Ἕσσεται ἦμαρ ὅτ᾿ ἄν ποτ᾿ ὀλώλῃ Ἴλιος ἱρὴ
καὶ Πρίαμος καὶ λαὸς ἐϋμμελίω Πριάμοιο.There will come a day when sacred Ilion shall perish,
and Priam, and the people of Priam of the good ashen spear.—Homer, Iliad 6.447–449, in A. T. Murray, trans., William F. Wyatt, Loeb Classical Library 170 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1924), 306-307.
Ὦ πόλις, πόλις, πόλεων πασῶν κεφαλή·
Ὦ πόλις, πόλις, ἰδοὺ πόλις, κέντρον τῶν τεσσάρων τοῦ κόσμου μερῶν·
Ὦ πόλις, πόλις, Ἀριστιανῶν καύχημα καὶ βαρβάρων ἀφανισμός.O City, City, head of all cities;
O City, City—behold the City, the center of the four quarters of the world;
O City, City, boast of the faithful and destruction of the barbarian.—Michaelis Ducae Nepotis, Historia Byzantina, ed. Immanuel Bekker (Bonnae: Ed. Weber, 1834), 41.1-3.
I
The signs gathered like storm-clouds over stone.
The moon held three hours in shadow,
as if faithfully remembering an ominous decree.
The City’s ikon slipped from its golden frame,
while rain came hard, with hail,
and darkened the candles’ light.
Fog lay thick upon the streets at dawn,
as though the Lord of history had withdrawn His gaze
and left the walls to reckon with themselves.
That night a luminous glow hovered over the dome of Hagia Sophia—
to those within, a burning crown of sorrow;
to those without, a sign the City’s time was done.
II
The emperor took up the old, hard work of prayer.
Along the battered circuit of the walls he walked,
bearing ikons and relics in his hands,
with Greeks and Latins chanting side by side,
their quarrels stilled beneath a sorrowful resolve.
The Mother of God, the martyrs, the confessors—
all were invoked as if their names
could buttress mortar more than stone.
In the Great Church, under the shadowed dome,
he knelt, seeking pardon—from bishops, from people—
received the mysteries, asked to be forgiven,
then rose to bid farewell to those of his own house
before he went alone to read the nighted ramparts.
III
The last assault came early, unheralded.
Waves of men broke upon the landward walls
until the very earth seemed to remember Troy.
He moved along the parapets with measured speech,
offering encouragement and what comfort he could,
standing where the shot tore stone to dust.
For a time the line held firm, the Rhomaioi
answering iron with iron, fire with fire.
But hope, not courage, failed first.
Then Giustiniani faltered, wounded, borne away,
and with his going something in the defence gave way—
not the line itself, but what had held the line together.
Through the small, forgotten gate of Kerkoporta
the first invaders entered—
banner against beleaguered sky;
the towers fell, and the wall itself failed open,
not by thunderbolt, but by an unattended door.
IV
When the breach could no longer be denied,
they urged him to flee—to seek a ship, a safer shore—
but he refused to outlive the City he had served.
Casting aside the purple and the eagle—
signs of basileus kai autokratōr Rhōmaiōn—
he stripped himself of what set him apart
and stepped into the tumult like any other man.
Sword in hand, he went to where the fighting
thickened into one indistinguishable struggle,
so that no eye might easily discern
which body among the fallen had been emperor.
Later they searched for him among the dead,
found a head, perhaps his, to lift before the sultan’s gaze;
yet some would say no certain corpse was ever found,
that beneath the sealed Golden Gate stone keeps a vigil,
and that a marble emperor bides his time in sleep
until the City, once more, has walls to be defended.
Northcoast Antiquarian 