All Things Medieval

Inquisitions were normally a program run by priests who answered to the local bishop, who answered to the Pope. They were the answer to a very active concern: what about false teachers who might lead the illiterate astray? Inquisitions had been run, periodically, for several centuries in many places. They were guided by canon law which was based on Roman law, answerable to local bishops and the Pope. Most of the time, they imposed penance and re-educated heretics. Their worst punishment was exclusion from the Church, so that the offender was outside the protections of canon law.

This background helps us understand why the Inquisition in Spain became so infamous, because it didn’t follow this model. It was not overseen by bishops and the Pope, nor was it run by canon law, nor did it stop at imposing penances. Instead, it was run by a priest directly appointed by King Ferdinand and answerable only to him. As it ran and grew year after year, the Popes tried to stop it at times. It is probably a good example of how mass hysteria can create a feedback loop, magnifying the problem.

The original problem was that many Jews in Spain had converted but remained culturally tied to their Jewish relatives and communities. Since Jews had been closely associated with Muslim rulers, often serving as officials, they were viewed as a foreign “5th Column.” The converted Jews, Conversos, were additionally seen as traitors by their Jewish relatives. The Inquisition’s roots seem to lie here: the Conversos had many enemies on all sides. An Inquisition was needed to find the ones who were not fully converted and straighten them out.

Canon law had some basic protections for the accused built into it. For example, anonymous denunciations were not permitted. If torture were used to persuade someone to confess, the confession was thrown out if the person recanted it when the torture was over (as many Templars had done). There were some rudimentary standards of evidence. But in Spain’s Inquisition, canon law was not followed. Anonymous denunciations were permitted and encouraged, and torture was used freely. This Inquisition, instead of imposing education and penance, convicted heretics as traitors to the King, therefore to death. It also, not incidentally, confiscated their property and fired them from their jobs.

Like anything, it began small. In 1478, the Pope gave Ferdinand and Isabella authority to name inquisitors in Castile. In 1481, the first six heretics were burnt at the stake. The Pope opposed sending Inquisitors into Aragon, objecting in 1482 that already many people, especially powerless and poor ones, had been seized, tortured, convicted and executed without evidence and often falsely. The Pope was concerned that the Inquisition was sending souls straight to Hell, rather than saving them. But King Ferdinand threatened to take the Inquisition from the Pope altogether, so that’s when the infamous Torquemada, Isabella’s personal priest, was appointed, and it was clear that he answered only to the King. Two years later, the Pope announced an appeal process to Rome, but the King announced a death sentence for anyone who tried it. At that point, the Pope had no control.

Torquemada’s Inquisitors would come to your town, and its officials proclaimed a 30 day amnesty: confess and do penance, abjure your heresy, and you would be spared. Once enough Conversos had been convicted and burnt alive, thousands of others rushed to confess to something, just to stay on the safe side. As the numbers grew, so did the Inquisition, since the problem seemed to be bigger than they had supposed.

Abjuring your heresy was not as easy as it sounded. The penitent heretic first had to don a sackcloth robe with yellow crosses, then must turn informer on other Conversos. If he ever stopped cooperating, he’d be considered Relapso and executed. Meanwhile, as a penitent, he could not practice medicine or law, bear arms, keep a tavern, carve stone, travel by horse or cart, wear jewels, or grow a beard. The status of penitent heretic was inherited by the children and some grandchildren.

Meanwhile, anonymous denunciation were welcomed, and any evidence of Shabbat observance was accepted: did you see your neighbor stocking up on food the day before Shabbat? buying meat from a Jewish butcher? lighting candles? not having a smoke-trailing chimney on Shabbat itself? Denunciations within families were definitely encouraged, with records of husbands denouncing wives and vice versa, children their parents, and so on. It may have been a convenient way to end a bad marriage or remove a hated father with a large estate, sort of like Agatha Christie plot premises. And denouncing your work colleague? Way to get a promotion! Your neighbor? Sweet, that extra lot will come in handy when it’s at city auction. Many royal officials and private citizens got rich off the Inquisition.

How many Jewish-origin Catholics were convicted of heresy and burnt as traitors? One historian (Henry Kamen) estimates about 2000, total. Other estimates begin at 12,000 and start climbing to 30,000 and on. Some say millions. We can infer, I think correctly, that under Torquemada the Inquisition didn’t keep careful records. By contrast, the medieval Cathar Inquisition kept such good records that historians can use them to reconstruct societal conditions in those towns. The high numbers in this case are probably wrong, because we know that additionally, tens of thousands of Jews left or were baptized, and their total number was not that great. But even the lowball estimate is shocking in its implied rate of arrests, and it too is probably wrong (like Ibn Khaldun, modern historians have a bias toward rejecting big numbers).

