The Fall Of Constantinople . . . And The Catholics Who Fought To Save Hagia Sophia

By JAMES LIKOUDIS

Two remarkable volumes, Roger Crowley’s 1453: The Holy War for Constantinople and the Clash of Islam and the West (New York, Hyperion: 2005) and art historian Lina Murr Nehme’s 1453 Fall of Constantinople: Muhammad II Imposes the Orthodox Schism (Paris, Francois-Xavier de Guibert: 2003), describe the historic carnage of the population of Constantinople at the hands of its Muslim conquerors. Historian Crowley noted that for Mohammed II, the enclave of Constantinople had long been “a bone in the throat of Allah.”
The butchery which would take place in the Emperor Justinian’s magnificent Church of Hagia Sophia, the mother church of Eastern Christendom, was horrendous. From its founding, Hagia Sophia was the wonder of the Christian world, “conceived as the replica of heaven, a manifestation of the Triumph of Christ and its Emperor regarded as God’s vice-regent on earth.”
Crowley details the 50 days of incredible fighting which saw the defenders of the city and the Turks “taunting and slaughtering one another across the walls and executing prisoners in full view of their compatriots.”
The Byzantines realized only too well that only effective military aid from the West could prevent the fall of the city besieged by land and sea. Pope Eugenius IV did all he could to gather depleted resources to save the Byzantine capital.
A Venetian galley was able to be gathered together. Cardinal Isidore of Kiev arrived in the city with 200 soldiers; 700 men in full body armor, 400 Genoese and 300 from Rhodes. The iconic figure of the Genovese warrior Giovanni Giustiniani would repeatedly lead his troops to beat back Muslim attacks on the walls. A small group of other Western soldiers were also brought by three Genoese brothers, and Catalans from Spain supplied an additional contingent.
A Scot engineer, John Grant, proved invaluable in exploding the mines which the Turks drilled under the mighty Theodosian walls and managing the Greek fire that was hurled to burn alive Ottoman attackers.
“Schism was to cast a long shadow over Constantine’s attempts to defend the City” (Crowley, p. 72). The position of the anti-unionists was clear: “We don’t want Latin help or Latin union — let us be rid of the worship of the unleavened [a reference to the Eucharist with ‘heretical’ unleavened bread].” The Grand Duke Lucas Notaras (famous for his resistance to the religious Union of Florence and secret financing of the anti-unionists) had made his infamous declaration: “I would rather see in Constantinople the turban of the Turks than the Latin miter.”
Vivid in Byzantine memories was the Crusaders’ sack of the city in 1204 which gave rise to much anti-Latin animus. For the Italians besought to come to the aid of the hostile Byzantines, they too had memories: the massacre of thousands of Venetians in Thessalonica in 1171, and the butchery of nearly every Latin in Constantinople in 1183: “women and children, the old and infirm, even the sick from the hospitals.”
Mohammed II’s policy was also clear — to always take advantage of the religious division between Latins and Greeks and to cement further division. “The fear of Christian Unity had always been one of the guiding principles of Ottoman foreign policy” (Crowley, p. 72).
It is, moreover, not an exaggeration to say that despite the hostility of the anti-unionists in the city, “the main adversaries of the Union were not the Orthodox but the Ottomans!” So lamented the Syrian Orthodox Lina Murr Nehme in her volume claiming Mohammed II’s strategy was always to strengthen the “Orthodox Schism,” and after the conquest choosing the anti-unionist monk Gennadius to be the new patriarch of Constantinople.
The year 1453 is also a story of shameful collaboration with the enemy by traitors. Crowley comments on “the help the Ottomans received from their Christian subjects (including those who helped build the largest cannons ever seen to bombard the walls of the City). ‘I can testify,’ said the eyewitness Catholic Archbishop Leonard of Chios, ‘that Greeks, Latins, Germans, Hungarians, Bohemians, and men from all the Christian countries were on the side of the Turks. . . . Oh, the wickedness of denying Christ like this !’” (Crowley, p. 101).
The Sultan Mohammed II urged the Emperor Constantine to surrender: “Are you willing to abandon the City and depart for wherever you like, together with your nobles and their property, leaving behind the common people unharmed both by us and by you? Or do you wish that through your resistance . . . the common people should be enslaved by the Turks and scattered all over the world?”
The emperor defiantly exclaimed: “It is not in my power, nor in that of any citizen, to hand over the City to you. It is our universal resolve to die rather than have our lives spared. . . . We accept neither the tax, nor Islam, nor the capitulation of our fortress” (Crowley, p. 107.).
The Italians who formed the hard core of the defense absolutely refused surrender. An early Ottoman source confirmed that the “Frankish infidels were offended and protested: “We will defend the City; we will not surrender it to the Muslims, and they persisted in continuing the fight.”
The emperor, who would fight heroically to the death in defense of the city after repeatedly encouraging the morale of the defenders amidst shot and shell, remained adamant in adherence to the religious union declared at Florence.
As historian Crowley noted, “Most of his immediate circle of nobles, officers, and civil servants supported the Union. Only a fraction of the clergy and people did.” The propaganda of the anti-unionists proved all too effective.
“They believed the Union had been forced on them by the treacherous Franks and that their immortal souls had been imperiled for base and materialistic motives. The people were profoundly anti-papist; they were accustomed to equate the pope with the antichrist, ‘the wolf, the destroyer’; ‘Rum Papa,’ the Roman Pope, was a popular choice of name for city dogs. The citizens formed a volatile proletariat: impoverished, superstitious, easily swayed to riot and disorder” (Crowley, p. 68).
Nevertheless, as the doom of the city appeared imminent with the Turks beginning to breach the walls, the emperor, after a procession with all the bells of Constantinople ringing, dramatically addressed his commanders and officers and his Venetians and Genoese allies.
“Never had his officers so much loved him. For nearly two months, they had seen him spending himself unselfishly. He inflicted on himself severe fasts to obtain the salvation of the City, and slept little. He would wake up at night to pray for hours with the monks, and instead of going to bed again, would climb the ramparts and spend the day visiting, listening, consoling, encouraging, fortifying his soldiers. The lack of sleep, the sorrows, the maceration had so much weakened him that, recently, he had fainted in front of them. However, his courage and his charisma had remained intact” (Nehme, p. 179).
“You know well,” he said to the Byzantines, “that the hour has come and that the enemy of our faith wishes to launch an intense assault against us with all his troops and cannon by land and sea. . . . For this reason I speak to you now and beseech you to resist bravely and with noble hearts, as you have always done until now, the enemies of our faith. Into your hands I give this most illustrious and renowned City, the Queen of cities, your homeland” (Nehme, p. 179).
Thanking his Venetian and Genoese allies, with all in tears, Byzantines, Venetians, and Genoese, embraced and forgave one another, forgetting their hatred and determined to die together for their Christian faith. “In the ultimate moment of need, it seems that Catholics and Orthodox worshipped together in the City, and the 400 year-old schism and the bitterness of the Crusades were put aside in a final service of intercession” (Crowley, p. 200).
“All the men, women and children who in Constantinople were capable of moving around, came to the Basilica of Hagia Sophia to pray. Even the bishops, the priests, the monks and the nuns who had claimed that Hagia Sophia had been soiled by the Union of the Churches and had announced that they would no longer set foot in it until it was purified of all Latinism, were there. . . .
“It was evening, and the Basilica was illumined with a very large number of candles, whose glow limned from afar the shapes of the immense cupolas, and made the golden chips of the closest mosaics sparkle, unveiling the image of the majestic Christ in the middle of the central cupola. In this somber and grandiose atmosphere, Cardinal Isidore of Kiev was saying the divine Liturgy behind the iconostasis, not according to the Latin rite, but according to the Byzantine, and the voices of the singers rose, insistent and sad amidst tears. The Liturgy was not finished when the Emperor arrived. He turned toward each bishop present and asked forgiveness for his sins, even when the bishop was his enemy. Then he received communion with the crowd and left with them. . . .
“When the lights had been extinguished, the Emperor returned alone to Hagia Sophia. Above one of the doors, an old mosaic represented an Emperor prostrated in supplication at the feet of Christ, surrounded by the Virgin and St. Michael. That was what he had come to do, pray for the sleeping City. He entered with small steps and started beseeching God for the City in the middle of the darkness that the night-lights broke, in front of the icons that soon would be no more. It was the last time that a Christian Roman Emperor knelt in this place” (Nehme, pp. 182-183).
There were about 8,000 defenders of the City protecting a parameter of 12 miles. They faced a horde of perhaps 300,000 Ottomans. The Byzantine combatants amounted to 4,774, including volunteers, monks, and some residents. The others were foreigners numbering 3,000, including Venetians and Genoese, Catalans and Cretans and some who secretly came from Galata to their aid.
There was also a contingent of allied Turks led by Prince Orhan, a pretender to the Ottoman throne and Mohammed II’s greatest enemy. His severed head would be handed to the conquering Sultan.
Giustiniani, who had so gallantly led the resistance at the walls, suffered a serious wound, his body armor pierced by a lead shot, and disgracefully fled the field of battle to escape on a small ship. He died on the island of Chios, blamed for the fall of the city.

