When did Constantinople fall?

Almost all that was left

By 1450 the Roman Empire of the East had shrunk to Constantinople, a few islands and part of the Peloponnese, in southern Greece, where the emperor’s brothers ruled from Mystras. The city had been taken only once before, by the Fourth Crusade in 1204 (why it held so long). Its population had shrunk too. Emperor Constantine XI could man the walls with about 7,000 defenders, some 2,000 of them foreigners, many from Genoa and Venice.

Against him came Mehmed II, sultan for the second time in 1451, at nineteen. In 1452 he built the fortress of Rumeli Hisarı on the European shore of the Bosporus to choke the strait. In 1453 he arrived with perhaps 50,000 to 80,000 men.

Fifty-three days

The siege began on April 6. Mehmed brought the biggest guns yet seen. A founder named Orban, usually called Hungarian, had cast him a bronze bombard that hurled stone balls of some 270 kilograms (600 pounds). For weeks the cannons pounded the land walls, and each night the defenders filled the breaches with timber and earth. A chain across the mouth of the Golden Horn kept the Ottoman fleet out of the harbor, so on April 22 Mehmed had ships hauled overland on greased logs, over the hill behind Galata, and launched them inside. His miners tunneled toward the walls; the defenders found the tunnels and fought them underground.

The morning of May 29

The final assault began soon after midnight on Tuesday, May 29. Wave after wave hit the walls. Then the Genoese commander, Giovanni Giustiniani, was badly wounded and carried away, and panic spread. The janissaries, the sultan’s elite infantry, forced their way in; the historian Doukas adds that a small gate, the Kerkoporta, had been left open. Constantine XI, the story goes, threw off his imperial insignia and died fighting. His body was never identified with certainty. Mehmed rode to Hagia Sophia, Justinian’s great church, and had it made a mosque.

More than a thousand years earlier, when Alaric’s Goths took the first Rome, Jerome had written from Bethlehem:

The City which had taken the whole world was itself taken.

Now the second Rome was taken too. This time it became the capital of another empire.

Why 1453 matters

Mehmed made the city his capital, and the sultans ruled from it until 1922. He took the title Kayser-i Rûm, Caesar of Rome, and let the Orthodox Church keep its patriarch, the monk Gennadios Scholarios (its names since). The last Byzantine outposts soon followed: Mystras in 1460, Trebizond on the Black Sea in 1461. With them ended a state that had called itself the Roman Empire since Augustus.

Many historians draw the line between the Middle Ages and the early modern world here, and Greek scholars fleeing west carried books and learning into the Italian Renaissance. In Greece, Tuesday is still thought an unlucky day. And there is a strange symmetry: the city was founded by a Constantine whose mother was Helena, and lost by a Constantine whose mother was Helena too.