The fall of Constantinople

The story

A city almost alone

For more than a thousand years Constantinople had been the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire, which historians also call the Byzantine Empire. It had been founded by the emperor Constantine in 330 on the European shore of the Bosphorus, the strait that separates Europe from Asia, and for centuries it had been one of the largest and richest cities in the world. By 1453, however, very little of that empire was left: the city, with a bit of land around it, was surrounded by the lands of the Ottoman Empire, the great state of the Turks, which had spread across Asia and the Balkans.

The emperor was called Constantine XI Palaiologos. He had few soldiers: estimates speak of about seven thousand defenders, Greeks and foreigners who had come to help, especially Genoese and Venetians. On the other side was the young sultan Mehmed II, who was twenty-one and wanted to conquer the city that his predecessors had not managed to take. The exact number of his soldiers is not known: historians give tens of thousands, but with very different estimates.

The walls and the cannons

Constantinople had a formidable defence: the Theodosian Walls, built in the 5th century, were a system of three lines, with a moat, a low wall and a high wall with towers. For centuries they had driven back sieges of every kind. On the sea side, the harbour of the Golden Horn was closed by a great iron chain held up by floats, which stopped enemy ships from getting in.

Mehmed II, however, had something new: gigantic cannons. A cannon-founder of Hungarian origin, called Orban, had built for him an enormous bombard that fired very heavy stone balls. Cannons were not new, but never before had they been used with such power against such ancient walls. They began to batter the walls on 6 April 1453; at night the defenders repaired the damage with earth, wood and barrels, but the breaches kept widening.

Ships on the hill

One of the most famous feats of the siege took place on 22 April. Because the chain stopped them from entering the Golden Horn, the Turks had about seventy ships or more dragged overland, on wooden rollers greased with fat, over a hill, and lowered them into the harbour on the other side. The defenders found enemy ships in a place they believed was safe, and had to spread their few forces even thinner.

The defenders held out for more than seven weeks. An important leader was the Genoese Giovanni Giustiniani Longo, who commanded the troops at the most threatened point of the walls. When he was wounded in the final battle and left his post, many of his men were frightened.

The final assault

The decisive assault began in the early hours of 29 May 1453. The Turks attacked in successive waves: first inexperienced soldiers, then stronger troops, and finally the Janissaries, the sultan's elite soldiers. At some point the Turks managed to get into the city and the walls gave way. A legend says that a small gate, called the Kerkoporta, was left open by mistake, but historians do not know whether that is true.

Constantine XI died fighting: his body was never identified for certain, and this fed many legends, including one that an angel had saved him and turned him into marble. The city was plundered for three days, according to the custom of the time, then Mehmed II rode into the great basilica of Hagia Sophia, which was turned into a mosque. From then on the sultan was called Fatih, “the Conqueror”, and Constantinople became the capital of the Ottoman Empire. The name Istanbul, of Greek origin, was officially adopted only in the 20th century.