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Turning the Ottoman Tide – John III Sobieski at Vienna 1. By Anthony Pagden.
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Constantine’s great city, and what little remained of the crumbling Byzantine Empire, had never fully recovered from the Latin occupation from 1. Despite its dilapidated condition, Constantinople was still the “Golden Apple,” the capital of the ancient Roman Empire.
Muslims and Christians alike reckoned it to be the greatest power the world had ever known. For the Ottoman ruler Mehmed II, it was the most treasured prize of all, whose possession would make him master of the world. Constantinople was the capital of the oikoumene, the “inhabited world,” over which Mehmed, the Amir al- Mu’minin, “Commander of the Faithful,” and his descendents would soon rule until the end of creation. On April 5, 1. 45. Mehmed’s army reached the outer walls of the city.
His forces, according to the Venetian merchant Nicol. Other accounts, all of them Christian, put the figure anywhere between two and four hundred thousand. Most were Muslims, marshaled from all over the empire, but their ranks were swollen by others in the expectation of rich pickings: Latins, a large contingent of Serbs, even some Greeks. Inside Constantinople a state of terror now reigned.
The able- bodied male population of the city numbered some thirty thousand, but the Byzantine statesman George Sphrantes estimated that fewer than five thousand of these were able and willing to fight. Mehmed moved no fewer than fourteen batteries of artillery into place along the entire length of the outer line of walls, known as the Wall of Theodosius.
Day after day, the Ottoman guns fired massive stone balls that carried away great chunks of masonry, sometimes entire towers. Although the entire population turned out each night to rebuild what they could, hour by hour the city’s defenses steadily crumbled. About three hours before dawn on May 2. Mehmed gave the order for a final assault. The Greeks managed to drive back the first two waves of attackers. But the outer walls of the city were now virtually in ruins. The Janissaries, the sultan’s crack troops, broke through the Kerkoporta, or “Gate of the Circus,” and poured into the city.
The fighting was fierce, but Ottoman victory was certain. For three days, Mehmed’s victorious army was allowed to pillage the city. The Greek chronicler Kristovoulos lamented that the Turks fell upon the defenseless population, “stealing, robbing, plundering, killing, insulting, taking and enslaving men, women, and children, old and young, priests and monks—in short, every age and class.” The blood ran in the streets “as if it had been raining,” wrote the merchant Barbaro, and “bodies were tossed into the sea like melons into the canals of Venice.”Ever since the armies of the caliph Umar II had been forced to abandon the first sustained siege of Constantinople in 7. Muslim world of the inevitable day when the great city, the last bastion of the ancient enemy, would pass into the dar al- Islam.
Now, under a sultan who bore the name of the prophet himself, these predictions had finally come to pass. Thereafter both Muslims and Christians alike referred to Mehmed II as “the Conqueror.”For the West, the fall of Constantinople was a calamity. It was not only a great Christian city, the last bastion of Constantine’s empire in the East, that had fallen. Gone too was the last living link with the ancient Greek world. And all this glittering past had been snuffed out by a horde of Muslim barbarians from the depths of Asia.
Mehmed was now—save for the tiresome presence of the Timurid Persian Empire to the east—ruler of all Muslim Asia. He could also now claim to be the legitimate heir of the succession of emperors—Solomon, Constantine, and Justinian—who in myth and reality had built and rebuilt the city, and to have fulfilled one part of the prophecy recorded in the Hadith, the oral traditions coming down from Muhammad, that the day would come when a Muslim emir would take both Constantinople and Rome. With the fall of the Golden Apple, the Ottomans became the only other state in the world to which the princes of Christendom were prepared to concede the title of “empire.”Mehmed, perhaps more than any subsequent sultan, determined to rule over a united, prosperous, and above all disciplined people. To that end, he restored to the Orthodox Church the powers and privileges it had enjoyed under Byzantine rule, together with a large part of its property.
From beyond the Dardanelles, however, it seemed as though Eastern Christendom had now vanished for good. In its place stood the most imposing power to threaten the liberties of the peoples of Europe since the days of Xerxes. All Christendom waited to see what would happen next. Would Mehmed remain where he was and consolidate his gains?
Were further conquests of the West to be expected? And if so, where would they stop? The sacred city of the West, the still- beating heart of Christianity, was of course Rome, and Muhammad himself had reportedly promised that one day Rome too would be incorporated into the dar al- Islam. On September 3. 0, 1. Pope Nicholas V issued a bull to all the Christian princes of the West, enjoining them to shed their blood and the blood of their subjects in a new crusade against the anti- Christ now seated in Constantinople.
