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The day the world came to an end
Noel Malcolm reviews Constantinople: The Last Great Siege, 1453 by Roger Crowley.
Even as a young schoolboy, I couldn't help noticing the uncanny resemblance between the siege of Minas Tirith in Tolkien's Lord of the Rings and the siege of Constantinople. On one side, the beautiful walled city with its ancient nobility and the few adventurers who had come to help in its defence; on the other, evil teeming hordes under a despotic ruler. You had only to look at the map in the end-papers, where the land of Mordor loomed to the east like Asia Minor, to get the point.
Tolkien even chose the name "Uruk-Hai" for some of his nastiest creations, fighting forces of Sauron who were a cross between orcs and goblins. This was surely borrowed from the "Yuruk", nomadic tribesmen used as auxiliary soldiers by the Ottomans. Few readers would have known that; but most would have got a whiff of something Asiatic here. For one thing Tolkien was outstandingly good at was tapping into the subconscious of our own, European, cultural history.
Deep down, we still think of the last great clash between Byzantium and the Turks as a Manichaean confrontation of civilisation and barbarism, West and East. But the historical reality, not surprisingly, is much less black and white. Above all, what sealed the fate of the defenders of Constantinople was the failure of "the West" to think of itself in any such monolithic, civilisational terms. When Venice, the leading Christian naval power in the eastern Mediterranean, received the Emperor's desperate pleas for help, it thought about its trading interests with the Ottomans and decided to do nothing.
Inside the embattled city there were tensions between Greeks and Italians, and bitter divisions between those Greeks who favoured the idea of union between the Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches, and those who opposed it. Some even said they would prefer Turkish rule to Papal tyranny: it seems they had not forgotten the previous conquest of their city, when their churches had been looted and their women raped not by Turks but by Catholic "crusaders".
Outside the city, the besieging forces were not exactly monolithic either. A large part of Sultan Mehmet's army was made up of Christian soldiers from his European dominions; some may have been fighting unwillingly, but some probably saw this military service as just a normal feudal obligation to their ruler. In the early Ottoman period there are even reports of peasants migrating into the Ottoman-ruled parts of the Balkans, because they found the conditions of life preferable there.
But wasn't the whole Turkish campaign driven by the spirit of Islamic jihad? Apparently not. Mehmet himself was motivated partly by Realpolitik, and partly by romantic notions derived from his study of Latin and Greek authors. As for his troops, we have the opinion of his own spiritual adviser, Sheikh Ak Shemsettin: "The number of those who are ready to sacrifice their lives for the love of Allah is extremely small. On the other hand, if they glimpse booty they will run towards certain death."
And run they did. However much one qualifies the ideological significance of this conflict, however far one downgrades its geopolitical importance (the Byzantine "Empire" was already tiny and quite powerless), nothing can diminish the human interest of this closely-fought contest with its colossal loss of life. This will always remain one of the most exciting, cliff-hanging stories in world history; and in Roger Crowley's new book it is told extremely well.
The background to the conflict is deftly sketched; so too are the characters of the leaders on both sides - the middle-aged Emperor Constantine, a politically weak man who showed extraordinary resolution in war, and the young Sultan Mehmet, barely out of his teens, animated both by soaring ambition and by a terrible fear of failure. And the geographical setting is also lucidly explained: the city was almost impregnable by sea, but its great land walls had two weak spots on which Mehmet cannily concentrated his attacks.
Crowley describes the advances in technology (above all, in the manufacture of gunpowder for artillery) that made it possible, for the first time, to reduce such massive walls to rubble - and the brilliant improvisations of the defenders, whose earthwork replacements for the shattered walls were actually more resistant to cannon fire. Meanwhile, under those very ramparts, a bizarre game of cat and mouse went on as Ottoman miners tunneled in the dark, and the defenders (led by a Scottish engineer) intercepted them with tunnels of their own.
With a little reinforcement from outside, the defenders could have won. Defeat was never certain, but what ensured it in the end was the astonishing logistical abilities of the Ottomans and the sheer imbalance of numbers: perhaps 60,000 Ottoman fighters versus 8,000 Greeks and Italians. For this was no mighty metropolis; Constantinople had become a shell, a poor shadow of its former self. As Crowley says of the Turks, in one of the most poignant sentences in this book: "the city they imagined did not exist".
Crowley has studied the sources carefully. Just occasionally he makes odd slips: when he talks of ulemas wandering among the Turkish troops he apparently does not know that "ulema" is a collective term (the Islamic equivalent of "clergy"). Nor do I understand why he refers to the Venetian Bailo (the governor of the Venetian community there, and quasi-ambassador) as the "bailey", which is a type of castle wall.
Occasionally he adds a touch of purple prose, or some novelistic detail that cannot be contained in his sources. And he is sometimes too eager to accept as authentic the made-up speeches put in the mouths of leading figures by some of the early chroniclers; as he admits only in a postscript, the trustworthiness of these sources is variable, and limited. But this is not an academic monograph. It is, rather, a powerful telling of an extraordinary story, presented with a clarity and a confidence that most academic historians would envy.
link:
The day the world came to an end - Telegraph
Noel Malcolm reviews Constantinople: The Last Great Siege, 1453 by Roger Crowley.
