In Our Time - Constantinople Siege and Fall

Episode Date: December 28, 2006

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the siege of Constantinople in 1453. When Sultan Mehmet the Second rode into the city of Constantinople on a white horse in 1453, it marked the end of a thousand years of the Byzantine Empire. After holding out for 53 days, the city had fallen. And as one contemporary witness described it: “The blood flowed in the city like rainwater in the gutters after a sudden storm”. It was the end of the classical world and the crowning of an Ottoman Empire that would last until 1922.Constantinople was a city worth fighting for – its position as a bridge between Europe and Asia and its triangular shape with a deep water port made it ideal both for trade and defence. It was also rumoured to harbour great wealth. Whoever conquered it would reap rewards both material and political. Earlier attempts to capture the city had largely failed – so why did the Ottomans succeed this time? What difference did the advances in weaponry such as cannons make in the outcome of the battle? And what effect did the fall of Constantinople have on the rest of the Christian world?With Roger Crowley, author and historian; Judith Herrin, Professor of Late Antique and Byzantine Studies at King's College London; Colin Imber, formerly Reader in Turkish at Manchester University.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio 4. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, when Sultan Mehmet II wrote into the city of Constantinople on a white horse in 1453, it marked the end of a thousand years of the Byzantine Empire. After holding out for 53 days, the city had fallen.

And as one contemporary witness described it, quote, the blood flowed in the city like rainwater in gutters after a sudden storm, unquote. It seemed to mark the end of the classical world and the crowning of an Ottoman empire that would last until 1922. Constantinople was a city worth fighting for. Its position as a bridge between Europe and Asia, and its triangular shape with a deep water port, made it ideal both for trade and defence. It was also rumoured to harbour great wealth. It was a place of fabled splendour.

Whoever conquered it would reap rewards both material and political. Earlier attempts to capture the city had largely failed. So why did the Ottomans succeed this time? What difference did the advances in weaponry such as cannons make in the outcome of the battle? And what effect did the fall of Constantinople have on the rest of the Christian world? With me to discuss this are Roger Crowley, an author and historian, Judith Herrin, Professor of Late Antique and Byzantine Studies at King's College London, and Colin Imba, formerly reader in Turkish at Manchester University.

Roger Crowley, in the 15th century the Byzantine Empire was in decline. It had lost most of his territory. Briefly, why was that? In a nutshell, it was a result of an extremely long process of external pressure and internal decline that goes back many centuries. At the end of the 11th century, the empire started to come under pressure externally from the east and the west. From the east, this came in the form of Turkish tribal raiders who started to push into Anatolia, Asia Minor. At the same time, it was coming under military and economic pressure from the West as a result of the Crusades.

The Crusaders passed through Constantinople and eyed it rather covetously as a very rich place. And in the aftermath of that, one of the signal disasters of Byzantine history was the Fourth Crusade of 1204, which the Venetians hijacked from going for Jerusalem and sacked Constantinople, instead. The upshot of this was catastrophic for the Byzantines. The emperors were in exile for 60 years. The Turks pushed on into Asia Minor, and out of these warring bands, one emerged under a tribal leader called Osman, whose people became known subsequently as the Ottomans. The 14th century, a calamitous century in Europe was equally calamitous for the Byzantines. Civil War. population decline, plague. Concentrable was the first city in Europe to be hit by plague rats coming on ships from the Black Sea. The Ottomans continued their advance.

They cross into Europe as guests of one of the warring factions in the Civil War. And by the end of the 14th century, they'd established themselves in Europe. They smashed the Serbs, and they created a capital at Erderni. 140 miles to the west of Constantinople, and the emperors of the empire were reduced effectively to vassals of the Ottoman sultans. They were in a very weak position. Well, that's a wonderful overview. Can I just pick out two things if we could do that?

