The Siege of Constantinople

The Siege of Constantinople

(Tr. Spa.-Eng. from a review in Shvoong)

 The Turks, again, are at the gates of Constantinople, the current Istanbul. The year 1453 was running its course, and the Ottomans, in an extension of the hegemonic struggles between West and East which come from the ones between Persians and Greeks through Romans and Carthaginians, Crusaders and Arabs, with Athens first, then Rome as a bastion and then Constantinople as a gateway to Europe, are back again, this time to put an end to the old imperial city.

The author of Sinuhe the Egyptian or The Etruscan, the Finnish Mika Toimi Waltari (1908-1979) writes The Dark Angel in 1975---then renamed "The Siege of Constantinople"---referring to the central character, Giovanni Angelos, that, in the form of a diary, makes us reminisce in first person the moment considered by many as the end of the Middle Ages: sultan Mehmed II's capture of the above mentioned imperial city.

Of noble, royal descent but, as in the most genuine mythology of any hero who prides, unknown to the world, Johannes Angelos distances himself from that typology of the classic tale as he renounces any form of power devoting himself to love and death without any material compensation, if at all the written words in the diary that his old servant, Manuel---picaresque imitation of other literatures more southern---will preserve.

To highlight the contrasts of this character, the author lets us know that Juan Ángel, despite having abandoned everything for the sake of Constantinople, his origin, had been the tutor of the very Mehmed II when his father, sultan Murat II, still ruled the Turks. That is why in the dissensions between Latins---Genoese and Venetians for hegemonic rivalry---, between Latins and Greeks---misgivings between ''Catholic'' and ''Orthodox''---and between the Emperor and the leaders of the city, Giovanni is a shady character that all come to doubt, and at the same time fear, because he is the only one who knows Mehmet II''s heart. That is, a character that transcends the duality of good and evil in history and still his heart dictates to him the place where to die, hence the ''angelic'' nature of his streams of thought and his sliding down the bloody scenes of a relentless siege to a city that was key to political hegemony, the gate between East and West of that age world trade at a time when new inventions in all fields were going to throw the world into its Renaissance (character Johan Grant, the ''scientific'', scholar avid of knowledge that raves between ancient knowledge and the pragmatic unstoppable inertia of time advancing, where the war industry, once again, sharpens wit for and to the homo sapien''s willingness to dominate).

The appointment with his angel, the angel of death, who always accompanied him, is fulfilled.