The Grand Turk Page 8
Mehmet began the reconstruction of his new capital in the summer of 1453, when he issued orders for the repair of the Theodosian walls and the other fortifications damaged in the siege. Since both the Great Palace of Byzantium and the Blachernae Palace were in ruins, Mehmet began construction of a new imperial residence on the Third Hill, on a site described by Kritoboulos as ‘the finest and best location in the centre of the City’. This came to be known as Eski Saray, the Old Palace, because a few years later Mehmet decided to build a new palace on the First Hill, the famous Topkapı Sarayı.
Kritoboulos, in writing of Eski Saray, also notes that Mehmet at the same time ‘ordered the construction of a strong fortress near the Golden Gate’ in the south-western corner of the city, a monument that came to be called Yedikule, the Castle of the Seven Towers. Then, at the beginning of his chronicle for the year 1456, Kritoboulos reports the sultan’s satisfaction at the completion of Eski Saray and Yedikule, as well as his initiation of new construction projects, most notably the great marketplace known as Kapalı Çarşı, or the Covered Bazaar.
Five years after the Conquest, Mehmet built a large mosque complex outside the city walls on the upper reaches of the Golden Horn. The mosque was dedicated to Eba Eyüp Ensari, friend and standard-bearer of the Prophet Mohammed. Eyüp is said to have been among the leaders of the first Arab siege of Constantinople in 674-8, during which, according to Islamic tradition, he was killed and buried outside the walls of Constantinople. During the siege of the city in 1453 Mehmet launched a search for Eyüp’s grave, which was miraculously discovered by Akşemsettin, his seyhülislam, or chief cleric, a fabulous story told by Evliya Çelebi.
Mehmet II having laid siege to Constantinople was, with seventy saintly companions, seven whole days searching for Eyüp’s tomb. At last Akşemsettin exclaimed, ‘Good news, my prince, of Eyüp’s tomb’; thus saying he began to pray and then fell asleep. Some interpreted this sleep as a veil cast by shame over his ignorance of the tomb, but after some time he raised his head, his eyes became bloodshot, the sweat ran from his forehead, and he said to the Sultan, ‘Eyüp’s tomb is on the very spot where I spread the carpet for prayer.’ Upon this three of his attendants together with the Şeyh and the Sultan began to dig up the ground, when at a depth of three yards they found a square stone of verd antique on which was written in Cufic letters: ‘This is the tomb of Eba Eyüp.’ They lifted the stone and found below it the body of Eyüp wrapt up in a saffron-coloured shroud, with a brazen play-ball in his hand, fresh and well preserved. They replaced the stone, formed a little mound of the earth they had dug up, and laid the foundation of the mausoleum amidst the prayers of the whole army. The tomb, the mosque, the medrese, the caravansarai, the public bath, the refectory, and the market were built by Mehmet II, and his successors added some improvements to its splendour, so that Eyüp’s funeral monument now resembles a kiosk of Paradise.
That following year, according to Kritoboulos, Sultan Mehmet issued a ‘command…to all able persons to build splendid and costly buildings inside the City’, Kritoboulos goes on to say that Mehmet ‘also commanded them to build baths and inns and marketplaces, and very many and beautiful workshops, to erect places of worship, and to adorn and embellish the City with many other such buildings, sparing no expense, as each man had the means and ability’.
Mehmet himself led the way by selecting a site on the Fourth Hill, where a decade after the Conquest he began building an enormous complex known as Fatih Camii, the Mosque of the Conqueror. The ancient church of the Holy Apostles occupied a large part of the site, and so Mehmet had it demolished to make way for his new mosque complex. Kritoboulos also notes Mehmet’s orders to build a new palace on the First Hill, the pleasure dome that would come to be known as Topkapı Sarayı.
Kritoboulos goes on to write that Mehmet also ordered his notables ‘to construct many very fine arsenals to shelter the ships and their furnishings, and to build very strong, large buildings for the storing of arms, cannon, and other such supplies’. The naval arsenal, known as the Tersane, was on the Golden Horn, while the armoury, called Tophane, was on the Bosphorus, both of them just outside the walls of Galata on those sides.
