The Byzantine Empire, when Constantinople fell to the marauding Ottomans under Mehmet II, had already been reduced to a mere shadow of its former splendor. After centuries of decline following the death of Emperor Andronikos I, and tensions with the West leading to Byzantium’s diplomatic isolation from the rest of Christendom, the Empire was in no position to counter Ottoman aggression. What had long been the preeminent polity not only in the Mediterranean, but arguably the World, had been irreparably truncated by foreign conquest, civil war, intrigue, and the gradual loss of military power. The Great Schism had irrevocably severed Byzantine religious and diplomatic relations with much of the Latin West. This rupture would reach a climax during the events of the Fourth Crusade, when the city of Constantine the Great would be viciously sacked and looted by fellow Christians. The events of Crowley’s book occur nearly two centuries after the reclamation of Constantinople from Latin occupiers by Michael VIII Palaiologos.
A descendent of Michael VIII, Emperor Constantine XI, would find himself called to fulfill a difficult destiny. The fall of an Empire that had lasted for more than a Millennium, and the heroically doomed attempts to save it, give Crowley’s work a Homeric undertone; there is a sense of tragic grandeur throughout 1453. In the course of human history few events rival the fall of Constantinople in terms of the widespread, far-reaching consequences it would have. It has, indeed, echoed through time. Considered by many historians to be the definitive end of the Middle Ages, the Fall of Constantinople sent shockwaves across the late-medieval West. It confirmed the emergence of an ambitious, technologically advanced Islamic polity, with designs on further Westward expansion, and shifted geopolitics by closing a vitally important East-West trade route. Even the Mamluk Sultanate in Egypt would be made apprehensive by the young Sultan Mehmet II, and rightly so. For several centuries, following the collapse of the world’s oldest Christian Empire, the Ottoman advance would continue into Europe and the Levant before being thwarted at Vienna.
Roger Crowley uses a range of historiographical accounts to piece together a rich and cinematic description of the fall of the greatest city of the Middle Ages. The level of detail contained in the book is astonishing. Various sources are synthesized into a larger, cohesive narrative. A clash of civilizations, with inverse trajectories; one at the close of its existence and one near the beginning, is featured within Crowley’s engaging tale. One finishes the book with a sense of the irresistible march of time, the rise and fall of great kingdoms; and no small part of Weltschmerz. Faith plays a prominent role in the lives of each side of this immortal battle; the Orthodox citizens of the beleaguered city of Constantinople, praying for intercession from God, and the culturally diverse Ottoman army, with soldiers of different faiths united, often against their will, under the banner of Islam. Despite the presence of a number of Christian troops who had been captured by the rampaging Ottoman threat and forced to serve the Sultan, there remained a large core of Muslim faithful among his troops.
1453 is the story of a people at the end of their history. The Empire that began with Constantine ended thusly with Constantine. There is an undercurrent of prophetic fatalism that Crowley insists, believably, was present in the civilians who experienced the siege. The amount of personalization and anecdote are part of what makes 1453 so captivating; seemingly incidental details add much to the characterization of the victims of the Ottoman sack. Crowley’s skillful account of the grueling six-week ordeal can be characterized as a successful attempt to convey events as they must have seemed to the participants themselves. Heartbreaking scenes such as when Emperor Constantine, valiantly defending his city against all odds, breaks down into tears after receiving critically bad news serve as enriching examples of pathos.
Far beyond a simple historical regurgitation of names, dates and sequences of events, 1453 devotes a considerable portion of its 266 pages to giving the reader a comprehensive look at the religious, social and psychological state of the citizenry experiencing this cataclysmic event. It painstakingly recounts the religious rituals observed, the motivations for perseverance, the undulations of morale, and in some cases the eschatological resignation of citizens so tired and scared they they come to feel that hope is a curse. Crowley brilliantly succeeds at providing a powerful snapshot of the psyche of a people on the verge of destruction. The fervent prayers in St. Sophia; the observance of divine liturgy hours before the final Ottoman attack; the exhausted families reverting to superstition and taking solace in prophecy; all these disparate pieces come together to create an extremely poignant impression. The psychology of the average citizen is explored in the passages that discuss the emotional effect certain meteorological anomalies had on the people inside the city: “Alarmed, people ran to see what was happening and cried aloud when they looked up at the dome of St. Sophia. A strange light was flickering on the roof. The excitable Nestor Iskander described what he saw: “at the top of the window a large flame of fire issuing forth…those who had seen it were benumbed; they began to wail and cry out in Greek: ‘Lord have mercy!” (p. 178-179). Crowley isn’t interested solely in the broad narrative contours; he endeavors to paint a vivid picture of the hopes and fears of regular people inside the city walls. The overall emotional impact of the story is magnified considerably by these intimate portrayals of humanity in the midst of catastrophe; particular attention is paid to the role religion played in the final moments of Byzantium’s existence.
One comes away from reading 1453 with a more intimate sense of what the inhabitants of Constantinople, who witnessed the final brutalization of their capital, must have experienced. This is unusual as far as historical non-fiction. The trend is to focus exclusively on the political and military leaders. While Crowley does go into detail about both Mehmet II and Constantine XI, these leaders do not absorb the entirety of the narrative focus. Import is assigned to other facets of the siege as well. The Hungarian iron founder Orban receives several pages dedicated to the description of his incredibly difficult craft, cannon forging, which provided the Ottomans with a crucial technological edge. One would be hard-pressed to find a historian who’d claim the Ottomans could have conquered Constantinople without artillery. On another note about the narrative color Crowley employs in his telling, the complex and multi-national character of the Ottoman forces is explored to great effect. Terms like Seraglio, Janissary, and Vizier are introduced to the Ottoman-naive reader.
