troops to blockade places like Salimbria to ensure that they could offer no help to their compatriots.

The main body of Turks continued on to the Theodosian walls.

There they cut down the vineyards and orchards which lay outside the fortifications to clear space for the artillery batteries which would be placed there.

On Easter Monday, the 2nd of April, the first units of Mehmet's army made camp in front of the walls.

The siege had begun.

The mood inside the city was one of deep anxiety.

Everyone had spent the winter preparing for the struggle of their lives, though the Byzantine elite had somewhat conflicted feelings.

As we discussed when the Ottomans besieged Thessaloniki or when Manuel built his wall across the Isthmus of Corinth, rich Romans no longer fully identified their interests with those of the Byzantine state.

Since the Empire had lost most of its territory, the only way for families to grow wealthy was through trade, tapping into the Italian trading networks and investing in overseas ventures.

It was therefore possible to imagine life without a Roman Empire.

If the Ottomans took the city peacefully, they might leave the elites in place.

In theory, they could transition from serving one imperial ruler to another while maintaining their status.

If the Ottomans took the city violently, well, they could lose everything.

This put rich Romans in a similar position to their Genoese and Venetian counterparts.

They all knew that an Ottoman takeover was not ideal, but if it was inevitable, then they didn't want to ruin their chance of surviving the transition.

Inevitably, this led to suspicion and mistrust.

The Emperor and the common people suspected the elites were not contributing all they could could to the common defence.

But from an elite perspective, it would have been foolish to do so.

A prime example of this conflict can be seen in the figure of Lucas Notoras.

Notoras was born in Constantinople to an elite family.

He served with distinction as an administrator and diplomat before essentially becoming prime minister during Constantine's reign.

He was also one of the richest men in the city.

His family owned land in the Peloponnese, and he was heavily invested in Genoese public debt.

He kept most of his money in the Bank of St.

George in Genoa, safely away from imperial tax collectors.

But with the siege bearing down on him, Notoras worked diligently to save the city, offering his personal fortune as collateral to help Constantine secure a loan, and using his own money to aid in repairing the walls.

After the siege, Notoras still had money left to offer the Sultan, which drew much criticism.

But would you give up everything you had for a seemingly doomed cause, or save some for your family's future?

This was the dilemma which all the Christian nobles faced as the Turks hove into view.

What chance did the Romans have of surviving this?

Perhaps five or six thousand Byzantines were now under arms, but most had little military experience, while the Venetian decision to stay and the arrival of Giustiniani had brought the foreign contingent up to somewhere between two and three thousand.

Nine thousand men to defend the walls against an army of sixty thousand, with potentially as many as 40,000 sailors in the Ottoman fleet.

As Antony Caldelles comments, rarely has a struggle between a dying and emerging empire been fought so unequally.

The only advantages the defenders had were the unique geography of the city and her walls.

Even a thousand years after their construction, they remained the most formidable fortifications in the world.

The Ottomans would first encounter a moat.

No water ran through it, but it was twenty feet deep and sixty feet wide, preventing siege towers from approaching.

Once the Turks had crossed it, they would encounter the outer wall.

thirty feet high with square towers standing every fifty to one hundred yards along its length.

If they made it beyond that point, there was a fifty-foot gap before they would encounter the giant inner walls, whose towers stood sixty feet high.

Few conventional armies had even bothered to assault the triple walls.

Those that attacked the city generally focused on the Vlhernai section in the northwest corner of the city.

Here, the slope of the land made a continuation of the triple walls impossible, and so a single wall, fifty feet high, guarded the palace district.

Of course, what no one knew was how the ancient stones would cope with an artillery bombardment.

Mehmet did not have high hopes for his fleet, as we'll get to in a moment, and since he could not afford to wait and starve the Romans out, he knew he would have to break through the land walls.

The Sultan arrived on the 5th of April and urged his artillery to begin firing as soon as possible.

The army had already spread out across the length of the walls, establishing their camps and digging defensive ditches.

They now prepared the ground for their cannons.

Embankments of earth were piled up to get the weapons to the desired elevation, and wooden platforms constructed to help absorb the recoil.

The Ottomans had around fifty regular battlefield cannons and some traditional catapults, but the main main event were the dozen or so giant bombards capable of firing huge cannon balls that could smash into the battlements.

Mehmet spread his artillery batteries out along particular sections of the wall.

From north to south he aimed significant firepower at the walls around the Vlakernai Palace.

The largest contingent faced the gate of St.

Romanos, and smaller forces lined up against the Peguay Gate and the Golden Gate down near the Sea of Marmara.

The two most vulnerable sections were the first two, Flakernai, because it was a single wall, as we just discussed, and the gate of St.

Romanos, because it guarded the Lycas River valley.

The Lycas was a shallow stream, which sometimes ran dry in summer, but it was significant enough that the land dipped down around the Romanos gate before rising again and being a fairly consistent height for the rest of its length.

This meant that the Romanos gate was the only place in the entire defensive chain where attackers could shoot down on the defenders, giving the cannonballs the chance to pick up extra velocity.

Needless to say, Orban's monster gun was in the vicinity.

Now to be accurate, the gate which the Ottomans targeted was not actually the gate of St.

Romanos.

It was the fifth military gate, which lay immediately to the north of the Lycas stream.

Check the maps I've posted on the website if you want to visualise all this.

When we talk about gates like the Pege Gate, we mean the very large gates through which the public could travel when they were open.

They had bridges which crossed the moat.

In between these large gates though there were lots of smaller military gates which allowed soldiers through the giant inner wall so that they could man the outer walls.

The public gate of St.

Romanus was a couple of of hundred meters to the north.

The military gate, often called St.

Romanos in the sources, was the lowest point in the walls and therefore where the guns were targeted.

So when we talk about the Romanos sector, you now understand that we mean this whole area where the land dips down.

And when I talk about the gate, I mean the military gate at the centre of the valley.

The two southern gates, the Pege Gate and the Golden Gate, were not particularly vulnerable to attack.

So why why did Mehmet bother attacking them?

Why not concentrate all his firepower on the vulnerable sections to the north?

In part because the Sultan had so many men and machines that he wanted to make use of them all, but mainly because he wanted to stretch and exhaust the defenders.