So it had reduced from what to what? In about 1453, how big was it? It was the empire and emperor. What was it? It was a city and what else? It was a tiny footprint. It was a city with some... small hinterland and effectively the Peloponnese, southern Greece,

and that was more or less it. There wasn't much more. And this amazing sacking of it by Christians, cracking a Christian city by Christians in 1204, that was extraordinary debilitating. Can you elaborate on that a little? I mean, the glories that we see in Venice were looted from Constantinople, many of them, wasn't there?

That's right. And one of the real symbols of the decline of Constantinople was the four, empty plinths in the hippodrome, which of course had housed the four horses which had been carried off to Venice. And these were kind of like, it seemed to like an ultimate symbol of the decline of a great empire. And it left a legacy, a long legacy of bitterness between the Catholic and the Orthodox world, the events of 1204.

Judith Heron, until 1453, apart from this unchristian incursion, there had been other attacks on the city and they had been beaten off as I understand it or can you give me some detail about that? Many, many attacks, starting in the 7th century with the Avars and the Persians in conjunction in 626, a very important symbolic moment because the victory was attributed by the inhabitants of Constantinople to the virgin mother of God, Theotocos. And she became the defender of the city and gave it her very special protection. and the inhabitants believed firmly that she would come to their aid, as she did, in all the subsequent sieges, when she was frequently seen, allegedly, fighting on the walls beside the Byzantines.

So they had very great faith in the divine protection that had been accorded to them. And they managed to beat off the Bulgaras in the early 9th century, attacks by the Russians in the 10th, and numerous other sieges right through till the major siege of 1422, when the Sultan Murad II was absolutely confident of capturing Constantinople and even sent out instructions, news to his subjects, to come and prepare to plunder the city, because he knew and they knew that it was very rich, and they were all lined up to come and enjoy the booty.

That was not to be, but in 1453 is what happened. What was the great strength of the city? Why could they not conquer it? They turn up again and again and again. We'll get to 1453 a moment or two. What was the strength, was it simply the depth of the fortification? The depth of the fortifications was very, very impressive. These early 5th century walls were a major architectural achievement,

a feature which is still very impressive today, even though they've been much destroyed and now patched up and restored. But there was a very simple triple system of a very simple, very major inner wall with many towers, an outer wall and a huge moat, three barriers which every besieging force had to tackle one by one. Let's fit another piece into the jigsaw, Judith Heron. And there was a growing isolation of Constantinople, not least in the schiz, after following the schism with Rome, where they set off as equal cities and equal, let's call them patriarchs

in Rome and Constantinople, and then Rome began to demand supremacy. and that Byzantine should cowtower to it. This too has a very long history, and I think it's quite clear that the notion of two major centres of Christianity, Latin, in old Rome, Greek, in New Rome, that had developed over many, many centuries. Originally, the five great patriarchates included Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem. And the five together were said to constitute the Pentarchy.

And this rule of five was the way in which the councils, the universal councils of the church, were organized right up to the 9th century. And that authority was vested in the five great seas representing Christendom. Of course, the three that were conquered by the Muslims in the 7th century never regained the strength that they'd had before or the wealth, although they had the authority and the tradition, and continued to govern the Christian populations still living under their control as minority churches within the world of Islam. The real problem is that the notion of the primacy of the heirs of St. Peter,

the founder of the Church of Rome, gave the bishops of Rome a greater authority, which they played on. And they called it the primacy of the bishop of Rome, which was superior in honour to anything that the bishop of Constantinople could provide. And Constantinople had been a very small church in the 4th century AD when Constantine made it his capital. The bishop had to be rapidly promoted to a patriarchal status. nonetheless there had been very good relations between the Christians and these were only vitiated by the question of the primacy of St. Peter and the wording of the creed, which was of course an impossible theological conundrum

that was never entirely satisfactorily resolved. What this resulted in, as I understand it, is that come critical times, the church, at Rome, for various reasons, was, not very willing to send allies and help to what should have been their equal Greek church in Constantinople. There were, of course, very successful crusades on the 11th and 12th century, but subsequent to the great sack of 1204, for which Pope John Paul II2, apologized on the 800th anniversary of the sack of 1204. These relations were very deeply embittered, as Roger just said.

and therefore the Byzantines were put in a very difficult situation in order to gain military aid from the West to combat the Turks there were certain conditions that the Bishop of Rome imposed and one, the first was submission of the Church of Constantinople to the authority of St Peter. And they wouldn't do that. Colin Imber, if we turn to the Ottomans, they're really enjoying great success.

