Bleeding Armenia: Its history and horrors under the curse of Islam

by Augustus Warner Williams; M. Smbat Gabrielean

The morning dawned with the four hundred thousand men in order of battle. The disciplined and veteran troops were carefully arranged in several lines of battle, Mohammed himself at the center and in their front with his twenty thousand Janizaries waiting for the decisive moment to arrive.

Between the city and the camp were the two hundred thousand motley volunteers whom he would send first into the battle to tire the defenders and fill the trenches with their dead bodies.

Constantine went with the nobles of his court to the Church of St. Sophia seeking to draw from the religion of his fathers the courage and perhaps the fortune of saving its altars.

He attended a short service, as if it were his own funeral service. He received communion from the hands of the Patriarch; made with tears a public confession of his sins to which the sobbings of the people were the only audible response. After this he repaired to his palace, his household and his family, where says one of his auditors in his farewell, he pronounced the funeral oration of the Greek Empire. He then threw aside the robes of royalty, keeping on only his shoes embroidered with a golden eagle, and his purple mantle, mounted on horseback in the costume of a private soldier, and went forth for the last time to battle in the front ranks of the defenders of the faith.

Such men only four hundred years ago did Western Christian Europe willingly let die when she failed to stand beside him to beat back the Turkish hordes and warriors to their desert plains in Asia.

Mohammed II. then proclaimed to his army as if to excite every fiercest passion in the breast of his men, that the entire city was devoted to spoil, and the inhabitants to slavery or death. “The city and public buildings are mine; but I abandon to you the captives and the booty, the precious metals and beautiful women; be rich and happy. The provinces of my Empire are numerous, the intrepid soldier who first mounts the walls of Constantinople shall be governor of the most delightful and opulent of them all, and such will be my gratitude that he will obtain more wealth and honor than he can dream of.”

Mohammed thus fired all the cruel passions of the undisciplined hosts of his vanguard.

Neither pen nor tongue can fly fast enough to describe the wild impetuosity of their attack as they precipitated themselves upon the reverse side of the moat, one hundred feet wide and six thousand paces long. The stone, the earth, the wood these carried were not sufficient to fill this mighty trench. The cannon and the sharpshooters behind the ramparts still existing, strewed thousands of Turks on the back of the exterior ditch. The smoke of the Greek artillery rolled back upon the combatants, so that the gunners and archers of Constantine could take aim only by the noise against the hosts of their invisible assailants. In vain the bullets and the grape shot filled the trenches with the Turks: these masses of men, pushed forward by their mere impetus, rushed headlong into the water and formed with the dead and dying a causeway of human bodies about the gateway of St. Romanus, which supplied a bridge for the battalions that pressed behind.

After this sacrifice of the “Scum of the Army,” thus put to death to secure victory, the three columns of the regular army, comprising two hundred and sixty thousand men, advanced in profound silence to the assault. The force of the fire of the nine thousand brave defenders was already exhausted by this desperate struggle of two hours. To protect them was this ditch now nearly filled up with earth and men and crumbling walls. The purple mantle of Constantine, as he appeared momentarily on the summits of the shattered walls, served as a target for the Tartars, and an inspiration to the Spartans and Italians inside. Strong yet in their broken walls, in their towers and in their artillery, in their despair they repulsed the mad rushes of these torrents of men as with wild cries, under cover of clouds of arrows and with glistening scimitars they charged again and again along the whole line on port and continent. For three terrible hours the carnage continued, and fifty thousand Ottomans rolled into the ditches or into the sea. The huge balls of Constantine tearing into these solid columns piled the ground with dead; stones, rocks, beams and Greek fire, crushed, burned, and mutilated those who tried to scale those wrecks of towers.

The three column heads halted, wavered and ebbed a moment towards the camp of Mohammed. A shout of victory rose from behind the ramparts, and a chanting of hymns from the heart of the city. Constantine hurried from gate to gate to encourage the hope of his soldiers, who were done nearly to death.