A number of Mehmet’s vezirs also erected mosque complexes in Istanbul. The earliest of these is Mahmut Pasha Camii. This mosque complex was built on the Second Hill in 1462 by Mahmut Pasha, who succeeded Zaganos Pasha as grand vezir three years after the Conquest. Kritoboulos writes in praise of Mahmut Pasha, who by all accounts was the greatest of all of the Conqueror’s grand vezirs and one of the best who ever held that post in the Ottoman Empire. ‘This man had so fine a nature that he outshone not only all his contemporaries but also his predecessors in wisdom, bravery, virtue, and other good qualities. He was…a man of better character than them all, as shown by his accomplishments.’
The mosques and other structures built by Mehmet and his vezirs marked the first phase of the transition in which Greek Constantinople, capital of the Byzantine Empire, became Turkish Istanbul, capital of the Ottoman Empire. One can see this transition in the famous Buondelmonti maps, the earliest of which is dated 1420 and the latest 1480. The city looks essentially the same in these two maps, but in the later one we can see the castles of Rumeli Hisarı and Yedikule, the Mosques of the Conqueror and Mahmut Pasha, the palaces of Eski Saray and Topkapı Sarayı, the Covered Bazaar, the naval arsenal on the Golden Horn, the cannon foundry on the Bosphorus, and even the minaret on what was now the Great Mosque of Haghia Sophia, which in itself symbolises the transition from Byzantine Constantinople to Ottoman Istanbul.
5
Europe in Terror
When news of the fall of Constantinople reached western Europe there was general consternation, and it was reported that Mehmet was assembling a huge army and fleet to attack Sicily and Italy. Cardinal Bessarion’s letter to the Doge of Venice after the fall of Constantinople catches the sense of terror in Europe caused by the Turkish onslaught: ‘A city which was so flourishing…the splendour and glory of the East…the refuge of all good things, has been captured, despoiled, ravaged and completely sacked by the most inhuman barbarians…by the fiercest of wild beasts… Much danger threatens Italy, not to mention other lands, if the violent assaults of the most ferocious barbarians are not checked.’
Frederick III, the Holy Roman Emperor, broke down in tears when he heard the news and shut himself away in his quarters to pray and meditate. His adviser, Bishop Aeneas Silvio Piccolomini, the future Pope Pius II, convinced him that he should take direct action and lead a holy war against the Turks. Aeneas wrote to Pope Nicholas V with this same proposal on 12 July 1453, pointing out the terrible threat posed by the Grand Turk, and urging him to call for a crusade:Here we have horrible news of the fall of Constantinople - if only it were false… Now we see one of the two lights of Christendom extinguished. We behold the seat of eastern empire overthrown, all the Glory that was Greece blotted out … Now Mohammed reigns among us. Now the Turk hangs over our very head. The Black Sea is closed to us, the Don has become inaccessible. Now the Vlachs must obey the Turk. Next his sword will reach the Hungarians and then the Germans. In the meantime we are beset by internecine strife… Let them make a peace or a truce with their fellow Christians, and with joined forces take up arms against the enemies of salvations.
The Pope issued a bull calling for a crusade, condemning Mehmet as the ‘son of Satan, perdition and death’. But disunity among the Christian rulers kept them from taking action, and when Pope Nicholas died on 24 March 1455 the crusade was abandoned, at least for the time being.
Nicholas was succeeded by the Catalan Alfonso Borgia, who on 20 April 1455 became Pope Calixtus III. On the eve of his coronation Calixtus wrote to the young King Ladislas Posthumus of Bohemia and Hungary, declaring his dedication to a crusade against the Turks, ‘even to the shedding of his own blood’, so ‘that those most hideous enemies of the Christian name should be entirely expelled not only from the city of Constantinople, which they have recen
tly occupied, but also from the confines of Europe’. The Hungarian leaders wrote back to Calixtus from Buda on 21 July, saying: ‘How very much indeed the pitiable condition of Christians now has need of your Holiness’s protection.’
The Venetian Republic was the Christian state most directly involved with the Ottomans, for its maritime empire included commercial concessions in Istanbul as well as possessions in Greece, Albania and the Aegean that were threatened by the Turks. In July 1453 the Senate decided to fortify Negroponte, Greek Chalkis, the town that they controlled on the narrow strait between the Greek mainland and the Aegean island of Euboea. The Venetian fleet under Giacomo Loredan, who had failed to come to the aid of Constantinople, remained on duty in the Aegean, and late in July he captured seventeen Turkish light galleys. The Senate congratulated Loredan on his action, and the following month they voted funds for the construction of fifty new galleys for his fleet.