Can you tell us about their strengths in the mid-15th century? Well, the strengths of the Ottoman seemed to, have been the manpower that they could muster coming from both the Asian provinces and the European provinces and also an extraordinary organisation in that nearly all of the troops at the Siege of Constantinople in 1453 were there because they had to be there. Their names existed in registers and they received either feast from the Sultan or they received a salary from the Sultan in return to which they had to perform military service, and if they didn't curtains, they would be sacked. So that the Seltans could muster troops very quickly.

What they had also shown themselves able to do was to master military techniques very quickly. And of course, I think the thing which concerns us particularly in 1453 is the use of cannon. Now, cannon was used in 1422. The Greek source calls them Bombardi. uses an Italian term, but says they were ineffective. What had happened in between? Well, I think the Ottomans faced a major crisis in 1443 to 44, when a crusade with the Hungarians attacking from the West,

the Emirate of Karaman attacking from the east, with the Venetians, the Burgundians, and indeed the Byzantines, blocking the straits. They could have failed at that moment, but they didn't. Well, what were the reasons for their success then? Well, partly alliance with the Genoese, who ferried Murad the 2nd troops across the Bosphorus for him. They also provided him with cannon.

Now, the reason the Hungarians had been very successful in those wars were, in fact, their use of cannon. Now, the Ottomans learnt this very, very quickly. I mean, they used Canon before that, but they became a major part of the Ottoman military machine. And where did they get the expertise from? Well, homegrown expertise, of course. I mean, they could already make them.

But in 1444, the Genoese from Perra, the city opposite Constantinople, provided them with Canon in order to go and fight the Hungarians, and also, of course, the famous canon of 1453, which produced by Hungarian Urban, and it's worth noting that he got a house in the newly conquered city afterwards as a reward for his... The famous canon, I understand it, had to be dragged across Europe

by 60 oxen and 2,200 men on either side, pulling it to its place for the siege. Yes, the number of men, let's say, varies according to your source. I'm quoting from one of the people. you three. Yes. Well, yes. But it certainly was a very, very large number.

Why did the Ottomans want Constantinople so much? Well, Constantinople was, from an Ottoman point of view, an annoying city-state in the middle of their, what you might call an empire. Now, the Byzantines, of course, had no military or naval power to speak of, but they had a very good diplomatic. diplomatic service, and they were able, as in 1443 to 44, to quote just one example, able to stir up the foreign powers against the Ottomans. Secondly, they had another weapon in that members of the Ottoman dynasty who had failed to make it to the Sultanate tended to take refuge in Byzantium. And if an emperor at any stage, as indeed at the beginning of Morad, the first,

seconds reign in 1421, and if an emperor wanted to cause trouble, he would release one of these Ottoman princes and start a civil war. So that was a reason. And of course it was also an enormous centre of trade, particularly coming from the Black Sea, coming from the Mediterranean. And so it was wealthy. And I think the Sultan would rather have his hands on that wealth

rather than the Byzantine Emperor. To round off this part of the programme, Roger Cullough, there's also a lot of superstition in city on both sides. There was a rumour that Mohammed Standard, Barra was killed at one of the early sieges in the 7th century, and the myths surrounded the city in its capture. Can you take us through those? Yes, I would say that both sides were kind of obsessed with prophecies,

a lot of them were of which had a very millennial nature, particularly for the Byzantines. Some of these go back to the Arab sieges, which Judith mentioned, of the 7th and 8th centuries, when Islam failed to take the city, the death of the Mohammed's standard bearer designated the city a holy place for Islam.

