According to an Ottoman legend, the sultan [Murad II] was asleep in his palace one night when God came to him in a dream and gave him a beautiful, sweet-smelling rose to sniff. When Murad asked if he could keep it, God told him that the rose was Salonica and that he had decreed it should be his.
In fact Murad had set his heart on the city from the start. So far as he was concerned, it was not only a vital Mediterranean port, but belonged to him by right since it had already submitted to Ottoman rule. After 1422 his troops besieged it, and with the hinterland also under his control, there was little the Byzantine emperors could do. The empire itself was dying. The city’s inhabitants invited the Venetians in, thinking they at least would bolster the defences, but the situation went from bad to worse. By 1429 urban life had virtually collapsed, three-quarters of the inhabitants had already fled—many into Ottoman-controlled territories—and only ten thousand remained. Despite occasional Venetian grain convoys, food was scarce. Some defenders let themselves down by ropes to join the Turks. Others passed messages saying they wished to surrender: the pro-Ottoman faction within the walls was as powerful as it had ever been, its numbers swelled by Murad’s promises of good treatment if the city gave in.
To the aged Archbishop Symeon, the defeatism of his flock came as a shock. “They actually declared they were bent on handing over the city to the infidel,” he wrote. “Now that for me was something more difficult to stomach than ten thousand deaths.” But angry crowds demonstrated against him. When he invoked the miraculous powers of their patron Saint Dimitrios, and talked about a giant warrior on horseback coming to their aid, they heard nothing but empty promises. God had preserved the city over the centuries, he told them, “as an acropolis and guardian of the surrounding countryside.” But the Turks were outside the walls, and the villages and towns beyond were in their hands. Their mastery of the hinterland had turned the fortified city into a giant prison. Resistance meant certain enslavement. In 1429 Archbishop Symeon died, but the Venetians brought in mercenaries to prevent the defenders capitulating and the siege dragged on until in March 1430 Murad determined to end it. He left his hunting leopards, falcons and goshawks and joined his army before the city. […] For two or three days the desperate defenders managed to hold out against the assault troops and sappers. But then Murad galvanized his men. “I will give you whatever the city possesses,” he pledged them. “Men, women, children, silver and gold: only the city itself you will leave to me.” […] As ever, Murad followed the customary laws of war. By refusing to surrender peacefully, after they had been given the chance, Salonica’s inhabitants had—as they knew well—laid themselves open to enslavement and plunder. Had they been allowed to follow the path of nonresistance that most of them wanted, the city’s fate might have been less traumatic. A few months later, Ottoman troops went on to besiege the city of Jannina, and their commander, Sinan Pasha, advised the Greek archbishop to surrender peacefully “otherwise I will destroy the place to its foundations as I did in Salonica.” “I swear to you on the God of Heaven and Earth and the Prophet Mohammed,” he went on, “not to have any fear, neither of being enslaved nor seized.” The clergy and the nobility would keep their estates and privileges, “rather than as we did in Salonica ruining the churches, and emptying and destroying everything.” Jannina obeyed and remained an important centre of Hellenic learning throughout the Ottoman period: indeed one of Murad’s generals actually founded a Christian monastery there. Salonica’s fate was very different: ruined and eerily quiet, its streets and buildings lay empty.16 In the Acheiropoietos church the sultan held a victory thanksgiving service. Then he had the building turned into a mosque, and ordered a laconic inscription to be chiselled into a marble column in the north colonnade of the nave. There it survives to this day, and if your eyesight is good enough, you can still make out in the elegant Arabic script: “Sultan Murad Khan took Thessaloniki in the year 833 [=1430].”
