ЄВРОПА. Історія

The final siege of Constantinople began on 2 April 1453, Easter Monday, and lasted for eight weeks. The twenty-year-old Sultan, Mehmet II (r. 1451–81), handsome and secretive, was eager to attack, having been frustrated as a boy, when his plan for a campaign against the Walls had been rejected. The bachelor Emperor, Constantine XI Palaeologos (r. 1448–53), still optimistically searching for a bride, awaited him without illusions. Preparations had been thorough. The cities of Thrace and the Black Sea coast were ravaged to prevent assistance. A fleet of triremes and transport barges was assembled at Gallipoli. A castle was built at the narrowest point of the Bosporus at Rumeli Hisar. A 26-ft (7.9-m) bronze cannon, hurling stone shot of 12 hundredweight (609 kilos) each, had been specially cast by the Sultan’s Hungarian engineer, and was pulled from Adrianople by 60 oxen. Inside the city, weapons were collected and money raised to pay the troops. Outside the walls, the ditches were deepened and the moat by the Blachernae Gate flooded. Embassies were duly sent to Venice, to the Vatican, to France and Aragon. A company of 700 men arrived under Giovanni Giustiniani Longo, a Genoese captain who was given command of the land walls. On the day that the first Turkish detachments came into view, a procession of migrating storks flew over the Straits. The city gates were closed. A great iron chain was stretched across the entrance to the Golden Horn. Only 7,000 defenders stood to arms against the onslaught of 80,000.

The progress of the siege at first gave encouragement to the defenders, though the impaling of Christian prisoners in view of the Walls was calculated to cause panic. On 12 April a naval attack on the boom failed. The great cannon, firing once every seven minutes from sunrise to sunset, day after day, reduced large sections of the outer wall to rubble. But the gaps were filled at night with wooden stockades. On 20 April an imperial transport flotilla fought its way into the harbour. Turkish mining operations were betrayed. But then, in a masterstroke, the Sultan ordered his fleet of galleys to be dragged overland behind Pera and into the Golden Horn. The City lost its harbour. From then on, the defenders had only three options: victory, death, or conversion to Islam. On 27 April an ecumenical mass was celebrated in St Sophia, for Greeks and Italians, Orthodox and Catholics. ‘At this moment, there was Union in the Church of Constantinople.’ The decisive assault was launched about half-past one in the morning of Tuesday, 29 May, the fifty-third day of the siege. First came the bashi-bazouk irregulars, then the Anatolians, then the Janissaries: The Janissaries advanced at the double, not rushing in wildly… but keeping their ranks in perfect order, unbroken by the missiles of the enemy. The martial music that urged them on was so loud that the sound could be heard between the roar of the guns from right across the Bosphorus. Mehmet himself led them as far as the fosse, and stood there shouting encouragement… Wave after wave of these fresh, magnificent and stoutly armoured men rushed up to the stockade, to tear at the barrels of earth that surmounted it, to hack at the beams that supported it, to place their ladders against it… each wave making way without panic for its successor. Just before sunrise, Giustiniani took a culverin shot on his breastplate and retired, covered in blood. A giant janissary called Hasan was slain after mounting the stockade; but he showed it was possible. A small sally-port, the Kerkoporte, was left open by retreating Greeks, and the Turks swarmed in. The Emperor dismounted from his white Arabian mare, plunged into the fray, and disappeared. Constantinople was sacked. Gross slaughter and rapine ensued. St Sophia was turned into a mosque: The muezzin ascended the most lofty turret, and proclaimed the ezan or public invitation … The imam preached; and Mohammed the Second performed the namaz of thanksgiving on the great altar, where the Christian mysteries had so lately been celebrated before the last of the Caesars. From St Sophia, he proceeded to the august but desolate mansion of a hundred successors of the great Constantine… A melancholy reflection on the vicissitudes of human greatness forced itself on his mind, and he repeated an elegant distich of Persian poetry. ‘The spider has woven his web in the Imperial Palace, and the owl hath sung her watch-song on the towers of Afrasiab’. The Roman Empire had ceased to exist.

Late in August 1914, the 35-year-old daughter of a Suffolk clergyman, Flora Sandes, arrived with seven companions in the Serbian town of Kragujevac. Some fifty miles from Belgrade, Kragujevac was the main base for Serbian forces fighting for their capital city against the Austro-Hungarian offensive. Flora’s group preceded several British, French, Russian, and American medical teams appointed by the Serbian Relief Fund. In mid-April 1915 they were joined by Mrs Mabel St Clair Stobart, a formidable dame who had raised a Women’s Sick and Wounded Convoy Corps during the recent Balkan wars. She now came up from Salonica, in command of a 70-strong field hospital staffed entirely by women, except for her husband, John Greenhaigh, their treasurer. She collected her casualties with a special ‘flying column’, which she led on horseback. Over 600 British female volunteers were active in Serbia. Of all the women’s wartime organizations, the British women’s medical services were undoubtedly among the most professional. Known as the Scottish Women’s Hospitals (SWH), after their founder, an Edinburgh surgeon called Elsie Inglis, they set out to prove that women could cope with the most stressful and responsible of enterprises. In due course they sent fourteen fully equipped hospitals to all the Allied fronts except those controlled by the British army. Mrs St Clair Stobart had worked in Cherbourg and in Antwerp before sailing for Serbia. Dr Inglis died in November 1917 after a year in Russia. Female surgeons were still a novelty in those years, especially in military hospitals. A French journalist, who once asked to watch Dr Inglis at work, emerged looking green and yelling: ‘C’est vrai, elle coupe’ (It’s true, she’s cutting!) In October 1915, when the Austrians and Bulgarians broke through, the Serbian army could escape only by a winter trek over the mountains to the Albanian coast. That terrible march through mud, snow, hunger, frostbite, typhus, and gangrene cost 40,000 lives. The Stobart Unit marched with them. Of all the volunteers, Flora Sandes (1879–1961) went furthest in her career of gender inversion. She joined the Serbian infantry, survived the trek to Albania, fought in combat, was severely wounded, and was decorated for bravery. She ended the war with an officer’s commission. She later married a Russian émigré, settled in Belgrade, defied the Gestapo, and only returned to England in widowhood. She was following a well-worn East European tradition, observable from Russia and Poland to Albania, where women in hard times stand in for their decimated menfolk. One source for the British women’s determination lay in the attitudes of their own government. When Elsie Inglis offered the services of the SWH to the War Office in August 1914, she was told: ‘My good lady, go home and sit still.’

У Східній Європі комуністи використовували чистки колабраціоністів як привід для розправи зі своїми опонентами. Кількох видатних нацистів та колабраціоністів покарано для науки: Госа, коменданта Аушвіца, засудили і повішали в Польщі 1946 р. З другого боку, чимало рядових колабраціоністів мали змогу зберегти життя, якщо погоджувались перекинутися на інший бік. Болеслав П’ясецький, голова польської фашистської Фаланги, 1945 р. вийшов з радянської в’язниці як голова підтримуваної комуністами псевдокатолицької організації РАК (Parafialna Akcja Katolicka). Тим часом переважна більшість східноєвропейських політичних в’язнів, яких отарами заганяли до радянського ГУЛАГу та інших комуністичних в’язниць, записавши до категорый «фашистів» і «колабраціоністів», не мали за собою жодної провини. Аж ніяк не було дивиною, коли нацистські воєнні злочинці сиділи в одних камерах із цвітом антинацистського Опору. КДБ знов відкрив нацистські концентраційні табори, як-от Бухенвальд, заганяючи туди нові покоління репресованих.