“You must have it, my master,” responded Khalil. “Who could refuse you that which belonged to you by the grandeur of your views, and by the omnipotence of your arms. I have divined this long time your desires beneath your silence; I have all prepared to satisfy on an appointed day, your religion, your patriotism, your glory. Constantinople or my head is at your feet.”
The next day the Sultan set out with Khalil for Gallipoli and then proceeded to the village situated on the European shore of the Bosphorus at the point which formerly gave passage to the Persians of Darius. There he ordered Khalil to construct forthwith a fortress in front of the Asiatic fortress constructed twenty years before by his ancestor, Bajazet-Ilderim.
This promontory on the Bosphorus, at a point where the channel is not wider than a river and only a few miles distant from Constantinople, was admirably chosen to extend the limits of the conquest, to wall in the city, and to smother it by terror even before being swept by the fury of their fiery onslaught.
With fantastic superstition the Sultan or his architect gave the different compartments the form of the letters, which in Arabic compose both his name and the name of the false prophet, as if to stamp with the very walls of a fortress on the soil of Europe, the seal of Islamism, and the empire on the last promontory that still sheltered the capital of the Christians.
The Greek Emperor alarmed at this menace almost under the very walls of his capital sent Ambassadors who timidly demanded explanations from the Sultan.
“Of what do you complain?” replied he, “I form no project against your city. To provide for the security of my dominions is not to infringe the treaties. Have you forgotten the extremity to which my father was reduced when your Emperor, leagued against him with the Hungarians, sought to hinder him from passing into Europe? His galleys at that time barred the passage and Mourad was obliged to claim the aid of the Genoese. * * * * My father at the battle of Varna vowed to construct a fortress on the European shore. This vow I fulfil. Have you the right or power to control in this manner what are mine; that of Asia because it is inhabited by Ottomans; that of Europe, because you are unable to defend it.
“Go tell your master that the reigning Sultan is not like his predecessors: that their wishes did not go so far as does to-day my power. I permit you to retire for this time: but I will have the skin flayed off the bodies of those who henceforth should have the insolence of calling me to an account for what I do in my own empire.”
A thousand masons and a host of laborers were soon at work on this fortress.
Some Greek peasants, at work in their harvest fields, having been slain, Constantine, the Emperor, sent messengers to expostulate, and then to add: “If unmerited reverses menace the capital of the empire, the Omnipotent will be the refuge of the Emperor. The inhabitants will defend themselves by all the means which destiny leaves them, so long as God shall not have inspired the Sultan with thoughts of justice and peace.”
Mohammed II. replied to this adjuration of his justice, but by the first cannon shot discharged from the fortress, already armed, at a Venetian vessel wishing to try if the Bosphorus were still free.