Outside Bursa, the seventh day
The guns had been firing on the Balabanbay tower since the day before. They had stood in the new position since the morning of the fourth day, dug in and platformed, and once they opened the northeast face had begun to break where the shot was concentrating, the facing stone knocked away in patches and the rubble core showing through. Constantine watched from the rise the gunners had cleared above the battery, far enough back that the smoke did not reach him and close enough to see the strikes land. The six pieces fired in their own time, each crew working its own gun. They were the new heavy Drakos, longer in the barrel than anything the army had used so far. This was the first wall they had been laid against. Between the reports he could hear a carriage run up again and a man calling for the sponge. The smell of burnt powder lay over the cut stubble.
The Drakos piece on the far left fired, and the ball went into the lower wall of the tower where the battery had been concentrating since the day before. For a breath nothing followed. Then the broken face gave. The northeast quarter of the tower came down in a long slide of stone and timber, the wall above folding after it, a column of dust climbing as it went. The roar of it reached the rise a moment behind the sight. When the dust leaned off east on the morning air the tower stood open down one side, the upper wall torn through and a length of the wall walk hanging where it had broken and not fallen.
The crews were cheering before the dust was clear. The men on the left gun had their arms up; one of them had climbed onto the trail and was shouting something Constantine could not make out over the rest.
"Hah, there it goes," Andreas said. He had come up the rise without Constantine marking it, mud dried in plates on his boots, his hands behind his back. He watched the dust go off the field. "A day sooner than I gave it. Those new pieces sure bite harder." He grunted. "Eat powder like nothing we've put up before. But they eat wall much faster, so I'll not complain."
Constantine watched the dust thin. It had folded easier than the face promised. Thinner in the core than it looked, or the guns better than they'd reckoned. Both, likely.
Andreas looked west to the citadel on its spur, the rock rising under the mountain. "That's the last of the outworks. It's the citadel now." He spat. "He was a fool to turn down terms. Now he's got one rock to die on, and we hold everything around it."
"He won't be the one who handed Osman's house to a Roman and lived. I respect him for that." Constantine said it watching the dust thin over the broken tower.
Andreas grunted. "If it's true, I'd respect it too. A man who stands on his ground and dies on it, that's worth something." He looked at the citadel a while. "But I've seen plenty talk honour and ride off in the night. You're sure he's still in there, and the boy with him? They could have slipped out before we closed the ring. Then it's no honour. Just a man who ran slower than the rest."
"I guess we'll find out sooner than later. Give the order, we move the guns." Constantine looked from the broken tower to the citadel and back, measuring the haul. "Bring all six up onto the east shoulder, close as the ground lets you, and open on the wall there. I want them firing by tomorrow if the carriages stand the move."
Andreas did not turn from the citadel. "There's the lower town to settle, too, before we sit down in front of the rock. The men are in the quarters near the Ulu Cami. They fought for those streets and took losses doing it, and they expect the city when the citadel falls." He let it sit, plain, the way he said the things that were not his to decide. "I can hold them off it. But it's easier if they know from you, not just from me."
Constantine knew the shape of it without Andreas drawing it. An army that had bled going into a town reckoned the town owed it, and reckoned the day the walls came down was the day the account was paid. It was the oldest arithmetic in war, and the hardest to argue a man out of with his friends dead in the streets behind him.
"As I said the first day. The Ulu Cami stands, whole. The Yeşil complex, the Muradiye, the tombs, all of it, untouched." He looked west toward the green domes of the Yeşil works sitting clear of the fighting on their rise. "We do not burn what we are about to own. A mosque is a building. So is a granary, so is a foundry. I mean to use this city, not stand in its ashes. Adrianople cost us what we are still paying the masons to put right. I will not buy that here."
"The men know your mind on it. They respect it." Andreas turned from the wall at last. "It'll hold better once they have the citadel to look at instead of the empty streets."
"Then give them the citadel to look at." Constantine looked from the broken tower to the rock under the mountain. "Move the battery."
Down at the battery the crews had gone back to the work of cooling and swabbing, the cheering done, two men knocking the chocks loose on the left gun to begin the move. A train of mules was being brought up the line for the hauling. Further along, a tagma was forming to go forward under pavises, to take the broken tower and clear what was left in it before the day was out.
The east shoulder, the following day
By the next afternoon the battery stood on the shoulder of cleared ground east of the Hisar, dug in behind a low bank the sappers had thrown up overnight, and it had been firing on the east wall of the citadel since the middle of the morning. Constantine stood back from the bank with Andreas, Thomas and George, far enough that a man could speak between the reports without shouting. The wall ahead of them showed a pale scar low in its face where the shot was concentrating, the stone there newer and heavier than the old work around it, rebuilt not long before by the look of it.
"Two days, perhaps three," Andreas said. "It's coming, but slower than the outworks went. They've built that stretch up thicker than it was, and the angle doesn't help either." He watched a strike burst chips off the scar without opening it. "And we don't want one breach in any case. He puts his best behind it and we pay for every yard. I'd rather have at least three." He raised a hand and marked them off along the wall. "That stretch, where the new stone meets the old. The low place by the tower there. And the run under the broken merlons, west end. Three, and make him guess which carries the storm. The men go in against a wall he can't hold all of at once."
"Three at least," Thomas said. "More if we can make them. There's no shortage of men on that wall, look at it." He nodded at the parapet. "He's packed that rock. We'll want every breach we can get to thin them out."