On 17 July 1453 the Senate sent Bartolomeo Marcello as an envoy to Istanbul, instructing him to negotiate with Mehmet a renewal of the treaty that Venice had signed with Murat II on 10 September 1451. While the negotiations were under way the Peace of Lodi on 9 April 1454 ended war between Venice and Milan. Freed from the enormous expense of the Italian war, the Senate was better able to negotiate with Mehmet, and on 18 April Marcello concluded a treaty with the sultan. This treaty, which reaffirmed the terms of the 1451 pact, gave the Venetians protection for their property and commerce in the Ottoman Empire and free access to Istanbul and other Turkish ports, Mehmet promising that ‘they shall be safe on the sea and on the land as was customary before, in the time of my father’. Another term of the treaty gave the Venetians the right to have a commercial colony in Istanbul headed by a bailo, and Marcello was appointed to the post.
One of the Venetian emissaries, Giacomo de’ Languschi, gives a detailed description of Mehmet, adding four years to his age.
The sovereign, the Grand Turk Mehmed Bey, is a young man of twenty-six years of age, well formed and of a stature rather above the average. He is skilled in the use of weapons. His appearance inspires fear rather than respect. He laughs rarely, is cautious in his judgements, and is endowed with great generosity. He shows great tenacity in all his undertakings, and bravery under all conditions. He aspires to equal the glory of Alexander the Great, and every day has histories of Rome and other nations read to him… There is nothing which he studies with greater pleasure and eagerness than the geography of the world, and the art of warfare; he burns with the desire to rule, while being prudent in his investigation of what he undertakes. Such is the man, and so made, with whom we Christians have to deal.
Languschi goes on to write of Mehmet’s desire to put the entire world under his rule, reversing the eastward march of conquest of Western rulers such as Alexander the Great, an imperial ambition for which he seemed perfectly suited by nature.
He is a man continually watchful, able to endure weariness, heat and cold, thirst and hunger, inexorably set upon the destruction of Christians, and would admit to fearing no man. He…says the Caesar and Hannibal were of no account compared with himself, and that Alexander…entered Asia with a far smaller force than his. Now he says, times have changed, and he will march from the East to the West, as the West once marched against the East; now there must be only one empire in the world, one faith for all, and one kingdom. There is no place anywhere for such a union than Constantinople, and with the help of this city, he can make the Christians his subjects. He is not a man given to lustful desires, and of sober habits, not wishing to hear of any drunkenness at the time of Rhamadan. He is not enslaved by any pleasures or delights, but only by the love of glory.
After establishing his capital in Istanbul, Mehmet launched a campaign into Serbia in the spring of 1454, his objective being to reclaim the territory his father had returned to the despot George Brancović by the Treaty of Edirne in 1444.
Mehmet and Ishak Pasha captured two Serbian fortresses, but they were forced to abandon their conquests when John Hunyadi appeared with a Hungarian army. Mehmet launched another campaign into Serbia the following year, when he captured the town of Novo Brdo, noted for its gold and silver mines. Among those captured by the Turks was a young Serb named Constantine Mihailović, who was enrolled in the janissaries and later wrote a memoir of his experiences, including his capture at Novo Brdo.
All those among the men who were the most important and distinguished he [Mehmet] ordered decapitated. The remainder he ordered released to the city. As for their possessions, nothing of theirs was harmed. The boys were 320 in number and the females 74. The females he distributed among the heathens [Turks], but he took the boys for himself into the Janissaries, and sent them beyond the sea to Anatolia, where their preserve is. I was also taken in that city with my two brothers…
The sixteenth-century chronicler Mustafa Ali notes that, on the sultan’s return from campaign in 1454, ‘Mehmet spent many nights in debauchery with lovely-eyed, fairylike slave girls, and his days drinking with pages who looked like angels. But he was only seemingly engaged in debauchery and wantonness, in reality he was working, guided by the love of justice, to relieve the oppression of his subjects in the land.’