The Sultan had reports on how few people were defending the city, and he wanted to make sure they were spread out across its length, unable to coalesce around one spot and hold him back.

Before he unleashed his cannons, he sent envoys to the walls to offer peace terms.

If the people of Constantinople surrendered, then their lives and property would be secured.

If they resisted, then it was all forfeit.

The Vasilevs rejected the terms.

On the 6th of April, the guns began firing.

This was just range-finding, but the psychological effects were instant.

When Orban's bombard was fired, people rushed out into the streets in terror.

One source describes it.

There was a fearful roar first and a shaking of the earth beneath and for a long way off, and a noise such as never was heard before.

Then, with an astounding thunder, and a frightful crashing, and a flame that lit up all the surroundings, and then left them black, the rod forced out from within by a dry, hot blast of air, violently set in motion the stone as it came out.

When I began this podcast, I never imagined that I would have to explain why the Romans did not surrender Constantinople.

But doubtless many thought that this was the best option on the table.

No one seems to have spoken publicly about this.

The Emperor had made it clear that he wasn't interested in giving in, nor were the Italians who were risking their lives to man the walls.

But let's dig a little deeper.

It's probably true to say that the people of Constantinople were less inclined to surrender than those at Thessaloniki and elsewhere.

Obviously, this was the capital of the Roman Empire and the seat of Orthodoxy, but practically speaking, the unique geography of the city meant that it could exist as an independent city in an Ottoman world so long as the Italian fleets were with them.

Whereas even a grand city like Thessaloniki had little future if its people couldn't access the fields outside the walls.

Constantinople, with its huge internal space, had fields and vineyards between its streets, giving it a real sense of being an island unto itself.

Conversely, while the elites of Thessaloniki could reasonably believe that the Turks would leave them in place and move on to other targets if they surrendered, the same couldn't be said of Constantinople.

The Turks would have to take over the city.

They couldn't leave Romans and Italians in prominent positions from which they might rebel.

Most likely, the Ottomans would make it their capital, convert churches into mosques, and in other ways transform it.

Change would be hard to navigate.

I think it's also questionable whether the terms of surrender would have been honoured had the emperor taken them.

Mehmet had spent such a colossal amount on this campaign that it would have been difficult not to recoup some expenses, not to mention the agitation from the tens of thousands of men who saw the sack of Constantinople as their own get-rich-quick scheme.

Before the peace terms had even been offered, the Romans had deployed troops across the length of the city.

They also dragged a chain across the Golden Horn.

It stretched from a tower in the sea walls across to a tower on the shore at Galata.

It floated on large round blocks of wood, which kept it on the surface of the water.

The Genoese colony there had declared their neutrality and made no official moves to assist either side.

In practice, of course, individuals from Galata sold goods and information to both sides.

Giustiniani and the Emperor both set up camp in the St.

Romano sector.

If this was where the Ottomans were going to concentrate their attacks, then this is where the defence must be at its strongest.

About two thousand men were under the direct command of the Condotiero.

The defence of Vlachiernai and its palace was given to the Venetian Bahilo, Girolomo Minotto.

This made sense since he would be right next to the Golden Horn and could maintain contact with the fleet.

Gabriele Trebisan would stand guard over that section of the sea walls, and the Vasilefs gave the Venetians the keys to four of the city's gates, an acknowledgement of how reliant he was on them to hold off the Turks.

They also agreed to parade along the land walls, waving the banner of St.

Mark, letting the Sultan know that the Venetians stood against him, with the implication that reinforcements were on the way.

A Theophilus Palaeologos took charge of the defence of the Peguae gate, while some other Venetians held the Golden Gate further south.

A mobile reserve of about seven hundred men were stationed near the Church of the Holy Apostles in the centre of the city, so that they could rush to whichever trouble spot needed them, indicated by the ringing of bells.

Members of the Cantacusinos family, as well as Lucas Notoras, were stationed close to the Emperor.

With With the defenders stretched so thin, there were large sections of the wall guarded by only one man, essentially a lookout who would call for help.

The Romans were reasonably confident that no attack would come along the rest of the sea walls, as the currents there made it hard for ships to stop.

But they still needed eyes in those places, and so Cardinal Isidore guarded the eastern sea walls, some Catalan mercenaries watched over the area to the south of the Achia Sophia, and Prince Ohan Ohan and his Turkish retinue guarded the southern harbours.

Given that he would definitely be put to death the second Mehmet got his hands on him, there seemed little chance of treachery.

It's just worth pointing out that the people defending Constantinople were all men of the eastern Mediterranean.

It's often reported as the Venetians and Genoese who fought with the Romans, and while that's obviously true, there is a bit more nuance there.

Justiniani was born on Roman Chios into the occupying elite, and having served in Caffa on the Crimea, he would have seen Constantinople as a vital, friendly Christian port whose conquest might destroy his way of life.

Cardinal Isidore was a Roman.

Girolimo Minoto lived in Constantinople, as did most of the Venetians defending it.

Even the ship captains who were forced to remain behind were those who traded in the Black Sea, a sea which might be closed to them if the Ottomans won.

In the end, there were very few true Western Europeans in the city.

It was those for whom Constantinople actually mattered, who showed up and put their lives on the line.

On the 9th of April, the Allied fleet anchored itself along the chain in the Golden Horn, waiting for the Turkish navy to appear.

Between them, the Romans, Venetians, and other allies had 27 ships, including several hulking great transports, far larger than anything the Ottomans would have at their disposal.

Any battle in the Horn would essentially be between men on ships firing missiles at one another, and the superior size of the Venetian galleys would be invaluable.

Three days later the Turkish ships appeared.

They sailed from Gallipoli and moved menacingly past the Golden Horn to make harbour in a small bay to the north of the city on the European side, modern Bashiktas.

As they passed by, they made a huge noise.

Niccolo Barbaro, present on the Allied ships, says they played tambourines and castanets, which makes them sound quite jolly, but he clearly found it an intimidating drumbeat.

Barbaro says that the Ottomans had 145 vessels in their armada.

Other estimates are slightly lower, but crucially they had few actual galleys that could go toe to toe with their Venetian counterparts.

The majority of ships were essentially large oared rowing boats.

