Faber £16.99 pp304

The Fall of Constantinople in May 1453 after a seven-week siege is one of the seminal events of early modern history. Like 9/11, it sent shock waves throughout the West, reviving feelings of Islamophobia that had lain dormant since the Crusades. As Roger Crowley relates in this engagingly fresh and vivid account of the siege and its bloody denouement, the news radiated outwards “as fast as a ship could sail, a horse could ride, a song could be sung”, reaching the perimeters of Christendom where it left its indelible mark. In the cathedrals and chancelleries of Europe, Mehmet the Conqueror, the brilliant young Ottoman Sultan and master-strategist who overcame defences that had stood fast for seven centuries, was seen as the Antichrist or Beast of the Apocalypse. Even in distant Iceland the Lutheran prayer book would beg God’s salvation from “the terror of the Turk”, who became the emblem of cruelty. The trope lasted well into Victorian times, resurfacing in the “unspeakable Turk” denounced by Gladstone.

Crowley explains the complex political and religious manoeuvres surrounding the siege, in which Christians fought on the Muslim side and vice versa, and deftly evokes the numinous atmosphere — the dreams, prophecies and portents — that emerge from contemporary accounts. The dropping into rain-soaked mud of the city’s holiest icon of the Virgin, credited with saving the city from some 23 sieges in the course of 1,000 years, filled the defenders with dread, as did a lunar eclipse that saw the crescent of Islam grow into a triumphant, full-blown disc. (The only previous occasion when the Virgin let her protégés down was when thuggish Norman Crusaders, prompted by the wily Venetians, sacked the city in 1204.)

Crowley’s most compelling passages, however, are those that expose the struggle in fascinating technical detail. On the Ottoman side the most significant breakthrough came with the casting of huge bronze cannons by the brilliant Hungarian metallurgist Orban, who offered his skills to Mehmet after being slighted by the cash-strapped Byzantine emperor. Crowley’s account of the casting of the largest of these superguns, a 27ft monster, 30in in diameter, known as the Basilica, recalls the great bell-casting scene in Tarkovsky’s film Andrei Rublev. The breaches in the walls made by the stone cannonballs terrified the defenders and exhausted them by forcing them to work throughout the night on improvised repairs using wood and buckets of earth.

The 21-year-old Mehmet emerges from this book as ruthless but innovative, irascible but versatile and, above all, indefatigable — a worthy successor to Alexander and the Roman emperors he admired as much as any Muslim hero. The military organisation he inherited from his father Sultan Murad, after nearly four centuries of Turkish settlement in Anatolia, was second to none. But at least two of his tactics — tunnelling beneath the walls using Saxon silver-miners and the construction of a siege tower made from hurdles and camelskins — resulted in failure and devastating losses. The outcome was far from being a foregone conclusion. Though the defenders were short of food and men, the attackers were vulnerable to disease. Providing an army of 75,000 and its animals with food and water, not to mention the disposal of 10,000 tons of human and animal excrement, was a logistical nightmare.

Knowing that time was not on his side as the summer hotted up, Mehmet ordered his final assault at the end of May. Carelessness and disarray on the part of the defenders played their part in his triumph. As the great Arab historian Ibn Khaldun had ruminated in the previous century: “Victory and superiority in war come from luck and chance.”

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