One by one the candles were extinguished, and the shadows of night slowly enveloped the great church.  The final mass had ended and the people had filed out for the last time, but the emperor, Constantine XI remained, enveloped in the coming darkness.

    Constantine XI Dragases, Constantine the last, Constantine, son of Helana, wait….that is a name we have heard before.

    Constantine, son of Helana – Constantine the great, the first, who gave the city his name.  He died in Izmit – Nikomedia on the 22^nd of May 337, receiving his famous death bed baptism – as Christians believe baptism cleans all sins, early Christians thought it wise to keep it as late as possible, especially when involved in politics.  He was buried in the church of the 12 apostles, under what is now the Fatih mosque, Mehmet II knew which monuments to erase to refound the city.  Perhaps he is still there.

    A legend arose that as Constantine, son of Helana, was the city’s first emperor, so another Constantine, son of Helana, would be the last.  The combination was never repeated until Constantine XI, who would be the last.  Whether his father Manuel II and his wife Helena Dragaš, a Serbian princess, thought of this when they named him is not known, but Constantine was the 6^th child, and unlikely to inherit.  Then, when his older brother John VIII died without heir, Helana planted Constantine on the throne.  He did, though, never get a coronation, no one knew where the crown was anymore, and the Patriarch had run off to Rome.

    After leaving Haghia Sophia Constantine returned to the palace to farewell his family and servants and then returned to his command on the walls – legend has it when passing the church of Blachernae, he was summoned inside by a woman’s voice and inside the Virgin Mary, patron saint of Constantinople, told him she had withdrawn her protection from the sinful city, and asked him to handover his royal scepter, to be held for some future ruler.  Meanwhile, like a child unable to wait for his Christmas presents, the impatient 21 year old Sultan got his troops up at 1am to finish the job.

    Constantine was in charge of the middle section of the walls and his headquarters was the gate of Saint Romanos, now known as Topkapi, or the Gun gate, from the cannon balls from the great siege that were displayed there.  Topkapi was one of the main entrances of the city, until living memory, with cars and trucks somehow squeezing through the narrow entrance, built over 1500 years ago for mule carts.  Today the traffic is a handful of pedestrians, with a typical Istanbul collection of men selling tobacco and cheap clothes.  It’s hard to imagine Constantine, with the Greeks and their Italian allies up on the walls, with Mehmet II giving orders from his tent, pitched somewhere across the ugly freeway.  Look, though, at how devastated the walls are, towers propped up by metal scaffolding and whole sections nearly leveled.  This is where the great cannon were, and their effect is clear.

   The Sultan sent in three waves of attacks, first the peasants, Christians and Muslims summoned to fight for their ruler, far from the crack troops, but their job their job was to give the defenders the shock of their lives attacking in the middle of the night and they were expendable.  Then came the Anatolian Turks, determined to fight for the piece of paradise which the defenders gave them.  Finally the crack troops, the Christian born slave army of Janissaries.  The outer wall was breached, the attackers were pushed back, then a Turkish flag appeared over one of the towers, a small group had forced its way through a secret door between the inner and outer walls, used by the Genoese for raids and fought their way up – the end had begun.

    Here chaos begins, and the eyewitness accounts disagree, some say Constantine asked his fellow defenders to kill him rather than be captured alive but all refused.  Others say, he tore off all royal symbols and charged into the fight to die unidentified.  Leonardo, archbishop of Chios, who was captured during the fall, but latter escaped, wrote to the Pope that Constantine died fighting at the walls, then he fell wounded, then rose up to fight again, and finally fell and was finally trampled underfoot.

    Most of the accounts state the body lay unidentified amongst the fallen, but several of the accounts, particularly the Turkish ones, say it was found, and his head hacked off and presented to the Sultan.  One writer has Fatih ridiculing it, then hanging it from a column in the Augusteion, the square beside  Haghia Sophia, before stuffing it with straw and sending it off to the Mamluk ruler of Egypt.  Another says the Sultan orders the body be given a Christian burial.

    Amongst Christians of the city a number of legends arose as to the emperor’s final resting place.  Some said he was secretly buried under the altar of Haghia Sophia, others point to a grave in a secret chamber of the Church of Theodosia, now the Gül Camii, where a mysterious grave bears Turkish inscriptions “Tomb of the Apostle, disciple of Christ” – peace be to him”.   In the 19^th century a simple unmarked slab of marble, with an oil lamp, mysteriously refilled every night, became a popular site of pilgrimage until it became known that a local coffee house owner had started the rumour and was re-filling the lamps.

    Finally a legend of the ‘immortal emperor’ arose amongst the Christians of the Ottoman emperor.  That Constantine was whisked away by an angel at the last minute, and lies, turned to marble, in a secret cavern under the Golden Gate, today’s yedikule, awaiting a day when we will be brought back to life, and reenter the city victorious through the Golden Gate – perhaps the reason why the gate has been walled up since the conquest.