The Janissary Tree

[ 86 ]

Now, stock-still in the alley, he remembered it all.

Above all he remembered her bitterness when she told him about the Kerkoporta. The little gate.

The siege had already lasted ninety days, when young Sultan Mehmed ordered a final assault on the walls. Exhausted and weak, the few thousand Byzantines who remained to defend their city heard the roll of the kettle drums, and saw the hills beyond the walls move as tens of thousands of Mehmed’s troops descended to the attack. Wave after wave broke on the thinly defended walls, raised a thousand years before: the Anatolian levies, the Bashi-Bazouks from the hills of Serbia and Bulgaria, renegades and adventurers from the whole Mediterranean world. With every assault that they repulsed, the defenders weakened, and still the attack came on, with Mehmed’s police standing at the rear with thongs and maces to discourage their retreat, the ladders crashing on the walls, the wild skirling of the Anatolian pipes, the fitful light of flares, and the sudden thundering crash of the Hungarian’s gigantic cannon.

All the bells of the city were tolling. As the smoke cleared from the breach in the walls where the invading troops lay dying; as the defenders rushed to reconstitute the rubble; as the moon struggled clear of a ribbon of black and flying cloud, Mehmed himself advanced at the head of his crack infantry, the Janissaries. He led them to the moat, and from there they advanced, not in a wild battering frenzy like the irregulars and Turks who had been flung against the walls all through the night but, in the hour before dawn, in steady and unwavering file.

“They fought on the walls, hand to hand, for an hour or more,” the old lady said. “Believing the Turks were failing. Even those Janissaries losing their momentum. It…it wasn’t so.”

Yashim had watched her lips working against her toothless gums. Dry eyed, she said:

“There was a little gate, you see, at the angle where the great old walls of Theodosius met the lesser walls behind the Palace of the Caesars. It had been blocked up, goodness knows how many years before. So little, that gate. I don’t think two men could pass through it abreast, but there—God’s will is infinite in its mystery. It was opened at the start of the siege, for sallies. A party had just returned from a sortie, and—would you believe it—the last man back forgot to bar the gate behind him.”

It was the discovery of the little gate rocking on its hinges—a tiny gap in the whole eight miles of massive wall and inner wall, a momentary lapse of attention in a story that had run for a thousand years—that turned the course of the siege. Some fifty Janissaries shoved through and found themselves between the double walls. But their position was desperately exposed, and they might still have been driven back or killed by the defenders had one of the heroes of the defence, a Genoese sea-captain, not been seriously wounded by a close shot at that very moment. His crewmen bore him from the walls; the Byzantines sensed that he had abandoned them, and gave a shout of despair. The Ottomans made a rush for the inner walls and a giant called Hasan surged over the stockade at the head of his Janissary company.

In ten minutes the Turkish flags were flying from the tower that stood above the Kerkoporta.

All this was four hundred years ago.

But now, rising behind the great cypress in the square, the tower of the Kerkoporta still stood, red and white and empty against the wintry blue sky.

The exact spot where fifteen hundred years of Roman history reached its bloody climax, as the last emperor of Byzantium tore off his imperial insignia and, sword in hand, vanished into the melee, never to be seen again.

The exact place where Constantinople, the Red Apple, the navel of the world, was won by the Janissaries for Islam and the sultan.

Old Palmuk had been right after all.

There was a fourth tower.

The fourth tekke.

Shaking his head at the memories he had summoned, Yashim walked forward into the winter sunlight.