The leaders of divisions remained, after the departure of the larger assembly, in order to receive their final orders. Hamoud, with his fleet, was to keep near the seaward walls and the archers and fusiliers[388] should be so ready to shoot, that no man dare show his head at the battlements. Zagan was to cross the bridge, and with the ships in the harbour to attack the walls on the Golden Horn. Caraja was to cross the foss—probably between Tekfour Serai and the Adrianople Gate, where was one of the three roads that Mahomet had opened into the city—and to try to capture the wall. Isaac and Mahmoud, at the head of the Asiatic division, were charged to attempt the walls near the Third Military Gate. Halil and Saraja, who were in command of the troops encamped around the sultan, opposite the third and most important breach—that, namely, at the Romanus Gate, defended by Justiniani—were to follow the lead which the sultan would himself give them.
Having thus made his final dispositions, Mahomet dismissed his inner council, and each leader went away to his own tent to sleep and await the signal for attack.
The speech to his leaders, which I have summarised in the preceding paragraphs from the report given by Critobulus,[389] is also recorded by Phrantzes, though at much less length. He describes it as having been made at sunset of the 28th,[390] and makes the sultan remind his leaders, with the usual voluptuous details, of the glories of paradise promised to the true believer who dies in battle.[391]
Preparations within the city.
Meanwhile, within the city preparation of a different kind had been made. After the meeting of the council of Turkish nobles, the besieged, who seem always to have been well informed of what went on in the enemy’s camp, learned at once that it had been decided to make a general assault forthwith. All day long during the last day of agony the alarm bell was ringing to call men, women, and children to their posts. Each man had his duty allotted to him for the morrow, while even women and children were employed to carry up stones to the walls to be hurled down upon the Turks.[392] The bailey of the Venetian colony issued a final appeal, calling upon all his people to aid in the defence, and urging them to fight and be ready to die for the love of God, the defence of the country, and ‘per honor de tuta la Christianitade.’ All honest men, says the Venetian diarist, obeyed the bailey’s command, and the Venetians, besides aiding in the defence of the walls, took charge of the ships in the harbour and were guardians of the boom. Barbaro and his fellow citizens occupied the day in making mantles for the protection of the soldiers upon the walls.
The silence during the Monday before the landward walls was more impressive than the noise of previous warlike preparations. The Turks were keeping their fast. Probably during the afternoon they were allowed to sleep in order that they might be fresh for the attack on the following morning, for, says Critobulus, the Romans were surprised at the quietness in the camp. Various conclusions were drawn from the silence. Some thought that the enemy was getting ready to go away; others that preparations were being completed which were less noisy than usual.[393]
The reader of the original narratives gets weary of the constant lament of their authors over the sins of the people, the principal one, if the writer is a Catholic, being the refusal to be sincerely reconciled with Rome; if Orthodox, it is the neglect to give due honour to the saints. The deprecation of ‘the just anger’ of God was on every one’s lips, and priests of both Churches speak confidently as to the cause of this anger. But assuredly, if the invocation of the celestial hierarchy were ever desirable, it was so on this last evening of the existence of the city as the Christian capital of the East.
Last religious procession in city.
A special solemn procession took place in the afternoon through the streets of the city. Orthodox and Catholics, bishops and priests, ordinary laymen, monks, women, children, and indeed every person whose presence was not required at the walls, took part in it, joined in every Kyrie Eleeson, and responded with the sincerity of despair to prayers imploring God not to allow them to fall into the hands of the enemy. The sacred eikons and relics were brought from the churches, were taken to the neighbourhoods where the walls were most injured, and paraded with the procession in the hope—to people of Northern climes and the present century inexplicable and almost unthinkable—that their display would avert the threatening danger.
It would be a mistake, however, to think that, because these processions and the veneration of the sacred relics are alien to modern modes of thought, they were not marked with true religious sentiment, or even that they were useless. They encouraged the fighters to go more bravely forth to battle against tremendous odds, and they comforted both them and non-combatants with the assurance that God was on their side. The archbishop concludes his account of this last religious procession in the Christian city, on the eve of the great struggle, by declaring that ‘we prayed that the Lord would not allow His inheritance to be destroyed, that He would deign in this contest to stretch forth His right hand to deliver His faithful people, that He would show that He alone is God and that there is none else beside Him [no Allah of the Moslems] and that He would fight for the Christians. And thus, placing our sole hope in Him, comforted regarding what should happen on the day appointed for battle, we waited for it with good courage.’