If an opening appeared the Turks could disgorge thousands of eager marines onto the shore, but if it came to ramming their way into the Golden Horn, the smaller Ottoman vessels would struggle to make an impact against the chain and the huge Venetian ships anchored behind it.

It seems unlikely that Mehmet wanted his fleet to really attempt this.

The true value of their presence was to block reinforcements from reaching the city.

It was better that they remain intact.

Not that this was of much comfort to Barbaro.

He makes it clear that the presence of this fleet led to a constant state of anxiety for his fellow sailors.

They only kept three ships stationed at the chain at any one time, but the men on the sea walls would sound the alarm whenever the Turkish ships moved, and at the sound of the bells all the sailors would rush to their ships and get in the water at any time of day or night, leading inevitably to exhaustion and fraying tempers.

The sultan was determined to exhaust, demoralise, and deplete the defenders as much as possible throughout the course of the siege.

On the twelfth of April the bombardment began in earnest.

This was modern warfare breaking through the silence of medieval history.

The relentless sound of explosions must have been traumatic for defenders and attackers alike, deafening ears, shredding nerves, and seeping into nightmares.

The guns would sound almost continuously throughout the hours of daylight for the rest of the siege.

Some would become numb to their monotonous sound, others never would.

Orban's cannon could fire a ball over 1,400 pounds in weight, but the bombard became so hot that it was in real danger of splitting soon after firing.

It had to be carefully treated with oil and only fired seven times a day.

Its smaller siblings could be fired more often, and soon huge gashes began appearing in the outer walls and towers of the Theodosian fortifications.

It took the Turks time to deal with cannons slipping across the muddy ground and the occasional artillery piece exploding, but eventually they were able to target the walls consistently, and slowly sections of the outer walls would fall off.

Masonry which fell into the moat was ideal, since this would have to be filled in before any attack could be launched.

When the artillery fell silent, excitable Ottoman soldiers would rush up to the walls, hurling stones and dirt into the moat and firing bows and handheld artillery at the defenders.

They quickly discovered that there was no way through and suffered a steady stream of casualties.

Apparently the Turks took pride in carrying their dead back to camp, though inevitably this made those dragging the corpses sitting ducks and the Christians had no compunction about shooting them where they stood.

First thing in the morning on the 18th of April a concerted attack was made on the St.

Romanos sector.

The defenders were roused in a panic, but the impossible obstacle which the walls still provided meant that two hundred Ottomans were dead before the rest realised what they were up against and backed away.

The bombardment resumed.

On the 20th of April, huge excitement swept the city when four large ships were spotted heading north from the Sea of Marmara.

Three were Genoese vessels, which the Pope had sponsored to bring men and materials to the besieged, while the fourth was loaded with wheat supplied by the King of Aragon.

The wind was with them as they sailed towards the city, cheered on by the people on the walls, but as they approached the Golden Horn the wind dropped away, and the Ottoman fleet appeared in all its numbers.

Dozens of Turkish ships now surrounded them, as the Sultan rode excitedly around Galata to get a view of proceedings.

As I hinted earlier, despite their vast superiority in numbers, the Muslim ships were far inferior to the so called great galleys which the Italians had mastered.

These forty metre long ships were capable of carrying two hundred tons of cargo beneath their decks, and as such the Marines standing on deck stood several meters above their counterparts in the Ottoman fleet.

So despite being surrounded and fighting for several hours, the Italians prevailed.

Their gunners and crossbowmen fired a relentless stream of missiles down on their vulnerable enemy.

Boarding was impossible, so the Turks used firearms to try and sink them, but their projectiles were too small and couldn't break through the hulls, and their trajectory made made it hard to target the men on deck.

With the currents of the Marmara causing everyone trouble, the Ottomans were unable to force the enemy south, and their admiral clearly didn't want to lose thousands of men by ramming the large Christian ships.

As Mehmet grew increasingly furious, the Allied ships edged towards the Golden Horn, and as night fell, the Venetians lowered the chain and their reinforcements limped across the line.

The Turks returned to their harbour to face the Sultan's wrath.

There was great joy inside the city at this small victory.

In fact, the past week had been both harrowing and hopeful.

Though the Turkish guns were doing damage, no towers had yet collapsed, and every day the Ottomans were using up more men and supplies.

The Christians had seen hundreds of dead enemies so far, compared to only a steady trickle on their side.

Justiniani had initially led his men out into the field to skirmish with the Turks, but when too many men were killed, he decided to pull back to the outer wall.

From here, arrows and handheld guns were doing more than enough damage to keep the enemy at bay.

You might think, why not just man the inner wall, since it was the largest obstacle?

But that would have meant surrendering the outer wall, which would allow the Ottomans to spread out their attacks across its length, potentially throwing up too many ladders for the defenders to deal with, whereas manning the outer wall allowed the defenders to bottle up enemy attacks.

The Ottomans could only cross where they had filled in the moat, which meant the Allies could load the nearest towers with defenders and rain fury down on the attacking column.

The Allies did have cannons of their own, but they had to be placed on top of the walls in order to strike the Ottoman camp, and when they fired them, the walls shook violently, defeating the purpose of using them.

They were withdrawn, and Justiniani relied on smaller pieces to target the onrushing enemy.

The Vasilevs had apparently begun to wail with grief when he was woken on the morning of the 18th by the sudden Ottoman attack.

Years before he had been stationed behind the wall across the Isthmus of Corinth when the Turks had launched a similar assault.

His men had fled in terror back then, and he assumed the same was about to happen.

But Justiniani's men held the Allied force together, and the relative ease with which they dispatched the onrushing enemy had given the Emperor some comfort.

The arrival of fresh men and supplies was also great news, but the hope was that it was only the beginning, that other crusaders would come to their aid and that the anticipated Venetian relief fleet would soon be here.

Little did they know that the merchants of Venice were moving at a snail's pace.

Having announced that a relief fleet would depart on the 8th of April, the project was soon hit by multiple delays.

The Venetians were at war with several of their neighbours in Italy at this time, and so raising the necessary troops was taking longer than expected.

And more predictably, the merchants they taxed to finance the expedition were slow to pay up.

It wasn't until the 19th of April that a single galley set sail from Venice.

The rest of the supplies and reinforcements would have to be raised from their bases in the Aegean.

