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.
The Emperor, without any hesitation, relinquished his Imperial regalia and threw himself into the fighting to repel the incoming waves together with the remaining defenders of the city. If there were a body somewhere, it would be impossible to locate, let alone identify, amongst the thousands of dead.
The Sultan could not allow for any doubt surrounding the death of the Emperor to remain. That would be dangerous for, as a symbol of resistance, the hope that the Emperor could still be alive and could still return to lead a new charge against the new rule would give hope to the Sultan’s newly-conquered subjects and ammunition to his rivals lurking in the background and craving the throne; and it would be an excuse to any foreign powers to interfere and unite against him and his Empire.
Such a situation would become a gangrene of doubt against the Sultan’s legitimate claim on the throne of the Roman Empire, as rightful successor of the Emperors of Constantinople.
The Sultan had taken the title of Roman Emperor, in addition to his other titles. He emphasised his descent from the Imperial family of Constantinople and the Imperial blood running in his veins, as one of his ancestors had married a Byzantine princess.
The Sultan devised a neat and final solution to this problem. The story goes that the news was spread that the last Emperor was killed and that his head was presented to the Sultan who impaled it on the walls for all to see, as a sign of the ultimate humiliation of the Byzantine Empire, the final proof of his great victory and as a message to the remaining defenders to take away their faith, to sap their strength and the hope, which they were still clinging on, that they could still win, with the Emperor as the symbol of their struggle and as their leader.
The Sultan was certain that with the dead Emperor being paraded publicly and with such brutal fanfare, his new Byzantine subjects would lose heart and the will to fight and would finally submit to his rule; any resistance would be quashed and would die a silent death with not even as much as a whimper.
But amidst rumours that the Emperor had removed his Imperial regalia and others saying that the so-called body of the Emperor when found had no Imperial signs or regalia, to irrefutably confirm the Emperor’s death, a huge cloud weighed on the truth of the Emperor’s fate.
And as the prophecy goes, “he will rise again and free us…”