Williams | The Windmill

PUBLISHED IN ISSUE 2 | FALL 2022

Nātūra Rōmam Dēlēverat

(Nature had Destroyed Rome)

Jacob Williams

University of Texas at Tyler

Jacob Williams is a history major at the University of Texas at Tyler. As a part of an independent study performed under the mentorship of Dr. Edward Tabri, he researches and seeks to discover the environmental factors that contributed to the Turkish conquest of Constantinople in 1453.

The Siege of Constantinople, and the fall of the Byzantine Empire in 1453 CE, was the culmination of the collapse of the 1,500-year-old Roman Empire that had engulfed and dominated the ancient world. At the fall of the last political remnants of the Eastern Roman Empire at Constantinople, there lay the beneficiaries of the imperial Roman inheritance: the Ottoman Empire under the leadership of Sultan Mehmet II. Within most traditional narratives of Byzantine historiography, the Siege of Constantinople is the military and political struggle between two imperial powers and two imperial autocrats. However, when the windows of the past are widened, the fall of the Byzantine Empire at Constantinople was intrinsically an event influenced by the natural and human built environments. Since the Roman Empire’s inception, the empire was never a stranger to the viral agents of the natural environment, and from the emergence of the Black Death in the fourteenth century to the Siege of Constantinople in the fifteenth century, Constantinople was weakened by a consistent bombardment of viral pestilence. The Byzantine Empire endured a two-century long period of viral weakening, an erosion by disease that infected the Byzantine government, economy, and population to a state of geopolitical weakness at the inopportune time of Mehmet II’s rise to the Ottoman throne.

Amidst the fateful siege for control of Constantinople, human manipulation of the environment was strategically instrumental to the Ottoman Empire’s victory on both land and in the sea. On land, Mehmet II’s tactful use of geography and landscapes proved instrumental to the victory of the Ottoman Turks. On land, Mehmet II constructed a fortress on the Bosporus that severed Constantinople from the lifeblood of goods that flowed between the Black and Aegean seas. In the sea, Mehmet II conquered the nigh-impenetrable defenses of the Golden Horn by dragging his ships across land, thus accessing the sea walls of Constantinople and effectively surrounding the entire geographical boundary of the city in a total assault. Deeper, on an elemental scale, Mehmet II employed the chemical mixture of gunpowder in his cannons that destroyed the Roman walls of Constantinople, allowing the Ottoman Turks entry into the city. The environment was not the only factor that led to the fall of the Byzantine Empire, but through the long-term societal erosion wrought by disease, and Mehmet II’s shorter-term tactical manipulation of his environment, the Byzantine Empire cracked like a rusty hammer to the wayside of the historical record.

Before delving into the environmental factors that caused the collapse of the Byzantine Empire, and to provide a larger picture, the more traditional historiographical ideas for the success of the Ottoman Turks at the Siege of Constantinople must be presented. By the eleventh century, the Byzantine Empire was pressed into a conflict with the Normans in the west and the Ottomans in the east that culminated in the loss of southern Italy to the Normans, and the fertile and wealthy lands of Anatolia to the Ottoman Empire. Further, the loss of Anatolia proved to be the most catastrophic, as the Greeks “had to abandon forever to the Turks the lands that had supplied most of their soldiers and most of their food, the upland plains of Anatolia.”[1] Even in the Middle Ages, the Byzantine Empire felt the effects of old age in an era of increased geopolitical competition.

In 1204, the Byzantine Empire suffered a fatal blow through the machinations of Venice when a crusading army captured Constantinople amidst the Fourth Crusade and transformed the Byzantine Empire into the Latin Empire. Later, the Byzantine Empire was reborn when Michael Palaeologus reconquered the Latin Empire, but the empire never recovered its former glory, and existed only as a rump state. A fracturing Byzantine Empire that faced Italian and Turkish encroachment, consistent civil strife, and religious disunity in west and from within.[2] Despite the weakening of the Byzantine Empire from the eleventh through the fifteenth centuries, the empire persisted, but the conditions had been set for the Byzantine Empire to become the perfect target for an onslaught of disease from the fourteenth to the fifteenth century, culminating in the ascension of Sultan Mehmet II to the imperial Ottoman throne.

From the second century to the fifteenth century, the emergence of viral epidemics and pandemics consistently devastated the lands of the Roman Empire and those that were once part of the empire. However, disease is only one head in the hydra of the natural environment, and often disease was a byproduct of the climate, urban expansionism, and famine. In the second century, in the lifetime of Galen and in the reign of the philosopher emperor Marcus Aurelius, the Roman Empire had a population of 75 million,[1] and was composed of an urban “galaxy of cities” that made up the golden age of trade in Pax Romana.[2] A golden age stewarded by the Roman Climate Optimum: a period of climate change defined by plentiful sunshine, abundant rains, and an absence of volcanic activity. The perfect set of environmental conditions that provided the Roman Empire with a blissfully “warm, wet, and stable climate,” a climate that allowed unprecedented agricultural growth, fueling specialized trade that provided for the expanding empire.[3]

However, within the expansion that flourished during Pax Romana, the Antonine Plague emerged and ravaged the Roman Empire from 165-172, a contagion that swept across the expanding empire. The plague was likely a pandemic of smallpox, and a viral episode that the historian Kyle Harper notes as the end of the golden age of the Roman Empire.[4] Later, in the crisis of the third century, drought afflicted the Roman Empire with the end of the Roman Climate Optimum, disrupting the predictability of the Nile River. Amidst the turbulence, the Plague of Cyprian emerged from Ethiopia, spreading viral devastation throughout the Roman Empire once more.[1] In Rome’s early history, disease afflicted the empire from its early golden age to the crisis of the third century, a viral trend of devastation that continued into the empire’s division between the east and the west.

