There are two common views of the fall of Constantinople. The first is most
vividly depicted in a painting presented toQueen Victoria in 1839 by a hero
of the War of Independence of modern Greece from the Ottoman Turks,
as a history lesson for the young queen (fig. 64). It shows Constantinople
on the fateful day: 29 May 1453. Constantine XI had died a martyr;
his Latin allies are scuttling away by sea. Christian youths are rounded
up in devshirme, to become janissaries who wield curved scimitars. The
enthroned Sultan Mehmed II supervises the placing of enormous yokes
over the Roman orthodox clergy and lay notables of Constantinople. A distinctly
pagan-looking lady, personifying Hellas disarmed, weeps under an
olive tree.However, escaping to the highlands of theMorea are young braves
in white Albanian kilts, ready to fight another day – which dawned in 1821.25
A second, revisionist, view of the event is in fact older than the schoolroom
one. This maintains that, as heir of the Byzantine emperors, the conquering
sultan created for his Roman orthodox subjects a self-governing
community, or millet, regulated by their patriarch, who now had greater
political powers than he had ever enjoyed, especially over the orthodox Slavs,
and restored Constantinople as capital of the Roman orthodox world. As
late as 1798 Patriarch Anthimos of Jerusalem explained that when the last
emperors of Constantinople sold out to papal thraldom in 1439, it was
through the particular favour of heaven that theOttoman empire had been
raised to protect theGreeks against heresy, as a safeguard against the politics
of the western nations, and as champion of the Roman orthodox church.26
No wonder the patriarch condemned the heroes of the Morea when they
rose against their sultan.
However, what actually happened in 1453 is still obscured by the writing
or rewriting of Roman orthodox, Armenian or Jewish tradition two
or three generations later. The non-Muslim peoples then claimed that the
conqueror had treated them well. This suited the wishful thinking of all
parties, Turks included, and allows modern historians to assume that the
status quo of a century later had been in place from the start. Would that
things were so tidy, and that sleeping myths could lie. Yet, it is worth looking
again at what Sultan Mehmed actually did, and ask: who won or lost
Constantinople on 29 May 1453? Even that is not a simple question. The
Genoese were first off the mark. Three days later they got the sultan to
confirm their privileges in Galata, opposite Constantinople. Dated 1 June
1453, thisTurkish charter granted to the Latins is naturally written inGreek –
and preserved today in theBritish Library (fig. 65).But no other community
had a ready-made relationship to confirm, or has a document to record a status
which had to begin anew through negotiation or accumulated custom.
Among losers, Constantine XI lost his life. He had supported not just
union with the Latins, but Mehmed’s rival, Orhan – in 1453 there were
Turks, too, within Constantinople, if outnumbered by orthodox outside
the walls. The sultan’s first action after the fall of the City should also
give pause for thought. The fate of the emperor would have posed a tricky
problem if Mehmed had taken him alive. The sultan knew, however, what
to do with his own prime minister, or grand vizier, Halil Djandarlioghlu
(1443–53) – put him to death. The Djandarli family was of impeccable
Anatolian Turkish descent. It had served the Ottoman dynasty since 1350,
supplying its first and four other grand viziers. But Halil, described by
both Muslims and Christians as ‘friend of the Romans’, had cautioned
young Mehmed against taking Constantinople. In 1453 the old Anatolian
backwoods beys, whom Timur had restored after 1402, and whom Halil
represented, were among the losers.27
The ruling orthodox dynasties lost, but a handful of secondary families
which switched allegiance – such as the Evrenos of Bithynia or the Vlora
of Albania – remained influential under new masters. This period lasted
only a generation or two, because their usefulness, to the Ottoman state
as well as to their old co-religionists, receded by the end of the century.