Once formed, this small relief fleet would hopefully reach Constantinople by late May.

Mehmet had his admiral removed from his command and publicly flogged after his failure to intercept the Christian ships.

Of course, four boats hardly changed the balance of power.

The Ottoman forces still outnumbered the defenders ten to one, but in a way that was why it was such a demoralizing moment.

How could a hundred Turkish ships fail to stop just four of their enemy?

Surely if more reinforcements arrived, the siege would be over.

Every man man outside the walls understood what was at stake.

They'd all been dragged hundreds of miles from their posts to be here, and the fury with which the Sultan responded to this setback made it clear that failure would not be tolerated.

Rumours began to spread about Venetian ships bobbing over the horizon.

The Grand Vizier again suggested that the siege be called off.

The Romans could agree to further political subordination and increase tribute, but he could not persuade the Sultan.

The siege would continue.

The next morning, after nine days of constant bombardment, a tower in the outer walls dramatically collapsed near the gate of St.

Romanos.

The defenders rushed in to try and patch up the breach, while the Ottomans sent waves of men in to find a way through.

Once more, the defenders cut down a hundred enemy, though they suffered nasty casualties themselves.

In between waves the guns continued to pound away, their operators encouraged by this sign that the defences could be breached.

Though the Sultan was pleased to hear this, his mind was elsewhere.

If it had taken a week simply to knock one tower down, how long would it take before a whole section was reduced to rubble?

Too long, he thought.

His men were using something like a thousand pounds of gunpowder every day.

His resources would not last forever.

He needed to increase the pressure on the defenders if he was going to find a way to break through.

So he put into action an audacious plan.

He ordered his new admiral to drag dozens of ships overland around the Genoese colony at Galata and drop them into the Golden Horn.

Cannons would be placed on the shore to prevent the Christians from attacking them as they slid into the water.

The next day, April 22nd, thousands of men disembarked from their ships and began clearing a path.

This was no easy job, Galata is on a steep incline.

The ships were going to have to be dragged uphill for a mile.

The ships would be placed on rollers, covered in fat to grease them and then pulled by hundreds of men and oxen.

His engineers had already been planning for this eventuality, but from the point of view of the Christians, this all happened incredibly quickly.

Throughout the day, news filtered through the city of this horrifying development.

It was happening too fast for the Venetians to respond.

They were afraid of the cannons on the shore and of leaving the chain open to attack from the remainder of the Ottoman fleet.

People People scaled the sea walls to Gork, as eventually 72 Ottoman ships were slowly unloaded into the Golden Horn.

As historian Kenneth Satton says, Mehmet had entered the inner harbour of Constantinople by the back door, secured his lines of communication with his fleet, exposed the northern wall of the city to attack, and thoroughly intimidated the Genoese.

It was a demonstration of the immense power of the Sultan.

The Allies held a meeting the next day to discuss what to do.

Barbaro says that he and his fellow sailors were terrified of imminent attack, either a pincer movement by each wing of the Ottoman fleet, or of fire ships being launched at them down the Golden Horn.

It was quickly agreed that this should instead be their plan of attack.

They must burn the Ottoman fleet in the Horn as soon as possible.

According to Barbaro, this plan was leaked to the enemy by Genoese informants, and the next day more guns appeared on the shore to protect the newly arrived ships.

Who knows if that's true?

As I say, individual Genoese profited from the siege by selling their services to both sides, but it seems just as likely the Ottomans wanted more firepower to protect themselves.

For various reasons it took the Allies several days to put their plan into action, and so it was that on the 28th of April a few ships set off two hours before sunrise to try and catch the Turks unawares.

They failed.

The lead ship was struck by a cannon and sunk, ending the attempt to set fire to the Ottoman ships.

The enemy sallied out and tried to capture the Allies.

Once more a fierce battle between the hulking Italian ships and the smaller oar-powered Turkish vessels ended in stalemate.

The Allies limped back to the safety of their fleet while the Turks publicly executed the Italian sailors who'd swum to shore.

Ultimately, no serious attack came from the Ottoman fleet.

Only the smallest ships had been carried overland, ships which had no real chance of defeating a Venetian galley, but they didn't need to.

They'd accomplished everything that Mehmet wanted.

The Emperor was forced to spread his meagre resources ever more thinly.

Barbaro comments that a larger number of Allied ships now had to be stationed permanently at anchor, further exhausting their crews.

Despite the sea being the major theatre of action, during this week there was no let-up at the walls.

The guns continued to pound methodically away, smashing into the battlements and deafening those who stood behind them.

As the siege reached the one-month mark, the strain began to tell on the defenders.

Food had become scarce and prices soared.

Officers reported to the Emperor that men were not turning up to their posts, leaving large sections of the walls unmanned.

Ordinary Romans had to tend to their animals and vegetable plots just to feed themselves.

When asked about going Awol, one man responded, Of what consequence is military service to us when our families are in need?

The tension between rich and poor was acute.

Many poor Byzantines felt that they should be paid to serve as soldiers.

Despite the existential threat the city faced, they simply couldn't survive without money.

And many commented bitterly that the houses of the wealthy were well stocked, not just with food, but cash, a fact borne out by what was discovered after the siege.

The Vasilevs responded by setting up a commission to raise more money.

They went around the houses of the rich to put pressure on them and confiscated treasures from churches to melt down.

The money was used to buy food for the poor and put something in the soldiers' pockets.

Every day, explosions continued to roar in the distance and cannonballs smashed into the land walls.

Piecemeal damage was done to other sections, but it was along the St.

Romano sector that the outer wall was being slowly reduced to rubble.

Every day the Turks would charge forward and probe for weakness.

Some would bring ladders and attempt to surprise the defenders, while others continued to hurl debris into the moat.

The Ottomans also opened a new front, using cannons from their golden horn harbour to smash the sea walls.

The Byzantines responded with cannon fire of their own, though they were running low on gunpowder.

If there was good news to be found, it was in the success of Giustiniani's countermeasures.

Every day his men worked relentlessly to plug the gaps created by the cannon fire, and their solution was ingenious.

Where the outer wall had fallen away, the Allies installed barrels filled with stones, then they piled earth over them and hides on top to create a makeshift rampart.

The result?

