Everything about Fall Of Constantinople totally explained
|combatant2=
Ottoman Sultanate
|commander1=
Constantine XI †,
Loukas Notaras,
Giovanni Giustiniani †
26 ships
|strength2= 80,000-200,000
126 ships
|casualties1=4,000 dead
10,000 civilian dead|casualties2= unknown but heavy
|notes=
}}
Fall of Constantinople refers to the capture of the Byzantine Empire's capital by the
Ottoman Empire on Tuesday,
May 29,
1453 (Julian Calendar). The event marked the end of the political independence of the millennium-old
Byzantine Empire, which was by then already fragmented into several
Greek monarchies. Most importantly, the fall of
Constantinople accelerated the scholarly exodus of
Byzantine Greeks which caused the influx of
Classical Greek Studies into the
European Renaissance. In addition, it played a crucial role in Ottoman political stability and its subsequent expansion in the Eastern Mediterranean and the
Balkans. The date of the event is one of the frequently
proposed events marking the end of the
Middle Ages as a historical period.
State of the Byzantine Empire
In the approximately 1,100 years of the existence of the
Byzantine Empire, Constantinople had been besieged many times but had been captured only once, during the
Fourth Crusade in 1204. The crusaders had most likely not intended to conquer Byzantium from the beginning, and an unstable
Latin state was established in Constantinople. The Byzantine Empire fell apart into a number of Greek successor states, notably
Nicaea,
Epirus and
Trebizond. The Greek states fought as allies against the Latin establishments but also as rivals against each other over the Byzantine throne. The Nicaean Greeks were the first to re-conquer Constantinople from the Latins in 1261. In the following two centuries, the much-weakened Byzantine Empire was facing threats from the Latins, the Serbians, the Bulgarians and most importantly, the Ottoman Turks.
In 1453 the empire consisted of little more than the city of Constantinople itself and a portion of the
Peloponnese (centered on the fortress of
Mystras). The
Empire of Trebizond, a completely independent
successor state formed in the aftermath of the Fourth Crusade also survived on the coast of the
Black Sea.
Preparations
When Sultan
Murad II was succeeded by his son
Mehmed II in early
1451, it was widely believed that the new Sultan would turn out to be an incapable ruler who could pose no great threat to Christian possessions in the Balkans and the Aegean. This belief was reinforced by Mehmed's friendly assurances to envoys that were sent to him at the assumption of his reign. His promise to respect Byzantine territorial integrity, however, soon proved false. During the spring and summer of
1452, Mehmed II, whose great grandfather
Bayezid I had previously built a
fortress on the
Asian side of the
Bosporus called
Anadolu Hisarı, now built a second fortress outside the walls of Constantinople on the
European side, which would increase Turkish influence on the straits. A specialist in defending walled cities, he was immediately given the overall command of the defense of the land walls by the emperor. Around the same time, the captains of the Venetian ships which happened to be present in the Golden Horn offered their services to the Emperor, barring contrary orders from Venice, and Pope Nicholas undertook to send three ships laden with provisions, which set sail near the end of March. In Venice, meanwhile, deliberations were taking place concerning the kind of assistance the Republic would lend to Constantinople. The Senate decided upon sending a fleet, but there were delays, and when it finally set out late in April, it was already too late for it to be able to partake in the battle. Undermining Byzantine morale further, 7 Italian ships with around 700 men slipped out of the capital at the same moment when Giovanni arrived, men who had sworn to defend the capital. At the same time, Constantine's attempts to appease the Sultan with gifts ended in the execution of the former's ambassadors - even Byzantine diplomacy couldn't save the city. The city had about 20 km of walls (
Theodosian Walls: 5.5 km; sea walls along the
Golden Horn: 7 km; sea walls along the
Sea of Marmara: 7.5 km), probably the strongest set of fortified walls in existence at the time. The walls had recently been repaired (under