And it left behind a deep longing for Islam to take this city and a set of prophecies which were attributed to Muhammad, but which were probably apocryphal, which foretold this cycle of defeat, death and final victory. They also had this image of the city of the red apple, this kind of centre of wealth and power. Roger, let's look at the two leaders, Constantin the 11th on the one hand of Byzantine,

but let's talk about him first. Can you tell us something about him? He was a member of the ruling, House of Palliologos who had been emperors of the city for 200 years. He became emperor at the age of about 44. He, as a young man, witnessed the siege of 1422, which was quite a serious one. And he'd spent 20 years of his life, more or less in the Peloponnese, trying to shore up the Byzantine inheritance and push back the Ottomans with disaster with consequences.

He was a practical man, a soldier, not a theologian, very straightforward. like his brothers who were rather treacherous. And he was deeply aware of his inheritance as emperor. And he was prepared to fight to the end for this. What about Mehmed II, Colin Himber, the Ottoman leader, who was 21 years old? Well, it's difficult to say anything about medieval characters. But he's described by Dukas, the Greek who knew him,

as being, in contrast to his father, insolent, and violent. And indeed, if you, I think the clear, cliche, ruthlessly ambitious would sum him up. He was highly unpopular with his subjects because he drove them, both from the military point of view and the taxation point of view, to exhaustion. But he never stopped until he died. His ambition was boundless. Judith Heron, this war is often seen in religious terms, and we've heard about the Virgin Mary fighting on the walls of Consentinople and defending the city. We've heard about Muhammad Standard Barra falling in Constantinople there for even. The Venetian Barbaro talked about the Turkish heathens and the infidels, Christianity versus Islam.

Does that hold water? Yes, I think the Christians really felt that this was the last Christian outpost in the Near East. It was a very ancient Christian city. It had been a centre of Christianity for centuries and centuries, and the Muslims had conquered all the other major centres of ancient Christianity. They did feel that this was a very Christian city, with an enormously long tradition, and their pride and their ability, their willingness to defend it to the last man is clearly evident.

And, of course, some Western Christians came to their assistance. It's not to be thought that there weren't Western Christians who arrived in the years 1452 and 3 to support the Christian defence, knowing that the city was completely surrounded. The defenders were totally outnumbered and that it was perhaps a lost cause. Let's get some idea over the numbers now, Roger Crows. How did they measure up in terms of fighting force and weapons as we close in on 1453? There's no context on paper really.

I mean, on the one hand you had the Ottoman army, described as being numerous as the stars. Very difficult, I think, to estimate the quantity of men that they had, possibly 60,000 fighting men, but a huge non-fighting force of ordnance, labourers, people who could dig trenches, carry out earthworks, drag cannons, an incredibly powerful mining engineers, that kind of thing. Mehmet had also built himself a fleet of unknown number of ships, possibly about 140, a lot of which were quite small, about 15 to 18 war galleys. Because he realised that you had to surround the city by sea as well, and Morat had not been able to do that.

Inside the walls, it was depressingly easy to count the number of men. Constantin organised a muster, and there were. 4,773 Greeks. And about 3,000 foreigners, some of whom were Venetians, Genoese, Catalans, Cretans, and there was one Brit there, a Scotsman called John Grant, who had paid a small but very significant part. He was a siege, mining engineer.

So it wasn't unequal struggle. They did have some ships as well, mainly Venetian and Genoese ships in the harbour, about 30. But sieges tended to favour the defenders, or had favoured the defenders, till 1453. So they're reasonably confident they could hold out that their walls are strong until Mehmet came along with his cannons.

A big canon, Colin Amor. I understand it. It was so big and difficult to load and difficult to cool. It could fire only seven great cannon balls or rocks a day, but these really hammered the walls. Can you tell us about how the siege began and the effect of this cannon and the other cannon, but the big cannon is the one that seems to have done the real damage?

