Zlatitsa Pass, October 20, 1436
Cold rain drove sideways and soaked through wool and leather until every cloak hung heavy. The old road up the Zlatitsa pass had shed stones for years; now an ox-wagon sat sunk to the axle where the paving slumped into mud, and the whole column bunched behind it.
Constantine held his horse on the higher edge of the road and watched. The men worked with the patient anger of soldiers made into laborers, hands raw, shoulders hunched, curses swallowed because an officer was near.
One team cut saplings and jammed them under the wheels. Another drove wedges into mud and stone; the mallets rang dull in the rain, and the cart frame shivered with every blow.
When the left wheel finally shifted a finger's breadth, a man laughed once—short, startled—and then bent back to the work as if hope were an indulgence.
George rode up beside him, cloak darkened to near-black, rain beading in his beard. He did not look at the carts. He looked ahead, to where the road narrowed into the hills.
"The road is warning us," George said.
Constantine's gloves were wet through. He flexed his fingers once, slow, to keep blood moving. "It is an old road."
"It tells us we're late for the mountains," George replied.
Constantine watched an engineer slip, catch himself, and return to the pole without ceremony. "It will get worse before it gets better," he said.
George's horse shifted. He leaned forward slightly, lowering his voice as if the rain itself carried ears.
"We should have stayed in Sofia," George said. "We could have wintered there, lines secured, wagons not dragged up goat roads. This—" He nodded toward the stuck carts. "This is how we get bled by inches."
Constantine let the words settle. Sofia still clung to him, scorched grain, wet ash, quicklime in the wells. The city hadn't fought; it had simply emptied itself. You could take it in a day. You could still starve inside it, once you found there was nothing left to take.
He shifted his weight in the saddle. Cold damp had found the seam between cuirass and tunic; it sat there like a small knife. "Sofia would have been tricky, too. You said it yourself: supplies were thin. The fields stripped. The wells fouled. We would have sat behind half-broken walls and watched our fodder shrink while the enemy chose where to sting us."
George's mouth tightened at his own words thrown back. He did not deny them.
Below, someone shouted, "Now!" and the first cart lurched forward a handspan. The wheel rose from the mud with a sucking sound like something reluctant to let go. Men shoved, boots sliding. The oxen leaned into the yokes, flanks trembling. For a moment it held, and Constantine felt a sharp relief.
"We still have time," Constantine said. "Not much, but enough before the heavy winter shuts every pass."
He did not give George room to answer.
"If we stop, they choose the ground," Constantine said. "If we move, they have to answer. They will not expect us in Thrace before the season closes."
George's breath fogged faintly. "I understand the logic," he said. The concession cost him; Constantine could hear it in the way George shaped the words like he was careful not to make them sound like surrender. "I'd still prefer a more cautious road."
"Caution doesn't always mean stillness," Constantine replied.
"And if Fruzhin is ahead, all the more reason not to linger."
George murmured—half prayer, half reckoning—"I hope you are right, Constantine. The men will follow you anywhere." He paused, then added more quietly, "May God grant that it is enough."
Constantine crossed himself. "Ieros Skopos," he said.
Below, the second cart began to shift. Men laid more wood, more rope, more patience. The road yielded inch by inch. It had carried armies before; it could carry wagons again.
Shouts rose from up the line as riders pushed through the rain, Prince Thomas and General Andreas, back from scouting ahead. Thomas slid off his horse, splashing into the mud. "Brother." He bowed quickly, nodded to George, then got straight to it. "They've blocked the narrowest point of the pass, felled pines, boulders, stakes. About a mile ahead. It's rough, but it's a wall."
"Defenders?" Constantine asked, nudging his horse forward as Thomas fell in alongside on foot.
"At least a few hundred behind it," Thomas reported eagerly. "Archers on the slopes, too. No cannons in sight, just felled logs and stakes blocking the choke point." His hand went to the hilt of his sword. "If you want it forced, I can force it," he said.
Before Constantine could respond, Andreas stepped forward. "Your Majesty, one of our guides mentioned a narrow forest path half a league back," he said. "It winds southeast toward a village called Koprivshtitsa. It's no real road, just a goat track, but it might let a small force slip around the main pass entirely."