John VIII) and were in fairly good shape, giving the defenders sufficient reason to believe that they could hold out until help from the West arrived. In addition, the defenders were relatively well-equipped. The defenders also had a fleet of 26 ships: 5 from Genoa, 5 from Venice, 3 from Venetian Crete, 1 from Ancona, 1 from Spain, 1 from France, and about 10 Byzantine. The Ottomans, on the other hand, had a larger force. It was thought to number around 100,000 men, including 20,000
Janissaries; recent estimates span between 80,000 soldiers and 5,000
Janissaries, and 150,000 soldiers, including mounted troops and 6,000-10,000
Janissaries. Contemporary witnesses of the siege, who tend to exaggerate the military power of the Sultan, provide higher numbers the Florentine merchant Jacopo Tedaldi and the Great Logothete
George Sphrantzes: 200,000; the Cardinal
Isidore of Kiev and the Archbishop of
Mytilene Leonardo di Chio: 300,000). Mehmed also built a fleet to besiege the city from the sea (partially manned by Greek sailors from Gallipoli). Contemporary estimates of the strength of the Ottoman fleet span between about 100 ships (Tedaldi), 200-250 (Isidore of Kiev,) to 430 (Sphrantzes
According to Nicolle (2000), the idea that Constantinople was inevitably doomed is wrong, and the overall situation wasn't as one-sided as a simple glance at a map might suggest.
Equipment and strategies
Prior to the siege of Constantinople it was known that the Ottomans had the ability to cast medium-sized cannon, but the range of some pieces they were able to put to field far surpassed the defenders' expectations. Instrumental to this Ottoman advancement in arms production was a somewhat mysterious figure by the name of
Orban, a Hungarian (though some suggest he was German). The master founder initially tried to sell his services to the Byzantines, who were unable to secure the funds needed to hire him. He then offered his skills to the sultan. He guaranteed Mehmed that he could cast cannons powerful enough to break down the "walls of Babylon", implying that the greatest fortifications couldn't be spared.. Having previously established a large foundry approximately 150 miles away, Mehmed now had to undergo the painstaking process of transporting his massive pieces of artillery. Orban's giant cannon was said to have been accompanied by a crew of 60 oxen and over 400 men. As their numbers were insufficient to occupy the walls in their entirety, it had been decided that only the outer walls would be manned. Constantine and his Greek troops guarded the Mesoteichon, the middle section of the land walls, where they were crossed by the river Lycus. This section was considered the weakest spot in the walls and an attack was feared here most. Guistiniani was stationed to the north of the emperor, at the Charisian Gate and the Myriandrion; later during the siege, he was shifted to the Mesoteichon to join Constantine, leaving the Myriandron to the defense of the Bocchiardi brothers. Minotto and his Venetians were stationed in the
Blachernae palace, together with Teodoro Caristo, the Langasco brothers, and Archbishop Leonardo di Chio. To the left of the emperor, further south, were the commanders Cataneo, with Genoese troops, and Theophilus Palaeologus, who guarded the Pegae Gate with Greek soldiers. The section of the land walls from the Pegae Gate to the Golden Gate (itself guarded by a certain Genoese called Manuel) was defended by the Venetian Filippo Contarini, while Demetrius Cantacuzenus had taken position on the southernmost part of the Theodosian wall. The sea walls were manned more sparsely, with Jacobo Contarini at
Stoudion, a makeshift defense force of Greek monks to his left hand, and prince Orhan at the Harbour of Eleutherius. Péré Julia was stationed at the Great Palace with Genoese troops; Cardinal Isidore of Kiev guarded the tip of the peninsula near the boom. The sea walls at the southern shore of the
Golden Horn were defended by Venetian and Genoese sailors under Gabriele Trevisano. Two tactical reserves were kept behind in the city, one in the Petra district just behind the land walls and one near the
Church of the Holy Apostles, under the command of
Lucas Notaras and Nicephorus Palaeologus, respectively. The Genoese Alviso Diedo commanded the ships in the harbour. Although the Byzantines also had cannons, they were much smaller than those of the Ottomans and the
recoil tended to damage their own walls.
