The World полностью

Mehmed had planned to take Constantinople but was foiled by his patronizing Turkic grand vizier Çandarlı Halil Pasha, who received bribes from Constantine IX. When his father died in 1451, Mehmed had his brother strangled, a fratricide that he made policy,^* and then turned on Constantinople. Çandarlı preferred to keep Constantinople as a client state but when the Romaioi intrigued against Mehmed, the vizier warned them, ‘You stupid Greeks. All you will do is lose the little you have.’

Mehmed was a cosmopolitan visionary. Educated by Turkish and Italian tutors, he read the Iliad and Arrian’s Life of Alexander the Great, spoke seven languages and wrote Turkish and Persian poetry. He grew up among Christian princelings, not least Radu the Beautiful, one of the Dracula brothers.^* They became lovers, Mehmed penning erotic poems – ‘His lips gave life anew to one whom his glances kill’ – in a culture that regarded sexuality as a question of power rather than identity: the penetrator, virile, the penetrated, submissive. Aspiring to the Roman legacy and international prestige of Constantinople, which the Turks called the Red Apple on account of its desirability, Mehmed realized that its defences were manned by scarcely 5,000 men, and that gunpowder had diminished the impregnability of its walls. Approached by Orbán, a Hungarian cannoneer, he commissioned a full gun park ranging from a monstrous showpiece to smaller, manoeuvrable cannon.

Mehmed built a castle, Rumelihisarı, on the European side of the Bosphoros that he called the Throat-cutter, designed to blockade the city. When a Venetian captain tried to run the blockade, Mehmed’s guns sank the ship, and he had the captain anally impaled on the Bosphoran shore as a living scarecrow.

On 5 April 1453, Mehmed arrived to oversee the encompassment of the city with an army that included Christian detachments of Serbians and Wallachians under his favourite, Radu the Beautiful. But full encirclement from the water was prevented by a huge chain boom stretched across the Golden Horn estuary, so he created a pathway of greased logs across Galata and had the entire fleet dragged over it then floated on the Golden Horn. The Romaioi tried unsuccessfully to burn the fleet by using fireships. Forty captured Italians were impaled on the sultan’s orders, at which the Christians slaughtered Ottoman prisoners on the walls. Ottoman attackers were fried in spurts of Greek Fire.

Mehmed mined the walls; a Romaioi expert, John the German, who was supposedly Scottish, countermined under Ottoman positions. Mehmed’s cannon repeatedly damaged the fortifications (though Orbán was blown to smithereens by one of his own creations). After midnight on 29 May, the sultan ordered the assault. His troops broke in through the damaged north-western section of wall as the last emperor tore off his purple regalia and threw himself into the fighting. His body was never discovered. In scenes of apocalyptic havoc, Venetians and Genoese jumped off the walls, heads bobbed in the Bosphoros like ‘melons in a canal’ and the Turkish conquerors ran amok, pillaging the Red Apple for three days – as Mehmed waited outside.

The pope was so depressed, he wished he was still a librarian. As Europe recoiled in horror, the pope’s flotilla, funded by the Portuguese king Afonso, arrived after the city had fallen. But in return Nicholas V recognized the Portuguese conquests in Africa as a crusade permitted ‘to invade, search out, capture, vanquish, and subdue all Saracens, and other enemies of Christ … and to reduce their persons to perpetual slavery’, a right expanded to include ‘Guineans and other negroes captured by force or bought with legitimate contracts’. Afonso expanded his Moroccan territories – winning the epithet O Africano – and backed his uncle Henry the Navigator.

In 1456, two of Henry’s captains, one Venetian, one Genoese, settled Cape Verde, an uninhabited island off Senegal that became the Portuguese slaving headquarters and the first tropical colony. The settling of islands in the Atlantic naturally encouraged the idea that there could be other, larger islands. Around 1139 – a century and a half before Columbus – a Milanese monk, Galvano Fiamma, wrote in the newly revealed Cronica Universalis about ‘another land, further westwards, named Marckalada’ – Markland, the Norse name for the coast of the USA–Canada – which he said had been described by ‘sailors who frequent the seas of Denmark and Norway’. English sailors had visited mysterious islands, probably Newfoundland, and Perestrello, the colonizer of Madeira, also possessed papers about a mysterious land there. Bodies said to have washed up in Ireland with Mongol faces were surely the corpses of Native Americans somehow lost at sea.

ITZCOATL’S MEXICA: THOSE WHO DIE FOR THE GOD