Smyrna, October 1439
The sea wall had been down for decades. Grass grew in the joints, and there was a fig tree out of a collapsed vault with a proper trunk on it, and where the curtain had come away from the tower the stones lay in the shallow water below the tideline. Nets were spread to dry across the foot of the second tower. Two fishermen working among the fallen blocks straightened when they saw the party on the shore, and one of them raised his hand and called out something in Greek, and Thomas raised his hand back.
The city had opened its gates a few days ago, and the army was quartered through it and camped outside it. Constantine walked the wall slowly, from the seaward end inward. The escort had been left at the head of the quay, a dozen men.
"They were thirty feet, Majesty, this stretch," Yorgo Eksantho said. He walked a half pace behind and to the left. "Thirty feet and the two towers at the mouth, and a chain between them that was let down for the ships. This was the Latins' castle. The harbour was theirs for sixty years and Pagos was the Turk's, and the city lay in between and belonged to neither."
"And how did that work?"
"Badly, Majesty, and for sixty years." Yorgo's hands moved when he talked. "The road ran up from the water to the mountain through the houses of men who paid customs twice, once going up and once coming down. My family paid it twice. We are an old house here."
Thomas laughed at that, and Yorgo made a face.
They walked towards the breach. Sixty paces of curtain had been thrown down to below a man's knee. The line of it went on through the weeds and the fishing gear and disappeared behind a shed that someone had built over it.
"That is what it left," Yorgo said. "Timur came down from Ankara after he had broken Bayezid, and he sat here fourteen days." He had stopped walking. "The Knights had six hundred men in the harbour castle and their ships were in the bay, and they thought the sea was enough. He mined under the wall from the land side, with fire and props, and on the fourteenth day the wall sat down."
He said the last of it flatly. He was a good teller and he knew where to be flat.
"They were killed to the last, Majesty. The ones who reached the ships got away. The ones on the mole were killed on the mole. They say he built a tower of the heads at the gate, and when the Latin ships came in from Rhodes the next week not knowing, he shot the heads at them out of the engines." Yorgo turned his palm up toward the foundation line. "And then he threw the walls into the sea and went east, and nobody has put them up since. The Turk did not want them up. A wall down is a wall no Latin can hold against you."
"The Turk seems not to have liked walls in general," Constantine said.
Thomas laughed again.
"No, Majesty," Yorgo said.
He crouched at the foundation and put his hand flat on it. The stone was warm from the morning, and there was salt dried white in the pitting where the mortar had been.
They went on along the line of it. Depth of water at the mole, where the ground was soft and where it was hard, which of the old towers still had footings a man could build on and which were rotten under the grass. Yorgo knew all of it, and when he did not know he said so and would have it counted by Friday.
Constantine was warm with him throughout. He asked about his family. He asked where the customs house had stood, and where the caulkers worked, and whether the spring above the shore road ran in August.
"Majesty." Yorgo waited for a natural place and took it. "The wall. Is it to stand again?"
"Not as it was," Constantine said. "The two towers at the mouth first, and then the curtain along the front here, and the mole out to the second tower, and the whole of it built for guns. I want thirty pieces on that water within three years and a basin behind it that can lie two great ships and twenty galleys in a blow." He was looking out at the bay while he said it. "The fleet should be able to winter here."
"Yes, Majesty."
Thomas had gone a little ahead of them, and now he came back with his cloak over one shoulder and the sun full on him, and he was in the mood he got into in cities that were coming back.
"Yorgo. Sunday."
"Prince."
"The priest tells me there are forty of you now."
"Forty-six this morning, Prince." Yorgo had his hands behind him. "It will be more than fifty by the day."
"Good," Thomas said, and went on down the shore. Yorgo followed.
The room in the citadel had been the Ottoman commander's, and his pegs were still in the wall. It was high and cool and the shutters faced west, and from the window there was the whole of the bay, the mole, and the fleet coming in.
They had been coming in since the middle of the morning. The Katarina anchored at the eleventh hour and the galleys were still working through the mouth in twos and threes, and there was a boat off almost every one of them before her anchor was down.
Laskaris came up at the second hour of the afternoon with his hat under his arm.
"Majesty."
"Welcome, Laskaris. Sit."
He sat, and put a leather case on the table, and did not open it until the wine had been poured and he had drunk with Constantine.
"So. I am eager for your news," Constantine said.
"The Marmara is quiet, Majesty." He got the case open and laid the packets out in the order he wanted them. "No Ottoman hull under sail anywhere in that water. No corsair out of the islands. Only Genoese and Venetians running grain like men in a peaceful year."
"And the grain."
"Moving, Majesty. Mudanya takes the most of it, the road inland is better. Nicomedia less, but steady." Laskaris set his cup down. "The magazines at Mudanya are full for the first time since we opened them, and the price in Bursa has come down twice since last month. Theophilus sent clerks on both moles counting what lands and where it goes."