Siege of the city
At the beginning of the siege, Mehmed sent out some of his best troops to reduce the remaining Byzantine strongholds outside the city of Constantinople. The fortress of Therapia on the Bosphorus and a smaller castle at the village of Studius near the Sea of Marmora were taken within a few days. The
Princes' Islands in the Sea of Marmora were taken by Admiral Baltoghlu's fleet.
Mehmed's massive cannon fired on the walls for weeks, but due to its imprecision and extremely slow rate of reloading the Byzantines were able to repair most of the damage after each shot, limiting the cannon's effect.
Meanwhile, despite some probing attacks, the Ottoman fleet under
Suleiman Baltoghlu couldn't enter the
Golden Horn due to the the Byzantines had laid across the entrance, and although one of its main tasks was to prevent any ships from outside from entering the Golden Horn, on 20 April a small flotilla of four Christian ships managed to slip in after some heavy fighting, an event which strengthened the morale of the defenders and caused embarrassment to the Sultan..
Mehmed offered to lift the siege if they gave him the city. When this was declined, Mehmed planned to overpower the walls by sheer force, knowing that the weak Byzantine defense would be worn out before he ran out of troops. Around this time, Mehmed had a final council with his senior officers. Here he encountered some resistance; one of his Viziers, the veteran
Halil Pasha, who had always disapproved of Mehmed's plans to conquer the city, now admonished him to abandon the siege in the face of recent adversity. Halil was overruled by Zaganos Pasha, who insisted on an immediate attack, an advice which the Sultan was glad to follow. Suspected of having been bribed by the Byzantines, Halil Pasha was put to death later that year.
On
May 22, 1453, the moon, symbol of Constantinople, rose in dark
eclipse, fulfilling a prophecy on the city's demise. Four days later, the whole city was blotted out by a thick fog, a condition unknown in that part of the world in May. When the fog lifted that evening, a strange light was seen playing about the dome of the
Hagia Sophia, and from the city walls lights were seen in the countryside to the West, far behind the Turkish camp. The light around the dome was interpreted by some as the
Holy Spirit departing from the Cathedral, while there was a distant hope that the lights were the campfires of the troops of
John Hunyadi who had come to relieve the city.
The following day a small Venetian ship of 12 entered the Capital and reported to the Emperor that no Venetian relief fleet was on its way after having searched the Aegean. Nonetheless the Emperor was able to receive the aid of the 12 in the defense of the city.
Final assault
Mehmed called a war council on 26 May and at his tent declared that the siege had gone on long enough. Preparations were to be made in the evening and continue on into the next day on the 27th. Prior to this the Ottomans had tried to starve the city and make notable breaches in the walls with artillery, occasionally testing the sea walls with his land-hauled fleet.
On May 28, as the Ottoman army prepared for the final assault, large-scale religious processions were held in the city. In the evening a last solemn ceremony was held in the Hagia Sophia, in which the Emperor and representatives of both the Latin and Greek church partook, together with nobility from both sides. Shortly after midnight the attack began. The first wave of attackers, the
azabs (auxiliaries), were poorly trained and equipped, and were meant only to kill as many defenders as possible. The second assault, consisting largely of
Anatolians, focused on a section of the
Blachernae walls in the northwest part of the city, which had been partially damaged by the cannon. This section of the walls had been built much more recently, in the eleventh century, and was much weaker; the crusaders in 1204 had broken through the walls there. The Ottoman attackers also managed to break through, but were just as quickly pushed back out by the defenders. The Christians also managed for a time to hold off the third attack by the Sultan's elite
Janissaries, but the Genoese general in charge of the land troops, Giustiniani was carried to
Chios, where he succumbed to his wounds a few days later.
