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 362 DESTRUCTION OF THE GREEK EMPIRE anything like an organised resistance in the streets is in- credible. 1 General The Turks seem, indeed, to have anticipated greater durln^haif resistance than they met with. They could not believe that the day. c ^y wag w ithout more defenders than those who had been at the walls. This, indeed, is their sole excuse for beginning what several writers describe as a general slaughter. From the entry of the army and camp-followers until midday this slaughter went on. The Turks, says Critobulus, 2 had been taunted by the besieged with their powerlessness to capture the city and were enraged at the sufferings they had undergone. During the forenoon all whom they encountered were put to the sword, women and men, old and young, of every condition. 3 The Turks slew all throughout the city whom they met in their first onslaught. 4 The statements made by the spectators of such scenes as they themselves witnessed are apt to be exaggerations, but a Turkish massacre without elements of the grossest brutality has never taken place. The declaration of Phrantzes that in some places the earth could no longer be seen on account of the multitude of dead bodies is sufficiently rhetorical to convey its own corrective. 5 So, too, is the account by Barbaro of the numbers of heads of dead Chris- tians and Turks in the Golden Horn and the Marmora being so great as to remind him of melons floating in his own Venetian canals, and of the waters being coloured with blood. 6 That many nuns and other women preferred to throw them- selves into the wells rather than fall into the hands of the Turks may be true. Their glorious successors in the Greek War of Independence, and many Armenian women during the massacres in 1895-6, chose a similar fate in preference to surrendering to Turkish captors. Probably the truth is that an indiscriminate slaughter went on only till midday. For the love of slaughter was 1 The Moscovite, xxv. The whole chapter is full of improbable statements. 2 Ch. lxi. 3 Barbaro, p. 55. 4 Thyselii Expugnatio, ch. xxvi. 5 Phrantzes, p. 291. 6 P. 57.