The Siege

Book by Kadare Ismail

As winter fell away and the Sultan’s envoys departed, we realised that war was our ineluctable fate. They had pressured us in every way to accept being vassals of the Sultan. First they used flattery, promising us a part in governing their vast empire. Then they accused us of being renegades in the pay of the Frankish knights, that is to say, slaves of Europe. Finally, as was to be expected, they made threats.

You seem mighty sure of your fortresses, they said to us, but even if they are as sturdy as you think, we’ll throttle you with an altogether more fearsome iron band – hunger and thirst. At each season of harvest and threshing, the only seeded field you’ll see will be the sky, and your only sickle the moon.

And then they left. All through March their couriers galloped as fast as the wind bearing messages to the Sultan’s Balkan vassals, telling them either to persuade us to give in, or else to cut off all relations with us. As was to be expected, all were obliged to take the latter course.

We were alone and knew that sooner or later they would come. Many times in the past we had faced attacks from our enemies, but lying in wait of the mightiest army the world had ever known was a different matter. Our own minds were perpetually abuzz, but our prince, George Castrioti, was preoccupied beyond easy imagining. The inland castles and coastal keeps were ordered to repair their watchtowers and above all to build up stocks of arms and supplies. We did not yet know from which direction they would come, but in early June we heard that they had begun to march along the old Roman road, the Via Egnatia, so they were heading straight towards us.

One week later, as fate decreed that our castle would be the first defence against the invasion, the icon of the Virgin from the great church at Shkodër was brought to us. A hundred years before it had given the defenders of Durrës the strength to repulse the Normans. We all gave thanks to Our Immaculate Lady and felt calmer and stronger for it.

Their army moved slowly. It crossed our border in mid-June. Two days later George Castrioti came with Count Musaka to inspect the garrison one last time, and to give it his blessing. After issuing final instructions, he left the castle on Sunday afternoon, followed by his escort and the officers’ womenfolk and children, so as to place them in safety in the mountains.

We walked alongside them for a while without speaking. Then we made our adieus with much feeling and went back into the keep. From look-outs on our towers we watched them climb up to the Plain of the Cross, then we saw them re-emerge on the Evil Slope and finally disappear into the Windy Ravine. Then we closed the heavy outer doors, and the fortress seemed to have gone mute now that we could no longer hear the voices of our youngsters inside it. We also battened down the inner sets of doors and let silence reign over us.

On June 18, at daybreak, we heard the tolling of the bell. The sentinel on the East Tower announced that a yellowish cloud could be seen in the far distance. It was the dust kicked up by their horses.


Chapter One

The first Turkish troops came beneath the walls of the fortress on June 18. They spent the day pitching camp. By evening the entire army had still not arrived. New units kept on coming in. A thick layer of dust lay on men, shields, flags and drums, horses and wagons, and on the camels laden with bronze and heavy equipment. As soon as each marching group came on to the plain that lay before the garrison, officers from a special battalion would allocate a specific camping site, and the weary soldiers, under orders from their leaders, would busy themselves with setting up the tents before collapsing inside them, half-dead from fatigue.

Ugurlu Tursun Pasha, the commander-in-chief, stood alone outside his pink pavilion. He was watching the sun set. The huge camp throbbed with the noise of horseshoes and a thousand voices, and with its long lines of tents, it looked to him like a giant octopus which would stretch out one tentacle after another and slowly but surely encircle and suffocate the castle. The nearest tents were less than a hundred paces from the ramparts, the furthest were beyond the horizon. The Pasha’s lieutenants had insisted his pavilion be placed at least a thousand paces from the castle walls. But he had refused to be so far away. Some years earlier, when he had been still a young man and of less elevated rank, he had often slept less than fifty paces from the ramparts, almost at the foot of the besieged citadel. Later on, however, in successive wars and sieges, as he rose in rank, the colour of his tent and its distance from the walls had changed in tandem. It was now pitched at a distance slightly more than half of what his lieutenants recommended, that is, at six hundred paces. That was a lot less than a thousand, all the same.

