14 - The Horseman Meets Its End

Summary

This chapter analyzes the fate of the horseman in the aftermath of the fall of Constantinople. Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II understood the horseman’s power and strove to neutralize it soon after entering the city. In the decades before 1453, it was also widely believed to have been an anti-Ottoman talisman. At some point between May of 1453 and spring 1456 Mehmed ordered the horseman to be removed from its column. I argue that this decision was made not only because of the great symbolic value of the monument in its own right, but also in order not to complicate the transformation of Hagia Sophia into a mosque. Justinian’s bronze horseman was decoupled from Hagia Sophia and sacrificed for the sake of the building’s cultural appropriation as the mosque of Aya Sofya. The horseman is absent from official Ottoman histories, but appears in the translations of the Narrative on the Construction of Hagia Sophia produced for Mehmed II. In this retelling, the talismanic horseman has become empty-handed. This was a decisive reorientation of the Byzantine narrative. Though Şemseddin Mehmed Karamani’s testimony that the horseman was melted down in the 1450s would appear to be conclusive, in the 1550s Pierre Gilles saw and measured fragments of the horseman.