Yes, because the big cannon was against the St. Romanos Gate, the modern top capo in the walls of the city, and that is in fact where the Turks finally entered. So I think you can say it is the canon that did the job. But there were a lot of other siege instruments involved, as Roger has mentioned, mining, which in the end was unsuccessful. Incidentally, the miners were brought from the silver mines of Serbia, as indeed there was also a large contingent of Serbian cavalry

provided by George Brankovic, the despot of Serbia, who was a vassal, if I can use the term, of Mehmet. And also they used siege towers, which some sources actually say were in the end very useful in the final conquering of the city, but it seems ultimately that it was the cannon that made the breach. and the ships were held out of the golden horn which provided a moat on one side of the city

by a large boom which was successful in keeping them out and that is what precipitated the famous incident when Mehmet ordered the ships to be brought overland from the Bosphorus into the golden horn. Incidentally he was to do the same thing in the siege of Negroponte in 1470 so it was obviously a tactic he favoured So Judith Heian, can you give us some... It's a chance for us to go into detail, which is great, I think.

Contemporary sources paint a vivid picture, the repeated attacks on the walls by the Ottomans. Now we hear about it, and we've got bow and arrows against this massive cannon. So it's a wonderful moment in all... I mean, horrible to be killed and all the rest of it. But still, in terms of... It's a wonderful moment. But we read as well about a terrific amount of noise.

Can you just give the listeners some idea of it started, and away it goes. happening? Medieval warfare was always very noisy, I think. The Byzantines used to take an organ and a lot of percussion instruments out when they were fighting in the field

and they used to have these huge organs water-powered, hydraulic organs, sound, make very blaring, horrid noises to frighten the enemy. By the 15th century, of course, there was a great deal more in the use of trumpets and drums, lots of drumming,

lots of a real racket of noise on both sides. We hear from the Greek sources that the bells would be rung in the city to tell everybody that the attack was commencing or the day's attack was commencing and that they should take up their positions and that women and children then joined the lines of people lifting stones up to the walls to be thrown down at the attackers when they got too close.

So everyone was involved, everyone inside the city was involved. the monks would go to pray in the churches if they weren't actually involved in ferrying water and supplies to the defenders. But the noise must have been something tremendous. And of course that's where Mozart got his notion of the Turkish military music, which we find it's 200 years later, 300 years later,

but it is an astonishing tribute to the fact that the Turks had developed this very noisy style of musical accompaniment on their warfare. And the great canon, something through the, today. That must have been a terrifying sound for everybody concerned. So, Colin Inba, can you, it goes on,

the Ottomans have this incredible superiority everywhere you look. Ships, men, kindness and so on. Constantine is there with his 7,500 men, as Rogers told us. Can you tell us about, and Judith earlier pointed out that some Christians

did come to his aid. Can you tell us about one or two of the, well, the more significant once we did. Well, the most significant was the Genoese Justiniani who took up his position on the wall, in fact, at the point where the cannon was firing, so he put

himself quite literally, you could say, in the firing line. And he seems to have been a highly effective leader. He brought 700 per person at his own expense. Yes, he did. And it seemed the final signal for the fall

of the city seems to have been, in fact, Justiniani receiving a wound and going away to have the wound dressed. The Venetian sources, the Venetians hating the Genoese, of course, say that Justiniani ran away, which is probably not true. But it seems that his absence from the wall certainly encouraged the attackers and disheartened the besieged. And that really was a key moment. So Justiniani does emerge as, I think,

one of the heroes of the defence of the city and also the tragic figure in its fall. Are we talking about how close are they getting at this stage? We're not quite at the fall yet, Roger. Are they rushing, you've talked about these three boundaries, obstacles before they got there, the outer wall. And then how near are they getting? It's 53 days, so let's say about 48.