Cannonballs which struck the barrel line simply sank into the soft cushion of earth rather than having the shattering effect they had on the stone walls.

The reality was that the climb over the moat and its retaining wall followed by the barrel rampart was exhausting enough to slow even the most determined attacker.

As long as the defenders still had missiles and swords to finish them off, the defender's advantage remained strong.

All of this, remember, is taking place in front of the huge inner walls.

Although they too were targeted, they proved harder to reach, and so the Ottomans focussed on reducing the outer wall to rubble in the hope that they could reach one of the gates of the inner wall and break it down.

Both sides were suffering a trickle of casualties every day.

Ottoman dead may have been tenfold greater, but then they could afford that ratio.

For now.

The Emperor's great hope was that a Venetian relief fleet would soon arrive.

He asked for volunteers to run the gauntlet of the Turkish ships and try to get to the Hellespont.

He wanted them to find the Venetians and urged them to sail quickly to the city's aid.

On the third of May, a small Venetian galley, flying the sultan's flag, with its crew dressed in the Turkish manner, darted out of the Golden Horn on a favourable wind.

They escaped the attention of the Ottomans and made it out into the Marmara.

Everyone prayed for their safe return.

The Sultan kept probing for weakness.

On the 5th of May he moved a cannon just to the north of Galata.

From there it fired over the top of the Genoese colony at the Allied ships in the water below.

Several were struck, causing a huge panic amongst Barbaro's colleagues.

They swiftly changed their anchorage to avoid further attack, but the Sultan really was adept at finding ways to drain their energy further.

Back at the land walls the Ottomans concentrated more of their guns on the ailing Saint Romanos section.

After puncturing a ten foot gap in the walls on the sixth of May, the Turks made a determined assault the next morning.

Tens of thousands of men rushed forward screaming, with castanets rattling and carrying rams to break into the city.

Initially, Justiniani's men mowed them down using crossbows and small cannons.

These fired walnut sized bullets that could penetrate armour, and with the enemy pressed together towards the narrow opening, some shots would pass through two or more men in succession.

But the weight of numbers pushed the Genoese back, and more and more Turks were able to scale the ramparts and make it into the gap between the outer and inner walls.

Soon the Genoese were fighting hand to hand with an enemy who vastly outnumbered them.

The lookout bells were ringing wildly, and slowly Byzantine reinforcements appeared behind them and above them on the inner walls, and the Ottomans were driven back with terrible casualties.

Most of these attacks were taking place between dawn and sunrise, to take advantage of the gloom and the cooler weather.

Early the next morning the Ottomans launched themselves at Vlakernai to the north.

The attackers set fire to one of the gates, but were once more driven off by the relentless missiles of the defenders high above them.

The burnt gate was quickly walled up.

On the twelfth of May another huge attack was thrown at the Vlakernai walls.

With Ottoman ships in the Golden Horn, the hope was that some kind of pincer could be brought to bear here, but again the Byzantines rang the bells and help arrived in time to send another few hundred enemy combatants to their graves.

Barbaro notes that since there hadn't been a naval attack in ten days, men from the fleet were being called up to serve on the walls to plug the gaps left by the fallen.

The Sultan was growing frustrated.

The siege was now five weeks old, and the expenses were racking up.

Thousands of his men were dead, and though they'd punctured a great number of holes in the outer wall, it wasn't having the effect he'd hoped for.

The defenders still possessed a significant advantage.

An ambassador from Hungary had also visited his camp, which his men had seen.

The ambassador carried a message from Yanko Hunyadi, warning the Sultan to desist.

Mehmet knew that the Hungarians were not even mustered yet, assuming they had any intention of marching.

But rumours spread through the camp nonetheless that a Christian army would soon be loose in the Balkans, in addition to the Venetian fleet that everyone expected to appear on the horizon at any moment.

But the Sultan refused to yield.

He simply changed tactics once more.

He ordered his fleet to begin manoeuvres, his soldiers to erect siege towers, and his sappers to begin digging.

The bombardment continued its explosive monotony over the next ten days.

At what point the Byzantines realized what was happening we don't know.

But on the sixteenth of May there was a flurry of activity.

The Turkish fleet tried to capture the chain across the harbour, but were chased away.

Then later that day Justiniani's counter-sappers confirmed that the Turks were digging a tunnel under the walls.

Hidden by their own ramparts, the Ottomans had dug a long tunnel which snaked under the Vilkyonai walls.

The goal of undermining during a siege was to place wooden supports under a section of the walls, then set fire to them.

The sudden collapse of soil would hopefully bring down the walls above.

Even a minor breach, occurring with no warning, could be enough to wrongfoot the defenders and doom a city.

Digging under the triple walls was difficult since the mass of fortifications made it harder to locate the right spot to burn, whereas Vlakernai, with its one large wall, was a tempting target.

Justiniani had brought with him an expert sapper named John Grant, a German or possibly a Scot.

Having detected the Ottoman tunnel, he instructed the Romans to dig one of their own.

Their goal was was simple, locate the Ottoman tunnel and destroy it.

When the Allies found it, they quickly set fire to the props, collapsing the tunnel and suffocating those still inside.

Despite this success, Mehmet was once more draining the defenders, invading their dreams and pushing them to be constantly alert on multiple fronts.

The next day, the Ottoman fleet appeared at the chain again.

They were driven off by cannon fire from the sea walls, but they were clearly under instructions to harass harass the Allies and force them to keep their crews in the water.

This prompted fears at the land walls that an attack must be imminent.

This duly followed the next morning, though from an unexpected direction.

The Turks suddenly elevated a prefabricated siege tower near the Pegue Gate in the south.

Their troops had filled in a small section of the moat and suddenly pushed the tower forwards.

This made a huge impression on the defenders, some of whom wrote about it years later.

They rang the bells and called for help before rushing out to meet this attack head-on.

They managed to get to the tower before it could reach the walls and set fire to it.

The Turks inside the tower fled in a panic, but the troops behind them rushed up to try and douse the flames.

Fierce hand-to-hand combat followed, again with the defenders' advantage slowly overcoming the superior Turkish numbers.

The Allied troops locked shields and stood in front of the tower until the fire had fully embraced it, while their archers poured volleys from behind them at the onrushing enemy.

Once the tower was suitably stricken, both sides withdrew.