With Giustiniani's Genoese troops retreating into the city and towards the harbour, Constantine and his men, now left to their own devices, kept fighting and managed to hold off the attackers for a while. At this point, some historians suggest that the
Kerkoporta gate in the
Blachernae section had been left unlocked, and the Ottomans soon discovered this mistake. The Ottomans rushed in. Around the same time, the defenders were being overwhelmed at several points in Constantine's section. When Turkish flags were seen flying above the Kerkoporta, a panic ensued and the defense collapsed. It is said that Constantine, throwing aside his purple regalia, led the final charge against the oncoming Ottomans, dying in the ensuing battle in the streets like his soldiers, although his ultimate fate remains unknown.
After the initial assault, the Ottoman army fanned out along the main thoroughfare of the city, the Mese, past the great forums, and past the
Church of the Holy Apostles, which Mehmed II wanted to provide a seat for his newly appointed patriarch which would help him better control his Christian subjects. Mehmed II had sent an advance guard to protect key buildings such as the Holy Apostles, as he didn't wish to establish his new capital in a thoroughly devastated city.
The Army converged upon the Augusteum, the vast square that fronted the great church of Hagia Sophia whose bronze gates were barred by a huge throng of civilians inside the building, hoping for divine protection at this late hour. After the doors were breached, the troops separated the congregation according to what price they might bring on the slave markets. A few of the elderly and some infants were summarily slain with a commercial ruthlessness.
There are many legends in Greece surrounding the Fall of Constantinople. One of them holds that two priests saying
divine liturgy over the crowd disappeared into the cathedral's walls as the first Turkish soldiers entered. According to the legend, the priests will appear again on the day Constantinople returns to Christian hands. Another legend refers to the
Marble King, Constantine XI, holding that, when the Ottomans entered the city, an angel rescued the emperor, turned him into marble and placed him in a cave under the earth near the Golden Gate, where he waits to be brought to life again (a variant of the
sleeping hero legend)..
Byzantine historian
George Sphrantzes was in the city, and witnessed the fall of Constantinople. He later recalled in his chronicle about the fall of the city, what happened at the end of the third day of the conquest:
On the third day after the fall of our city, the Sultan celebrated his victory with a great, joyful triumph. He issued a proclamation: the citizens of all ages who had managed to escape detection were to leave their hiding places throughout the city and come out into the open, as they were remain free and no question would be asked. He further declared the restoration of houses and property to those who had abandoned our city before the siege, if they returned home, they'd be treated according to their rank and religion, as if nothing had changed.
Far from being in its heyday, by then, Constantinople was severely depopulated as a result of the general economic and territorial decline of the empire following its partial recovery from the disaster of the Fourth Crusade inflicted on it by the Christian army two centuries before. Therefore, the city in 1453 was a series of walled villages separated by vast fields encircled in whole by the fifth-century
Theodosian walls. When the Ottoman troops first broke through the defenses, many of the leading citizens of these little townlets submitted their surrender to Mehmed's generals
Scholars consider the Fall of Constantinople as a key event ending the
Middle Ages and starting the
Renaissance because of the end of the old religious order in Europe and the use of cannon and gunpowder. The fall of Constantinople and general encroachment of the Turks in that region also severed the main overland trade link between Europe and Asia, and as a result more Europeans began to seriously consider the possibility of reaching
Asia by sea.
Third Rome
With Byzantium considered the continuation of the Roman Empire, or the "Second Rome", the fall of Constantinople led competing factions to lay claim to being the "
Third Rome". The Papal States are described by a Russian monk as the "third...still standing", counting Moscow and the emerging power of the Russians as the fourth. Russian claims to Byzantine heritage clashed with those of the Ottoman empire's own claim. In Mehmed's view, he was the successor to the Roman Emperor, declaring himself
Kayser-i Rum, literally "
Caesar of Rome", that is, of the Roman Empire, though he was remembered as "the Conqueror", founder of a political system that survived until
1922 with the establishment of the
Republic of Turkey that has since held Constantinople (renamed Istanbul) but moved the capital of the Turkish state to
Ankara. Such conflict in ideology only stimulated warfare between the two countries, with the 18th and 19th century seeing Russian armies approach slowly closer to Constantinople.