Pleading insolvency or the pressure of domestic affairs, the princes of Christendom—Charles VII of France, Henry VI of England (now, in any case, out of his mind), King Alfonso V of Aragon, and Emperor Frederick III—all politely declined. For Nicholas’ successor, Pope Pius II, the Turkish menace became something of an obsession.
Shrewd and well traveled, he had a far broader vision of the possibilities and need for Christian unity than his predecessors. In 1. 45. 9 he proclaimed a new crusade to retake Constantinople, but nothing came of it.
The pope also tried diplomacy and flattery, proposing not only to recognize Mehmed’s claim to be ruler of the Eastern Roman Empire but also to transfer to him the imperium of the West. All the sultan had to do was to convert to Christianity.
It was an empty gesture, as he must have known. Mehmed never did come to Rome. He spent most of the rest of his reign consolidating his hold over the Balkans and securing his eastern frontiers. The failure of Mehmed to make good on his alleged promise to march on Rome did not, however, lessen the fear of the West that this remained the ultimate objective of his successors.
Ever since 1. 48. Ottoman forces had sacked and occupied Otranto on the Puglian coast of Italy, the Turkish navy, backed by Barbary Coast pirates, had created an atmosphere of almost constant alarm.
All along the coasts of southern Italy and Spain, towers were constructed, many of which are still standing, to maintain a permanent watch for the marauders. The fear was not limited to the Mediterranean or to the eastern borders of Christendom. Even as far away as Iceland, Christians prayed to be delivered from “the terror of the Turk.” In 1. Ottoman- backed corsairs from North Africa penetrated deep into the North Sea and carried off four hundred captives for sale in the slave markets of Algeria. For all those who still lived beyond its borders, the empire of the Turks had become, in the words of historian Richard Knowles, “the present terror of the world.”Almost every Ottoman victory was greeted with calls to mount a new crusade, with the objective of pushing the Turks out of Europe, out of Constantinople, even possibly out of all that had once been the Byzantine Empire. Yet no pontiff could do more than pontificate—and raise a certain amount of money.
If there was to be a new crusade, it would have to be manned and financed by the secular rulers of Europe. And whenever possible, they preferred diplomacy to conflict. While its leaders wrangled among themselves, Christendom watched the Ottomans slowly encroach. By the end of 1. 46. Byzantine oikoumene—the Duchy of Athens, the Despotate of Morea, and the Empire of Trebizond—had passed into Turkish hands. Serbia capitulated in 1. Bosnia four years later.
Albania was overrun in 1. Across the Danube, the Transylvanian state of Wallachia, which had maintained a precarious independence under the infamous Prince Vlad Drakula, known as “the Impaler” because of his favorite method of disposing of his opponents, fell in 1. The neighboring principality of Moldavia followed in 1. In 1. 52. 1, an Ottoman army seized the Hungarian city of Belgrade, having failed before, in 1. In August 1. 52. 6, Sultan Sulei. But in the long run, it was to be something of a pyrrhic one. For the death of Louis brought to the Hungarian throne Ferdinand II, the Hapsburg archduke of Vienna, brother of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V and ruler of Spain, Spanish America, much of Italy, the Netherlands, and a great swath of central Europe.
The Ottomans now faced a far greater and more united Christian power than they had ever had to confront before. As the Italian poet Ludovico Ariosto put it, now there were “two suns” shining upon the globe and two rulers competing for universal supremacy: A Christian emperor in the West and a Muslim sultan in the East. Suleiman I, called “the Magnificent” in Europe, saw himself as the heir of Alexander the Great, the “last world emperor” who would destroy his rival Charles V and then march west and conquer Rome.
Like his competitors in the West, Suleiman was also eager to see himself as the beneficiary of an apocalyptic tradition, based loosely on the Book of Daniel, that foretold of a time toward the end of the sixteenth century when the Great Year would dawn, in which one true religion (Catholic Christianity for Charles V, Sunni Islam for Suleiman) would triumph over all others, ruled by one divinely appointed ruler—the sahib- kiran, “Emperor of the Last Age.”In 1. Suleiman marched west again, his sights now set on the emperor Ferdinand’s capital at Vienna. This time, however, the sultan overextended himself.