Constantine's brow furrowed as he pondered the idea. He nodded decisively. "We won't gamble the whole army on a goat track, but I want eyes on it. Send a few hundred light infantry with scouts to reconnoiter that path immediately. If it offers a route behind the Turks, secure it by dawn tomorrow."
"Yes, Majesty," Andreas said at once. He dispatched an aide at a run to organize the scouting detachment.
Thomas rolled his shoulders. "That path might help a few men, but we still have to go in and crush them," he argued. "We should attack as soon as our guns are in range. Every hour we wait could let them strengthen their works or call reinforcements."
"We'll attack soon enough, Thomas," Constantine said, raising a restraining hand. "The men need rest, and the guns need placing. We camp. At first light, the guns speak. Then we press from every side."
Thomas's knuckles whitened on his sword hilt, but he gave a curt nod. "One more night, then." He flashed a tight grin. "Just don't expect me to sleep."
George breathed a soft sigh of relief. "A sound plan, Majesty. Let the guns speak before our men bleed."
That evening, the imperial camp sat on a wet meadow below the pass. The rain eased into mist, but the wind came down hard from the heights and kept snuffing the cook-fires. Men huddled in damp cloaks and ate hardtack in silence.
In the dark, oxen and sweating gangs hauled the guns up the winding track—slow, cursing work—and by midnight eight pieces sat on a low rise with the choke in view. Constantine did not sleep until he had walked the line himself, boots sinking, counting angles and distances.
Across the gulch, faint orange points burned behind the timber wall. The enemy was there. Waiting.
At first light, the guns spoke. Flame in the mist, then the reports rolling back and forth off the cliffs until the whole pass seemed to be coughing. The barricade jumped under the blows—logs splintering, stones spilling into the ravine—and behind it, shouts rose, thin and sudden.
The Ottomans answered with what they had. A few musket shots cracked back from behind the barricade, hurried, and the balls fell short or buried themselves in the mud.
Constantine watched a section of the timber wall burst apart under a direct hit, logs and earth flung upward. Each shattered span was one less hazard his men would have to cross.
Beside him, Thomas let out a sharp whoop as another shot sent figures scrambling for cover.
"Look at them run," he said. "Give the word, brother. We can take them now."
Constantine kept his eyes on the wall. "Hold," he said.
Another shot slammed into the barricade and threw up a spray of earth and splinters.
"Every minute the guns work is fifty men I don't have to spend," Constantine added.
George stood cloaked and silent at Constantine's other side, watching the smoke drift and thin. When a heavier blast tore loose a shower of debris, he allowed himself a narrow smile. "The fewer men waiting for us behind that wall," he murmured, "the better."
That night, by lantern-light, Constantine set the shape of it. Before the main force moved, two assault parties would climb at dawn and take the ridges that ruled the pass. Aristos went right with his veteran mountaineers. Thomas took the left with Serbs and Greeks. If the horns sounded, the army would move in behind the guns. Constantine lay down for what rest he could find. Morning would be costly.
At dawn, Aristos led four hundred picked men up the right flank through dripping ferns and broken rock. Ahead, the final rise steepened. An earthen parapet cut the crest, and a few Ottoman silhouettes stood against the dull sky.
They were within a hundred paces when a shout snapped down from above. "Now," Aristos hissed, and the climb became a scramble. Arrows and stones answered at once. A man near him went backward with an arrow in his throat and slid down the wet shale; another lost his footing and vanished into the dark below.
Aristos slammed in behind a boulder as missiles hammered the slope. Horns sounded along the ridge. His men fired back, but the defenders held, and the approach funneled into a narrow throat where bodies stacked and momentum died.
He pulled them back a few yards behind a rocky spur. The slope already had its first still shapes. Above, the Ottomans jeered.
Through mist and smoke Aristos studied the right-hand face: near-vertical, choked with thorn scrub, no way for a company, but perhaps for a few. He beckoned nine men and spoke fast and low. Then he left his second to keep the pressure on the parapet and slipped into the trees with his flanking team.
They worked along the slope half-crouched, letting the noise of fire cover them, until a cleft in the rock opened beyond the enemy's right. Aristos pressed his back to cold stone, drew his sword, and nodded once.