The Inquisitors became convinced that Jews were seducing converts to slip back into Judaism. They told the King that there must be a final solution or it would keep getting worse. In 1492, Ferdinand and Isabella reluctantly agreed to expel all Jews. Not all Conversos, but all practicing Jews.

To put this into perspective, everyone had been expelling Jews for the last few decades. German cities expelled Jews in the 1420s, and cities in Italy were expelling them during the years of the Spanish Inquisition. The Medici family protected Jews in Florence, until their fall from power, and then Florence sent the Jews away. France and England had expelled them in previous centuries. So Jews were moving to Italian cities at first, then as these were closed, they were moving eastward to Austria and Poland. Poland and Bohemia didn’t really want Jews, but it needed them.

And, of course, Spanish Jews and Conversos had been fleeing all during the Inquisition and its precursors. The problem is that Spain had been a very good place to live, and many of these Jews had lived there since Roman times, like the Jews of the Rhine Valley. Emigrating might mean saving your life, but it could just as easily mean losing it to robbers, pirates, or starvation and exposure to weather. Arriving in a new place, it would take several generations to rebuild, and meanwhile your family was at the bottom, where survival was unlikely. If there was any way to placate the Inquisition and stay, it seemed safer.

Christopher Columbus may have been a Spanish Jew whose parents fled earlier, settling in Genoa, so that he could come from Genoa to seek funding from what would have been his king. Michel de Montaigne was a Jew; France had expelled its Jews in 1306, but apparently some refugees were able to settle there again. Montaigne’s family was not of original French Jewish (northern) extraction, but from Spain.

In parallel developments, Ferdinand and Isabella’s joint Aragonese-Castilian forces were just finishing off the last Muslim ruler, the Emir of Granada. So in 1492, a lot of people were about to sail the ocean blue.

When the King of Hungary created the Order of the Dragon in 1408, one of the knights to receive this honor was the illegitimate son of the Voivode of Wallachia (modern Romania). When the legitimate son died, Sir Vlad of the Order of the Dragon became the Voivode (Old Slavic for rank below the king but above the boyars). Vlad Drakul had three sons: Mircea, Vlad, and Radu (all of these names, strange to us, were quite traditional, like Louis in France). All of these sons could be titled “Drakula,” essentially “Son of the Dragon.”

The Drakula sons were born at a time when Wallachia was a battlefield that sometimes acted as vassal to the Ottomans, and sometimes joined Christian kings in a Crusade effort. The strongest ruler in the area was John Hunyadi, the Voivode of Hungary and Transylvania, vassal to the King of Poland. Hunyadi was a determined enemy of the Ottomans; his career was made of battles, negotiations to find more allies and resources, and attempts to choose the Voivodes around him.

Vlad Drakul joined Hunyadi in a rebellion and was captured; his sons Vlad and Radu were taken from him as hostages. They grew up at Edirne, speaking Turkish, while their older brother had his turn to rule and be murdered. Hunyadi installed a Drakul cousin as Voivode, but Vlad the hostage, who was something like 20, decided to make a play for his inheritance. First he tried to oust his cousin with Ottoman support, but failed. He must have decided that power was going in the Hungarian direction, because next he left the Ottomans to live in Hungary for about six years. At the end of that time, he came back to Wallachia now with their support, as the enemy of the Ottomans.

Radu, meanwhile, seems to have been pretty well assimilated to the Ottoman court. A Greek chronicler asserts that Mehmet II and Radu, who were about the same age, were very close friends—-and further that Mehmet tried many times to make Radu his paramour, while Radu resisted virtuously but stayed on good terms. I’d need real evidence to buy that idea. Resisting sexual advances (reportedly by cutting the prince with a dagger and hiding in a tree) is not consistent with staying on good terms, and Radu’s later nickname “the Handsome” may have suggested the idea. Mehmet may have been bisexual, but it doesn’t mean that Radu was a target. And while Vlad was contesting for the Voivodeship of Wallachia, Radu became a Muslim and lived at the Topkapı Palace.

Vlad killed his cousin in battle, but there were more cousins who were apparently preferred by the locals. The German colony in Transylvania, which dated back to the early years of the Teutonic knights, didn’t support Vlad. He not only razed their towns, he also took captives back to Wallachia and used them for a public demonstration: he impaled them. That’s when his notoriety began. Even then, impaling people alive was shocking.