"Three at least, then, and the proper time to make them." Constantine looked along the wall. Up on the standing stretches men kept low behind the merlons, and twice now the dull cough of the Ottoman guns had come back at the battery from embrasures higher in the wall.
That had been the morning's surprise. The citadel's guns had fallen short all the first day, and the Romans had read it as the limit of their reach and pushed the lighter Drakos forward. A little after dawn they fired at their true range for the first time, and a ball came down full on a forward gun.
It killed two of the crew outright and broke a third under the carriage when the gun jumped, and it was a long quarter of an hour before the man was quiet. Andreas had pulled the forward pieces back while the bodies were still being carried off, and brought the breaching work onto the six new siege Drakos, set further out, where only their barrels had the reach to bite the wall and the guns on the height fell short of them. The sappers had been at the new position since, raising the bank in front of the six and banking the flanks, so that what came over from the rock buried itself in the earth and not in a gun crew.
"I guess you can teach an old dog new tricks. Cost us a crew and the morning," Thomas said. He had been watching the embrasures with a hand up against the sun. "Seven or eight pieces up there, small by the sound, but the height carries them further than we gave them."
"It does. Not far enough now." Andreas watched the six fire from the long position behind the bank. One went off as he spoke and they all put their hands to their ears against it, the sound of the big pieces flatter and harder than the old guns. "Cost us a crew to learn where his line falls." He let it stand. "It won't cost us that again."
A rider came up the line from the north, off the camp road, from Aristos's column on the Mudanya road. He swung down before he reached them and came the last of it on foot, and George stepped to take the folded paper from him before he had finished the bow.
George read it once to himself. Then he read the weight of it aloud, the way he did, counting it off rather than telling it. "Mudanya is held. The fleet's in the gulf and the port's ours, Laskaris confirms it. But the division Aristos took north ran into horse on the Mudanya road. A thousand at least, the report says, and not a rabble. They came on in order, hit the baggage, and pulled off before our foot could close. Aristos pushed them back and holds the road. He's counting better than three hundred dead and hurt." He looked up. "And there is more."
"Say it."
"The country between here and the sea is coming apart. There are Ottoman parties loose all through it, bands and akıncı, burning the Christian villages and killing whoever stands in them." George turned the paper over as though the other side would have less of it. "Laskaris writes that better than twenty thousand Christians have come into Mudanya off the land in a week. They are sleeping in the streets and on the mole, and there is not bread in the town for half of them."
The guns went on behind them, the scar in the wall taking another strike, while the four of them stood with the report between them.
Constantine had it ordered in his head before George finished. Aristos was on a road he could hold but not clear. The port was filling faster than it could be fed. And if the bands had a month in the country before the citadel fell, there would be nothing left to rule when it did, and no people left in it to rule.
"George. You go north." He said it plainly, and George folded the paper away and listened. "Take four more tagmata off the second legion, and Captain Arethas under you. Secure the Mudanya road from this end to the port, link with Aristos, and put paid to the broken bands where you can find them. But the road and the people come before the killing."
He looked off north toward the port he could not see from the shoulder of the rock.
"And there's the twenty thousand in the streets to settle. Work it with Laskaris. Grain landed at Mudanya, from wherever the fleet can reach, and it goes to them, not held back for the army. Feed them. Shelter what he can. And put it about, in the town and through the villages that still stand, that when Bursa falls there will be land for every family, the good land the beys held, in their own names and free of the old dues." He turned back to George. "I do not want the region empty when this is over. I want the people in it, and I want them to know who fed them in the bad month."
"It will take more than bread to make them believe the land," George said. "But the bread first. I'll go within the hour." He was already turning for the camp road and the column he would have to draw out of the line.
"Thomas." Constantine looked to his brother. "The country's blind to us past the next ridge and that is half the trouble. I want the scouting trebled, ranging parties out to the day's ride and back, so we hear of these bands before they are a report from Mudanya. Set it up."
"I'll have the parties out by dark," Thomas said. "Bigger sweeps, in strength enough that the akıncı can't eat them one at a time. We should have done it on the third day." He did not say whose lapse that was, and Constantine did not ask him to.
The orders given, the three of them turned to the work each had been handed: George already gone toward the camp, Thomas after him, Andreas back to the bank and the slow business of the wall. Constantine stayed a moment longer. Ahead of him the battery fired again, the scar in the east face deepening by a hand's breadth with each strike, the new stone breaking no faster than the old. Two days. Perhaps three. He turned the haul over once more, the breaches and the cost of them, and went down off the shoulder toward the guns.
Author note:
Getting the ground right for this one took a while. The city in the 1430s had expanded well beyond its old fortified core. That core, the Hisar, sat partly on a rocky spur, with deep stream-cut ravines on the further east and west (the Gökdere and the Cilimboz) and Mount Uludağ, the ancient Mysian Olympus, rising behind it to the south. The lower town had spread out around the Ulu Cami and the great commercial hans, with the külliye complexes, the Muradiye and the Yeşil among them, standing as their own nuclei on the slopes beyond the wall. The tombs of the early sultans sit out there too.
Bursa proper was a substantial city, around 30,000. (1487 Ottoman record, gives Bursa 174 quarters and 6,457 tax-paying household heads)but the thing worth saying is that the wider region in this era was still full of Greek villages. The Ottoman conquest of Bithynia was barely a century old, the countryside was a patchwork, and a large rural Rum Orthodox population was still very much present across the plain and the hills down toward the Marmara coast. That's the country emptying toward Mudanya in this chapter.