Stefan Dušan, Tsar of
Serbia, and
Ivan Alexander, Tsar of
Bulgaria both made similar claims, regarding themselves as legitimate heirs to the Byzantine Empire. Other potential claimants, such as the
Republic of Venice and the
Holy Roman Empire have disintegrated into history. The
Papal States were the final remaining claimant. Forged as the "Rome-Ravenna" corridor after Emperor Justinian's conquests, and later placed under Frankish protection, it could claim Byzantine descent until its conquest in 1870 by Victor Emanuel.
Aftermath
The loss of the city was a massive blow to Christendom; the Pope called for an immediate counter-attack in the form of a crusade, but when no European monarch was willing to lead the crusade, the Pope himself decided to go; his early death eliminated the possibility of a counter-attack.
With Constantinople beneath his belt, Mehmed II had acquired a great, rich city albeit one in decline due to years of war. The Capital allowed the Turks to establish a permanent supply base in Christian Europe. Further advances into Hungary and the principalities bordering the two kingdoms would have been difficult, if not impossible, without the harbors of Constantinople bringing in supplies and serving as a fortified center from which to administer the empire and strategy.
In addition to the military and political benefits bestowed upon the Turks with its capture, it also brought the trade in Eastern Spices through Muslim intermediaries into a declining period. Europeans would continue to trade through Constantinople into the 16th century but high prices propelled the search for alternative sources of supply that didn't pass through the intermediaries of the Ottomans and, to a lesser extent, the Safavids and Mamelukes. An increasing number of Portuguese, Spanish and Dutch ships began to attempt to sail to India via the southern tip of Africa. Indeed, had Columbus not believed that he'd reach Asia to negotiate trade rights by sailing west--the mission as he presented it to his patron, the King of Spain--he wouldn't have found the New World.
Renaming
It is widely believed that the city was renamed to "Istanbul" in the aftermath of the conquest. In actuality, Ottomans used the Arabic translation of the city, "Konstantiniyye," as can be seen in numerous Ottoman documents. The name Istanbul ("The City") spread among the populace. Istanbul would become official name of the city in the 1930's.
Cultural references
Western cultural impact
The Christian reconquest of Constantinople remained a fascinating and much sought-after event in Western Europe for years to come after its fall to the
House of Osman. Rumours of Constantine XI's survival and subsequent rescue by an angel led many to hope that the city would one day return to Christian hands. However as Western Europe entered the 15th century the age of Crusading began to come to an end. Initially, the fall of the city seemed to cause a stir of crusading zeal in the West, where, apart from religious sentiments,
Renaissance humanism had for about a century been fuelling an interest in the cultural and intellectual heritage of
classical antiquity, and the role that Byzantium had played in preserving that heritage.
Guillaume Dufay composed several songs lamenting the fall of the Eastern church, the duke of Burgundy,
Philip the Good,
avowed to take up arms against the Turks, and
Pope Pius II went to great lengths trying to organize a crusade which was to reconquer the city, but any genuine enthusiasm that existed was short-lived, and a crusade never came into effect. With the
Protestant Reformation and subsequent
counter-reformation, the recapture of Constantinople became an ever-distant dream. Even France, once the greatest participants of the Crusades became an ally of the Ottomans. Nonetheless depictions of Christian coalitions taking the city and of the late Emperor's resurrection by Leo the Wise persisted. Entertaining such ideas became politically incorrect in the Western world after the
Turkish war of independence, where Turkey emerged with a secular republic constitution.
Eastern cultural impact
Contrary to popular belief, the name of the city remained Constantinople and the Turks didn't change the name until Turkey emerged as a new nation. An example illustrating the retention of the Greco-Roman Christian name is the
Convention of Constantinople.
The fall of the city fulfilled the call of the city's capture hundreds of years earlier. With the rise of Arab nationalism however and the breakup of the Ottoman Empire, the efforts of Saladin became more popular in the Middle East than the achievements of Mehmed.
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