They blasted a lot of holes in it, but you've seen it have been quite successful in replacing them with a kind of earth, barrier, which was actually more effective than a stone wall, because it was rather like throwing stones into mud. It kind of dispersed the effect of them. It reached a point where both sides are pretty exhausted, and Mehmet decided that it was do or die. His own troops were starting to kind of get a bit edgy about the whole thing. The prophetic atmosphere was getting to everybody. The weather was very bad, which added a kind of, is this the end of the world

moment, particularly for the Byzantines, so the whole thing. So he just decided he was going to have to go for it. And there was no secret about an Ottoman attack. You could see it coming. They would have three days of fasting and ritual prayer, huge bonfires at night. The Christian sympathizers in the Ottoman camp fired arrows over the walls, telling them what was about to happen. And the 1.30 in the morning on the 29th of May, he started to march his, it was no cunning plan, just three waves. March his men forward in waves. The most expendable Christian trips first, working out to his most valuable trips at the end, Constantine decided that he was going to do or die,

so he marched all his men between the inner and the outer wall and locked the doors behind him, so they were going to, you know, go for it, basically. And they held out pretty well for about five hours until Justiniani was wounded, and his men asked for him to be taken back into the city, and Constantine didn't want him to go, but he said, now I've got to go.

Gates were opened, everybody panicked and tried to run for the gates, and of course, Messon were locked, and they were surrounded a massacre and the actual moment of collapse happened, I think, very quickly and people were surprised how quickly it happened inside the city.

Can we just come on the side of Constantine in Constantinople there? Roger's given us a graphic idea of his waves and waves, there's upwards of maybe 60,000 coming at these group of... Two thousand. Yeah, says,

have we any notion of what Constantine thought he was... Because he still thought the Virgin would protect them as she had done for nearly a thousand years or over a thousand years. So do we know what his position in it was? He hoped for a miracle, and he ordered all those who could pray to pray, and the great church of Aosophia on the 29th of May 1453 when the city walls were breached was full of those praying to the Virgin for intercession. and divine support.

The night before the major attack, as we know, he knew, he and his advisor, Sfrancies, rode out together, and Sphrancies later gave a very moving account of how they looked at the bonfires and saw the advancing troops and knew that the end was near. And Constantine looked at his city and told Sphrancies that he was there to defend it. and in fact since his body was never found, it is quite clear that he preferred to die, leading his troops against the Turks,

than to negotiate any sort of compromise and handover. Sphrancies himself was captured and imprisoned and later ransomed. And in his old age he was able to write about this. It's a little sentimental, but I'm sure he reflects the truth when he says, or reflects what Constantine perceived to be his role. He had a duty to defend the city, and as the Christian emperor he would do that, even if it cost him his life.

Roger, can you just briefly say, when was the moment when the city fell? Was it when Grygiani had to be taken through the gate and therefore the gate was open? Was that the moment when it was all over? More or less, yes. The Ottoman troops got up onto the walls, trapped the Christian soldiers,

then opened the gates, and people flooded into the city and started to, to ransack it, there was a kind of ceremonial moment when Mehmet entered the city and which he much reflected in romantic 19th century, Turkish paintings of this moment and he takes on the

epithet of the conquer as he's called in Turkish and this is the moment when it's considered to have fallen but it effectively had fallen but before he entered in. But before he got in there were three days Colin Inver where as I understand it from really what you have written the three days were somehow allowed, the soldiers were allowed to loo, pillage, rape.

There were three days they were given. There was some sort of almost official licence given. What's all that about? Yes, there is an official licence. But I think Ottoman Sultan's knew perfectly well the reason why troops, particularly volunteers, were there and the things which could keep all troops busy, is the promise of plunder.

And an immensely wealthy city did indeed promise plunder. and some people did become very wealthy. I can in fact quote an early 16th century Ottoman historian Kemal Pashasarad, who said it is a proverbial saying that if there's any person who seems to have wealth far beyond his humble status in life, he must have been at the siege of Constantinople. And this was true in all Ottoman sieges. Just briefly on the motivations of the truth. We don't know, I think you know a great deal about the motivations of the Ottoman truth.