In the Eastern Roman Empire during the reign of Justinian, in 541, the Bubonic Plague made its first pandemic appearance on the world stage in the Plague of Justinian. The Plague emerged from Egypt in a global environment hospitable to the bacterium Yersinia Pestis, and volatile enough to force the migration of pestilent rodents. Through the fleas of the Black Rats who sailed in the grain ships from Alexandria and rode with travelers on Roman roads, the bubonic Plague swept over the Eastern Roman Empire, persisting until 749.[2] Westward, in the parceled remains of the Western Roman Empire, the Roman Foederati, specifically the Franks, carried the viral torch of disease into their Carolingian Empire consisting of Gallia, western Germania, and northern Italia.[3]

The Carolingian Empire in the early ninth century saw increased volcanic activity and the movement of the Lower Grindelwald Glacier, causing a series of wet summers and harsh winters between 820 and 834.[4] Further, the French medievalist Pierre Richè notes that epidemic of disease usually follows volatile weather and subsequent famines. In 836, an epidemic of “choking disease” emerged and devastated the Carolingian Empire as it “killed both the ecclesiastic and lay aristocracy in Italy.”[5] Thus, the viral precedent did not subside in the third century, and in the division of the Roman east and west, the Eastern Roman Empire and the Carolingian Empire continued the imperial viral tradition.

The Eastern Roman Empire and the Carolingian Empire, the major powers that made up the once-united Roman Empire carried the metaphorical baton of pestilence from the sixth century to the ninth century. The Eastern Roman Empire faced viral devastation in unprecedented proportions from the bubonic and pneumonic Plague - a destructive force that killed 50-60% of the estimated five hundred thousand population that lived in the city of Constantinople in 542.[1] Throughout the historical record of the Roman Empire, the empire intimately experienced the devastation of disease, and the Siege of Constantinople was no exception to this microbial tradition.

ABSTRACT

Morbī Rōmānōs Populōs Dēlēverant (Diseases had Destroyed the Roman People)

The microbial weakening of the Byzantine Empire began in the fourteenth century and continued into the fifteenth century primary by way of Yersinia Pestis. The “Plague of Justinian” and the “Black Death” are the ominous names of the pandemic spread of the Bacterium scientifically known as y. Pestis, which spreads in two vectors into two forms. Initially, y. pestis is transmitted via infected rats to fleas, and from infected fleas to humans in the bubonic form. The Plague can also be transferred from infected humans to other humans via respiratory droplets in the pneumonic form.[1] The pandemic emergence of the Black Death in the fourteenth century, and the Plague’s cyclical epidemic reemergence in the fifteenth century was largely due the environment in the form of the Black Rat. Just as the Black Rat rode the transportation systems of imperial infrastructure in the Plague of Justinian, the fourteenth and fifteenth century also provided a vehicle for vermin in the pandemic and epidemic spread of the Plague.

The natural and built environmental conditions that spawned the Black Death manifested in the east in what John Aberth called “the ‘big bang’ mutation event in c.1268,” an event that saw the mutation of y. pestis just as the West reconnected with the Mongol-controlled Silk Road. Further, scholars largely accept that the Black Death began somewhere in Central Asia and traveled through the army of Janibeg Khan of the Golden Horde to the Crimean city of Caffa.[1] Thus, the built environment played an integral role in the transfer of the Black Death through the infrastructure of the Silk Road.

However, the natural environment held the key to the spread, in the concept of viral transportation called the metastatic leap, in which fleas travel with people over shorter distances, while rats travel over longer distances in the built environment through transportation and urban infrastructure.[2] However, the movement of the Black Death through the vectors of rats and fleas begs another explanation into what sort of environmental conditions spawned their rapid expanse. Fleas are cold-blooded, live longer, and spread bacterium faster in “warm and moist environments,” and take shelter in rodent dens during the winter to regulate their body temperature. Like fleas, rats are forced to flee from their dens in the rainy winter to seek new shelter, usually near humans, and in the spring, rat populations grow with the reemergence of flora and fauna after the winter. Additionally, there is a timeframe “from a few months to two years” before rat and flea populations become large enough to burst into an outbreak of y. pestis.[3]

Historically, the Mediterranean climate during the summer provided an environment prone to the emergence of endemic disease that “ravages in the spring and usually lasts until the beginning of winter.”[1] These many environmental factors, layered in synchronous fashion, equated to the perfect biological tinderbox, a viral bomb of insect and mammalian relationships. The natural

environment created the perfect biological storm, but humans built the environment for the viral proliferation of the Plague, and in cities, the greatest risk of rat migrations lay in the areas defined by food production and the food trade.[1]

Perhaps the deadliest factor of the Black Rats was their tendency to “prefer second stories and roofs as habitats,”[2] a factor that likely contributed to the devastation of Constantinople’s urban cityscape. According to Steven Runciman, Constantinople and the city’s surrounding settlements contained around one-million inhabitants in the twelfth century, a number that likely declined to less than one-hundred thousand by the Siege of Constantinople.[3] However, even in the Byzantine Empire’s twilight years, Constantinople’s urban cityscape and surrounding areas supported an expansive population. For reference, London and Paris only reached a population of around two-hundred thousand by 1600, over one-hundred years after the Turkish conquest of Constantinople.[4]

Compounding the emergence of y. pestis in the fourteenth and fifteenth century was the state of medicine in the European and Muslim worlds that largely continued the Hippocratic-Galenic tradition. Europeans in the fourteenth century thought that the Black Death spread through bad air in the “seeds of plague, or noxious miasmas,” or contrarily to Hippocratic thought by spreading through punishments from God.[5] However, some, such as Boccaccio, understood contagion on a basic level, and that physical contact often related to the spread of the Plague.[6] Of the surviving accounts of Byzantine medical knowledge, one-third of the over two-thousand records are from authors such as the disciple of Hippocrates; Galen, while the rest are largely “anonymous antidotaria – lists of pharmaceutical treatments for specific diseases.”[1]

