What would it have been like to be a soldier in the siege of Constantinople by the Ottoman Turks?

A Byzantine soldier would have lacked confidence inside,but be determined to fight to the last (as they did).

Morale was low - little help arrived from Europe,and some Italian ships even left before the siege began, weakening the strength of the defenders.There was also a split in public opinion over whether union with the Catholic Church was justified in order to receive military help from Europe (which never arrived anyway).

The Ottomans had a huge army,heavy artillery that battered breaches in the previously impregnable Theodosian Walls,and when the Sultan was able to build a causeway that enabled his ships to be dragged overland and launched into the Golden Horn,even the most naive or confident Byzantine soldier must have known the end was near.

The Ottoman strategy was to cut off the city from outside help,and then use heavy artillery to batter a breach in the walls and take the city by storm.However,until the final assault,all these attacks were beaten off with heavy Turk casualties.As the Turks removed their dead during attacks,and the Byzantines did the same to avoid an outbreak of disease,there probably wasn't any smell of rotting corpses during the battle.

Black powder weapons - the Turks used a lot of artillery,and the defenders had some troops armed with handguns - produced a lot of thick black smoke which quickly produced a pall which hung over a battlefield,so an individual soldier wouldn't have been able to see much other than what was immediately in front of him during combat.The rest of the time,he would have seen the encampment of the huge Ottoman army (which,even at its smallest estimate,outnumbered the defenders by more than 10 to 1.)

So,altogether,being a soldier during the siege would have been increasingly depressing as time wnt on and it became clear that the city would eventually fall.

If you have textbooks giving you facts then you should have no trouble finding out what tactics were used in a Medieval siege.

As for smells: Sewage, rancid meat (death), B.O. and apparently used gunpowder smelled like rotten eggs.

Sights: Byzantium was all about the opulence of Orthodox Christianity with mosaics and bronze robots. The crescent moon and star was their symbol, not the Muslims'. It would have looked like the Kremlin smashed to bits and full of refugees.

Mood: Byzantium was suffering a crisis of faith near its end. The Iconoclasts were destroying their artworks in the belief that the Muslims had won the favour of God with their "graven images" rule. Any soldier would act like a professional, but internally he would either be (a) beside himself with indignation that the Muslim's were winning, (b) in despair that he was following the wrong faith or (c) excited at his chance to die a martyr in this first phase of the Apocalypse, believing that he would be reborn with supernatural powers very soon.

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