But their joy was vanishing. Mohammed wavered only a moment, then stirred by the cries of his Janizaries, who still stood motionless about his tent, yet burning with fury to avenge the rebuff of the army, he turned and launched them like a mighty thunderbolt to the deserted center of attack—the gate of St. Romanus.
The presence of the Sultan brandishing his battle-mace, the shame of forsaking their sovereign, the reproaches of the Janizaries rallied the shaken columns and the battle was on as fierce as ever. Mohammed promised a kingdom to the first man who should take and hold a rampart.
At this juncture his heroic Justiniani fled his standard, though the Emperor pleaded with him by the panic that would follow his flight; but there may be bounds to human courage when men fight for glory, and not for country or for faith, and he fled. It proved the rout of the besieged.
The Italians followed their general. The Janizaries, at fearful loss, swarmed over the walls. Constantine, flinging off his purple mantle and retaining but the arms and the uniform of a common soldier, that it might not be mutilated, fought to the last breath between the inner and the outer wall at the breach of the gate of St. Romanus, that the Turks might enter the imperial city only upon the dead body of its fallen Emperor. Thus did Constantine by his heroic death put to eternal contrast and eternal shame the dastardly degeneracy of his own nation and the miserable cowardice and selfishness of the Christian nations of western Europe.
The story is soon finished. As the troops rushed through and over the deserted walls, a hundred thousand panic stricken men and women fled to the church of St. Sophia. The sight of this unarmed and helpless multitude disarmed the fury of the soldiers, who, remembering the promises of the Sultan, began each to seize his captives and his. The Greeks held out their hands to be tied with cords or saddle girths; women and girls were tied by their girdles or their veils. Nuns were torn from the altars and from their convents with naked bosoms, outstretched hands and dishevelled hair. The cries of mothers, children and nuns were heartrending: even the Ottomans themselves were affected by it. Yet sixty thousand captives thus bound came forth from convent, hovel, or from palace, traversed for the last time the streets of their desolated city to be carried into captivity into all the cities and the tents of Asia.
The pillage lasted eight hours without exhausting the riches of an empire. The coined treasure was more than four million ducats, the uncoined gold, silver, pearls, diamonds, vases and ornaments of palaces and churches was incalculable. One hundred and twenty thousand manuscripts warmed the baths of the barbarians. But at the close of the day Mohammed entered at the head of his Janizaries to restore order. He proceeded at once to the Church of St. Sophia. The soldiers were still engaged in pillaging its treasures: and one of the barbarians even in his presence continued the work of destroying a precious marble of the sanctuary. Mohammed struck him a blow with his club saying: “I have abandoned you the slaves and the treasures, but the monuments belong to me.” The soldier was borne off dying from the church.
Accustomed to Arabian and barbarian magnificence—Constantinople dazzled him as she sat in her grandeur the Queen of two continents on the shores of the Bosphorus:—
“Earth hath no fairer sight to show
Than this blue strait, whose waters flow,
Bordered with vineyards, summer bowers,