“In the Sultan's camp it was now proclaimed that for the three days preceding Tuesday the twenty-ninth of May they should light bright fires and call upon their god, fasting the whole day long and preparing themselves for battle, to make a general assault upon the Christians. The heralds cried at the top of their voices that it was their ruler's will that the city should be given to the soldiers for three days to sack. The Sultan swore by their immortal god, by the four thousand prophets, by Mahomet, by the soul of his father and by the sword with which he was girded, that his warriors would be granted the right to sack everything, to take everyone, male or female, and all property or treasure which was in the city; and that under no circumstances would he break this oath.
Oh! if you had heard their voices raised to heaven, crying 'Illala, Illala, Mahomet Russolalla!' which means, 'God is, and will be forever, and Mahomet is his servant, you would have been struck dumb with amazement. And it was done as he had ordered: for three days they kept fires burning to their god, and fasted by day, touching no food until nightfall. Greeting and celebrating with one another, they saluted each other with kisses, as if they were certain of going to the shades below when the day of battle came.”
A substantial fifteenth-century manuscript fragment holding two-thirds of the ‘most authoritative’ eyewitness account of the Fall of Constantinople on 29th May 1453, completed a short time after the events described and composed as a letter to Pope Nicolas V. We can trace no other copy in private hands and only eight examples in libraries, seven in Italy and one in the Netherlands.
As well as being the ‘most authoritative’ record of this pivotal moment in history, the fall of the Byzantine Empire to the Sultan of the Ottomans, Mehmed II, the Conqueror, Philipiddes states that it, ‘remains our basic source for the event. His report was the first extensive narrative in literary form to reach Europe; the disaster is described in graphic detail with the experience of an actual participant in the defence, a proud eyewitness.’ (2011, p. 14).
Philippides further notes that Leonard’s ‘influence extends over three centuries, and his narrative remains the basic source ... It is indeed unfortunate that a complete edition, with a reliable critical apparatus, remains to be published, as this important account has been printed on the basis of inferior manuscripts … This influential and important narrative thus deserves further scholarly attention and an editio princeps.’ (1998, p. 207).
The present manuscript fragment has a fascinating history, it was in Germany by 1590, entered the collection of Professor Eucharius Gottlieb Rink in the first half of the 18th century and in the early 19th century was acquired by the diplomat and bibliophile Charles Stuart, first Baron Stuart de Rothesay and printed, at his expense, in a facsimile edition of Paris 1823. We can see from the auction catalogue of Rink’s 1749 library sale that the manuscript already held only the 12 leaves found here. The note facing the first page (‘hoce manuscriptum continet...’) suggests that three leaves are missing at the beginning. The editor of the facsimile edition, L'Ecuy, himself prints this note (stating however on p. ix of his introduction that more leaves must be missing), making it clear that this is the manuscript used for his edition, which is further confirmed by the facsimile plate of part the last leaf, recto, of the text (Pertusi para 49 ‘Haec praecogita pater beatissime, qui vices Christi geris in terris…’) which also adds Leonard’s colophon.
The modern academic edition is that of the distinguished Byzantinist Agostino Pertusi. The complete text occupies 535 lines in 51 sections or paragraphs and is based on a number of 15th century manuscripts including those at Venice, Milan, and Rome. The present manuscript lacks text at the beginning (Pertusi lines 1-207) and begins with his section 17, line 208: [crescente perinde angustia, consultum] 'est si quomodo intromissas hostium fustas urere nostri possent.’ and continues to the end, finishing with Leonard’s colophon ‘Datum Chii, decimasexta die Augusti, Millesimo quadringentesimo quinquagesimo tertio’. The text was first published in 1544 at Nuremberg (VD16 L1219; Göllner, Turcica, 835), and then in Lonicer’s Chronicon Turcorum, Frankfurt, 1578 (ii, 84-102) and from that in various later publications, including in the 19th century Migne Patrologia Graeca CLIX, coll. 923-941 and P.A. Dethier in Monumenta Hungariae Historica, XXI, pp. 553-616.
The author Leonardus, a Dominican, seems to have been born of humble origins on the island of Chios in 1395/6 and possibly brought up in the household of a member of the Gattilusi family; Maria Gattilusi, obtained for him the bishopric of Mitylene or Lesbos. In 1449 he went to Rome and met Cardinal Domenico Capranica. From October 1452 he was in Constantinople with Cardinal Isidore of Kiev, and so witnessed the siege from early April 1453 until the eventual conquest. He was captured, and possibly wounded by the Turks, fled to Pera and then to Chios where he wrote his account of the fall addressed to Pope Nicolas V.