They burst into the enemy position from the side. A handful of Ottoman soldiers whirled to face them, but Aristos was already upon them. He knocked aside a spear thrust and drove his sword into a man's gut. Around him, his men fell on the surprised defenders with ferocity. A savage melee erupted at the parapet, steel clanged, men screamed in Turkish and Greek. Pinned between the flanking attack and a renewed charge from below, the Ottoman defense crumbled.
Minutes later the parapet was theirs. Aristos stood gasping among torn brush and bodies, blood warm at his sleeve. "Form up," he rasped. "Hold the height."
Across the gorge, horns answered from the left ridge. Thomas had taken his as well. From below, the imperial camp erupted in distant cheers.
Constantine heard the horns and let out a single slow breath. Reports came quickly: Aristos wounded but alive on the right; Thomas on the left, banners raised on the crest.
With both ridges secured, Constantine did not wait. Guns were dragged forward, teams straining through mud and shattered timber while soldiers held the slopes above. As the light strengthened, the bombardment resumed, closer now, heavier. Shot raked the broken remains of the barricade and swept the choke from flank as well as front.
When the guns fell silent, the order went out. Trumpets sounded; drums took it up, and the army surged into the gorge. Andreas led the vanguard on foot at the head of the pikes, the hedge bristling as they advanced over rubble and splintered logs. Behind them came the Pyrveloi, stepping carefully through the gaps the guns had torn.
The defenders loosed a last, uneven flight of arrows from the bend of the pass. Then the musketmen leveled their pieces. The volley broke at close range—fire, smoke, and lead tearing through what remained of the line. When the echoes died, the choke was no longer held.
Andreas and the vanguard crashed into what remained of the Ottoman line. The clash was brief and ugly. Stripped of their heights and shaken by the guns, the defenders broke almost at once. The Romans pressed through, cutting down the last resistance and driving the rest out of the pass. By afternoon, the gorge was theirs. Constantine rode through it slowly, reading the cost in bodies strewn among shattered timber and stone.
Three days later, the last of the debris was cleared. With the road through the mountains finally passable for wagons and cannons, the imperial army began its slow procession out of the high pass and onto the rolling plains of Thrace.
That afternoon, as engineers made the final repairs, a band of Ottoman militia emerged from the eastern woods in a desperate ambush. Arrows and stray bullets whistled into the work parties, wounding a few men before the imperial vanguard reacted. Within moments, the nearest Romans unleashed a withering musket volley and charged, sending the ambushers fleeing in disarray. The brief attack was over almost as soon as it began.
Just before sunset on October 26, Constantine and General Andreas rode up a low bluff at the foot of the pass. Behind them, long columns of men, horses, and wagons poured out of the narrow defile, finally emerging into open country after a week in the mountains.
Andreas drew a deep breath, his eyes on the horizon. "The road to Philippopolis is open, Majesty," he said quietly.
Constantine studied the plain ahead, dusk light catching the worn lines of his face. For a moment, something like a smile touched him. "Seven days," he said. "God willing. If the roads let us."
Author note:
In 12 December 1443, during the Long Campaign, John Hunyadi attempted to force this same mountain pass rather than take the more direct route through the Trajan Gate into the Thracian plain. The decision was strategic. By advancing deep into winter, Hunyadi hoped that Sultan Murad II would be unable to summon the full strength of the Ottoman field armies, allowing a sudden descent into Thrace by an unexpected route.
Hunyadi was not without artillery. His army did bring cannon into the mountains, and these were employed against Ottoman positions in the pass. However, the guns were few, difficult to maneuver in winter conditions, and poorly suited to sustained positional reduction in steep terrain. Murad, though unable to gather a grand host, was present with a capable force and had prepared the ground well. Using terrain, weather, and defense in depth, he succeeded in holding the pass and forcing the crusader army to turn back.
In our story, the conditions are different. Constantine advances earlier in the season, before winter hardens the mountains, and without Murad or a centralized Ottoman command present at the pass. His army is not merely equipped with artillery, but organized around it, able to bring guns forward, and apply sustained fire against prepared obstacles.
The pass does fall rather easily, but it falls because the circumstances have changed. Constantine's success reflects timing, preparation, and command cohesion, not superior courage or the mere presence of cannon.