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hand on his shoulder and tells him he is under arrest. Pizarro too longs for immortality, he too longs to conquer the land of gold, and perhaps he is not sorry to know that so bold a predecessor will be out of the way. Pedrarias the governor opens the trial for alleged rebellion , and it goes ahead fast and in defiance of justice. A few days later Vasco Núñez de Balboa and the most loyal of his companions go to the block. The executioner’s sword flashes, and in a second, as his head rolls, the first human eyes ever to see both the oceans that embrace our earth at the same time are extinguished for ever.

THE CONQUEST OF BYZANTIUM

    29 May 1453

     

THE DISCOVERY OF DANGER
    On 5th February 1451, a secret messenger goes to Asia Minor to see the eldest son of Sultan Murad, the twenty-one- year-old Mahomet, bringing him the news that his father is dead. Without exchanging so much as a word with his ministers and advisers the prince, as wily as he is energetic, mounts the best of his horses and whips the magnificent pure-blooded animal the 120 miles to the Bosporus, crossing to the European bank immediately after passing Gallipoli. Only there does he disclose the news of his father’s death to his most faithful followers. He swiftly gathers together a select troop of men, bent as he is from the first on putting an end to any other claim to the throne, and leads them to Adrianople, where he is indeed recognized without demur as the master of the Ottoman Empire. His very first action shows Mahomet’s fierce determination as a ruler. As a precaution, he disposes of any rivals of his own blood in advance by having his young brother, still a minor, drowned in his bath, and immediately afterwards—once again giving evidence of his forethought and ruthlessness—sends the murderer whom he employed to do the deed to join the murdered boy in death.
    In Byzantium, they are horrified to hear that this young and passionate prince Mahomet, who is avid for fame, has succeeded the more thoughtful Murad as Sultan of the Turks.A hundred scouts have told them that the ambitious young man has sworn to get his hands on the former capital of the world, and that in spite of his youth he spends his days and nights in strategic consideration of this, his life’s great plan. At the same time, all the reports unanimously agree on the extraordinary military and diplomatic abilities of the new Padishah. Mahomet is both devout and cruel, passionate and malicious, a scholar and a lover of art who reads his Caesar and the biographies of the ancient Romans in Latin, and at the same time a barbarian who sheds blood as freely as water. This man, with his fine, melancholy eyes and sharp nose like a parrot’s beak, proves to be a tireless worker, a bold soldier and an unscrupulous diplomat all in one, and those dangerous powers all circle around the same idea: to outdo by far with his own deeds his grandfather Bajazet and his father Murad, who first showed Europe the military superiority of the new Turkish nation. But his initial bid for more power, it is generally known, is felt, will be to take Byzantium, the last remaining jewel in the imperial crown of Constantine and Justinian.
    That jewel lies exposed to a fist determined to seize it, well within reach. Today you can easily walk through the Byzantine Empire, those imperial lands of Eastern Rome that once spanned the world, stretching from Persia to the Alps and on to the deserts of Asia, and it will take you only three days, whereas in the past it took many months to travel them; sad to say, nothing is now left of that empire but a head without a body—Constantinople, the city of Constantine, old Byzantium. Furthermore, only a part of that Byzantium stillbelongs to the emperor, the Basileus, and that is today’s city of Istanbul, while Galata has already fallen to the Genoese and all the land beyond the city wall to the Turks. The realm of the last Roman emperor is only the size of a plate, merely a