The Fall of Constantinople

By the middle of the fifteenth century the Byzantine Empire, heir of the Roman Empire in the East, had shrunk to Constantinople, a few islands and the Morea in southern Greece. The great city itself had lost much of its population since the Latin sack of 1204, and fields and orchards lay inside its walls. Its rulers had sought help from the West, at the price of a union between the Greek and Latin Churches agreed at the Council of Florence in 1439. Many Orthodox clergy and laypeople rejected the union, and when it was solemnly proclaimed in Hagia Sophia in December 1452 the city was deeply divided. A saying attributed to the nobleman Loukas Notaras, that he would rather see the Turkish turban in the city than the Latin mitre, captured the mood, though it may be a later invention.

Constantine XI Palaiologos had become emperor in 1449, after serving as despot in the Morea. His opponent was the young Ottoman sultan Mehmed II, who came to the throne for the second time in 1451, when he was eighteen. Mehmed saw the conquest of Constantinople as the fulfilment of an old Muslim aspiration and as the key to a united empire spanning Europe and Asia. In 1452 he built the fortress of Rumeli Hisarı on the European shore of the Bosphorus, opposite an older Ottoman castle, which allowed him to control shipping through the strait.

The siege began on 6 April 1453. Constantinople was protected on its landward side by the Theodosian walls, a double line of fortifications with a moat, which had resisted attackers for a thousand years. On the north side lay the Golden Horn, an inlet sealed by a great floating chain or boom stretched from the city to Galata, the Genoese colony on the opposite shore. Constantine had perhaps seven or eight thousand fighters, including Venetians, Genoese and other foreigners. The most famous of them was Giovanni Giustiniani Longo, a Genoese captain who took charge of the land walls. The Ottoman army was many times larger.

Mehmed’s artillery pounded the walls for weeks. Some of the largest guns were cast by Orban, a founder who had reportedly offered his services first to the emperor, who could not pay him. The defenders repaired the breaches each night with timber, earth and rubble. A small relief squadron of Genoese ships fought its way through the Ottoman fleet into the Golden Horn on 20 April, a humiliation for the sultan. Two days later Mehmed made his boldest move. His engineers laid a track of greased timbers over the hill behind Galata, and dozens of ships, contemporary accounts suggest around seventy, were hauled over land and launched into the Golden Horn behind the chain. The city now had to defend its sea walls on that side too, thinning its already stretched forces.

In the last days the defenders saw dark omens: a lunar eclipse, a sacred icon slipping from its bearers during a procession, a sudden storm and fog. On the evening of 28 May Christians of both Latin and Greek rites held a final service together in Hagia Sophia. The assault began before dawn on 29 May. After hours of fighting, Giustiniani was badly wounded and carried from the walls, and Ottoman troops broke through near the gate of Saint Romanus. Constantine was last seen fighting in the breach. The city was given over to plunder for a day; many inhabitants were killed or enslaved, while others found refuge or were later ransomed.

Mehmed entered the city the same day and went to Hagia Sophia, the great church built by Justinian in the sixth century. It was converted into a mosque, and the sultan attended Friday prayers there on 1 June. Over the following decades minarets were added and Christian images were covered rather than destroyed, which helped many mosaics to survive. In the twentieth century the building became a museum, and in 2020 it was again designated a mosque.

Mehmed made Constantinople his capital and worked to repopulate it, bringing in Muslims, Christians and Jews from across his lands. In 1454 he installed the monk Gennadios Scholarios, a leading opponent of the union with Rome, as patriarch, recognising him as head of the Orthodox community. The sultan took Roman imperial titles and saw himself as heir to the Caesars. In the West the news caused shock and calls for a new crusade, but no major expedition followed. Pope Pius II, elected in 1458, tried for years to organise one and died in 1464 at Ancona, waiting for a fleet that barely arrived. For Muslims, the conquest was celebrated as the fulfilment of a saying attributed to the Prophet Muhammad praising the commander and army that would take Constantinople, and Mehmed became known as Fatih, the Conqueror.

Because Constantine XI’s body was never identified with certainty, legends grew around him. The best known holds that as the Turks broke in, an angel rescued the emperor, turned him to marble and laid him in a cave beneath the Golden Gate, where he sleeps until the day he will rise and retake the city. Similar stories say that a priest celebrating the liturgy in Hagia Sophia walked into a wall that opened for him, and will come out to finish the service when the church is Christian again. These traditions became part of Greek popular culture and later of Greek national feeling.

Another famous story concerns the Kerkaporta, a small postern gate in the walls. According to the Greek historian Doukas, it was left unbarred during the final assault, allowing a group of Ottoman soldiers inside, whose flags on the towers caused panic. Other contemporary accounts do not mention it, and historians debate whether it decided anything; most think the breakthrough came where Giustiniani was wounded.

Modern myths are broader. The fall is often said to have ended the Middle Ages, or to have caused the Renaissance by sending Greek scholars to Italy, or the age of exploration by closing trade routes. In fact Byzantine scholars had been teaching in Italy for decades, and the search for sea routes had other causes. The fall was momentous for the Orthodox world and for the Ottomans, but it was one turning point among many.