By 1460, Vlad was solidly in control. His old frenemy Mehmet II required him to come pay homage, but Vlad decided to stay on the Hungarian side. Not only that, he impaled the envoys and began to ravage Bulgaria, killing Slavs and Turks alike. Mehmet brought an army to remove him and install Radu, landing 150,000 soldiers and Janissaries at a Danube port.

Now Vlad cemented his reputation. First, he made a daring night attack on Mehmet’s camp, trying to assassinate Mehmet himself. The Wallachians, an army with some knights but mostly peasants (and probably no artillery), then retreated toward their capital Târgoviște with the Ottomans in pursuit. They destroyed everything in the Ottoman path: poisoned wells, burned crops, flooded land, and dug pit traps. Vlad’s army also sent anyone with an infectious disease to the Turks, so that the weary Ottomans not only went hungry but began to catch the plague.

When they arrived at Târgoviște, the Turks found that Vlad had rounded up about 20,000 ethnic Turks. His peasant army had been busy: the Turks were impaled on 20,000 stakes along the road for miles. The city was deserted, its gates wide. The Ottoman army was sickened and shocked by the impaling: it included men, women, and children; there were babies impaled with their mothers. If Vlad was aiming at shock value, he achieved it, and the Ottoman main army quickly withdrew. They burnt the town where their fleet waited.

Vlad won some more battles, but Radu and the Janissaries remained in the field. Vlad’s peasants could not win, and the nobles were also sickened by his brutality. So Vlad went to Hungary, where Hunyadi’s son Matthew Corvinus had been elected King. Instead of backing him, the king arrested Vlad.

Vlad stayed imprisoned in a small castle near Budapest for 14 years. The official cause was a charge that Vlad had actually gone back to the Ottomans, to betray Hungary; but from this time, legends about his cruelty were circulating in Germany and Hungary. Mehmet II had made Radu the Bey—-not Voivode, notice the war of language terms for “ruler”—-of Wallachia, with Janissary support. Radu may have crossed back over to Christian rituals, and he got along well enough with the nobles. He married an Albanian girl and had a daughter. However, Wallachia became an Ottoman stronghold, and its Christian neighbor Moldavia felt (rightly) threatened. Then even Radu died. Now what?

In 1475, at Moldavia’s request, Hungary released Vlad but refused to provide him with an army. Another cousin, Basarab, was now the ruler with Mehmet’s support. Vlad lived in Hungary as a free man for a year or so, but eventually Hungary gave him enough funds to join the Prince of Moldavia. Technically, this was Vlad’s third reign as Voivode, but it didn’t last long since he died in battle. The Ottomans cut him into pieces.

It wasn’t long before biographies of Vlad were being printed in German and Slavic. By now, he was widely known as a sadistic psychopath, which is probably true. But with early movable type, printers could invent new adventures and crimes for Vlad, who was soon on the Strasbourg Best Seller List. He became known as Dracula (his son also used this as the surname for the noble house they established). Probably most of the interest was generated by refugees from the German colony in Transylvania, so that his name became associated with this place. By 1500, about 25 years after his actual death, gruesome woodcuts showed him feasting with impaled bodies nearby, and other stories said he boiled people to death. It wasn’t much of a stretch for him to become an undead bogeyman.

Romania, on the other hand, recalled Vlad Țepeș (the Impaler) as a national hero. If he was harsh, it was to uphold public order and national strength. If he executed nobles, it was because they were disloyal. By the 19th century, Romanian literature celebrated his life. In the Communist years, he was lionized, and he is still best known in Romania as one of its strongest kings in history.

The national hero of Albania has the improbable (to our eyes) name of Skanderbeg. He was born George Kastriotis to a family that owned/ruled somewhere between 3 and 20 villages with a castle (“Kastrioti” implies “owner of a kastro, Greek for castle”). When he was 18, he was sent as a hostage to the Ottoman court, to ensure that his father would not rebel. He was put into the Palace School with the upper-level devşirme kids; one of his brothers may also have been taken in the devşirme levy. In service to the Ottomans, George was known as Alexander, which is Iskander in Turkish. The Turkish title for any kind of leader or ruler is Beg, but the “g” is pronounced as a y. We often spell it “Bey,” but sometimes in old documents it’s still Beg. So as George rose in the Ottoman ruling bureaucracy, he became Iskander Beg, which became Skander-beg even in his time (when he signed his name in Cyrillic characters, he wrote it that way).

Skanderbeg served the Turks for 20 years, sitting out several rebellions and often governing parts of Albania; then suddenly he defected to the Christian side. His family had remained devoutly Orthodox, although hostage Skanderbeg was expected to follow Muslim daily religious customs. His father and several of his brothers had died by then, and he had adopted his nephew Hamza. In 1443, forces led by the King of Poland (and his regional ruler, John Hunyadi, about whom more later) made the Ottomans retreat, which left the Kastrioti lands free. Skanderbeg left the Turks and went home, taking Hamza and 300 Albanians with him.