The next day the Ottomans completed a pontoon bridge they had been building.

It crossed the narrowest point of the Golden Horn at its northern end.

This allowed Ottoman cannons to be moved swiftly between firing at the sea walls and the land walls in that corner of the city, constantly keeping the defenders on their toes.

The endless bombardment continued with large sections of the outer wall near the gate of St.

Romanos now reduced to rubble.

Every day soldiers would rush up and hurl debris into the moat despite the missiles of the defenders, and every day Giustiniani would try to scoop it out and use it to reinforce his makeshift ramparts.

Though this was becoming increasingly difficult to accomplish, as the cannons would target his men if they lingered around the moat for too long.

Everyone in the city was being pressed into helping the men on the walls.

The old women and children, priests would all bring food, water, and rubble to the garrisons along the battlements.

On the twenty-first of May, the Turkish fleet once again menaced the chain, causing bells to ring out across the city, but no attack came.

Later in the day, another tunnel was found and destroyed at Vlakernai.

And then, in the twilight, a lone ship made its way up to the city, the chain was lowered, and it came in.

It was the scout ship that had departed eighteen days earlier.

The Emperor came rushing to hear their account, but was deeply depressed to hear that they had seen nothing.

They had made it to the Hellespont and asked the locals what they knew, but they had no inkling of a Venetian fleet.

Unbeknownst to the besiege, the single vessel the Italians had dispatched was still at Negropont, the Venetian headquarters on the island of Euboea, just off the Greek mainland.

They were waiting for ships from Crete to join them before they loaded up on supplies.

The Venetians were being slow and cautious and didn't realize the urgency with which Mehmet was prosecuting his siege.

By the way, a word for those men, probably Venetians, who took on that mission.

After sailing for nine days away from the siege and learning that no help was coming, they turned back.

Plenty of others would have sailed on, justifying their flight by saying they were trying to locate the relief force.

Instead, they returned to the lion's mouth to honour their word to their comrades.

Constantine seems to have become deeply depressed at this point.

Though his defences were holding, he clearly felt that the arrival of reinforcements would push Mehmet to abandon the siege.

Now there was seemingly no prospect of that.

A lunar eclipse soon after caused a ripple of paranoia in the city.

Omens and prophecies were circulating widely as everyone searched for some heavenly sign of their impending fate.

One apparently claimed that the city would not fall unless the moon gave an unusual signal, which this eclipse seemed to fulfil.

The icon of the Virgin was paraded along the walls the next day, but was dropped during the procession, a bad sign.

Another story the defenders had heard was that since Constantinople was founded by Constantine, son of Helena, it would not fall until another Constantine, son of Helena, reigned over them.

Someone clever had designed that one to drive Palaeologos mad.

His mother, as you'll recall, was Helena Dragash.

On the twenty-third of May, another tunnel was discovered, and two of the enemy were taken alive.

They were tortured to reveal the location of any other tunnels, and once they had, they were decapitated and their bodies thrown over the walls.

Over the next two days, two more tunnels were discovered and destroyed.

One had its props in place under a section of the wall and would have been ready for incineration at any moment.

But as far as the Romans knew, they had successfully neutralized all of the enemy's subterranean assaults.

Sultan Mehmet II was at a crossroads.

Every attack he'd made on the walls had failed.

Yes, his artillery continued to smash them, but only one section had truly been levelled, despite firing continuously for forty-three days.

Orban's promise that his cannon could reduce the walls of Babylon had not been fulfilled.

Simply scaling a rampart of dirt was proving too much for his men.

The walls remained an obdurate obstacle, providing the defenders with enough height and depth to bring aid to whichever section was under attack.

The fleet was too vulnerable to launch headlong at the Venetians, the siege towers had been foiled, and the undermining had failed.

Thousands of his soldiers were now dead, and morale was beginning to waver.

Rumours of Hungarian or Venetian assistance continued to burble.

The Sultan knew that no aid was imminent, but he couldn't keep asking his men to approach walls that would not yield.

He couldn't keep emptying his treasury into this moor.

It was time to either take the city or abandon the siege.

On the 26th of May, the Sultan held a council of war.

He was determined to make one last concerted effort to break through before he would consider any other option.

The plan that was agreed was unthinkable under any other circumstance.

The Ottomans would launch a series of human wave attacks on the walls, using sheer weight of numbers to wear out the defenders and find a way into the city.

Why was this so radical?

Because despite what some films suggest, it was pretty rare for medieval soldiers to throw themselves against well-defended walls.

If fifty of your colleagues were murdered in front of you, men usually ran away.

Mehmet was proposing to force his charges to keep attacking the walls until thousands and thousands of them were dead.

This meant using the threat of violence against his own troops to get them to comply.

To be clear, I'm not saying that all out assaults during sieges never happened.

Of course they did, but generally men have a plan.

They have a siege tower, or they have ladders, and only one wall to scale.

They can endure the death of those around them if they believe they have a reasonable chance of success eventually.

The Sultan was proposing to throw his men against the wall, knowing that thousands of them had little chance of making it through, that a certain proportion of them were guaranteed death or maiming just to wear the defenders down.

In many an army, such an order would not have been followed.

It's testament to the immense authority of the Ottoman sultans and the fear they generated that the army did not waver.

In fact, they were excited at the prospect of a huge assault on the city, though the reality of what they were about to do may not have dawned on all of them until the moment came.

The sources concur that money, rather than jihad, was the primary motivation of Mehmet's men.

Obviously, there were lots of of Christians in the army, but though some of his Muslim troops considered fighting infidels an important part of their work, and Mehmet made lofty pronouncements about the religious nature of this campaign, we know from a letter sent by his spiritual advisor that few among the army were interested in sacrificing their lives and becoming martyrs.

He advised the Sultan to emphasize the potential booty on offer if he wanted to properly motivate them.

Mehmet toured the camps the next day.

There was to be no secrecy.

In fact, he advertised what was coming and encouraged his men to party into the night, lighting huge camp fires and singing and screaming as loudly as they could.

There was no point in holding anyone back.

If this attack failed, then the siege would be over.

The following day he let his men rest, except for his gunners, who unleashed a fearsome barrage on the walls along the St.

Romano sector.

That night, more campfires were lit as the men stacked up their weapons and ladders.

