Fall of Constantinople
Constantinople fell to Mehmed II on 29 May 1453 after a siege of fifty-three days, ending the Roman empire. What was left of that empire was the city itself and a few fragments of Greece. The population had fallen to perhaps 50,000 in a walled area built for half a million, with fields and orchards inside the walls, and the defenders numbered around 7,000 including some 2,000 foreigners, mostly Genoese and Venetian. Mehmed was twenty-one and brought perhaps 80,000 men and a siege train including a bombard cast by a Hungarian engineer who had offered his services to the emperor first and been unable to be paid. The Theodosian walls had held for a thousand years and had never faced artillery. The Byzantines closed the Golden Horn with a chain, so Mehmed had some seventy ships dragged overland on greased rollers behind Galata and put into the harbour, which forced the defenders to spread themselves further. The final assault came before dawn on 29 May in three waves, the irregulars first, then the Anatolian troops, then the janissaries. A postern gate left open and a wound to the Genoese commander Giustiniani, whose withdrawal broke the morale of the inner wall, decided it. Constantine XI died fighting and his body was never identified. The city was sacked for three days, Hagia Sophia became a mosque, and Mehmed made the ruin his capital and rebuilt it. Greek scholars fleeing west carried manuscripts with them. The date is one of the conventional markers for the end of the Middle Ages, which is a European convenience rather than anything the participants would have recognised. Mehmed took the title Kayser-i Rum, Caesar of Rome, and meant it.
- Year: 1453 CE
- Category: Military