From that point on, he led a chronic rebellion against the Turks in his part of Albania. His insider status made him particularly dangerous. Early on, before he was known to have deserted the Turks, he showed Ottoman officials forged documents in the central Albanian town of Krujë. The documents appointed him Bey of Krujë, and once he had taken this role, it was hard to dislodge him. He knew Turkish and Arabic; he knew many of the officials and the structure of the hierarchy; he knew the weak points of the Ottoman army.

Skanderbeg declared to other Albanian and Serbian nobles that he was the successor to their previous Prince, Stefan Lazarević, one of the founding knights of the Order of the Dragon. He set up a standard with a black double-headed eagle, on which today’s Albanian flag is based. He successfully captured a series of castles that became the core of his nascent kingdom. His “court” was multi-ethnic, with Serbs, Albanians, Greeks and Italians who had been displaced in the Ottoman wars. They wrote documents in three scripts: Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic.

As his power grew, other Albanian nobles joined his cause. Multiple noblemen always lead to bickering and divided loyalty, but under Ottoman pressure, they became more loyal to Skanderbeg, who was the only effective resistance in sight. His forces grew to 10,000 and upward. It was hard for the Ottomans to keep track of his men, since like all guerrilla forces, they could melt away into the countryside and look like simple farmers, or hide in mountain forests. The Albanians won a few pitched battles against the Ottoman army in 1444-6.

The other power in the region was Venice, which first supported the Albanians but then turned on them, choosing to eliminate the smaller threat before making some kind of peace treaty with the larger. Skanderbeg’s forces were beset on two fronts. They won a blistering battle against Venice that led Venice to sue for peace. Albanians joined Serbs and Poles at the Ottoman front; they had already lost a major fortress and soon they were fighting to keep Skanderbeg’s capital, Krujë.

The struggle to defend Krujë from the Ottoman siege took all the resources Albania could muster, and in the aftermath of saving his city, Skanderbeg’s fortunes ran low. Other nobles chose to work with the Ottomans, while he held out. His rescue came when the King of Aragon offered to make him a vassal of Aragon and its ally against Venice, Naples. Aragon had formal overlordship in Albania, in exchange for sending material support for Skanderbeg’s fight. A hundred Spanish soldiers were stationed at Krujë, sort of like American advisers in the Vietnam or Syrian wars. King Alfonso V was probably considering launching a new crusade from Albania; he signed treaties with other Albanian noblemen, too. Skanderbeg married the daughter of one of the other Albanian feudal lords, and he was back in business.

In the years before Constantinople fell, while Mehmet II was preparing his army and guns, the Albanians saw significant victories against Ottoman forces. When Europe reacted in shock to the fall of Constantinople, the King of Aragon increased his support to Albania. He sent a Spanish Viceroy to rule Albania, Greece and Serbia in his name, and with the Viceroy came a new crusade flag. Spanish and Neapolitian troops joined Skanderbeg. Together, they turned to take back the Albanian fortress of Berat, which the Ottomans had occupied. After a long siege, the Ottoman commander promised to surrender, but Skanderbeg carelessly took the promise for the deed. He left, with half the army. The Ottomans rallied and slaughtered the rest of the Albanians and Neapolitans.

By this time, Skanderbeg’s young wife had given birth to a son. All this time, his brother’s son, Hamza, had followed him like a son. Apparently he had viewed himself as a prince in waiting; when a new heir was born, Hamza gave up hope. He actually defected back to the Ottomans and helped lead an army of 70,000 into Albania to put an end to his uncle’s rebellion. Amazingly, the Albanians came out of nowhere and soundly beat the Ottoman army at the Battle of Ujëbardha,  Hamza was not killed, but he was captured and put in some kind of prison at Naples.

The Ottomans intensified their efforts to end the Albanian rebellion once for all. Three successive armies advanced to Albania and were defeated, in 1461. Mehmet II finally signed a ten-year truce with Skanderbeg. By this time, Skanderbeg had been in high-level talks with two Popes who both kept wondering about starting up a new crusade and asking him to lead it. In 1463, only two years into the truce, Pope Pius II preached crusade, and Albania joined. Once again, Skanderbeg was at war with the Ottoman Empire.

The Pope died before he could get his promised forces actually into the field, but the truce had already been broken. The new Pope had no commitment to the effort that his predecessor had set in motion, and the Kingdom of Naples could not spare much. Skanderbeg was an old man by this time, in a body that had experienced much wear and tear. He still managed to destroy a major Ottoman army sent against him, again lifting a siege against his hometown of Krujë. By this time, he had been fighting the Turks for about 30 years and several generations of fighting-age men had grown up revering him. They flocked to join him, and they kept winning miraculous victories.

