The fall of Constantinople and the end of empire.(Constantinople: The Last Great Siege, 1453)(Book review)

Constantinople: The Last Great Siege, 1453. Roger Crowley. Faber. [pounds sterling]16.99. 304 pages. ISBN 0-571-22185-8.

On Tuesday, 29 May 1453, Constantinople fell to the besieging army of Sultan Mehmet II. Constantine XI, the last Byzantine emperor, charged hopeless, defiant and screaming into the Ottoman masses. He was never seen again. More than a city fell that day. Some say the Middle Ages ended then, and Constantine saw himself as the last of the Romans. The Theodosian wall that for a thousand years had repulsed all invaders except those of the Fourth Crusade, had been eroded by vast cannon. It was the first war in which gunpowder had been more than psychologically important. From now on the old intimacy of hand to hand combat gave way to non-relational killing at a distance. This in turn made war more palatable. Islam had a bridgehead into Europe and the notion of Christian supremacy suffered its biggest knock since the Horns of Hattin.

The surprise is not that Constantinople fell in 1453, but that it did not fall before. Over the previous two centuries the Byzantine empire had gradually been nibbled away, and by 1453 consisted of little more than the city of Constantinople itself and a small outpost in the Peloponnese. An Empire that small and that isolated needs friends, and the Byzantines had precious few. The Roman and Orthodox churches had mutually excommunicated one another in 1054, and although there had been a formal Bull of Union in 1439 there was still enmity between the two wings of the church. Constantine's efforts to paint the plight of Constantinople as the plight of Christendom all but failed. The Pope might have wanted to help, but his power was nothing like as great as Constantine thought it was. Real power lay in the hands of the Italian city-states--notably Venice and Genoa. But their balance sheets had not got to be as healthy as they were by quixotic gestures of Christian gallantry. They were in the business of trading, not crusading and so the pale defenders of Constantinople looked in vain down the Bosphorus for the relieving fleet.

Mehmet II felt that he had been born to take Constantinople. 'The Prophet' had spoken of the city being delivered from the infidel, and since his childhood Mehmet had fantasised about being the instrument of that divine plan. But his was a brutally practical fantasy, backed with detailed calculations, innovative siege engines and obsessively drawn maps. There are several surviving portraits of him. They tell the same story as his life. He has dead eyes with a terrible focus. He has a hang-dog melancholy and thin lips that never hesitated to give the command to impale prisoners when it pleased him. But pleasure for him was a bloodless thing. He was no sybarite. What would have been sensual depravity for others was merely tactical good sense for him. If cruelty took his army a step closer to Constantinople, he was cruel. If apparent kindness did the same, he was kind. There is nothing so terrifying as complete dispassion.

Mehmet strangled Constantinople systematically, blockading the Bosphorus, and then came himself at the head of a massive force. It sat outside the city, filling the land to the horizon with their pointed tents. The Christians inside the wall saw the fires as the embers on the edge of hell. They bound their city in prayers and steel, processing with relics and icons and deploying their relatively few soldiers with consummate skill on the ancient battlements. The portents were not good. The earth shook; an eclipse taunted the defenders with the old prophecy that a city would fall under a waxing moon; an unseasonable fog cloaked the city; a strange phosphorescence hung over the dome of Sancta Sophia; the holiest icon of the Mother of God toppled off its stand.

Militarily, too, things looked bad for Constantinople. The Byzantines cut off the Golden Horn with a chain, but Mehmet simply dragged his ships overland round the chain--stretching further the length of wall that had to be watched. The walls slowly gave way to the cannon. The Christians never quite gave up hope. Surely a Crusade would come? Surely God would not abandon His people? But He seemed to have done just this, and when the Janissaries burst into the city, the Greeks saw it as judgment for a millennium of sins.

Roger Crowley's account of this siege is an extraordinary blend of true scholarship and rare story-telling skill. If all history were written like this John Grisham would be destitute. Mr Crowley navigates the tricky waters of Byzantine and Ottoman politics with the confidence that comes only from real understanding. He paints the characters with the sympathy and insight that come only from having lived with them for years: Mehmet and Constantine live, pray, obsess and duel from the first page. But best of all the author is a master of mood. He makes omens ominous. The first approach of the Ottoman army is like a black bird whose wings block the sun: to look at the pennanted camp is to look into the maw of a great dog. These are my metaphors and similes, not his; they show that the story lived as he told it. Objectivity is often a casualty of lyrical skill and a romantic sense of the import of a story but not here. This is a model of historical writing.