So the rather grumpy letter during the siege from Mehmet's spiritual advisor saying, most of these men are not interested in dying for God at all, but they'll run for death if there's booty involved. The idea of material reward was kind of infinitely more attractive, I think, to many of them than, you know, the hereafter. And I think they assumed that the city was full of gold and silver and silks and wonderful things that they all wanted. This was possibly not as true as it had been.

in 1204. But nonetheless, there were sources of gold, and we know from one of the Byzantines who was later captured, that he offered the Sultan a great deal of gold for his safety and the safety of the ransoming of his family. And the Sultan turned to him and said, why did you not offer this to your emperor before? So that was not a russ who lost his head as a result. Can we just conclude this process of the three days, which fascinates me, was it in some, was it some agreed deal or was it written down somewhere? I think it was written down in Islamic law. I might be able to correct me on that one,

but it was a general, it didn't pertain just to Islam, it pertained to all siege warfare, that if you didn't surrender, you could expect to be sacked, and three days was a lot of term for this, but actually within a day, they'd stripped out everything of value, and Mehmet was keen to preserve the fabric of the city intact,

so he was very keen to put a stop to it. Is there only been kind of, and said after that day or two or three, this looting and pillaging and raping stopped? I don't think there's any hard evidence, but I think probably it did, because as Roger said, it had been stripped out within a very short time. And in fact, sieges prior to that,

the siege of Jerusalem, for example, by the Crusaders, was followed by days and days of looters, and there wasn't nearly so much control. So to the extent that there was only a three-day period, that was a limitation which was very much more civil than the unrestricted looting that had taken place in medieval warfare before. And it wasn't a complete sack.

The Christian churches did survive this process. The Church of the Holy Apostles, I believe, survived and was put under guard by Mehmet. And some of the other Christian churches were in some of the villages in the walls, surrendered and took the keys of their little stockade to Mehmet, and they survived the siege as well. And also I must remember that a lot of the looting was people,

and there was a big slave trade. Oh, yes. So younger people and handsomer people, I presume, in terms of women were kept, were brought, looted for the slave trade. Colin, he was funny. And not only of humble, everyday domestic slaves, but also of members of the imperial family because we find a governor-general of Rumilia

of the European provinces of the empire in 1470 trading under a Turkish name, Khas Murad Pasha, but he was a member of the Palealogos family. And indeed, Messich Pasha, the Ottoman commander at the failed siege of road in 1480, and later Grand Vizier was also member of the Paleologos family. and another Greek vizier of the 1460s is known in Turkish as Ruhm Mehmed Pasha or Mechmed Pasha the Greek. So we know that there were Greeks that the old aristocracy, if I can call them that, continue to trade but under different names.

Can we just develop what Roger said, Julius said a little, about the treatment of the Christian monuments in Constantinople? We know that Dio Sophia, the cathedral church, was rapidly converted into a mosque and remained a mosque, of course, until it was secularised under Ataturk and is now a museum. The other churches, we learn, some of them were converted to mosques. One was reserved for the Greek patriarch, Scolarios, who became the leader of the Greek group, the Greek ethnic group under the Ottomans. and the Church of the Holy Apostles, where the emperors of Byzantium had been buried, was raised to the ground on Mehmet's orders in order for him to have constructed

a very beautiful mosque called the Mosque of the Conqueror, which survives today and is a very fine 15th century mosque. But it was clearly a symbolic replacement of the imperial mausoleum and a magnificent church dedicated the Holy Apostles, by the mosque of the conqueror on the same place and it shows how insistent Mechmed was that he should become the master of this city with all its traditions. And that leads me, Colin from what Judas said,

to the business of all its traditions. There was a sense of, was there not, of keeping people there from different traditions, from different faiths, from different groups. Yes, there certainly was, and also in order to revive the city of bringing people in from all over the empire, was one of the reasons why Mehmet was so unpopular. He derasinated people and put them in the city.

But there's another interesting incident from 1539 actually, which tells us a bit about the survival of the Greek churches, is that an overzealous chief Mufti wished to close them down on the grounds that the city hadn't surrendered. And so a rather more clever chief judge produced an 110-year-old man and 130-year-old man who gave evidence, that's two witnesses as required in Islamic law, that the Christians and Jews of the city had made a secret agreement with Mehmed to surrender, therefore the churches can stay.