The final attack would begin at first light.

As soon as it became clear what was coming, the Allies began working through the night trying to repair any patches of wall or rampart that they could.

Any remaining missiles or armor were dragged to the fifth military gate.

Tempers were fraying.

Giustiniani asked Notaras to bring him one of the cannons from the sea walls, but the Prime Minister refused, preferring the gun where it was.

The Condottiero angrily responded with a threat to kill Notaras, which caused great offence.

Barbaro says that a batch of new mantlets had been made ready for the final showdown, small missile-proof screens for an archer to operate behind.

But the local Romans wouldn't transport them without being paid.

So the Venetians put up money, expecting Notaras and other rich Byzantines to match their contributions, but they refused.

The mantlets were left unused.

The Venetians and Genoese down at the harbour were having arguments too, as was entirely predictable.

The sailors with Barbaro must all have been working out how to escape if the worst happened.

Genoese troops could probably take refuge in Galata, but the Venetians could not.

To their great credit, a small band of Galatans crossed over that night volunteering to fight with their fellow Christians.

Amongst them was the nephew of the Podestar.

Many living in Galata must have been emotionally torn throughout the siege.

Earlier that day, Mehmet had sent an envoy to give the Romans one last chance to surrender.

Perhaps with the end in sight, the Vasilevs would spare everyone the slaughter.

The terms were the same.

Constantine could even save his own skin and leave for the Peloponnese, but the city must be surrendered.

But the Vasilevs believed that he could still hold the city.

The Turks had been unsuccessful so far despite overwhelming numerical superiority.

They were now signalling exactly where the attack would take place.

The Emperor could amass his resources in one spot.

Why couldn't they survive again?

Apparently, the Vasilevs responded to the embassy by saying,

I do not have the right to give you the city, nor does anyone else who lives in it.

By a collective decision, we will all willingly die and not try to save our lives.

The Romans spent the night redeploying their troops, securing their families as best they could, and praying.

Our two perspectives now become one for narrative simplicity.

As soon as the first flicker of light was visible on the morning of the 29th of May, 1453, the Ottoman guns began one final barrage, smashing the St.

Romanos sector with everything they had left.

Then around 1am,

the attack began.

The first wave of soldiers were the irregular Ottoman troops, volunteers from Anatolia and from the Balkans who had been attracted by the prospect of booty, along with the Allied troops sent from various Christian rulers as part of their vassalage.

Over the course of the next hour and a half they charged forward with ladders to try and gain access to the city.

The results were predictably catastrophic.

Because only a limited section of the moat was filled in, the attackers were funnelled directly towards the stockades where Giustiniani's gunners and crossbowmen were dug in.

Behind and above them were the Byzantine soldiers armed with bow and arrows, rocks and other missiles.

It was a massacre.

Hundreds and hundreds were cut down as they charged into the killing zone in and around the outer wall.

As men approached the ramparts and saw their comrades tumbling backwards in various states of disrepair, they began to retreat and head back to camp, only to discover that the Janissaries were waiting for them, swords drawn, to insist that they resume their attempts in earnest.

Most chose to return to the walls.

Fighting Fighting was now taking place all over the city.

Some of the irregulars avoided the Romanos sector and tried to attack further north at Vlakiernae, but were driven back.

Further south, attempts were made to storm the Pegae and Golden Gates, but with far fewer men.

Down at the Golden Horn, the Ottoman ships approached the sea walls in an attempt to land and drive defenders from the towers.

While out in the bosphorus, ships approached the chain to try and keep the Venetians distracted, while others sailed along the Marmara, taking potshots at the defenders in the hopes of finding an opening.

Bells rang from every church and tower across the city to alert anyone who'd managed to find sleep that they were needed.

None of these other attempts to break into the city succeeded, and doubtless Mehmet didn't expect them to.

Once more their goal was to maintain pressure on the defenders to confuse and to tire them and to prevent them from coalescing at the Romanos sector.

Back at the walls thousands of dead men now lined the moat and and the outer wall.

The Sultan finally called a halt to proceedings around two thirty AM and ordered another bombardment of the defences.

So far the defenders had endured with relative ease, but Mehmet knew what he was doing.

The Christians would barely have slept, then been on their feet fighting with relentless concentration for an hour and a half, all the time expending their energy and their stocks of missiles.

Now the blasted sound of cannons did its traumatizing work once more.

As the guns fell silent, the second wave began.

This time it was the Sultan's regular troops, most of them men from Anatolia, well armed and much better disciplined than the first wave.

With war cries and castanets rattling, they raced for the stockades, using ladders and grappling hooks to get to the defenders as quickly as they could.

Again the fighting was fierce, and again the Allies drove them back.

The more orderly Anatolians called for a cannon blast to help clear the defenders out.

They withdrew in good order, a bombard launched a cannonball into the area, and under cover of the smoke and noise the Turkish troops rushed into the breach once more.

In the pre-dawn gloom the Turks thought they could make headway against the outnumbered defenders, but they couldn't.

Hundreds more were killed.

This time many did make it up into the outer walls.

There they found postern gates and hacked away at them, only to be discovered by the Allies who cut them down, while those who skirmished with the Genoese found the Italians too tough and too entrenched to make any progress.

Finally, the Sultan gave the signal and the battered remnants of his infantry collapsed back behind their own ramparts.

The time had come for the final wave.

It was nearly 4 a.m.

Dawn.

The defenders were exhausted, running low on supplies, but they still held the fifth military gate.

The thousands of dead and wounded men all around them only created more obstacles for an attacker to overcome.

It was now time for the Sultan himself to join the fray.

He rode forward, leading the Janissaries towards the breach.

If you want your donatives, then you're going to have to earn them.

The elite Ottoman troops were highly disciplined and professional, easily recognizable by their tall white turbans.

And unlike all other Turkish troops, they advanced in terrifying silence.

Once he reached the moat, Mehmet wisely withdrew, leaving his best men to finally break the Christian line.

The fighting which followed was the most intense of the entire siege.

Two sets of highly disciplined soldiers in full armor.

Arrows would no longer necessarily do, and the hand-to-hand fighting was bitter and brutal.

Regular troops were eventually pushed back into the fray to support their betters as the Janissaries struggled to overcome the Allied lines.