Skanderbeg could not live forever, though. It’s clear that his personal strategic genius had been behind most of Albania’s striking success. He had kept the nobles as united as possible, formed international alliances to keep their effort afloat, even successfully intervened to help the King of Naples. He had lifted three sieges of Krujë and beaten Ottoman armies much larger than his many times. But finally, he died of malaria. A nephew (not Hamza) stepped in to take his place, and Venice was still at war with the Ottomans and tried to maintain cooperation. But it wasn’t the same. When Mehmet II circled back again, the fourth siege of Krujë succeeded, and the nephew’s alliance with Venice soon fell apart. Albania became Ottoman territory, with pockets of resistance.

Albanian lords who had followed Skanderbeg fled to Naples, settling around Apulia and Calabria. King Ferdinand had a castle and estate set aside for Skanderbeg’s widow and son, in Galatina right at the Italian boot’s farthest heel. The descendants of these Albanians are still a distinct ethnic group in Italy, known as the Arbëreshë. Their Albanian language still preserves the oldest forms, when the majority of Albanian speakers in the homeland took on several centuries’ worth of Turkish borrowings.

Mehmet II wanted to become the legitimate Byzantine Emperor, in addition to being its Turkish conqueror. Now they pulled out a long-ago event forgotten by the Greeks: remember that one renegade son of an Emperor had converted to Islam and married a Turkish girl? The family of Osman was descended from that very same 12th century couple! (True? Who knows.) Further, Orhan had married a Byzantine Princess Theodora in 1346. Mehmet was not descended from her, but they didn’t count inheritance that way; he felt his great-great-grandfather should be counted among the heirs of the Emperor, by right of marriage. Were the people convinced? Probably not, but for those who needed a fig leaf to hang on acceptance of the occupation, perhaps it helped.

Mehmet had the money and manpower to rebuild the city in a serious way. There was, of course, a great risk that the kings of Europe would mount another Crusade and use the same wall breach that he had made. I wonder if he had the giant bombard melted down to prevent its later use against him, too. An awful lot of defensive wall cannons could be made from the metal, and nobody was sentimental about the gun. Orban, the master metalworker, had been killed by one of his other guns exploding during the siege.

As the walls and gates rose, Mehmet sought to repopulate the city. So much emptiness could not be defended, governed, or taxed. He ordered a levy of Muslims, Christians and Jews to be shipped in from around his Empire: bring in 5000 new families by September! He sought to keep Greeks from fleeing with every promise at his disposal. He set up a Grand Rabbi and an Armenian Patriarch to show his good intentions, in addition to the Greek Patriarch whose churches he had preserved. Of course, he also turned the city into his pious Muslim capital with mosques, madrassas, and shrines.

In 1459, while the repopulation and rebuilding was still in progress, he built an Imperial Palace. They first called it the New Palace, or Yeni Sarai, while Mehmet temporarily lived in what is now the university. It’s possible that the Italian word “seraglio,” which means a secluded harem, was based on the Persian-Turkish word “Sarai,” but nobody is sure. Later, the New Palace’s main gate was called Topkapı, which means Ball Door, that is, Cannonball Gate. The palace, which was the main residence of Ottoman Sultans until about 1665, became known by the same name, though it was formally called the Palace of Felicity. It’s now a museum.

The Topkapı Palace was built right in the Old City, on the main street that led to the Hagia Sophia. The old Imperial Palace was a ruin, so they just used the same site, some of the same walls and acropolis, and probably many of the old stones. Mehmet chose that his personal quarters would be on the highest point of the Golden Horn peninsula, with walls and gardens running down to the water. It’s probably the model C. S. Lewis used for the great palace in Tashbaan, Narnia’s southern enemy, so if you know those scenes you can fill in the details. Turkish TV has also produced shows about the Ottoman Sultans where you can see them looking down from their personal balconies on the whole city and the water.

There were inner courtyards with rings of outer ones, though it was not round as Baghdad had been. The shapes were irregular, probably following the topography, but perhaps for another purpose. Mehmet II was the heir of the grandfather who had won a civil war among four brothers; it was important that he design a family residence that could be defended if necessary, and that would provide safe haven and escape at need. Hence there were secret passages and secluded areas with grill-covered windows so that the family could move about unnoticed, if needed. A too-regular design would be too easily mapped. Along the waterfront, on the Golden Horn side, there were summer houses and boat houses. (At need, the royals could slip away by boat as Lewis’s protagonist does.)