Medical knowledge in the Muslim world was comparatively more divisive than medicine in Europe. For example, like Boccaccio, the Umayyad Al-Khatib understood that the Plague spread through contact with the infected and stated that “even an earring can destroy him who puts it in his ear, and all the inhabitants of the house.” Another Ummayyad, Al-Khatimah also held a rudimentary understanding of contagion, but later changed his view and espoused “that contagion was contrary to Islamic Law.” Largely, as with Europe, Muslim medicine was mostly a further profession of the ancient Hippocratic-Galenic tradition,[2] and thus, the Muslim world had little advantage over Europe to handle the devastation of y. pestis. However, there was one successful and major development in terms of treatment after the initial wave of the Black Death. A treatment found in the procedures of quarantine, and quarantine was used in “Florence and other Italian City-States” in reemergence of the Black Death.[3]

The Black Death arrived in Europe in 1346 amidst the Mongol siege of Caffa, during which the Plague ravaged the invading Mongol army. The Mongols then proceeded to catapult the bodies of their comrades into Caffa in “one of the first instances in recorded history of a live infectious agent being used as a biological weapon.” Subsequently, the Plague devastated Caffa, and the survivors fled the city and traveled with the pestilence to Constantinople, and to broader Europe, [1] thus sparking the largest viral catastrophe in European history and the most devastating reemergence of y. pestis in the Mediterranean since the Plague of Justinian in late antiquity.

The Plague festered in the ships of Genoa and Venice that returned home on the highways of the Mediterranean Sea back to western Europe. In Italy, ghost ships returned home, and the survivors spoke with their neighbors, spent time with their families, and were mended by physicians, all while likely spreading the pneumonic form of the Plague.[1] Thus, with every interaction, these sailors spread the Black Death through the interconnected social networks of Venice and Genoa. In 1348, the Plague reached Florence in catastrophic effect, killing both commoners and aristocrats alike leaving “the hallowed ground now insufficient for repeated burials.”[2] The people retreated into their homes or fled the city, the Florentine economy fractured, and only the gravediggers profited from the devastation, if they survived.[3]

In 1347, the Black Death reached Constantinople from Caffa,[4] and swept across the Byzantine Empire for two years.[5] In the desolation there was no cure, and those of pre-existing conditions suffered the swiftest manifestations of both Bubonic and Pneumonic forms of the Plague. From the mouths of the afflicted, “sputum suffused with blood was brought up and disgusting and stinking breath from within,” indicating pneumonic transmission. In the bubonic form, the famous black buboes developed in the crevasses of the body that “when cut, a large quantity of foul-smelling pus flowed” out. In desperation, some people resorted to snake oil remedies and dangerous concoctions, while others turned to repentance towards God, and the Black Death showed no bias in affliction to either the commoner or the aristocrat in the Byzantine Empire. Even emperor John VI’s son Andronikos fell to the effects of the pestilence.[1] Steven Runciman stated that the Plague’s visitation killed “at least” one-third of the Byzantine Empire’s total population, a sum of mass death that includes all those who died in Constantinople.[2]

The Black Death engulfed the western and eastern Mediterranean worlds and killed an estimated one-third of the European population,[3] though solid numbers for the dead in broader Europe and in the Byzantine Empire are murky.[4] However, scholars place the estimated consistent death toll of y. pestis at 50 to 60 percent in regions where the bacterium emerges.[5] The fourteenth century proved to be a viral fracture point for the entire Mediterranean world. Thus, from the Italian west to the Byzantine east; the reconnection of the eastern and western hemispheres through trade unimaginably devastated the European population.

Amongst contemporary sources of the Plague within the Byzantine Empire during the fifteenth century, the Byzantine Aristocrat, George Sphrantzes presents a view at the pinnacle of the Byzantine political hierarchy. A perspective that pawned from the fact that Sphrantzes’s political rise coincided with that of the last Byzantine Emperors. From Manuel II to John VIII and ending with Constantine XI, Sphrantzes rose from the position of Manuel’s chamber servant to Constantine’s Grand Chancellor by the Turkish conquest of Constantinople.[6] Thus, George Sphrantzes is an invaluable source in gaining an overarching top-down perspective of the events that occurred at the close of the Byzantine chapter in Roman history.

In the fifteenth century, the Plague returned, ravaging Constantinople in cyclical fashion, and between September 1403 and September 1413, the Plague killed the infant Lord Michael Palaeologus and Prince Demetrios of the Osmanli dynasty.[1] In the winter of 1416, the Plague emerged again and swept “through the districts around the Black Sea,” killing the Byzantine aristocrat George Sphrantzes’s sister, his brother-in-law, George Palaeologus Mamonas, and his niece in their castle. In the aftermath of the outbreak, two of Mamonas’s surviving servants traveled to Constantinople, bringing news of the outbreak to Sphrantzes’s parents, who died soon after. Sphrantzes stated that the cause of his parent’s deaths was unrelated to the Plague, and due to “weakened health,” but suspiciously, the Plague reached Constantinople in spring of 1416.[2] A potential vector for the early fifteenth century lies with the two servants of Mamonas, but also in the Black Sea itself, because “the Black Sea was the main supplying region” for Constantinople beyond the smaller flow of goods from the Balkans and Egypt.[3]