"And it goes where it should."
"It goes where Theophilus sends it. I would not want to be the man who took a sack of it off the road."
"Nor would I." Constantine smiled and turned the second packet toward himself without opening it. "And Heraclea?"
"Heraclea is where it gets interesting." Laskaris set his cup down. "We went east along the coast and came off the town, and the Genoese were out to us before we were within a mile of the mole. The podestà greeted us well. Water, pilots, a dinner." He turned his cup once. "And they watched every man I put ashore, and counted them, and wrote it down. I do not fault them for it. I would have done the same."
"So they were glad to see us."
"Majesty, they were glad and they were not, and they did not know which they were, and that is the truest thing I can tell you about Heraclea." Laskaris put his finger on the packet. "But there is this. Three weeks before we came, they were raided. Fifteen hundred horse, by their count, and I would not argue with it, because they held it off the walls and lost men doing it, and they showed me the graves."
"Raiders from where?"
"Amasya."
"That far west?"
"They were sure of it," Laskaris said. "They had prisoners and they hanged them, and they had the standards off them and showed me those too. And it is not the raid that matters, Majesty. It is what the raid was doing there." He turned his hand over on the table. "The country east of Heraclea has been ownerless since Bursa fell. Amasya has been coming west along that coast, village by village, taking the oaths and putting men in, and nobody has fought them for it because there is nobody left to. They are not raiding that country. They are collecting it. The raid on Heraclea was a man reaching for the last thing on the table."
"So they hold the land all the way to Heraclea."
"I have it marked as well as I can." Laskaris pushed the packet across. "I would want a proper report before I said a line on the map. But it is a great deal of country, Majesty, and they took it fast, and it cost them almost nothing."
Constantine drew the packet toward him without opening it.
"And Teke has gone over to Karaman," he said.
Laskaris looked up.
"It seems the old beylik has risen again," Constantine said. "Probably as a vassal. An oath, and a marriage in it, and the Karamanid getting the coast down there without spending a man on it."
Laskaris said nothing for a moment, and then he picked up his cup and found it empty and put it down again.
Beyond the window the last of the galleys was coming through the harbour mouth, past two hulls at the mole. Somewhere below in the town a bell was ringing the hour, and it was ringing badly, the way a bell rings when the man on the rope is new to it and has not yet been taught.
"There is a thing in the harbour for you," Constantine said. "Two Ottoman hulls at the mole. Put a man to survey them and everything else that floats here, and talk with the harbour master."
"The harbour master."
"Yorgo Eksantho. A Greek who took the Turk's faith, and he is to be baptized on Sunday with some dozens more. He is a good man at the work and he will give you everything you ask for, and I want it all in writing."
"Majesty."
"One more matter. When you are full, you go south." Constantine put his hand on the chart at the elbow of the coast and moved it down. "Andreas is on the coast road with a few tagmata, and he is clearing it as he goes towards Milasa. He is going to want the water on his flank and he is going to want guns he does not have to drag over that ground. Give him both. If he sits down in front of Milasa, you are in the gulf below it before he has his ditch dug."
"How long do I have?"
"Not much. Sail as soon as you can." He took his hand off the chart. "Go and see about your galleys."
Laskaris stood, and gathered the packets he was taking and left the ones he was not, and put his hat back on at the door.
"Yes, Majesty."
When he had gone, Constantine sat where he was with the unopened packet in front of him, and after a while he got up and went to the window and pushed the shutter back the rest of the way. The bay was full of masts. On the mole a working party had begun to clear the shore end of it, and they were doing it the way soldiers do a thing they have not been told the reason for, badly and cheerfully, and one of the sergeants was shouting at them.
Author note:
The Ottomans held that region together for a century. Now they're gone, and it's a free-for-all! Amasya grabbing part of the coast, Teke running to Karaman, every bey with fifty horsemen reaching for whatever's closest. Rome broke the house of Osman. Everyone else is looting the estate.
Also, you'll notice we jumped straight to Smyrna. The coast between was towns opening their gates one after another: no drama in that, just chapters of surrendering. Skipped it.
On the new lands: my rough numbers put the conquered territory around 700-800k people. Maybe 200k openly Christian, another 150-200k crypto-Christians and converts — men like Yorgo (Giorgos turned Yorgo, the Turkified George), who went over to hold office under the old masters and can come back just as easily under the new ones. The Ottoman machine assimilated in one direction for a century. Now it runs in reverse. Germiyan adds another ~250k under Mesud as vassal.
Want to see what comes next? Patreon is 15 chapters ahead. The diplomats take over from the soldiers: union talks in Florence, a winter of envoys, new companies, new goods, new money, and the slow work of turning a conquest into a state.