Meanwhile the courage and numbers of the defenders ebbed away. Giustiniani, wounded in the hand, withdrew, and with him the Genoese. A rumour spread that the Turks had forced an entrance at the Kerko Porta. Constantine, who, mounted on a white arab, was directing operations from the inner terrace by the fifth military gate, dashed along the rampart to help if help were needed. Indeed the Turks had gained admittance, but had again been speedily expelled. So Constantine returned the way he came, and resumed his position by a small postern-gate that gave from the inner wall on to the terrace by the fifth military gate. When he arrived there the fighting masses of the Sultan’s bodyguard and Janissaries were surging over the ruins of the outer wall and over the corpses of their predecessors on to the inner wall. The fury of their onslaught beat down all resistance, and the numbers of the Christians were now but one to fifty of the Ottomans. A gigantic Janissary Hassan was first upon the walls, he and those with him were thrown back; they charged again, and fell to make way for others. In swarms they came, those fiery Janissaries, under the weight of whose tumultuous onslaught the Christian garrison was overpowered. The victorious Turks rushed in at the breaches in the wall, others had forced the gate of the Phanar on the Golden Horn, and Constantine’s fair city was given over to the sword.
Thus after a siege of fifty-three days Constantinople fell before the scimitar of Othman, whose descendant reigns here to this day. And what of Constantine IX, the last, perhaps the bravest, and certainly the most unfortunate bearer of an illustrious name? He was seen at his post by the postern-gate, bearing his part as a soldier in the defence of his city. He had laid aside the Purple, and the nobles who fought around his person fell at his feet, until he too was cut down by an unknown hand, his body buried under a mountain of the slain. We may with Gibbon apply those noble lines of Dryden—
“As to Sebastian—let them search the field;
And where they find a mountain of the slain,
There they will find him at his manly length,
With his face up to Heaven, in that red monument
Which his good sword had digged.”
So, gentle travellers, ere we turn away from this historic spot, let us stand here a moment, here where the great cannon hurled missiles against the walls of Theodosius. The Lycus, now an insignificant stream, but yet so old and memorable in history, trickles away gently towards the ruined ramparts. It finds ingress under one of the ruined towers to our right. In front of us rise the remains of those walls that guarded the city through many centuries. There is the built-up entrance of what was once the fifth military gate, beside it the jagged ruins of the flanking tower, the gate of which we witnessed as the drama of the last siege was played before us. In front and all along to either hand the outer wall and moat are but a mass of ruins, and from the heights to north and south those solemn cypresses that guard the graves of the warriors who fell here, look down upon a scene of desolation. One more look upon the ruined curtain through which the built-up arch gave ingress to retreating Greeks and Ottoman assailants on that 29th of May, there in the angle caused by the wall and its southern flanking tower you may faintly see the remains of a postern-gate. There fell Constantine, the last of the Emperors of the East.
CHAPTER X
FROM THE GATE OF EDIRNÉ TO THE GOLDEN HORN
OUR travellers are approaching their journey’s end. The road leads on northward up a steeper incline than that which took us to the Gate of St. Romanus. Under the shade of cypress-trees, for here too they stand in dense and sombre gloom, we pass the Edirné Kapoussi, known before the Turkish conquest as the Gate of Charisius. Here the walls of Theodosius recede towards the city. To reach them again we enter a little wooden gate into a Greek cemetery. An attendant Greek springs up out of the long grass with a hungry leer, and though we may not understand his speech, his hand extended to us, palm upwards, makes his meaning clear. The Artist proudly points out that on all three occasions he knows of, the palm of that hand returned empty to the suppliant’s trouser-pocket. A few paces due west take us again to the edge of the moat, out of the rank grass where a few goats are browsing, and from among the brambles that spring out of the crannies in the ruined scarp and counterscarp, rise sturdy fig-trees. Their grey stems, the twisted branches and deep grey foliage form a sympathetic foreground to the mass of ruins that rise beyond them, bathed in the waning light. This is the Palace of the Porphyrogenitus, of him born in the Purple.