In the spring of 1431, the recently appointed Governor of Patras, George Sphrantzes received a letter concerning the death of his friend Makarios, the leader of the Monastery of the Pantokrator who died from “an infectious disease.” Also in the spring of 1431, Turahan attacked the Hexamilion Wall not far from Patras, likely contributing to the subsequent Plague outbreak that killed “numerous victims” in the city.[1] In 1443, Lord Constantine Palaeologus made Sphrantzes the overseer of Selybria, which then passed to Lord Theodoros, who died of an unspecified “contagious disease” in the summer of 1447. [2] After Theodoros’s burial in the fall of 1447, emperor John VIII died of an “illness,” and was succeeded by the last Byzantine emperor, Constantine XI. George Sphrantzes noted in the year 1451 that the Byzantine government existed in a state of economic decline “since the days of the illness of the emperor,” and lacked the funding for the maintenance of Constantinople. Further, Sultan Murad of the Ottoman Empire died in 1451, and Mehmet II

succeeded him.[1] These episodes of Plague and unknown disease may seem independent from one another, but a key possibly lies in the seasons in which Makarios, the people of Patras, Theodoros, and John died within. Appearances of disease fit within the seasons and migratory movements of vermin hospitable to the emergence of the y. pestis and other endemic diseases.

Beginning in the fourteenth century, infrastructure also played a role in the propagation of pandemic disease through the besieging Mongol army of Janibeg Khan. From the Mongols, the Black Death fanned across the eastern and western halves of the Mediterranean world, from Florence to Constantinople, and reaped unseen losses in human life. In the fifteenth century, the Plague and other diseases continued their devastation throughout the Byzantine Empire and Constantinople, even killing the Byzantine emperor on the eve of Mehmet II’s ascension. Thus, disease defined the fourteenth and fifteenth century into an era of its own, an era of viral pestilence that spanned two centuries to the detriment of Europe generally and Constantinople specifically.

Sultanus Rōmānam Urbem Constantīnopolī Dēlēverat (The Sultan had Destroyed the Roman City of Constantinople)

The Greek historian Kritovoulos and the Venetian Nicolo Barbaro, as with George Sphrantzes, present invaluable lenses to the events of the Siege of Constantinople. Kritovoulos was a Greek from the island of Imbros that wrote a history on Sultan Mehmet II, a text based on witness testimony and written in admiration for the Ottoman sultan.[1] Barbaro presents the best account of the Siege of Constantinople because he was one of the Venetian merchants that agreed to stay and defend the city,[1] a point further expressed by Steven Runciman.[2] Thus, Sphrantzes gave a lens from the pinnacle of the Byzantine Empire, Krivitoulos gave the secondhand perspective of a historian, and Barbaro gave the experience of a participant. Three perspectives that come together to form a more complete picture of the Siege of Constantinople.

In the early years of Mehmet II’s reign, the newly crowned Ottoman Sultan quickly set out in establishing the geographic framework for his conquest of Constantinople. In September 1451, Mehmet II initiated an occupation of “the straits around the district Asomatos,” and word spread through the Byzantine Empire of the construction of a new fortress.[3] In 1452, Sultan Mehmet II constructed the fortified fortress “on the Bosporus on the European side,” giving the Ottoman Empire a permanent foothold between Europe and Asia – a foothold placed right on the doorstep of Constantinople.[4]

In terms of distance, the castle was only six miles from Constantinople, and was built “for the express purpose of taking the city”[5] and to initiate a blockade between the Black Sea and the Aegean Sea, effectively preventing seaward passage.[6] This blockade likely had a major impact on supplies reaching Constantinople, given that the Black Sea was a major source of goods to the city. Afterwards, Mehmet II embarked on a conquest of Asia, Greece, and the Balkans,[7] and pillaged Byzantine lands up to the boundaries of Constantinople. [8] Geographically, Mehmet II had cornered Constantinople by conquering the city’s surrounding regions, blockading the Bosporus, and thus making Constantinople ripe for an impending siege.

After Mehmet II consolidated his geographic stranglehold of the eastern Mediterranean, the Ottoman Sultan prepared his armies for a siege designed to encompass the entire perimeter of Constantinople on land and in the sea. Mehmet II bolstered the armaments of his troops, built up an arsenal of siege craft that included cannons, and fortified the number of ships in his navy to “three hundred and fifty without counting the transports or those engaged in some other necessary service.” In terms of troops, Mehmet II had raised an army of “more than three hundred thousand” soldiers that encircled the boundaries of the Constantinople.[1] The Byzantine Empire was ill-equipped and unprepared to host an army of such magnitude, since the empire had incurred catastrophic losses from y. pestis and had not begun recovering until 1450.[2] There was also the added economic depression in the years following the death of emperor John, and so on the eve of the siege, Constantinople only had “4,773 Greeks, as well as just about 200 foreigners” to defend the cities eighteen-mile expanse.[3]

Amongst the contemporary sources of the fifteenth century, the size of the attacking offensive forces of Mehmet II vary, but scholars estimate that Mehmet II’s armada consisted of over one-hundred and twenty-six ships. The conservative estimates for the Turkish army lay in the realm of over one-hundred thousand men.[1] Further, scholars agree that five-thousand defenders are an accurate estimate for the number of Greeks and foreigners who defended Constantinople,[2] a defending force less than one-tenth of the impending Ottoman onslaught. Despite the desolate situation, the Greeks still attempted to fortify Constantinople by repairing and reinforcing the city walls and armories, closing the harbor that protected the Golden Horn, consolidating public funds, and calling for foreign aid in the defense of the city.[1]

Foreign aid to Constantinople was either blasted to the depths from the fortress at the Bosporus or consisted of mercenaries with motivations of wealth cloaked in a desire to protect Christendom. The first victim of the Bosporus fortresses was Antonio Rizzo in 1452, Rizzo sought to aid Constantinople with foodstuffs, but his ship was destroyed by cannon fire, and the Turks sent him to Adrianople where Mehmet II ordered his execution by impaling. A captain from Trebizond came to the Bosporus for an alliance with the Turks but became unhappy with a Turkish gift and caused a scene; meanwhile, his crew snuck away to Constantinople.[1] A Genoese named Giovanni Longo di Giustinianni had come to Constantinople’s aid with over 400 men on two galleons, and he was appointed as the main commander over the defense of the city.