But it is, as I understand it, I'd like to develop this just a little bit. The Christians had their own quarter, they stayed, the Jews had, now of course they were penalised with taxes and some of them converted to evade the taxes and to get on better in. But that is, he is definitely, Mehmed is definitely attempting to establish this sort of place,

isn't it? Can somebody just give it a bit more colour? Roger, or not Judith, whatever. Well, I think that the whole tradition, the whole history of Constantinople had been one of a very cosmopolitan polyglot, multicultural city, which Mehmet knew about and wished to preserve and strengthen.

Not only did he wish the craftsmen all to stay in Constantinople so that they would continue to service the city, but as Colin said, he brought in a lot of craftsmen and inhabitants from other places and made them live in Constantinople so that it would flourish again. And indeed it did. Under his rule, Constantinople became again a very prosperous city.

And it was to become even more prosperous, of course, in the great Ottoman cultural renaissance of Soleiman the Magnificent in the 16th century. So we have a clear policy of reinforcing the multicultural traditions of the city, which required tolerance, which demanded that those who didn't want to adopt Islam, pay an extra tax and keep themselves and their religious celebrations at a low key, no ringing bells or riding horses. But nonetheless, they could carry on. And it's quite evident that there was a very determined policy

to build up Constantinople, to make it again a great city and a great capital. Roger, how did the other Christian countries in, let's call it, Europe, react to the fall of Constantinople? They had a, the first, I can see it, sort of like a 9-11 moment. When you read the accounts, you feel that people could remember where they were at the moment that the city fell. You know, people wept in the streets of Rome about this. And it recreated a kind of zeal for crusading. Pius II, Pope shortly afterwards, tried very hard to get crusading going as a project, not with a great deal of success. The news of this rippled across the European.

Europe incredibly quickly. There were songs, there were poems, there were all kinds of diatrives written up against the Turks. And it was bad luck for the Turks, the Ottoman reputation. Of course, they arrived just as printing was being developed. And one of the things that you see in the latter half of the 15th century, a huge amount of corpus of literature in Europe about the terrible Turk. It was very bad for their PR to have arrived on the scene at that moment. But of course, the public which had been the Saracen's head in the Middle Ages became the Turks head, and you start to see this whole projection of the terrible Turk in European thought and literature. It signalled what was obvious that the Turks were established in Europe and were going to be there for a long time.

Colin, what about the reaction inside the Ottoman Empire to this? Well, the immediate reaction, to judge from very exiguous sources, seems to be not very great. What is remarkable is that the Byzantine Emperor has no special titles. He's not regarded as anything very special in contemporary sources. And accounts of the siege are actually very small. It's later, I think, that the siege begins to acquire a symbolic significance. For example, the coronation, part of the coronation, ceremony, as developed from 1595, incidentally, the Sultan took a trip up, the golden

horn to the shrine of Abu Ayub. Then he came round the outside of the city walls, entered the city through the Edirina gate, the Adrian Ople Great, visited the tombs of his ancestors and then entered the palace. Well, this was, I think, a symbolic reenactment of the conquest of the city, which somehow emphasized that it was an Ottoman city. And I think also by that time the Ottomans had began to treat Istanbul, Constantinople, in the same way as the Byzantines did.

It was the city. And the inhabitants were extremely snobbish and thought that anybody in the provinces wasn't worth anything. But in a sense, I think that the Byzantine culture was replicated in the Ottoman city. Just very quickly. It seems to me it's a history written by the losers. There's very little contemporary Ottoman material. that we can point to in any detail and it thinks to me that everything we know

is being written by people who lost it. Well, that's a very good ending. Thank you very much Judith Hearn, Colin Ember and Roger Crowley. Next week we'll be discussing the life and work of the Argentinian short story writer George Giorgouard-Louis. And thank you for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast.

You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy at BBC.com.com.uk forward slash radio four.