Notices of Books: Sack of Constantinople by The Turks, May 29, 1453, Its Causes and Consequences

306 NOTICES OF BOOKS
September 1423 (no. 3408; MM III, 163-73)? European context briefly and lucidly. Then he sets
Papad. Geneal. nos. 170, 173 (to whom reference is out the events of the last six months of the Empire,
made) is at fault in saying that one of his daughters in which all the troubles of the previous two centuries
married the megas dux Loukas Notaras. Notaras's were recapitulated—problems of national identity and
wife was a daughter of the Emperor John VIII, as of Frankish Union so intractable that only the
indicated in no. 3516. Conquering Sultan could bring a solution. Finally,
D. M. NICOL. Sir Steven's history of the siege itself is a model of
University of Indiana. historical narrative: slow, controlled and majestic.
The book has excellent maps and plans. The first
line on p. 42 would make better sense if 'corps' were
RUNCIMAN (S.) The fall of Constantinople, 1453.
read for 'crops'; there are a few slips in the biblio-
Cambridge: the University Press. 1965. Pp. graphy and a number of inconsistencies in the index
xiv + 256. 2 maps. 1 plan. 8 plates. 1 text (who, for instance, was Irene Brankovic?). Unfor-
figure. £1 15s. tunately, the thirty pages of notes are concealed at
the end, and occasionally Sir Steven does not say
STACTON (D.) The world on the last day: the whether his statements are inferences or not: for
sack of Constantinople by the Turks, May example his over-precise chronology of the fall of
29, 1453, its causes and consequences. Trebizond is not justified by the sources he cites, and
London: Faber and Faber. 1965. Pp. 302. Amastris fell not in June 1461 but two years earlier.
2 maps. 1 plan. £1 15^ It must be said at once that Mr Stacton's version of
Marc Bloch cautioned the historian against 'I'idole the Fall of Constantinople is grotesque. Nevertheless
des origines'. Readers of history are more often it is an enjoyable book. He is interested in every-
seduced by the cult of the bitter end. The fall of thing: customs from Yucatan to Shanghai, or the
great empires, in particular, has a special piquancy, Carib origin of the word 'barbecue'. His lively
and none has made a finer end than the East Roman. imagination tends to confuse geography and theology
In his preface, Sir Steven argues that most of the with human anatomy. Both Constantinople and
other attractions of his subject are spurious. Econ- Albania are compared to the uvula (the former
omically, even politically, the fall of Constantinople 'pitted', the latter 'distended'). Mr Stacton could
caused no great stir. Nevertheless the formal trans- have made more of the navel-staring hesychastoi, but he
ference of power in 1453 was a considerable event, is good on the Shi'ites: 'by shifting the balance of the
but its significance was largely confined to the two body during Muslim prayer, they removed pressure
peoples most directly involved, the Greeks and the on those neural ganglia which control the emotions of
Turks. Sir Steven has taken the Greek people as his anxiety, and thus shifted the experience of the human
tragic hero and includes useful, if unoriginal, sections numin from the tremendum to the fascinosum'. The
on the fate of the vanquished and of their churches. World on the Last Day may not be history, but it is
It is a pity that he did not continue by discussing the splendid reading.
Fall of the City in Greek and Turkish folk memory, ANTHONY BRYER.
and that he did not use some of the Moldavian wall- University of Birmingham.
paintings of the siege as illustrations instead of his
nineteenth-century steel engravings of Constantinople.
The most interesting recent research on the subject
has been concentrated upon those Greek sources SHERRARD (P.) Constantinople: iconography of
composed or rewritten some time after 1453, and upou a sacred city. London: Oxford University
the rather disappointing Turkish chronicles. The Press. 1965. Pp. 139. 54 illus. (incl. 11 in
sources are marvellously varied and their assessment a colour). £3 3s.
nice historical exercise to which Sir Steven devotes an Written in a highly ornate style, this book (first
appendix. The history of several chronicles is much published in German in 1963) evokes a mirage of
more complex than he suggests, and, curiously, he medieval Constantinople that is all swelling domes,
has not used Darko or Grecu on Chalkokondylas, or gleaming mosaics and celestial powers hovering over-
noticed Elisabeth Zachariadou's strictures on the head. The argument, if I understand it correctly,
Barberini Codex 111. Sir Steven's most valuable runs something like this. Unlike other cities which
contribution here lies in his expansion of J. H. come into being and develop merely as a response to
Mordtmann's partial rehabilitation of Cantemir, and economic and social forces, Constantinople was 'the
in his consequent explanation of how parts of the organic manifestation of certain coherent and pre-
City surrendered on terms. But whilst he makes a determined values'. As such, it had an 'iconography'
special case for Cantemir, Sir Steven dismisses expressed by the two antithetical images of the New
Tomadakis' forcefully argued apology for George Rome (exemplified by the life of the court and of the
Amiroutzes without explanation. hippodrome) and the New Jerusalem (exemplified by
The story of the Fall is well known and Sir Steven the Byzantine devotion to the Virgin Mary, the
offers no new information, but, as a literary exercise, hundreds of churches and monasteries and the relics
his account is superb. He places the siege in its of saints kept therein). The question is posed, but

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306 NOTICES OF BOOKS

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