On the surface, Giustinianni came to Constantinople with a boost in aid, but the Greek historian Kritovoulos mentioned that Giustinianni’s true motivations may have lain in an agreement with the emperor Constantine for “the island of Lemnos as a reward for his help.[2] The Pope sent the Cardinal of Russia with 200 hundred Genoese, but this was for a reunification agreement between the Catholic and Orthodox church. Further, Constantinople received “eight ships loaded with malmsey” from Candia, two ships from Caffa in Crimea, and five Venetian ships.[3] Largely, broader Christendom abandoned Constantinople, and only few came to the aid of the Greeks, and those who came mostly did so in the hopes of what they could gain in the successful defense of the city.

Mehmet II organized his assembled army amongst his leading commanders around the entire geographical circumference of Constantinople and commissioned the creation of an enormous cannon that could destroy the Roman walls of the city.[1] Cannons at their core are chemically fueled weapons, as described by the contemporaries Loanikos and Kritovoulos, destruction comes from “within the powder, it is the niter that has all the power, which comes from a mixture of carbon and sulphur”[2] and “herbs,” that when ignited, creates an explosion of pressurized gas that forces a projectile towards its target. To overcome an obstacle of the built environment: the Roman walls of Constantinople, Mehmet II ordered the construction of a cannon ominously known as “the Battering-ram, the Propellor, the Apparatus, or simply the Cannon.”[3]

All human weaponry is inherently environmental, having been created from materials provided by the environment. In the grand arsenal of weapons found within the historical record, the Apparatus was not environmentally unique compared to other cannons. However, it is historical events that make a weapon unique because weapons are granted differentiation and meaning in the way they are used within an event. Just as Little Boy and Fat Man became differentiated from all other nuclear weapons through the capitulation of the Japanese Empire in WWII, the Apparatus became differentiated because of the weapon’s strategic contribution to the Turkish conquest of Constantinople. Further, analyzing the Apparatus through an environmental lens grants further understanding of the cannon on the building block levels of earth’s makeup; a world defined by elements and chemical reactions.

Later, within the initial advance the Ottoman army amidst the siege, there was yet another use of the built environment in the rudimentary musket known as the Arquebus. A firearm that was developed in western Europe and spread out through arms trading in the fifteenth century.[1] Further, Mehmet II’s contemporaries account him for having “a special interest in artillery, military science and in war history in general.”[2] In the writings of Kritovoulos, the integration of cannoneers and arquebusiers into the Ottoman military during the Siege of Constantinople displays the Ottoman Empire’s integral adaptation of gunpowder technology.[3] However, the implementation of the Arquebus likely did not have the same strategical impact as the Apparatus in the Siege of Constantinople.

In the construction of the Apparatus, Mehmet II ordered the Hungarian cannon smith Orban to construct the cannon at Adrianople,[1] creating a clay mold with two furnaces to melt the large quantity of “bronze and tin” that was required to finish the cannon.[2] Further, Mehmet II moved the Apparatus to sieging grounds at Constantinople, a gargantuan transport pulled by thirty wagons by sixty oxen while 200 hundred men held its sides.[3] Upon firing, beams weighted with stones were used to hold the Apparatus to prevent the weapon from shifting, because when the Apparatus was fired, it is said to have shook “the earth beneath and for a long way off.” In use, Mehmed II had the Apparatus situated with other cannons at the “Middle Wall,” which was brought down, where the underlying moat was filled to allow the movement of the Ottoman infantry for the impending siege.[4] Further, Mehmet II ordered his troops to dig tunnels underneath Constantinople’s walls in a further display of environmental manipulation, “but later he deemed this superfluous and a useless expenditure, since the cannon were accomplishing everything.”[5]

Tactical manipulation of the built environment was not purely an Ottoman venture in the Siege of Constantinople, and the Greeks and their mercenaries in defense of the city employed their own uses of nature. Initially, the defenders lowered “bales of wool” between the walls and incoming cannon fire to prevent further damage to the city’s defenses, but this was largely ineffective. More effectively, the defenders created palisades of “stones, wood, bundles of brushwood and branches and reeds,” covered in hides, and topped with boxes of soil. These palisades were built in areas where the walls had been destroyed, and these natural creations proved to be quite effective in dampening artillery fire.[1]

In the moat made by the Apparatus from the crumbled Middle Wall of Constantinople, Mehmet II launched his first assault towards the capture of the city and was repelled by the defenders under Giustinianni. The Ottoman infantry advanced attempting first to burn out the defenders, but this failed, then the Turks destroyed the wooden boxes of soil making the Greeks vulnerable to projectiles. The Turkish infantry simultaneously attempted to climb ladders placed on Constantinople’s walls, but the Greeks and mercenaries under Giustinianni were “fully armored” and resisted every wave from the Ottoman assault.