From his report, as might be expected, Leonard was deeply prejudiced against those he considered schismatics (‘what traitors were among the Greeks, what greedy betrayers of their country!’) and also laid bare the strained relations between the Greek, Venetian and Genoese defenders of the city. Leonard describes the final preparations and was not averse to questioning tactics, he criticised the concentration of the defence on the outer rather than the inner walls (‘the task of protecting the foss and the outer wall was a heavy one for us. I had always advised against this and recommended that we should put our trust in the lofty inner walls, and not leave them’. On the final evening before the assault, Leonard recounts the city’s response to the Ottoman’s religious fervour in preparation for battle, ‘We carried the sacred images in a remorseful procession around the ramparts and through the city, and with crowds of men and women following bare-footed, we begged with penitent hearts that the Lord should not let His inheritance be overthrown’. The Emperor then gave a speech to his commanders which united the various factions at the crucial moment (‘Now that we see the day of battle approaching, I have decided to bring you together in this place to make it clear to you that you must stand together even more firmly. You have battled gloriously against the enemies of Christ at all times, and now your home, your city famed through all the world, which these evil heathen Turks have besieged for two and fifty days, is committed to your brave spirits alone to preserve it’). Leonard gives a vivid account of the fighting itself and blames the ultimate defeat on the decision of the wounded commander Giovanni Giustiniani to abandon his position (‘Like a boy unused to war, he trembled at the sight of his own blood, and feared for his life’) which left the remaining defenders without a leader. Defeat then came quickly as key positions were overrun, the Emperor was killed in the fighting having tried to avoid capture (‘The Emperor then, seeking to avoid capture, cried, 'Which of my brave young soldiers will run me through now with my own sword, in God's name, so that his sovereign may not be handed over to our crafty foes?'). The aftermath is also described in detail from the shock (‘Imagine our amazement at such an astonishing turn of events! The orb of Phoebus had not yet shown half of itself over the horizon, and the whole city was in the hands of the pagans, for them to sack’) to the horror of the destruction (‘the heathen infidels entered Sancta Sophia, the wonderful shrine of the Holy Wisdom, which not even the temple of Solomon could equal, and showed no respect for the sacred altars or holy images, but destroyed them, and gouged the eyes from the saints’).
Provenance:
There is an erased (ownership?) note in the lower margin of the first page of text. The manuscript was in Germany by 1590 (see inscription on verso of final leaf).
Eucaharius Gottlieb Rink (1670–1746), professor of law and history at the University of Altdorf; the seven-line inscription facing the start of the text may be by him; offered in the posthumous catalogue of his library: Bibliotheca Rinckiana, seu Supellex Librorum tam Impressorum, quam Mstorum, quos per Omnia Scientiarum Genera collegit [Leipzig, 1747], item 8620.
Unidentified Regensburg owner: the 1823 edition (see below) describes the present manuscript, which was then in a different binding, and states that it was recently bought at Regensburg.
Lord Stuart de Rothsay (1779–1845): the front cover with an effaced armorial shield surmounted by a coronet, the back cover with a similarly erased rectangular area; Stuart de Rothesay sale at Sotheby’s, 31 May 1855, and 14 following days, lot 1930, bought by “L”, possibly the London bookseller Joseph Lilly or perhaps unsold as there is a family connection to the present owners.
Stuart de Rothesay, grandson of the Earl of Bute, entered government service in 1801 and was secretary of the legation in Vienna (1801-4) and then in St Petersburg (1804-8). By 1823 he was in Paris where he paid for a facsimile printed by Didot of 60 copies only, edited by Jean-Baptiste L’Ecuy (1740-1834), the last head of the Premonstratensian order in France before the Revolution. It is perhaps he who has written the note in French on a loosely inserted piece of paper advocating the printing of the manuscript ‘complet en regard avec l’ouvrage de Langus et quelques notes explicatives…’ as this volume contains not only the text of Leonard's work (printed on the even numbered pages) but facing (printed on the odd numbered pages) the work of Gottfried Lang, to whom Leonard’s work had been attributed to in the 1594 Helmstadt edition of Reiner Reineck (Annalium de gestis Caroli Magni imp. libri V., opus auctoris incerti,... acc. Godefridi Langi de capta a Turcis Constantinopoli narratio; VD16 L286).
Manuscripts:
The present manuscript is the only one known to be in private hands; the text is found in only eight other 15th-century or early 16th-century copies, all but one located in four Italian institutional libraries:
Florence, Biblioteca Riccardiana, MS lat. 660 (M II 19), fols. 44–50.
Milan, Biblioteca Ambrosiana, MS lat. C. 145 inf., fols. 25v–44r.
– , Biblioteca Trivulziana, MS lat. N 641 (I 95), fols. 1r–21r.
Vatican, Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, MS Vat. lat. 4137, fols. 172r–206v.
– , – , MS Vat. lat. 5392, fols. 99r–106r.
Venice, Biblioteca Marciana, MS lat. 397 (n. 1733), fols. 1r–22r.
– , – , MS lat. XIV 218 (n. 4677), fols. 46v–68v.
Leiden, University BPL 2010.
Bibliography:
The text was edited from the present manuscript (and from the 1544 edition published by Rottinger in Nuremberg), and privately printed by Lord Stuart de Rothsay:
Jean-Baptiste L’Écuy, De capta a Mehemethe II Constantinopoli: Leonardi Chiensis et Godefridi Langi narrationes … (Paris, 1823). The top 19 lines of fol. 11r and the colophon on fol. 11v are reproduced in facsimile.
Valuable library of the late Right Honourable Lord Stuart de Rothesay, Sotheby's 31st May 1855, lot 1930.
A. Pertusi, La Caduta di Constantinopoli Le Testimonianze dei Contemporanei, Fondazione Lornzo Valla by Arnaldo Mondadori (1976). Leonardus occupies pp. 120-171 (notes pp. 390-407).
M. Philippides & W.K. Hanak, The Siege and Fall of Constantinople in 1453, Historiography, Topography, and Military Studies (2011), pp. 14-19.
M. Philippides, ‘The Fall of Constantinople 1453: Bishop Leonardo Giustiniani and His Italian Followers’, Viator: Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 29 (1998), pp. 189–225.
J. R. Melville Jones, The siege of Constantinople 1453: seven contemporary accounts. Translated (from the Latin). (Amsterdam, 1972)