The book concludes with a disclaimer, citing the lack of consistent eyewitness testimony as requiring of scholars a parsing out of the more unbelievable accounts from the realistic ones in formulating a coherent sequence of events for the siege. The fact that 1453 is not an academic work, being relatively accessible and not shrouded in technical didacticism, does not make it any less impressive; in fact it is arguably more effective as a narrative piece as a result. Although 1453 is fairly straightforward, the writing is sophisticated, and not without scholarly merit. Crowley highlights the historical importance of the fall of Constantinople by placing emphasis on the wider ideological and religious struggle which was renewed and intensified across Europe after 1453. The Ottomans, under Mehmet II, would make it as far as the Italian peninsula before the death of the conqueror. The expansion of the Ottoman Islamic polity gave rise to fervent Islamophobia in the West despite the indifference that Western leaders, secular and religious, showed to Constantinople’s plight in the years leading up to the siege of 1453. On finishing 1453, one is struck by the degree to which Europeans lamented the loss of a city which they did almost nothing to protect. Repeated diplomatic missions were embarked upon by Byzantine Emperors seeking assistance with the Turkish threat. In the end, a tiny force of foreigners would be there to aid in the defense of the city in the weeks leading to the fall. Crowley describes the term Saracen falling out of lexical prominence as the catch-all word for Islamic peoples, being replaced by Turk. The spirit of Jihad was nourished by the conquest of Constantinople, and the Ottoman political program took on an imperialistic dimension.
The adjective Cinematic, used before in this review, remains the most salient term with which to describe the style of 1453. Scenes have been etched into my memory, as though I saw them in person, or at least on a screen: Mehmet II, aware of the faltering resolve of his army, rallying support for a final attack with evocations of the Islamic law of 3 days of plunder for any city taken by force without surrender; Constantine XI, the final Palaiologoi Emperor, sharing a final moment with friend George Sphrantzes on the land wall on the eve of the final Ottoman incursion; these are only some examples. Then there’s the intense scene of Mehmet entering Hagia Sophia to find one of his men destroying the floor, the mercurial Sultan supposedly having him executed that day. It is a testament to any medium for scenes to be portrayed memorably; in this case, 1453 is a rousing success. Although in its later chapters it becomes painful to watch the exhausted defenders succumb to their fate, the refusal to capitulate; the stalwart perseverance with which Constantine XI faced his Empire’s destruction, in the face of a foe so irreconcilably different as to be incomprehensible to the Byzantine Christian; the inner strength with which the byzantines confronted pure moral and religious terror; these are all immensely inspiring to the reader existing in a mundane realm of screens and social media.
The heroic defense, while it lasted, some 6 weeks, was in every sense a collaborative effort. The Byzantines were joined by several thousand Italians; Venetians and Genoese, each with vested interests in keeping Constantinople out of the hands of the Ottoman juggernaut which had already taken all of Asia Minor and much of the Balkans. The tertiary main character of Crowley’s account is Giovanni Giustiniani. This Genoese nobleman came to defend Constantinople on his own accord, and at his own expense. He came along with 700 well armored soldiers, and played a critical role in repulsing wave after wave of Ottoman troops. In particular, the fastidiousness that he and his men summoned when they painstakingly repaired the damaged outer walls again and again, filling them with dirt, branches, barrels and anything they could find, proved invaluable to stopping the momentum of the siege up until the very end. Crowley emphasizes how his injury, and subsequent departure from the city at the last minute, marked a turning point in the siege. The 700 Genoese, seeing their leader gone, decided all was lost and followed him, creating an opening in the defense which the Ottomans immediately sensed and exploited. Whether this is true or not, that Giustiniani ended up tipping the scales after his injury, the way it is folded into the larger narrative serves only to add to the dramatic flair of Crowley’s telling. A single quasi-criticism emerging from this would be the fact that the role of the native Greek defenders seemed relegated to the background while various Italians occupied much of the foreground. Crowley obviously felt that it was important to highlight the multinational character of the defenders, but the point of focus, at times, seemed to linger on Giustianni and his Genoese contingent to the exclusion of the Constantinopolitan residents.
Crowley attributes the dearth of Ottoman first-hand accounts to the preliterate character of Ottoman society at the time of the siege. Despite this, narration from the perspective of Constantine XI is extremely limited. Crowley alleges the historical record is unclear about the precise death of the final Byzantine Emperor, and while the book goes into some detail as to Constantine’s behavior during the ordeal of the siege, Mehmet II features more prominently in the narrative. Crowley’s work attempts to provide the reader with a psychological profile of the young Sultan; exploring his motivations, his preoccupation with the city, and his self-identification with figures from history, such as Alexander (somewhat ironically), in what seems like a manic self-aggrandizement common to despots. The degree to which the work explores the character of the respective leaders is lopsided; Constantine XI receives only a fraction of the attention and narrative focus. The reasons for this are decidedly opaque, but, perhaps it was intentionally done to avoid the possibility of accusations of islamophobia in our overly politicized culture. If there is one single criticism that would warrant voicing, it is that 1453 would benefit from a symmetrically allocated narrative focus between the two leaders.
Ultimately, a thoughtful assessment of 1453 observes an account of the fall of Constantinople with superb narrative emphasis. Crowley succeeds in producing an extremely engaging, entertaining, and emotionally devastating chronicle of the final days of a once great city, inhabited by still great people. Although the survivors of the Ottoman conquest would go on to become a Byzantine diaspora, there would never again be a Byzantine Empire. The decision to employ a narrative style that holds the experience of the unnamed denizen as equally important to that of the leader makes the tale all the more engrossing, after all, the world is no longer made up of Emperors or heroes of legend; only celebrities and anonymous denizens; the age of immortal deeds is over, perhaps it ended with the Fall of Constantinople.
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