Even as a young schoolboy, I couldn't help noticing the uncanny resemblance between the siege of Minas Tirith in Tolkien's Lord of the Rings and the siege of Constantinople. On one side, the beautiful walled city with its ancient nobility and the few adventurers who had come to help in its defence; on the other, evil teeming hordes under a despotic ruler. You had only to look at the map in the end-papers, where the land of Mordor loomed to the east like Asia Minor, to get the point.
Tolkien even chose the name "Uruk-Hai" for some of his nastiest creations, fighting forces of Sauron who were a cross between orcs and goblins. This was surely borrowed from the "Yuruk", nomadic tribesmen used as auxiliary soldiers by the Ottomans. Few readers would have known that; but most would have got a whiff of something Asiatic here. For one thing Tolkien was outstandingly good at was tapping into the subconscious of our own, European, cultural history.
Deep down, we still think of the last great clash between Byzantium and the Turks as a Manichaean confrontation of civilisation and barbarism, West and East. But the historical reality, not surprisingly, is much less black and white. Above all, what sealed the fate of the defenders of Constantinople was the failure of "the West" to think of itself in any such monolithic, civilisational terms. When Venice, the leading Christian naval power in the eastern Mediterranean, received the Emperor's desperate pleas for help, it thought about its trading interests with the Ottomans and decided to do nothing.
Inside the embattled city there were tensions between Greeks and Italians, and bitter divisions between those Greeks who favoured the idea of union between the Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches, and those who opposed it. Some even said they would prefer Turkish rule to Papal tyranny: it seems they had not forgotten the previous conquest of their city, when their churches had been looted and their women raped not by Turks but by Catholic "crusaders".
Outside the city, the besieging forces were not exactly monolithic either. A large part of Sultan Mehmet's army was made up of Christian soldiers from his European dominions; some may have been fighting unwillingly, but some probably saw this military service as just a normal feudal obligation to their ruler. In the early Ottoman period there are even reports of peasants migrating into the Ottoman-ruled parts of the Balkans, because they found the conditions of life preferable there.
But wasn't the whole Turkish campaign driven by the spirit of Islamic jihad? Apparently not. Mehmet himself was motivated partly by Realpolitik, and partly by romantic notions derived from his study of Latin and Greek authors. As for his troops, we have the opinion of his own spiritual adviser, Sheikh Ak Shemsettin: "The number of those who are ready to sacrifice their lives for the love of Allah is extremely small. On the other hand, if they glimpse booty they will run towards certain death."
And run they did. However much one qualifies the ideological significance of this conflict, however far one downgrades its geopolitical importance (the Byzantine "Empire" was already tiny and quite powerless), nothing can diminish the human interest of this closely-fought contest with its colossal loss of life. This will always remain one of the most exciting, cliff-hanging stories in world history; and in Roger Crowley's new book it is told extremely well.
The background to the conflict is deftly sketched; so too are the characters of the leaders on both sides - the middle-aged Emperor Constantine, a politically weak man who showed extraordinary resolution in war, and the young Sultan Mehmet, barely out of his teens, animated both by soaring ambition and by a terrible fear of failure. And the geographical setting is also lucidly explained: the city was almost impregnable by sea, but its great land walls had two weak spots on which Mehmet cannily concentrated his attacks.
Crowley describes the advances in technology (above all, in the manufacture of gunpowder for artillery) that made it possible, for the first time, to reduce such massive walls to rubble - and the brilliant improvisations of the defenders, whose earthwork replacements for the shattered walls were actually more resistant to cannon fire. Meanwhile, under those very ramparts, a bizarre game of cat and mouse went on as Ottoman miners tunneled in the dark, and the defenders (led by a Scottish engineer) intercepted them with tunnels of their own.
With a little reinforcement from outside, the defenders could have won. Defeat was never certain, but what ensured it in the end was the astonishing logistical abilities of the Ottomans and the sheer imbalance of numbers: perhaps 60,000 Ottoman fighters versus 8,000 Greeks and Italians. For this was no mighty metropolis; Constantinople had become a shell, a poor shadow of its former self. As Crowley says of the Turks, in one of the most poignant sentences in this book: "the city they imagined did not exist".
Crowley has studied the sources carefully. Just occasionally he makes odd slips: when he talks of ulemas wandering among the Turkish troops he apparently does not know that "ulema" is a collective term (the Islamic equivalent of "clergy"). Nor do I understand why he refers to the Venetian Bailo (the governor of the Venetian community there, and quasi-ambassador) as the "bailey", which is a type of castle wall.
Occasionally he adds a touch of purple prose, or some novelistic detail that cannot be contained in his sources. And he is sometimes too eager to accept as authentic the made-up speeches put in the mouths of leading figures by some of the early chroniclers; as he admits only in a postscript, the trustworthiness of these sources is variable, and limited. But this is not an academic monograph. It is, rather, a powerful telling of an extraordinary story, presented with a clarity and a confidence that most academic historians would envy.
link:
The day the world came to an end - Telegraph