During the years 1454-5 Mehmet also sent his navy into the Aegean under the command of Hamza Bey, who attacked the islands of Nisyros, Kalymnos, Kos and Chios. One of the Turkish galleys was sunk at Chios, which led Mehmet to dismiss Hamza Bey and replace him with Yunus Bey. At the beginning of November 1455 Yunus captured the Genoese colony of Nea Phokaia on the Aegean coast of Asia Minor north of Izmir. Six weeks later another Turkish force seized the Genoese colony at Palaeo Phokaia, a short way to the south of Nea Phokaia. This gave Mehmet control of the lucrative alum mines that the Genoese had developed through the two Phokaias, their principal commercial colonies on the Aegean coast Asia Minor, now permanently lost to them.
The two ports and the mines had been the property of Dorino II Gattilusio, the Genoese lord of Lesbos and the islands of Samothrace and Imbros as well as the port of Enez (Aenos) north of the Gallipoli peninsula. Early in 1456 Mehmet himself led a force of janissaries against Enez, which surrendered without a struggle, while at the same time Yunus Bey captured the islands of Imbros and Samothrace, where he took Dorino Gattilusio prisoner. Gattilusio was forced to give up all his possessions to Mehmet, who in compensation gave him a small fief in Macedonia. Mehmet then appointed Kritoboulos, his biographer, to be the Ottoman governor of his native Imbros.
Mehmet spent the winter of 1455-6 preparing a major campaign against Serbia and Hungary, which he regarded as his major enemies in Europe now that he had made peace with Venice. His major objective in this campaign was Belgrade, the great fortress city at the confluence of the Danube and the Sava, for its capture would open the way to Buda, the capital of Hungary. Mehmet’s plan was to send his fleet up the Danube to meet his army when he began the siege of Belgrade.
Meanwhile, Pope Calixtus had renewed his predecessor’s call for a crusade against the Turks, setting 1 March 1456 as the date for the departure of ‘all the Christian princes and peoples’ for the holy war. A great diet convened at Buda on 6 February 1456, when the Franciscan monk Fra Giovanni da Capistrano presented the Pope’s appeal for a crusade, with King Ladislas in attendance. On 6 April the assembly finally decided that they would march against the Turks, but on the following day a messenger arrived with word that Mehmet’s army was already marching north towards the Danube.
John Hunyadi, who had served as regent of King Ladislas Posthumus in 1452, though still considered by the Hungarians as their true leader, commanded the defence of Belgrade, which began on 14 July 1456 with a terrific bombardment by the Turkish artillery. A week later Mehmet ordered in his janissaries, who penetrated the defences and made their way into the city, only to be virtually annihilated there by the defenders. Fra Capistrano then led a force of some 2,000 defenders out of the city to charge the surrounding Turks, whom they routed after a furious five-hour battle in wh
ich Mehmet himself was wounded in his left thigh by a javelin. The following day Mehmet lifted the siege, abandoning his artillery as he hurriedly withdrew his forces and began the long march back to Edirne.
News of the Christian victory at Belgrade reached Rome on 6 August, sparking a celebration that echoed throughout western Europe as word spread through the Christian world that the Grand Turk had at last met his match. The two heroes of the siege died not long afterwards, Hunyadi succumbing to the plague on 11 August and Fra Capistrano dying on 23 October, supposedly of exhaustion.
Meanwhile, a new pretender to the Ottoman throne appeared in Rome early in 1456, when an eight-year-old boy named Beyazit Osman was brought to the Vatican by an Italian from Istanbul, Giovanni Torcello. Torcello claimed that the boy, who had been born in 1448, was the son of Sultan Murat II, and thus a half-brother of Mehmet. When Mehmet became sultan the boy was smuggled out of Edirne Sarayı so that he would not be killed like Küçük Ahmet, after which he was taken to Istanbul and raised by Torcello - or so he said. After the capture of Constantinople Torcello and the boy were sold as slaves, and eventually they were redeemed by Pope Calixtus, who had been convinced that ‘Beyazit Osman’ was in fact a son of Murat II. The boy was baptised in Rome on 8 March 1456, taking the name Calixtus Ottomanus, becoming a ward of the Pope, who thought to use him as a pretender to the Ottoman throne in a crusade against the Turks.