Slowly, the weight of Turkish numbers allowed more and more men to penetrate the outer wall.

This didn't instantly give them a significant advantage.

The defenders on the inner wall were still shooting down on them, but it increased the pressure on the Christians significantly.

Their attention was now drawn in multiple directions.

Some groups of men put ladders up to the inner wall, others hurled missiles at the Genoese.

Eventually, some Ottomans broke through a posten gate, which some sources claim the Romans had inadequately sealed.

The Turks who broke through were cut down, but it created an opening, which allowed increasing number of Ottomans into the city from where they could climb the inner walls and shoot down on the defenders manning the stockades at the Fifth Military Gate.

The crucial moment came when Gustiniani was shot through the armhole in his breastplate.

Either an arrow or a bullet lodged itself in his side, bringing the great general to his knees.

Those around him dragged him through the fifth military gate to seek medical attention.

Once they realized how much blood he was losing, they decided to carry him down down to the Golden Horn to find a proper medic.

As in many a medieval battle, the withdrawal of the army's general caused panic and uncertainty.

No deputy seems to have been appointed, and so the Genoese began to withdraw when they realized the Condotiero was not coming back.

With the Genoese departing, the Janissaries increased their efforts, hacking at the Romans and other Italians left at the ramparts.

A rout began with more and more Allied soldiers rushing to get through the gate to safety.

A crush ensued, with unfortunate men trampled to death in the stampede, the janissaries stabbed away at their backs, and the defence collapsed.

Once the gate was clear, the Turks poured into the city and began opening other gates in the wall.

Soon everyone who could left the Ottoman camp and swarmed into the city.

Estimates suggest that two or three thousand allies were killed in the rout, the Emperor Constantine amongst them.

Some Ottoman troops scaled a tower in the center of the city and raised the Sultan's banner.

This alerted the defenders in other parts of the city, who were still fighting, that a breakthrough had occurred.

Soon, everyone abandoned their posts.

Most ran for the Golden Horn to try and reach a ship as the Turks fanned out across the capital, searching for loot.

The city was lost.

No Christian eyewitness eyewitness was present to confirm what happened to Constantine XI.

The first story we hear is that he asked his own men to kill him so that he wouldn't be taken alive, flinging off his insignia before the Turks did the job for him.

While an Ottoman account says he was fleeing for the Golden Gate to escape the city when he was cut down.

Either could be true.

Both could be propaganda.

Nothing in his conduct of the siege suggested that Constantine wanted to be a martyr.

He may well have attempted to flee.

The battle was lost, most people were running, and he did have somewhere to go.

If he made it to the Peloponnese, he might have been able to survive.

All we can say with confidence is that he was killed inside the city and that his body was never convincingly identified.

Whether he ran or fought to the death, the fact that he refused to surrender the city lent his death a noble quality which contemporaries immediately recognized.

He was forty-eight years old and had been emperor for four years and five months.

With his death, the Roman Empire finally reached its end.

Over the course of this podcast I've had many assumptions overturned, and today we have another.

It seems that the fall of the city was was far from inevitable, that the cannons did not reduce the walls to rubble, that the Sultan was not chilling in his tent waiting patiently for victory.

Instead, it took an act of tremendous human sacrifice to force the breach.

Had Justiniani survived, it's possible that no breakthrough would have occurred, and that Mehmet would have packed his bags and left, leaving the Romans with a humiliating peace deal and extortionate tribute payments, no doubt.

But the astonishing defensive capabilities of the walls cannot make up for the reduced state of the Romans who lived behind them.

Had Mehmet walked away, it's hard to imagine what future the Empire would have had.

The siege had brought home the reality that Constantinople was really just an outpost of the Italian merchant republics.

The only way for the city to remain a free port was for the Genoese and Venetians to work together, something that rarely happened.

Neither side would adopt the city as their own and risk all-out war with the Ottomans, and so the Romans would have simply limped on until another sultan decided to take a crack at them.

Better than conquest, surely?

Perhaps, but subordination to the Latins was the price of survival, and many Romans saw no joy in that.

In contrasting Constantine XI, son of Helena, with the first of that name, Antony Caldellus notes that

the last vassilefts of the Romans had no crown, no wife, no heir, no patriarch, no money, no legions, no fleet, and no grave.

It's a fitting summary of the state of the empire when it fell, though I also like the sheer pettiness of the Venetians, who noted that the last emperor of Constantinople died seventeen thousand one hundred and sixty-three hyperpira in debt to them.

In the end, Constantine's death did bring a glimmer of dignity to the end of Roman history, as Antony Cordellis puts it.

And I can't better his lines that, quote, Constantinople did not bow its head and go quietly under the Turkish yoke.

Constantine was a man of modest abilities, but he made sure the world knew that something epochal had just happened.

Epochal is right.

The Roman Empire had endured in one form or another for over two millennia, an achievement unmatched in Western Eurasia.

I began by describing the walls of New Rome and the sheer length of time they'd stood.

But the capital they protected was older still.

When Constantine founded it, men still believed in Zeus.

By the time it fell, the discovery of America was just four decades away.

As a tale of survival, it doesn't get much grander than that.

I hope you've enjoyed hearing my version of it.

I so loved the History of Rome podcast, it tied together all the strands of Roman history that I'd absorbed across my life and weaved them together into a beautiful whole.

I was so disappointed that Mike was going to stop in 476 AD that I wrote to him urging him to continue.

But when it became clear he wouldn't, I wondered if I could possibly pick up the torch and run with it.

It's been my absolute pleasure to do so for the past thirteen years, and if you've enjoyed the ride across the past 2206 years of history, then mission accomplished.

This podcast is not over.

I will continue on for some time to come.

But for those leaving me here, I want to say thank you for listening.

And thank you to all of you who've shown me kindness and support.

Thank you for your feedback and your advice, especially over pronunciation.

Thank you for your patience.

If you're not a Patreon person, then there is a donate button at thehistory of Byzantium.com should you feel the urge.

And if you'd like to visit Istanbul with me, then I will keep running tours as long as there are listeners who want to go.

Most of the land walls still stand today in 2025.

Finally, thank you to listener RW for the title of this episode, which is far cleverer and more appropriate than anything that I would have come up with.

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