Meanwhile, the Ottoman fleet was making its first advance towards the capture of the seawalls of Constantinople to be able to “attack the city from all sides, by land and by sea.”[2] Seaward, at the harbor protecting the Golden Horn, Mehmet II’s fleet Admiral Baltaoglou attacked the defending force of ships and the chain blocking the passage to the Golden Horn. The defenders at the seawalls under “the Grand Duke,” pushed back the advance of the Turkish fleet by throwing projectiles and swinging “heavy stones which they let fall, tied by ropes” from the tops of their ships at the Ottoman infantry, and by putting out fires with “great jars of water.” Considering this initial naval defeat, Mehmet II conceived another manipulation of the built environment, and created a cannon that had the ability to be fired up into the air to then fall on the ships in the harbor. Initially, these cannons proved effective in destroying the Greek ships until the Greeks pulled their fleet back and repositioned it out of range for the cannons, making the weapons ineffective. [1]

After Baltaoglou’s failed advance towards the Golden Horn, Mehmed II sent Baltaoglou to stop the advance of supplies coming to Constantinople from the Pope in Rome, but the superior numbers of the Pope’s ships routed the Ottoman fleet. Further, Baltaoglous was injured, taking a stone to the eye, and Mehmet II relieved Baltaoglous of his command – replaced by Mehmet II’s friend Hamza.[2] Mehmet II’s initial attempts to capture Constantinople were utterly futile, and despite having superior numbers and artillery technology, the defenders of the city forced back the Ottomans. However, these military setbacks were brief, and Mehmet II soon enacted a plan of environmental manipulation so outrageous that it utterly shocked and terrified the people of Constantinople.[3]

To gain access to the Golden Horn and the seawalls that were key to Mehmed II’s plan for a total land- and sea-spanning siege against Constantinople, Mehmet II ordered his navy to perform the most drastic use of the built environment in the entire duration of the battle for the city. Mehmet II ordered his fleet to build a roadway of wooden beams on land from the harbor to the Golden Horn itself, a distance of “eight stadia,”[4] roughly 1,680 yards.[5] The Ottoman ships were equipped with supports and mounted onto glideways, and sixty-seven vessels were physically pulled across land by the Ottoman troops, and “by certain machines and capstans.” Amidst the shocking display, the Ottomans hoisted their sails, celebrated, and “manned the ships on the land as if they were on the sea.”[1]

In a defining turning point in the naval front of the Siege of Constantinople, sixty-seven Ottoman ships now stood within the impenetrable Golden Horn, and with the city’s seawalls at their mercy. Further, the seawalls had largely been undefended because of the small number of Greeks and foreigners that manned the entire circumference of the walls of Constantinople, and thus, the defenders of the city had to be stretched to dangerous levels of vulnerability. Furthermore, the Ottomans constructed a bridge to reach the seawalls, and the defending fleet at the harbor now had to contend with a two-front assault from the sea and from the Golden Horn itself.[2] In effect, due to the strategic use the built environment, Constantinople was, to the benefit of the Ottoman army and navy, completely surrounded in a state of total besiegement.

With Constantinople surrounded, the peoples of the city were thrown into religious hysteria, and natural phenomena turned into portents for the coming fall. The dropping of an Icon for the Virgin Mary, a thunderstorm, and the following fog all spelled God’s abandonment of Constantinople.[1] Outside Constantinople, Mehmet II called upon the leaders of his army from the regional governors to the lower echelons of military officers, and gave them a speech, promising the bountiful loot found within the city. Mehmet II promised his soldiers the wealth of the homes and the churches, the slaves and wives to be taken, and the glory of taking Constantinople itself, “a city whose renown has gone out to all parts of the world.” Lastly, Mehmet II organized his army, and placed them into subsections around the city for the final assault, an assault to end the last political vestiges of imperial Rome. [2]

At dusk, when “the sun was at the Ottomans backs but shining in the faces of their enemies,” Mehmed II ordered the advance of his army towards Constantinople. The Ottoman archers, slingers, cannoneers, and arquebusiers advanced in the first wave, firing and throwing projectiles towards the defenders of Constantinople. Then, the Ottoman infantry advanced across the moat created by the Apparatus, engaging in hand-to-hand combat with the Greeks and their mercenaries. Meanwhile, from a distance, the Ottoman cannons shot and killed all “among those in the near vicinity” of the ensuing battle. The Greeks and their allies held firm initially, and were accounted as better warriors than the Ottomans, repelling Mehmet II’s army on land. On the seaside, the defenders of the seawalls were equally stalwart towards the Ottoman fleet that hammered them with Arquebus, archer, and cannon fire, while the Ottoman infantry scaled ladders towards their position.[1]

After the repulsion of the Ottoman army, Mehmet II sent his elite bodyguards, the Janissaries, against the defenders of Constantinople to great effect. The Janissaries assaulted the defenders under Giustinianni, along with fire support from the diverse companies of Arquebusiers, archers, and slingmen. The Turks eventually pushed back the Greeks and their mercenaries, Giustinianni was shot through the chest by a crossbow bolt, and Giustinianni’s men deserted Constantinople in their ships with their fallen captain. The Greeks continued to fight the Ottoman army, but some sections of the wall were “now empty of men and deserted by the defenders,” and some of the defenders started to desert. In the close of the siege, Mehmet II charged into the fray with his troops against the remaining defenders, and the Ottoman infantry cut down emperor Constantine in the ensuing chaos.[2]

On the seaside, the fleet admiral Hamza cut the chain protecting the Golden Horn, sank the defending ships at the harbor, and slaughtered the defenders. From the land to sea, the combined Ottoman army and navy spread throughout the urban cityscape of Constantinople plundering, slaughtering, enslaving, and raping as they went. The Ottomans paid no heed to the sanctity of the churches nor the privilege of the nobility in their pillage; nothing was spared from their pursuit for war spoils.[1] From the eyewitness account of Nicolo Barbaro, “the blood flowed in the city like rainwater in the gutters after a sudden storm.”[2]Further, Kritovoulos accounts that Mehmet II cried at the sight of Constantinople after the siege.[3] With the capture of Constantinople, the death of emperor Constantine, and the collapse of the Byzantine Empire, the last political vestige of the Roman Empire fell on Tuesday, May 29th, 1453.[4]