The innermost (Fourth) courtyard had a rule of strict silence among servants; the Sultan could enjoy perfect silence in the middle of the big city. Equally inaccessible was the harem, which this time did mean a place for multiple wives (as it did not originally mean at the Alhambra). If you were outside the Palace and managed to get through the Topkapı Gate, you would be in outer courtyard, where there was an old Byzantine church and some other official buildings, like the Mint. The next gate you’d have to pass through looks a lot like the iconic gate of Disneyland, and then you would be in in the Second Courtyard, where the Janissaries lived. This area was large, with a number of official buildings, and a golden throne for the Sultan. Peacocks wandered the Second Courtyard. To enter the Third Courtyard, where the Grand Vizier’s official meetings were held, you had to pass through the Gate of Felicity.  The main throne room was also in this zone, as were the harem and the apartments of the Sultan’s mother. There doesn’t seem to be a special gate to get to the final inner zone; it must have been set apart just by passageways, doors, walls, and gardens. And this is where the secret passages would have been.

The oldest building in the innermost Fourth Courtyard is a square watch tower, built with very thick walls and only small, high windows. Mehmet II apparently installed his chief physician (probably a Jew) there, with a royal pharmacy. His son’s chief tutor also lived in this super-secure house. The innermost courtyard is still large enough for a number of terraces and smaller buildings, used as summer or prayer retreats by the later Sultans who built them. Here his heirs lived and studied; there is even a special room (built later) for circumcising the boys. Of course, there is also a mosque.

The Palace was probably finished in the late 1460s but it continued to be added to by later Sultans. The city’s rebuilding was considered (by historians) as “complete” after a census in 1478 showed its population was back up to about 80,000. By 1500, it was again the region’s largest city. It’s unlikely that its population from that point had any familial, historical connection to the pre-conquest population. The new citizens were Muslim, Christian, and Jews, but they were descended from the prisoners of war shipped in for resettlement.

Meanwhile, Mehmet was not sitting still. Conquest fueled his income and secured his borders. Rebuilding his new city led to conquering more and more of the old Empire it had ruled. What was still unconquered in Serbia was under Ottoman control before the Palace had been designed. Remaining Greek and Thracian ports were next, and then other parts of the Black Sea coast. The last of the “Empire of Trebizond,” one of the Greek Byzantine governments-in-exile from the Fourth Crusade, fell in 1461.

The last siege of Constantinople took 57 days. The old core city had been built at the point where the Bosphorus met the Mediterranean and some smaller rivers fed into it with a long inlet, shaping the city’s site into a horn. The smaller inlet was known as the Golden Horn; it was a major part of the city’s defenses. The Emperor had strung an iron chain across it, to keep ships out, which meant the walls along that stretch of water did not need to be manned as heavily.

Mehmet’s gigantic bombard was firing at the main gate that faced his Bulgarian territories. His navy surrounded the city by sea and river. The city appeared able to hold out until Mehmet did one last thing: he moved a fleet of light warships across land and into the Golden Horn, so that they suddenly appeared upriver of the iron chain. Constantinople’s last hope was that Venice, by now a major sea power, would send a large relief fleet since it technically owned part of the city. It didn’t. Smaller Venetian and Genoese fleets were already part of the failing defense.

On May 28, 1453, everyone knew the end was near. The Turks prepared for a huge push in places where the wall had been breached. The Emperor attended one last mass at Hagia Sophia, and on this occasion, the Greeks and Latins worshiped together. The offensive began a few hours later, after midnight.

Mehmet II sent in his Bulgarian and Serbian troops first, so that when the defenders were able to throw them back, his Turks and Janissaries did not suffer the casualties. When the Janissaries finally rushed in against the exhausted defenders, the resistance crumbled. Greeks and Italians surrendered or leaped off walls to end their lives. The Emperor died in the fighting; one legend says he led a sortie, while another says he hanged himself.

The city’s sacking had a few interesting details. Mehmet was planning to rebuild the city on a grand scale, and he already knew he wanted to preserve the biggest churches. So his advance guard already protected Hagia Sophia and other historic churches as his army began to loot. The city’s wealth was so famous that the Turkish army did not focus on hunting down and killing the remaining resistance, as they were searching buildings for gold and other loot. Many of the city’s Genoese and Venetians escaped to the harbor, where their ships fled the scene.

It was sheer misery in the city itself, for those who did not have ships to flee. The Turkish army had been promised three days of free looting. It was chaotic and bloody, as you can imagine. In fact, it went way beyond anything Mehmet had intended. The city was left utterly despoiled with ruined buildings and whole deserted sectors: the people had been raped, killed, enslaved, or (in lucky cases) fled or deported. Shops and houses were empty.

