August 9, 2005
EAST IS EAST:
Constantinople's fall and the gate left open: a review of The Holy War for Constantinople and the Clash of Islam and the West by Roger Crowley (Michael Standaert, August 9, 2005, LA Times)
The terminal events surrounding the fall of great empires have long been studied, pondered and argued over. Edward Gibbon's "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" comes to mind as one of the best documentations of these eventual apocalypses, as does the more recent seven-volume series on the history of political violence by William T. Vollmann called "Rising Up and Rising Down."But while these arduous reads likely scare away anyone but the scholarly or somewhat masochistic reader, Roger Crowley's 1453: The Holy War for Constantinople and the Clash of Islam and the West is an exercise in focused attention on the events surrounding the final year of the Byzantine Empire.
Though long having fallen into decay, the last days of that empire as told in "1453" may have come down to a single gate left unlocked during the height of battle. Certainly the sheer numbers of the attacking Turks, their mighty cannons, the religious zeal of jihad and their superior organization factored highly into how the battle was won. But if not for this turning point in the final attack on Constantinople — — the unlocked gate allowed the Turks to overcome the wall of Theodosius — the Byzantine Empire may have withstood. If only a short while longer.
Crowley's fascinating account of the years leading up to and the final sacking of Constantinople by the Ottoman Empire reads more like lively fiction than dry recounting of historical events. The characters, led by Mehmet II, the young leader of the Ottoman Turks, and Constantine XI, the wearying 57th emperor of a weakening Byzantium, are drawn in great detail from historical source material to bring them to life on the page.
While largely known as impatient, ambitious and ruthless, Mehmet II led the Turks to victory with the brilliant organization of his land and naval forces, as well as the utilization of siege tactics that were soon to render the castle walls across Europe nearly obsolete.
The battle for Constantinople of 1453 was the first to see the major use of "super-gun" cannons around 14 feet long. One monster cannon measured 27 feet long and accommodated "a monstrous stone shot eight feet in circumference weighing something over half a ton." When first testing the weapon, Crowley notes Mehmet II sent a warning to those in the area that the noise could possibly strike people speechless or cause pregnant women to miscarry. The constant bombardment from those guns on the few thousand defenders of Constantinople became a daily source of fear and torment, seen by the prophetic in the city that their apocalypse was near.
The city had a cannon so large and walls so old that firing it was causing their own defenses to crumble. Posted by Orrin Judd at August 9, 2005 6:18 AM
I'm having a hard time determining whether your spelling error was unintentional or really, really clever...
[Editor's note: He's not that clever.]
The modern version of Constantinople's unlocked gate is our immigration policies.
Posted by: carter at August 9, 2005 1:48 PMHad Constantinople brought in as many Christians as we are they'd have easily held the city.
Posted by: oj at August 9, 2005 1:53 PMFor those reading this post after oj fixed his spelling mistake, he initially wrote "The city had a canon so large..." Personally, I think it made a brilliant commentary on the glories of the Orthodox Greek culture and the fact that their influence on the West and Islam benefited those rising cultures enough so that the ancient city walls weren't sufficient at the close of the Middle Ages...
The most shocking thing about the fall of the city is that during the siege Constantinople was defended by ~7000 men. For a city whose population was at least half a million a few centuries earlier. Just doubling the number of defenders would have made the city unconquerable.
Of course, for the Greeks, holding the city wasn't worth letting the Latins in...
Posted by: b at August 9, 2005 2:03 PMOJ: The cannon belonged to the attackers, not the city.
P.S. Gibbon was the greatest non-fiction prosidist in our language. Reading his master work is a treat.
Posted by: Robert Schwartz at August 10, 2005 12:59 AMRobert: The legendary super-cannon did belong to Mehmet. But Constantinople's smaller (but still large by the standards of the day) cannons did indeed prove useless because they damaged the walls they were fired from.
Interestingly, the man who built the huge cannon for Mehmet first offered his services to the Emperor Constantine, but Constantinople lacked both the materials and funds he was asking. The Turks had no such problems, so he went to work for them.
Robert:
The only good paper I wrote in college was on the Fall of Constantinople.
Posted by: oj at August 10, 2005 11:42 AMHungarian Christians built the cannon.
However, what destroyed the eastern Empire was religious intolerance among various Christian cults.
The Anatolian who were the empire's soldiers easily converted to Islam because Christianity offered them nothing. The Turks then picked up the scraps.
Christian polities never survive long, because Christians cannot stand each other. Only secularism allows Christian hatred to be directed away from the state and the Jews.
Posted by: Harry Eagar at August 10, 2005 11:34 PMYou never put the most important city of your empire at its very fringe--you'll never be able to defend it. Of course, by the time it fell Constantinople had been supplanted by numeropus more important Christian capitals.
Posted by: oj at August 11, 2005 10:30 AMThis is a fascinating and tragic story, but I have a different question for oj: Have you ever read anything by this William T. Vollmann character mentioned in the article? If so, any thoughts on whether he's worth checking out?
Posted by: b at August 11, 2005 1:22 PMI've got three of his books which I've tried reading on numerous occassions but I just can't get into him. I've been meaning to give him another shot.
Posted by: oj at August 11, 2005 1:25 PMI dunno, Orrin, the Turks defended Stamboul very efficiently in 1915.
They lost their empire and with it their capital elsewhere.
The Russians never lost Petersburg, either, except to internal collapse.
Athens lost its empire in Sicily, not the Piraeus, and did a pretty good job defending itself against the biggest opponent there was.
On the other hand, Ecbatana was in the center and fell like an overripe fruit.
Posted by: Harry Eagar at August 11, 2005 11:10 PMPut Moscow on the western border and the USSR falls to Hitler.
Posted by: oj at August 11, 2005 11:18 PM