From imperial Rome to the Turkish conquest of the Byzantine Empire, the Roman Empire was subject to the long-term degradation of viral contagions from antiquity to the Renaissance, and thus, the empire becomes a smaller facet within the broader history of the environment. In the reconnecting of the eastern and western halves of the Old World in the fourteenth century, a reconnection made through the Silk Road, the Black Death emerged and traveled with the Mongols to the Ukrainian city of Caffa. From Caffa, Europe experienced a state of viral devastation not seen since the Plague of Justinian one thousand years earlier, a pandemic that reached and ravaged Constantinople. From the Black Death, the European population experienced a decline that would not recuperate until the middle of the fifteenth century. In the fifteenth century, the Byzantine Empire experienced a cyclical reemergence of the Plague up to the middle of the century, and the Plague did not act alone as other illnesses also threatened the Byzantine Empire, and one killed the

Byzantine emperor John VIII. The fourteenth and fifteenth century proved to be the tipping point in the Roman Empire’s centuries long struggle with disease, a climax that spanned two hundred years – an era of disease.

At the close of the Roman Empire’s long-term viral history, Mehmet II ascended to the Ottoman throne, and purposefully manipulated the environment into a series of strategical advantages against Constantinople. Mehmet II created a fortress on the Bosporus between Europe and Asia cutting Constantinople off from the Aegean and Black Seas, a strategy to hinder the movement of supplies, and to mount a full-scale besiegement against the city. To obliterate the Roman walls that protected Constantinople, Mehmet II ordered the construction of a monster of human ingenuity, the cannon known as the Apparatus. Once Constantinople’s land walls had been tamed, Mehmet II faced the protected harbor at the Golden Horn that defended the city’s seawalls. To overcome the harbor, Mehmet II shocked the defenders of Constantinople by pulling his ships overland into the Golden Horn. Thus, due to Mehmet II’s strategic use of the environment, Constantinople was surrounded in a total besiegement that ended with the fall of city, and the end of the Byzantine Empire.

From the fourteenth century to the fifteenth century, through the systems and human manipulation of the environment, the Byzantine Empire was siphoned of its strength by the long-term degradations of disease and toppled by the military tact of Mehmet II and the rising Ottoman Empire.

Footnotes

[1] Stephen Runciman, The Fall of Constantinople 1453 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1966), 2.

[2] Runciman, The Fall of Constantinople 1453, 3-20.

[3] Kyle Harper, The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, & the end of an Empire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017), 30-31.

[4] Harper, The Fate of Rome, 33-37.

[5] Harper, The Fate of Rome, 44-54

[6] Harper, The Fate of Rome, 72-118.

[7] Harper, The Fate of Rome, 129-145.

[8] Harper, The Fate of Rome, 218-236.

[9] Pierre Riché, Daily Life in the World of Charlemagne, trans. Jo Ann McNamara (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1978), 2.

[10] Michael McCormick and Paul Edward Dutton and Paul A. Mayewski, “Volcanoes and the Climate Forcing of Carolingian Empire, A.D. 750-950,” Speculum 82, no. 4 (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press on behalf on the Medieval Academy of America, October 2007): 881-884.

[11] Riché, Daily Life in the World of Charlemagne, 48-49.

[12] Harper, The Fate of Rome, 226.

[13] Joshua S. Loomis, Epidemics: The Impact of Germs and Their Power over Humanity (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, LLC., 2018), 8-9.

[14] John Aberth, The Black Death: A New History of the Great Mortality in Europe, 1347-1500 (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2021), 19-20.

[15] Aberth, The Black Death: A New History of the Great Mortality in Europe, 1347-1500, 24.

[16] Aberth, The Black Death: A New History of the Great Mortality in Europe, 1347-1500, 91-92.

[17] Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean: And the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II Vol. 1, trans. Siân Reynolds (Berkley and Los Angeles, CA & London, UK: University of California Press), 258.

[18] Aberth, The Black Death: A New History of the Great Mortality in Europe, 1347-1500, 100-101.

[19] Aberth, The Black Death: A New History of the Great Mortality in Europe, 1347-1500, 101.

[20] Runciman, The Fall of Constantinople 1453, 9.

[21] Margaret L. King, A Short History of the Renaissance in Europe (Toronto, CA: University of Toronto Press, 2017), 334-335

[22] Harrison, Contagion, 9-10.

[23] Birsen Bulmus, Plague, Quarantines and Geopolitics in the Ottoman Empire (Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), 40-41.

[24] Timothy S. Miller and John W. Nesbitt, Walking Corpses: Leprosy in Byzantium and the Medieval West (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014), 48.

[25] Birsen Bulmus, Plague, Quarantines and Geopolitics in the Ottoman Empire (Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), 42-43.

[26] Birsen Bulmus, Plague, Quarantines and Geopolitics in the Ottoman Empire (Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press, 2012), 41.

[27] Loomis, Epidemics: The Impact of Germs and Their Power over Humanity, 11-12.

[28] The Decameron Web, “Gabriele de’ Mussi on the Plague,” Italian Studies Department’s Virtual Humanities Lab at Providence, RI: Brown University, last updated February 18, 2010, https://www.brown.edu/Departments/Italian_Studies/dweb/plague/perspectives/de_mussi.php.

[29] The Decameron Web, “Francesco Petrarca: Ad Seipsum (To Himself) (Epistola Metrica I, 14: lines 1-55),” Italian Studies Department’s Virtual Humanities Lab at Providence, RI: Brown University, last updated March 12, 2010, https://www.brown.edu/Departments/Italian_Studies/dweb/plague/perspectives/petrarca2.php.

