Fall of Constantinople
siege · 1453 · Constantinople
Ended the Roman/Byzantine Empire; symbolic apex of Ottoman ascent.
At a glance
| Type | siege |
|---|---|
| Date | 1453 |
| Location | Constantinople |
| Outcome | Ottoman victory; the Byzantine Empire fell and the city became the Ottoman capital. |
The city that fell on 29 May 1453 had been an Ottoman objective for three generations, and a Muslim objective for eight centuries: Arab armies had besieged it under the Umayyads in 674–678 and again in 717–718, and Sultan Murād II had tried and failed in 1422. What his son Mehmed II brought to the problem in 1453 was not greater zeal but better engineering and a closed sea. In 1452 he built the fortress of Rumelihisarı at the narrowest point of the Bosporus, so that no ship could reach the city from the Black Sea without his consent, and he commissioned a Hungarian gunsmith named Urban to cast artillery heavy enough to break walls that had held for a thousand years. By April the guns — some sixty-nine pieces in the Ottoman train — had been hauled from Edirne to the landward side of the city.
The defence was formidable in stone and thin in men. Constantinople's land walls ran some six kilometres in a double line behind a moat, and a sea wall with a great iron chain closed the Golden Horn; but the Emperor Constantine XI Palaiologos could field only a few thousand trained soldiers alongside armed townspeople, against an Ottoman army contemporaries numbered between sixty and eighty thousand. Western help was little and late. Hungary declined; Pope Nicholas V treated the emergency as leverage for reunifying the Orthodox and Latin churches, a bargain the people of the city rejected in the streets; Venice voted troops and galleys that arrived too slowly, and Genoa sent some seven hundred men under Giovanni Giustiniani Longo, whom Constantine put in charge of the walls.
The siege ran from early April to the end of May — some seven weeks — and turned on the water. Twice repulsed at the chain, Mehmed had his lighter vessels dragged overland on greased timber ramps from the Bosporus into the Golden Horn, and by 22 April the city was encircled on every side. The bombardment then ran without pause until the general assault, when the walls were carried near the Gate of St Romanus. Giustiniani was mortally wounded and the defence broke; Constantine XI died in the fighting, and the manner of his death — sword in hand at the breach — passed quickly into legend on both sides. Three days of plunder followed, by the convention of a city taken by storm rather than by surrender, after which Mehmed halted the sack and began to govern.
He governed as a builder rather than a destroyer, and the consequences reached far beyond the Bosporus. The capital moved from Edirne to the conquered city, which Ottomans came to call Istanbul; Hagia Sophia became a mosque; and the Orthodox patriarch was confirmed in authority over his community, the beginning of the arrangement by which the empire ruled its Christians and Jews as self-administering confessional communities. The last Byzantine remnants were absorbed within a decade — Athens by 1458, the Morea in 1460 — and the Ottoman sultans thereafter presented themselves as heirs to Rome as well as leaders of a Muslim empire, a claim that fed their later assumption of the caliphal title. In European historiography the date became a conventional marker for the end of the Middle Ages, and the migration of Greek scholars westward is often linked to the Italian Renaissance; both readings are interpretive conventions rather than settled fact, and later scholarship has questioned how much either owes to 1453 alone.