Lamentations
For Constantinople

With the Turks streaming into the city on all sides, the 49-year-old emperor stripped himself of his imperial insignia and, as a common soldier, sword in hand, plunged in to fight the oncoming janissaries. He died amidst the pile of bodies at the St. Romanus Gate, regarded as a martyr and whose death would give rise to many enduring legends, reflected in songs and lamentations. It is doubtful that his head was given as a trophy to Mohammed II since he would not have been easily identified among the many beheaded corpses.
Almost the whole population of 50,000 was led way into captivity as slaves and worse. There were “400 survivors rescued in the final chaotic hours, as well as a surprising number of Byzantine nobles who had already boarded before the City fell. Seven ships from Genoa got away, among them the galley carrying the wounded Giustiniani” (Crowley, p. 226).
It is noteworthy that Constantine XI Drageses, the last of the emperors of New Rome, died a Catholic. He remains venerated as a saint by both Orthodox and Byzantine Catholics. “On May 29, each year, while the Turks celebrate the capture of Istanbul with a military re-enactment at the Edirne Gate, Constantine is remembered in the small barrel-vaulted village churches of Crete and the great cathedrals of Greek cities” (Crowley, p. 258).
The union which he supported would continue in parts of Greece and the islands under Venetian rule. Interestingly, into the 20th century, Christians of Asia Minor, conscious of being heirs of the Roman Empire, referred to their land as Romania, and themselves as Romios, or Romans.
The following is one of the popular lamentations for the Fall of Constantinople:
“Alack and Alas! The Turks have taken Constantinople. They’ve taken the King’s throne, the rulers are changed. Churches mourn, monasteries cry, and St. John Chrysostom weeps and laments. ‘Don’t cry, St. John, and don’t lament, Romania is taken. But though gone, Romania will blossom again’.”