These decades (1453–92) were, however, vital to the new order, because
first-generation converts reached the highest ranks of the Ottoman army
and government (which came almost to the same thing) before they forgot
their origins. Unlike the Djandarli beys, they were eager for conquest – of
their native lands in particular. Like all converts, they tried harder and were
typically patrons of new mosques and Islamic foundations in the Christian
Balkans and the new capital. Their inherited contacts in the Balkans and
the Pontos assisted a relatively orderly transfer of power to Mehmed II.28
An example isMahmud Pasha, a convert who served as the sultan’s grand
vizier from 1455 to 1474 and who successfully dealt with the surrender of
the Serbian state in 1459 and of the empire of Trebizond in 1461, both
after spirited campaigns. Yet both events were something of family affairs.
Mahmud was born an Angelovi´c, so the last prime ministers of Serbia and
Trebizond, with whom he negotiated, were respectively his brother and a
cousin. The latter was none other than George Amiroutzes – the shadow
of Florence fell over such Ottomans too.29 After executing his own grand
vizier in 1453,Mehmed’s next action was to look for a credible agent through
whom to rule his Roman orthodox subjects. Their emperor was dead.
Their patriarch, Gregory III Mamme (1443–50?), had literally gone over
to Rome. But megas doux Luke Notaras, the last Byzantine prime minister
(1449–53), survived.He was outspokenly anti-unionist, andMehmed seems
to have turned to him. What exactly went wrong is obscured by mutual
recriminations in later tradition, to do with sexual habits which may be
acceptable in one culture, yet scandalous in another. Perhaps the reality is
that Notaras would not convert to Islam. It would have lost his credibility
not with Venice (where he had a good bank account) but with the Roman
orthodox, and therefore his usefulness to the sultan. Like Djandarlioghlu,
he and his sons were executed. It was only then, in January 1454, that
Mehmed looked to the religious institutions of his overwhelmingly non-
Muslim subjects as a way of running them.With hindsight, this expedient
seems obvious, even predestined, but it was not so at the time; despite the
long experience of Islam in dealing with non-Muslim communities, such
institutions had yet to be embedded in the Ottoman state. In effect the
Muslim sultan restored the ecumenical patriarchate, so setting a precedent
for other community leaders whom the Ottomans brought under their eye
in Constantinople: a chief haham for Jews (sometime between 1454 and
1492), and a new catholicos for Armenians (sometime between 1461 and
1543), in addition to the privileges granted to western Christians on 1 June
1453, which survived for almost five centuries.30
The reconstitution of the see of Constantinople by the sultan is almost as
obscure as its traditional foundation by St Andrew. But the evidence of his
deed is enough.Mehmed sought out and installed Gennadios II Scholarios
as successor of the first-called apostle, and his own first patriarch. It was
an inspired choice. Obviously, he could not trust a unionist ally of the
papacy, a leading enemy of theOttomans in thewest. The monkGennadios
had rallied the anti-unionists of Constantinople, whose leadership he had
inherited from his old teacher, Mark Eugenikos. A veteran of the Council
of Florence, Scholarios learned how to deal with the unionists by adapting
their own scholastic tools. Now, as patriarch, Gennadios proved adaptable
to new facts of life – for example relaxing canon law to allow for the breakup
of families and remarriage in the wake of the sack of the City. Even the
title he adopted as patriarch was an innovation: ‘the servant of the children
ofGod, the humbleGennadios’. In complaining that his bishopswere more
trouble than the Turks, he recognised that to save the Roman orthodox,
the patriarchate must become an Ottoman institution.31
Mehmed was quite as remarkable as Gennadios. His stepmother was
orthodox. He wrote Greek and hung lamps before his collection of icons.