After three days, the Sultan proclaimed an end to the looting. From that day forward, he declared, any Greek survivors were welcome in the city and they would be protected. They could go home; perhaps some did, but in most cases the homes were uninhabitable. He turned Hagia Sophia into a mosque, but other churches remained in operation and he confirmed that the Greek Patriarch was in office. The Sultan located the Emperor’s heirs, his nephews. He took them into his care and they lived out their lives as Ottoman officials.

Europe did not trust the new ruler of Constantinople at all, with good reason. Every nearby city was afraid he was coming for them next (and in some cases he was). Greek survivors did not trust Ottoman rule; it was in the years just after 1453 that scholars began to arrive in Italy with whatever books they could carry. Many had existing ties to Italian universities and took up lecturer posts there. The Greek language and books they brought were the sea change that shifted Italy and the rest of Europe—-at least from our point of view—-from Medieval to Renaissance. The “rebirth” part of the Renaissance was this return of Europe’s past legacy that had sheltered at its eastern margin during the barbarian years.

During the 1440s, the Ottoman Sultans continued to push back their frontier in Europe. Murad II made his 12 year old son Mehmet king, but he had to be called back in 1444 to confront the Hungarian-Wallachian army at Varna (more about them later). In the Battle of Varna, Murad II won a decisive victory that included the death of the young King of Poland. But the most lasting effect on world history was that, in these battles against Hungary, the Turks observed their first gunpowder firearms in operation.

Gunpowder had been used for very simple cannons, if they can even be called that, as early as the mid 1300s. By the 1440s, soldiers could use the arquebus, a simple gun that we can recognize: wooden stock, long metal barrel. The matchlock trigger wasn’t added until about 1475, but the basic arquebus was an effective personal weapon even without it, as long as the soldier didn’t blow himself up with it.

The Janissary Corps (or Ocak, in Turkish) had been rebuilt after some years of Ottoman civil war. The devşirme resumed once the government was stable again in 1413, so by this time it even had men growing old in its service. Mehmet II had several Grand Viziers who had been devşirme children in the elite Palace school. Until the Turks saw guns in action, their best warriors were still using bows, but they became early adopters in spite of how messy the black powder could make the Janissary’s sharp red uniform.

When young Mehmet II resumed control, he felt a great religious duty to overthrow the Greek Christians of Constantinople. The city was still a very sad place, suffering from low population and depressed economy. It had been paying tribute, but Mehmet decided to make it his new capital. The last Emperor tried to make another tribute-peace deal, but Mehmet rejected it. And through his father’s attempts to conquer the city, he had learned what needed to be done.

Just north of the city, the Turks built a fortress on the European side of the Bosphorus Strait, which is effectively a river, with wooded hills on both sides, leading to the Black Sea. There was an ancient fortress on the Anatolian side, which they seized and rebuilt. Its new twin on the European side went up in record time, less than six months. They called it the Rumeli fortress, since Rum still signified Europe to them. The two fortresses, the Anadolu and the Rumeli, effectively cut the neck of the Strait. The official name of the new fortress, in fact, was the Throat-Cutter.

The fortresses were both armed with the largest cannons Mehmet II could buy. Any ship that did not stop when commanded was shot and sunk. A Venetian ship took the dare soon after the fortress was in operation, and yep, it was sunk. Surviving sailors were beheaded, and the captain’s body set up as a warning scarecrow. With the twin fortresses and cannons, the Turks controlled the Black Sea and could put Constantinople in an effective chokehold.

With the fortresses complete, Mehmet II’s siege of Constantinople began in 1452. The Byzantine Emperor had repaired his formidable walls as well as he could, and even in their decayed state they were able to turn back the Turkish army. Then a rogue Hungarian armorer showed up.

Orban first offered the Emperor that he could cast the largest cannon known to the world. He named his fee and explained how much metal it would require. But the city of Constantinople could no longer afford the best defenses. The Emperor turned him away, probably not realizing that Orban’s loyalties were not strong enough to send him back to serve his European homeland. Instead, Orban crossed over to the Turks.

The bombard technology of the time had been developed in Germany’s iron-working regions. It involved welding long iron bars to iron rings, with the goal of creating one solid round barrel of iron. When it didn’t work, the explosion inside burst the barrel, killing everyone nearby. They could also cast bronze, probably using lost-wax technique also used for bells. Bronze was not as strong, though.