[30] The Decameron Web, “Marchionne di Coppo di Stefano Buonaiuti,” Italian Studies Department’s Virtual Humanities Lab at Providence, RI: Brown University, last updated February 18, 2010, https://www.brown.edu/Departments/Italian_Studies/dweb/plague/perspectives/marchionne.php.

[31] Mark Harrison, Contagion (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012), 3.

[32] Christos S. Bartsocas, “Two Fourteenth Century Greek Descriptions of the ‘Black Death’,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 21, no. 4 (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, October 1966): 395.

[33] Bartsocas, “Two Fourteenth Century Greek Descriptions of the ‘Black Death’,” 395-397.

[34] Runciman, The Fall of Constantinople 1453, 4.

[35] Loomis, Epidemics: The Impact of Germs and Their Power over Humanity, 10.

[36] Bartsocas, “Two Fourteenth Century Greek Descriptions of the ‘Black Death’,” 398-399.

[37] Harper, The Fate of Rome, 226.

[38] George Sphrantzes, The Fall of the Byzantine Empire: A Chronicle by George Sphrantzes 1401-1477, trans. Marios Philippides (Amherst, MA: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1980), 24-70.

[39] Sphrantzes, The Fall of the Byzantine Empire, 22.

[40] Sphrantzes, The Fall of the Byzantine Empire, 23-24.

[41] Braudel, The Mediterranean, 110-111.

[42] Sphrantzes, The Fall of the Byzantine Empire, 46.

[43] Sphrantzes, The Fall of the Byzantine Empire, 54.

[44] Sphrantzes, The Fall of the Byzantine Empire, 56-59.

[45] Kritovoulos, History of Mehmed the Conqueror, trans. Charles T. Riggs (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1954), 3-11.

[46] Nicolo Barbaro, Diary of the Siege of Constantinople 1453, trans. J. R. Jones (Jericho, NY: Exposition Press, 1969), 9-26.

[47] Runciman, The Fall of Constantinople 1453, 83.

[48] Sphrantzes, The Fall of the Byzantine Empire, 64.

[49] Kritovoulos, History of Mehmed the Conqueror, 15-22.

[50] Nicolo Barbaro, Diary of the Siege of Constantinople 1453, trans. J. R. Jones (Jericho, NY: Exposition Press, 1969), 9.

[51] Kritovoulos, History of Mehmed the Conqueror, 21.

[52] Kritovoulos, History of Mehmed the Conqueror, 24-25.

[53] Kritovoulos, History of Mehmed the Conqueror, 33-35.

[54] Kritovoulos, History of Mehmed the Conqueror, 36-38.

[55] Aberth, The Black Death: A New History of the Great Mortality in Europe, 1347-1500, 49.

[56] Sphrantzes, The Fall of the Byzantine Empire, 69.

[57] Runciman, The Fall of Constantinople 1453, 75-76

[58] Runciman, The Fall of Constantinople 1453, 85.

[59] Kritovoulos, History of Mehmed the Conqueror, 36.

[60] Barbaro, Diary of the Siege of Constantinople 1453, 10-12.

[61] Kritovoulos, History of Mehmed the Conqueror, 39-40.

[62] Barbaro, Diary of the Siege of Constantinople 1453, 11-16.

[63] Kritovoulos, History of Mehmed the Conqueror, 41-42.

[64] Laonikos Chalkokondyles, The Histories: Volume 1, Books 1-5, trans. Anthony Kaldellis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library, 2014), 383.

[65] Kritovoulos, History of Mehmed the Conqueror, 46.

[66] Ágoston, “Ottoman Artillery and European Military Technology in the Fifteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,”16-17.

[67] Ágoston, “Ottoman Artillery and European Military Technology in the Fifteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” 25.

[68] Kritovoulos, History of Mehmed the Conqueror, 67.

[69] Gábor Ágoston, “Ottoman Artillery and European Military Technology in the Fifteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” Acta Orientalia Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 47, no. ½ (Akadémiai Kiadó 1994): 28.

[70] Kritovoulos, History of Mehmed the Conqueror, 43-44.

[71] Ágoston, “Ottoman Artillery and European Military Technology in the Fifteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” 28.

[72] Kritovoulos, History of Mehmed the Conqueror, 44-46.

[73] Kritovoulos, History of Mehmed the Conqueror, 46-47.

[74] Kritovoulos, History of Mehmed the Conqueror, 48-49.

[75] Kritovoulos, History of Mehmed the Conqueror, 49-50.

[76] Kritovoulos, History of Mehmed the Conqueror, 50-52.

[77] Kritovoulos, History of Mehmed the Conqueror, 52-55.

[78] Kritovoulos, History of Mehmed the Conqueror, 57.

[79] Kritovoulos, History of Mehmed the Conqueror, 56.

[80] Edward Bispham and Thomas Harrison and Brian A. Sparkes, The Edinburgh Companion to Ancient Greece and Rome (Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), 471.

[81] Kritovoulos, History of Mehmed the Conqueror, 56-57.

[82] Kritovoulos, History of Mehmed the Conqueror, 57.

[83] Kritovoulos, History of Mehmed the Conqueror, 58-59.

[84] Kritovoulos, History of Mehmed the Conqueror, 60-66.

[85] Kritovoulos, History of Mehmed the Conqueror, 66-68.

[86] Kritovoulos, History of Mehmed the Conqueror, 68-71.

[87] Kritovoulos, History of Mehmed the Conqueror, 72-76.

[88] Barbaro, Diary of the Siege of Constantinople 1453, 67.

[89] Kritovoulos, History of Mehmed the Conqueror, 76-77.

[90] Sphrantzes, The Fall of the Byzantine Empire, 70

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