2 – 18 April 1453
The chain across the Horn
On 2 April 1453 the defenders close the Golden Horn with a chain made by Bartolomeo Soligo. It rests on wooden floats and runs from the tower of Eugenius below the Acropolis to the Kastellion, a tower on the shore of Galata. Behind it lie 26 ships under the Venetian Alviso Diedo: five from Genoa, five from Venice, three from Venetian Crete, one each from Ancona, Aragon and France, and about ten of the emperor’s.
Links of the chain that closed the Golden Horn, Istanbul Military MuseumWikimedia Commons, RHaworth, CC BY-SA 4.0 (Askeri Müze 971.jpg)
Baltaoğlu Süleyman Bey brings the Ottoman fleet from Gallipoli to the Double Columns on the Bosporus shore. The eyewitnesses count 110 to 430 ships, and a modern estimate gives about 110, most of them galleys and large rowing boats. In the first days of the siege part of the fleet probably takes the Princes’ Islands in the Sea of Marmara.
A galley in Bernhard von Breydenbach’s Peregrinatio in terram sanctam, woodcut by Erhard Reuwich, 1486Wikimedia Commons, Erhard Reuwich, Public domain (Peregrinatio in terram sanctam MET MM4640 crop 1.jpg)
In mid April Baltaoğlu’s galleys attack the ships behind the chain and try to break it. The Christian ships stand higher in the water than the galleys, and their crews beat off the attack. The fleet returns to the Double Columns, and the Horn stays closed to it.
Sources
- Nicolò Barbaro, Giornale dell’assedio di Costantinopoli (1453).
- Michael Kritovoulos, History of Mehmed the Conqueror (about 1467).
- George Sphrantzes, Chronicon minus (about 1477).
- Steven Runciman, The Fall of Constantinople 1453 (1965).
- Franz Babinger, Mehmed the Conqueror and His Time (1978).
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