Triumph and Disaster by Stefan Zweig

Author:Stefan Zweig [Stefan Zweig]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
ISBN: 9781782273530
Publisher: Steerforth Press
Published: 2016-11-23T05:00:00+00:00

The Fleet Crosses the Mountain

The exuberant delight of the besieged citizens lasts for a night, and night always beguiles the senses with fantasy, confusing hope with the sweet poison of dreams. For the length of that night the besieged believe that they are secure and safe. For as those four ships have landed soldiers and provisions without mishap, more will come now, week after week, or so they dream. Europe has not forgotten them, and already, in their over-hasty expectations, they think of the siege as lifted, the enemy discouraged and conquered.

But Mahomet too is a dreamer, if a dreamer of that other and much rarer kind, one who knows how to transform dreams into reality. And even as the Genoese, in their delusions, think that they and their galleons are safe in the harbour of the Golden Horn, he is drafting a plan of such fantastic audacity that in all honesty it can be set beside the boldest deeds of Hannibal and Napoleon in the history of warfare. Byzantium lies before him like a golden fruit, but he cannot pluck it. The main reason is the Golden Horn, that inlet of the sea cutting deep into the land, a long bay that secures one flank of Constantinople. To penetrate that bay is in practice impossible, for the Genoese city of Galata, to which Mahomet has pledged neutrality, lies at the entrance, and from there the chain is stretched across to the enemy city. So his fleet cannot get into the bay by thrusting forward, and the Christian fleet could be attacked only from the inner basin, where Genoese territory ends. But how can he get a fleet into that inner bay? One could be built, but that would take months and months, and the Sultan is too impatient to wait so long.

It was then that Mahomet made the brilliant plan of transporting his fleet from the outer sea, where it is useless to him, across the tongue of land and into the inner harbour of the Golden Horn. The breathtakingly bold idea of crossing a mountainous strip of land with hundreds of ships looks at first sight so absurd and impracticable that the Byzantines and the Genoese of Galata take as little account of it in their strategic calculations as the Romans before them and the Austrians after them did of the swift crossing of the Alps by Hannibal and Napoleon. All worldly experience tells us that ships can travel only by water, and a fleet of them can never cross a mountain. But it is always the true sign of a daemonic will that it can turn the impossible into reality, and in warfare military genius scorns the rules of war, and at a given moment turns to creative improvisation rather than the old tried and trusted methods. A vast operation begins, one almost without an equal in the annals of history. In secrecy, Mahomet has countless wooden rollers brought and fixed to sleighs by carpenters. The ships are drawn up out of the sea and fixed to the sleighs as if on a movable dry dock.

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