Effective Christian Prayer

EFFECTIVE CHRISTIAN PRAYER

AN EXAMPLE FROM HISTORY

THE AGE OF CALAMITY, Time-Life Books, pages 68-69.

Once the Crusader menace was removed, Bajazet resumed the siege of Constantinople, intending to press it to a full-scale assault. Penned behind their walls, unable to work their fields outside the city, the inhabitants survived only because the Ottomans lacked the naval forces that would have prevented food convoys from getting through. Many died, though, and others surrendered to the Turks.

Manuel prayed constantly for relief: "Lord Jesus Christ, let it not come about that the great multitude of Christian peoples should hear it said that it was during the days of the emperor Manuel that the city, with all its holy and venerable monuments of the faith, was delivered to the infidel." He sent pleas for help to all the crowned heads of Europe. Again only the French court offered practical support, sending a small force under Marshall Boucicaut, one of the survivors of Nicopolis, who inflicted several minor defeats on Ottoman forces in 1399. But Boucicaut knew that a much greater effort was needed if Constantinople was to be saved, and he persuaded Manuel to go and argue his case in person before the rulers of western Europe. In December 1399, the emperor set out, beginning a three-year round of the Italian, French, and English courts that brought him much sympathy and precious little else.

While he was away, Bajazet prepared to administer the final blow to Constantinople. By 1402, after eight years' siege, the city was on the point of collapse. Every day more of its inhabitants left the shelter of its walls to give themselves up; the small French contingent left by Boucicaut could not find enough food in the city and had to provision themselves by raiding outside its walls. Bajazet was so confident that the city would soon be in his hands that he had begun allotting its great buildings to his officers, reserving the church of Saint Sophia for his own use as a palace. But at the eleventh hour, his ambitions were thwarted. Bajazet lifted his blockade; all troops in Europe were rushed to Asia. A new and terrible conqueror was advancing into Anatolia from the east.

The name of this dreadful foe was Tamerlane. Styling himself "the scourge of God" and campaigning with legendary ferocity, he had carved out the vast Mongol Empire in central Asia in the last three decades of the fourteenth century, and in the summer of 1402, he was to overwhelm the Ottomans at Ankara in Anatolia.