We no longer have the bombard Orban made for Mehmet, but there are surviving bombards from the same period. They are quite different, as you’d expect in a time when each one was its own invention and no standard had emerged. They have names, like ships: Pumhart von Steyr is short and broad, Dulle Griet looks a bit like a spyglass, and the cast-bronze Faule Gret is even shorter and broader. But we do still have an Ottoman bombard made not long after Orban’s work, and based on it. The Dardanelles Gun looks like a very long set of barrels.

Orban’s bombard was manufactured at Edirne, the Ottoman capital on the European side, and transported by a massive oxen train to its position in the siege. It shot large stones at the ancient walls; it could shoot really large stones harder and faster, from out of reach of any defenders’ crossbow bolts. Once it began to bombard the walls, it was only a matter of time.

A threat to the young Ottoman state even more serious than Timur’s invasion came in the form of Bedreddin, a Turkish sheikh, judge, and mystic. It was important to the Ottomans to create a unified state by enforcing Sunni Islam as the official religion, even in areas that had traditionally been Christian. Those places could remain Christian, of course, by paying the jizya tribute-tax and sending boys to the devşirme levy for the Janissaries. But it mattered a lot to their strategy and identity that all religions were not equal. We know that this strategy prevailed, and we’ve seen the Middle East as Ottoman strategy shaped it. It’s worth looking at the philosophy that almost derailed it.

Bedreddin was born near Edirne, around the time when the Ottomans began to rule on both sides of the Aegean Sea. His father was the Turkish ghazi, or independent military commander, while his mother was the Greek daughter of the local Byzantine fort commander. Bedreddin’s formative years were the same years when the Ottomans really began to be a small Empire, not just another beylik. It’s interesting that he was equal parts Turkish Muslim and European/Greek, though his own religion was always officially Islam. It clearly shaped his view of the world, which was much less black and white than most of the Muslims he was around.

Bedreddin served as a sort of chaplain/judge, a marching Qadi, to an Ottoman contingent, then studied theology formally in Konya—-you’ll recall that Konya was Rumi’s hometown and had become the center of “whirling dervish” practice. Doubtless, Bedreddin picked up a strongly mystical tone in Konya. After some years of study in Cairo, he went east to Iran, to an area ruled by Timur. In Ardabil, he learned a type of Sufi mysticism and probably unlearned some Ottoman loyalty.

Bedreddin seems to have reconnected with Ottoman politics through one of Bayezid’s warring sons, Musa, the one who was carried off as a prisoner by Timur. Bedreddin may have been his personal sheikh during the years Musa was at times a ruling co-Sultan of southern Turkey, and at other times, a guerrilla war leader. The other guerrillas in the network were ghazis, like Bedreddin’s father, so he was well suited to fit in. As the Qadi, he had some power to distribute land to these ghazi soldiers. Musa’s strategy may have been to gain support of the ghazi network by undoing some of the centralization installed by his father. Bedreddin was a key figure in his efforts.

Bedreddin’s rogue theology had developed in Ardabil to where he was a universalist; he believed that Allah was manifest in nature and all religions could save. A believer just needed to clear away all obstacles to becoming one with God. Social hierarchy and land-based wealth were among the obstacles; Bedreddin was a radical egalitarian and land redistributionist.

When Sultan Mehmet defeated his brother Musa in 1413, Bedreddin was exiled and all of his land gifts were undone. For three years, he lived at the margins of the Ottoman Empire, taught his disciples, and gathered strength within the ghazi independent-military network. In 1416, he and his disciples began preaching a radical doctrine of communal land ownership and equality of Muslims and Christians. Turkish nomads, Christian peasants, dispossessed ghazis, and interested madrasa students joined him.

Bedreddin himself was in Bulgaria, in the region of Dobruja, when the revolt began. His two top disciples were in Turkish cities. They went beyond preaching, to start coordinated attacks on Ottoman government buildings. Sultan Mehmet and his leading pashas had to act quickly. One Turkish revolt was ended fairly easily, with Bedreddin’s disciple killed, but the other put up a lot of resistance. To end Bedreddin’s revolt, the Ottomans had to choose a policy of merciless slaughter. Thousands of peasants and nomads died with Bedreddin and his disciples. In the underground, however, Bedreddin’s ideas were kept alive in Dobruja until at least the 1500s.

After that, the Ottoman strategy of strict Sunni Islam with suppression of dissent had been proven necessary. Mehmet and his successors made no apology about keeping non-Muslims in subjection, and probably the devşirme policy, which allowed officials to track non-Muslim children while removing the strongest ones, became more acceptable. The Ottomans developed the old Arabic idea of the dhimmi, the conquered person living under Muslim protection, into a full legal system. Non-Muslim religious sects declined under Ottoman rule, of course.