The End of Everything by Victor Davis Hanson

Author:Victor Davis Hanson [VICTOR DAVIS HANSON]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2024-05-07T00:00:00+00:00

You see how strongly the city is defended and how impossible it is to storm it; in fact, the more men you send to attack it, the more are left lying there, and those who manage to scale the wall are beaten back and killed. Your ancestors never got as far as this, or even expected to. It is to your great glory and honor that you have done so much, and this should satisfy you, without your wishing to destroy the whole of your forces in the way.63

Mehmet once more ignored his old advisor’s nagging and instead took counsel from his most aggressive commander and convert, Zaganos Pasha, who begged for one last day of collective effort: “Give us the chance of making one short sharp general assault, and if we fail, we shall afterwards do whatever you think best.” The sultan then pledged to his enthused soldiers that their ruler and his state wanted only the city, the walls, and its buildings. For three days, everything else in Constantinople—money, people, property—was theirs to do with and profit from as they pleased.

The uncertainty on both sides about the course of the siege was not resolved immediately even on the last day of the Byzantine Empire. In the words of Nicolò Barbaro, who witnessed the repulse of the first two waves of attackers massed below the outer wall on the last day of the siege, “Our crossbows and cannon kept on firing into their camp at this time and killed an incredible number of Turks.” Another contemporary account noted that when the Turks began to fill in the moat and mass below the outer wall, they proved easy targets and were mostly slaughtered:

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