He was a patron of Bellini and curious of all new things. Indeed old Turks
complained that ‘if you wish to stand in high honour on the sultan’s threshold,
you must be a Jew or a Persian or a Frank’.32 Tradition has Mehmed
and Scholarios settling the future of the Roman orthodox in taxis, a brave
new order, and discussing higher theology in a side chapel of the new patriarchal
cathedral of the Pammakaristos. But, happily unaware that they were
describing what would later be called a millet, the fifty-year-old patriarch
and twenty-two-year-old sultan appear to have felt their way, apparently
making up the rules as they went along. The results are clear. It took a
Turk to define a Greek adequately as the son of a Roman orthodox. In so
doing, Mehmed ensured the survival of a hitherto endangered people, for
the Roman orthodox were thenceforth protected subjects of the sultan’s
patriarch. The patriarch was responsible to the sultan for regulating the
Roman orthodox under canon law – including considerable fiscal franchise
over his own flock – in return for privileges and immunities within the
Ottoman state.33
It was in nobody’s interest to question such a rosy tradition later. But
it overlooks some harder realities of 1454, one of which was that Mehmed
II and his predecessors were primarily sultans of a militant Islamic state,
however upstart. They took titles and epithets such as khan, shah, malik,
‘shadow of God on earth’ or, more contentiously, ghazi (or holy warrior
against the infidel). Mehmed II himself was styled ‘ever victorious’ and
fatih (or conqueror). As a pious ruler he founded mosques and charities,
which often replaced churches and monasteries; the endowment of St
Sophia in Constantinople alone, transferred from cathedral to mosque in
1456/7, numbered over 1,000 properties, including baths, butcheries and
beer-shops.34 The Ottoman state inherited from earlier Islamic practice
long-established legal ways of dealing with dhimmis – non-Muslims who,
although protected, were unquestionably second-class subjects. Christians
may have lived under their own canon law, but ultimately it was the sharia,
Islamic law, which was supreme.35
In turn Patriarch Gennadios may have been adroit in exploiting the
position of the underdog, but in truth his encounters with Mehmed in
the Pammakaristos can hardly have been meetings of Renaissance minds.
Judging by the patriarch’s voluminous writings, he was deeply Roman and
conventionally orthodox. His exposition of faith, prepared for the sultan,
is uncompromising, even polemical. For him, both the prophet and the
pope were equivalents of the great beast of the Apocalypse. Gennadios had
sharp views on the Armenians, too, and told the Jews that they laboured
under an appalling delusion; it was in fact the Roman orthodox who were
the chosen people of God.36
The fifteenth-centuryOttoman empire reunited the Roman orthodox as
subjects of their patriarch in Constantinople. Yet it was not the Byzantine
empire in disguise. Mehmed was eventually to resettle Constantinople as
the centre of the Roman orthodox world and was to be even more effective
in making it the governmental capital of an Islamic empire. But these
developments were not overnight decisions, let alone plans, and took a
decade or more to work through in a sequence whose details remain unclear.
In 1453 the City was almost as depopulated as Thessaloniki had been in
1430. The earliest surviving defter survey (see above, p. 859), dated 1477,
which includes Constantinople and the Frankish trading town of Galata
across the Golden Horn, has been variously analysed. A total of 16,326
households were registered, making a population of over 80,000. Of these
the absolute majority was already Muslim with 9,517 households. There
were 5,162 Christian households, the majority (3,748) Roman orthodox,
which had been augmented by resettlement (s¨urg¨un) from the Morea after
1460, Trebizond after 1461 and the Crimea after 1475 – the last two in
quarters of their own. Besides 372 Armenian households and probably
under-recorded Latins and gypsies, the final major element was Jewish,
already with 1,647 households.37
Constantinople, and most of its communities, grew prodigiously in
roughly the proportions set in 1477, reaching perhaps 200,000 by 1489
and certainly double that population in 1535. The one exception is the
curiously small Roman orthodox element as registered in the defters, which
by 1489 had hardly grown. While Ottoman statistics can lie, more often
they omit. The meetings of patriarch and sultan in the Pammakaristos were
off the record, but the defters make one wonder if in 1454 Gennadios did
not getMehmed to exempt the refounded patriarchate, its dependants and
properties, from the record too. For Gennadios it would only have been a
temporary financial precaution. After all, his prediction of the end of the
world in 1492 is on record.
World History