The Pasha sighed. He often did that when he took up quarters before a fortress that had to be taken. It was a reflex prompted by the first impression, always the deepest, before he became accustomed to the situation – it was rather like getting used to a woman. Each of his apprehensions began the same way, and they always also ended with another sigh, a sigh of relief, when he cast his last glance at a vanquished fortress, waiting, like a small and dusky widow, for the order for restoration, or for final demolition.

On this occasion, the citadel that soared up before him looked particularly gloomy, like most of the fortresses of the Christians. There was something odd, or even sinister, in the shape and lay-out of its towers. He had had that same impression two months earlier, when the surveyors responsible for planning the campaign had brought him drawings of the structure. He had spread out the charts on his knees many times, for hours on end, after dinner, when everyone else in his great house at Bursa was sleeping. He knew every detail of the lay-out by heart, and yet, now that he was at last seeing it with his own eyes, it aroused in him a sense of foreboding.

He glanced up at the cross on the top of the citadel’s church. Then at the fearsome banner, the two-headed black eagle whose outline he could barely make out. The vertical drop beneath the East Tower, the wasteland around the gallows, the crenellated keep, all these other sights gradually grew dark. He raised his eyes to take another look at the cross, which seemed to him to give off an eerie glow.

The moon had not yet risen. It struck him as rather odd that the Christians, having seen Islam take possession of the moon, had not promptly made their own emblem the sun, but had taken instead a mere instrument of torture, the cross. Apparently they weren’t as clever as people claimed. But they had been even less bright in times when they believed in several gods.

The sky was now black. If everything was decided up on high, why did Allah put them through so many trials, why did he allow them to spill so much blood? To one camp He had given ramparts and iron doors to defend itself, and to the other, ladders and ropes to try to overcome them, and He was content just to be a spectator of the ensuing butchery.

But the Pasha didn’t rebel against fate and he turned around to look at his own camp. The plain was gradually being drowned in darkness and the myriad white tents appeared to hover above the ground like a bank of fog. He could see the different corps of the army laid out according to the plan that had been agreed. From where he was standing, he could see the snow-white flags of the janissaries, and the copper cauldron they hung on top of a tall pole. The raiders, or akinxhis, were taking their horses to drink in the nearby stream. Further on lay the endless tents of the azabs, as the infantry units were called; beyond them were the tents of the eshkinxhis, the cavalry recruited for this campaign; then, further on still, the tents of the swordsmen known as dalkiliç, then the quarters of the serden geçti, the soldiers of death, then the müslüman or Muslim troops, and the prettier abodes of the sipahi, the regular cavalry. Spread out behind them were the Kurdish units, then the Persians, the Tartars, the Caucasians and the Kalmyks, and, even further off, where the commander’s eye could no longer make out any clear shapes, there must have been the motley horde of the irregular volunteers, the exact number of whom was known to no man. Everything was gradually falling into order. A large part of the army was already sleeping. The only noise to be heard was the sound of quartermasters unloading supplies from the camel trains. Crates of bronze pieces, cauldrons, innumerable sacks bursting with victuals, gourds of oil and honey, fat cartons full of all kinds of equipment, iron bars, stakes, forks, hempen ropes with hooks on their ends, clubs, whetstones, bags of sulphur, and a whole array of metal tools he could not even name – all now came to rest in growing piles on the ground.

At the moment the army was swathed in darkness but at the crack of dawn it would shimmer like a Persian carpet as it spread itself out in all directions. Plumes, tents, manes, white and blue flags, and crescents – hundreds and hundreds of brass, silver, and silk crescents – would burst into flower. The pageant of colour would make the citadel look even blacker beneath its symbolic instrument of torture, the cross. He had come to the end of the earth to topple that sign.

In the deepening silence the sound of the azabs at work on the ditches became more noticeable. He was well aware that many of his officers were cursing through their teeth and hoping that as he was himself half-dead from fatigue he would give the order to halt work on the drains. He clenched his jaw just as he had when he had first spoken about latrines at a meeting of the high command. An army, he said, before it was a marching horde, o...