just had a dream.
What I did not know was that I would not see the Emperor again. Events would throw our plans off kilter.
I had always wondered why my mother had never told me who my father was. I had sometimes wondered whether I had been adopted, as I was very often at cross-purposes with my mother. However, I could also see the striking similarities in our character and the family resemblance in our looks.
CHAPTER 8
Constantinople
29th May 1453 A.D.
(The Day of the Fall)
Dawn was breaking over the dome of Ayia Sofia and the first rays of the sun were starting to throw an incandescent light on the Patriarchate and the bell towers of the churches scattered around the city.
The harbour was waking up and the first ships were ploughing the waters of the Bosphorus heading for the harbour of the Golden Horn. It seemed like another normal day in the city that took your breath away.
The streets were waking up with the first signs of life. Or rather that was the idyllic view on a normal day, before the siege, before the heavy chain or boom was put in place to close the entry to the harbour of the Golden Horn and prevent the Ottoman fleet from entering the city’s heart, from bringing forward the seemingly inevitable and finishing the job once and for all.
Inside the Vlachernae Palace, all was being prepared for the Emperor’s audience with his ministers and advisors and a selected number of prominent citizens. The Emperor was in readiness to rally his troops and his citizens.
The distinction between ruler and ruled was now blurred and waning further. On everybody’s mind was the Ottoman, on everybody’s lips was one word, their eyes directed involuntarily to the heavens and the direction of the painted dome with the depiction of the Virgin Mary and Jesus Christ hugging the world.
All present had only one question. When would the city fall, not how.
Rising above the murmur of raised, burning, anguished concerned voices, was the serene and calming sound of the trickling water from the fountain in the middle of the Great Hall. But on this day the serene surroundings, their potency diminished, failed to inspire and beguile.
Outside the walls the normal activity was as if suspended in time. The fields were deserted. All the city’s gates were hermetically closed. All available defenders were manning the battlements. And those defenders were few and severely diminished in number through hunger and the disease that was spreading like wildfire through the crowded city.
Everybody who could fight was armed. Everybody else was assisting with the organisation of the city’s defences and the supply of any help to the defenders on the walls.
Every church and chapel and religious spot was teaming with people praying to their God. Ayia Sofia, the city’s great Cathedral, was packed to the rafters with people trying to reach God with the prayers and hope of a thousand years. The air inside the great church was thick with the breathing of so many, mixed with the heady smoke of the incense burners.
The view from the walls chilled the blood and spread terror through the heart. As far as the eye could see, the fields had lost their normal sunburned colour; they had turned black. The Ottoman armies looked like a dark cloud that had descended on earth and had choked the life out of every living thing. The Ottoman had fanned out far and wide in its blockade of the city.
The mighty canons were in place ready to direct their firepower at the centre of the Western land walls or Mesoteichion, between the St. Romanus Gate and the Gate of Charisius. That was the weakest part of the walls where the ground descended towards the valley of the Lycus stream, making this part of the walls lower than the rest of the walls.
The walls were thick, but could they withstand the vicious and relentless onslaught about to be unleashed at them?
The walls of every city had a weakness and so it was with Constantinople. Particular attention had been given to the defence of that weak spot. Unlike the rest of the land walls, which were of triple-thickness, at the Vlachernae Quarter, on the North-Western side, there was only one single wall, and it was here close to the Palace of Vlachernae that the Ottoman cannons were concentrating their firepower and where they would break through.
A small gate on the Vlachernae walls called Kerkoporta was the culprit. It had accidentally been left open after a sortie by a band of the city’s defenders. Some Ottomans went through, but were repelled and the small gate was closed. However, a small number of Ottomans were trapped inside, between the outer and inner walls.
Unfortunately for the defenders, this small Ottoman group had the canny idea to raise the Ottoman standard on the tower next to the gate. Some of the defenders saw that as a sign that the Ottomans had got through and that the Vlacharnae Quarter had fallen to the enemy.
The news spread through the city like wildfire and demoralised many. Others were heartened and enraged by it, their determination bolstered, and it became the impetus for a final push to repel the enemy within. They fought like lions, but to no avail.
The bombardment rained relentless on the city. Stone after stone was dislodged from its many-a-century-old position. Chunk upon chunk of wall was collapsing. Every hit slashed another wound. The wounds were multiplying and they were getting deeper until one final hit brought a huge section of the Western Walls near the Vlachernae Quarter crushing down.
A powerful gust of stale air rushed out and hit the Ottomans with tremendous force. It took them aback and the Ottoman rush paused, but only for a moment.
A gust of dust and debris burst through and blinded the defenders within. The mouth had widened considerably and its appetite for the Ottoman troops entering the city was insatiable.
Nothing could stop the flood of Ottomans rushing into the city through the breach. Wave after wave of Ottomans was sweeping through, thirsty for victory, hungry for killing and looting and raping, hungry for their rightful reward.
They had no fear for death itself, for there was reward in death as well, perhaps for them the biggest reward was in heaven.
Fires were breaking across the city. Screams pierced the night air. The sound of sword against sword, gun against gun, echoed all around and was getting louder as it spread through the city’s streets.
Panic reigned everywhere. You could smell the fear, the sweat, the smoke and the already rotting bodies. It choked the air out of you.
The city had been breached. The city was being violated. Its reputation of inviolability and impregnability shattered in one fell swoop. The curtain fell on the Empire that had been ruled from this city for more than a thousand years.
A new chapter was beginning. The Sultan ordered a halt to the looting after three days. The Ottomans obeyed their master and stopped, but they also saw the sense in his message: ‘do not destroy what is now ours’.
The Sultan lost no time in installing himself in the Vlachernae Palace and making the city the capital of his Empire. The Sultan, finally relieved to be able to finally put a halt to the relentless campaigns and conquests of the last few hundred years, set into motion the next part of his ambitious plans; the consolidation of his sprawling Empire.
Amongst the confusion of the battle, the Emperor’s fate would become one of the world’s greatest and longest-running mysteries.
When some of the elite Ottoman Yenitsari troops went through the breach on the wall of the Vlachernae Quarter, they opened the Adrianople Gate, and it was then that thousands of Ottoman troops started to stream into the city like an unstoppable flattening avalanche.
