Fall of Constantinople

Background

By 1453 the Byzantine Empire, heir of the eastern Roman Empire, had shrunk to Constantinople, a few nearby towns and part of the Peloponnese. The Ottoman Turks had crossed into Europe a century earlier, and their capital, Edirne, lay west of the city. Mehmed II became sultan in 1451 at the age of nineteen and set out to take Constantinople. In 1452 he built the fortress of Rumeli Hisarı on the Bosphorus north of the city, and in November its guns sank a Venetian ship that refused to stop. Emperor Constantine XI Palaiologos appealed to the West for help, but little came. The Genoese soldier Giovanni Giustiniani Longo arrived in January 1453 with 700 men, and Venetian ships and crews in the harbor joined the defense. A count ordered by the emperor found fewer than 5,000 Greeks fit to fight, and with foreigners the defenders numbered perhaps 7,000 to 8,000. Estimates of the Ottoman army run from about 50,000 to 80,000 fighting men, and contemporary claims were much higher. The city's strength was its fifth-century land walls, a double wall with towers and a moat running about six kilometers from the Sea of Marmara to the Golden Horn. A boom of chain closed the Golden Horn to enemy ships.

The Battle

The Ottoman guns opened fire in early April. They broke down parts of the outer wall every day, and every night the defenders filled the gaps with timber, earth and barrels. An assault on 18 April at the valley of the Lycus was beaten off. On 20 April four Christian ships fought their way through the Ottoman fleet into the harbor. Two days later Mehmed had about seventy ships dragged overland on greased rollers behind Galata and launched into the Golden Horn, which stretched the defenders even thinner. Serbian miners dug tunnels toward the walls, and the defenders, directed by an engineer called John Grant, found and destroyed them. The final assault began after midnight on 29 May. Mehmed sent in waves of irregular troops, then Anatolian regiments and finally the Janissaries. Giustiniani was badly wounded and carried to a ship, and the defense at the main breach collapsed. The Janissaries broke into the city. A story that a small gate called the Kerkoporta had been left open may be legend. Constantine XI died fighting, and his body was never certainly identified.

Weapons

The siege was decided mainly by gunpowder. The Ottomans brought dozens of guns, the largest being the great Bombard cast by Orban, which fired stones weighing several hundred kilograms. Ottoman archers with the Ottoman Composite Bow swept the walls, and the Janissaries carried bows, swords and some firearms. The Genoese and Venetians fought with the Crossbow and early handguns descended from the Hand Cannon. The defenders used incendiaries, sometimes called Greek Fire, against ships and siege works, and the Ottomans also brought some Trebuchet engines.

Aftermath

Mehmed allowed his troops to sack the city, then entered it himself and turned the great church of Hagia Sophia into a mosque. He made Constantinople his capital, repopulated it and was remembered as Fatih, 'the Conqueror'. The last Byzantine territories fell by 1461. The fall shocked Latin Europe, and it is often used to mark the end of the Middle Ages. It opened a long era of the Ottoman Wars in Europe, and it showed that even the strongest medieval walls could not stand against heavy guns.