Constantine quickly realized the gravity of his position, and made every effort to patch the fortifications, enlist troops and provision the town. An urgent appeal was sent to Italy, and hundreds of volunteers and adventurers were attracted; though the Pope was still mainly concerned about the recognition of his supremacy, and sent a cardinal who distracted the doomed city with fierce religious controversy. When the hour came, Constantine found that barely six thousand Greeks could be induced to enlist in the last defence of their city, and these, with other two or three thousand Italians, had to hold fifteen miles of wall, with many gates, against seventy thousand Turks and three hundred vessels.
On 12th December 1452 the church of St Sophia rang with its last great Christian celebration, the solemn union of the Latin and Greek Churches, the price of that secular aid which was destined never to arrive. Four months later the vanguard of the Turks was descried from the walls, and day by day the endless regiments and engines of attack and the monstrous cannons came from the line of the horizon and took up their stations. For a time the spirits of the besieged were maintained by those little successes which so often precede a great catastrophe. Four large Italian ships had fought their way through the Turkish fleet and brought provisions: Mohammed’s biggest gun had burst: a general attack of the enemy had been repulsed. But the incessant rain of projectiles made at last a ghastly breach in the stout wall, and on 29th May, before dawn, the dreaded Janissaries flung themselves at the defenders. The last of the Paleologi died like a man. Later in the day the victorious Turks swept over his body and the bodies of some thousands of his people, and the last remnant of the Byzantine Empire was swallowed up in the Mohammedan tide. And the relics of its culture passed westward and, meeting and blending with the humanism of the later Middle Ages, begot the new man and new woman of the Renaissance, the heralds of modern times.
FOOTNOTES
[1] Readers of Professor Bury’s incomplete “History of the Later Roman Empire” may wonder that I continue to use the phrase “Byzantine Empire” after Bury’s protest against that phrase. But it seems to me that if “Roman Empire” means an Empire centred in Rome, “Byzantine Empire” is the most congruous name for a dominion that centres in ancient Byzantium and has, during the far greater part of its story, no connexion whatever with Rome. Most historians continue to speak of it as Byzantine.
[2] See, especially, J. Ebersolt, “Le Grand Palais de Constantinople.” 1910.
[3] There was no hereditary right to the throne in the Roman Empire, though a father generally contrived to secure it for his son. “Born in the purple” is, by the way, an inaccurate description of the imperial children, though not uncommon. They were “born in the Porphyra,” or porphyry-lined palace; but, as the Greek word porphura properly means “purple,” it is mistranslated at times. There are those who maintain that the imperial colour was rather red than what we know as purple.
[4] The date of the marriage is much disputed. Chroniclers assign it to various years, and, when the son of Ariadne and Zeno mounts the throne, he is variously described as an infant, a boy of seven, and a youth of seventeen. Professor Bury puts the marriage in 458 or 459. I prefer the estimate of Tillemont, that it took place in 468, the year of the disgrace of Basiliscus.
[5] It is a popular fallacy, as we shall frequently see, that the Romans had abandoned these bloody spectacles in the days of Honorius.
[6] See, especially, the work of Débidour, “L’Impératrice Théodora,” and a summary and approval of Débidour’s arguments in an article by Mr Mallett in The English Historical Review, January 1887. Mr W. G. Holmes’s learned work, “The Age of Justinian and Theodora” (2 vols., 1907), is much too meagre in its references to Theodora.
[7] See the Latin translation (“Commentarii de Beatis Orientalibus”) by Douwen and Land of this Syriac work (Amsterdam, 1889). John also speaks of her as “a most astute woman,” and, although his work teems with the immense services done to his Church by Theodora, he never mentions her with more than stiff and formal respect.