Sultan Meurad II lifted the siege of Constantinople on this day in 1423. The dynamics of the more than thousand-year existence of the Eastern Roman Empire entailed constant incursions by neighboring peoples into Roman territory, while the Romans policed the borders using their grand strategy to pacify, convert, deceive, or defeat their potential enemies. In 1040, the Seljuk Turks took over Persian and Armenian territories bordering Byzantium. Earlier, Basil II (an emperor of the Macedonian dynasty, 958–1025) had taken over Armenian lands that served as a buffer zone. Now the Byzantines and Seljuks had a common border. At the beginning, the Seljuks just raided the borderlands. Tughrul Beg (990–1063) became the first Turkish sultan. He wanted to control Baghdad and the Abbasid Caliphate, and did not cross into Byzantine lands. While the Arabs, an earlier threat, could not stand the climate of Anatolia, the Seljuks Turks liked it. The first serious challenge to the Byzantines came when the Seljuks defeated them at the battle of Manzikert in 1074. By 1097, they had made the ancient city of Iconium their capital Konya. By the mid-thirteen century, the Seljuk sultanate of Konya was in decline, and new powerful Turkic border warlords started to move across the weakly defended sultanate boarder. From those warlords came the house of Osman (or the Ottoman Turks). Although, by the beginning of the fifteen century, Constantinople was surrounded by Ottoman territories, the empire continued to fight tooth and nail using its grand strategy. In 1422, John VIII Palaiologos encouraged Mustafa Çelebi, son of Sultan Bayezid I (1360-1403), to fight against his nephew Sultan Murad II. Mustafa lost, and as a result, Murad II besieged Constantinople. The well-organized defense of the city walls, absence of the Ottoman naval power, adequate cannons, military engineering, and the emergence of another backstabbing plot against Murad, made him call off the siege on August 24, 1423. However, Murad’s son Mehmet II took this defeat as a personal challenge. Thirty years later, in May 1453, a retreat from the walls of the Queen City (originally built in the 5th century) was not an option, even though Mehmet’s Grand Vizir Çandarlı Halil Pasha (executed in June of 1453) said: “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 honour that you have done so much, and this should satisfy you, without our wishing to destroy the whole of your forces in this way” (as reported by Tedaldi in The Siege of Constantinople 1453: Seven Contemporary Accounts, J.R. Melville Jones tr. Amsterdam, 1972). |
