History · Guide
The Fall of Constantinople in 1453
The fall of Constantinople in 1453 ended the Byzantine Empire after more than a thousand years. Learn about the Ottoman siege, the last emperor, and the consequences of the city's capture.
On the morning of 29 May 1453, the Ottoman army of Sultan Mehmed II, having battered the ancient land walls of Constantinople for fifty-three days, finally broke into the city. Within hours, the last Byzantine emperor, Constantine XI Palaiologos Dragases, was dead, and the great capital of the Eastern Roman Empire had fallen after a continuous existence of more than two thousand years. The event, the most consequential political catastrophe of the fifteenth century, marked the end of the Byzantine Empire and the rise of the Ottoman state to dominance in the eastern Mediterranean.
The fall of Constantinople is one of the most studied and most mythologized events in European history. It has been remembered, on the one hand, as a symbol of the end of Christian civilization in the East, and on the other, as the catalyst for the great changes of the early modern world: the rise of the Ottomans, the expansion of Islam into the Balkans, the westward shift of the central Mediterranean, and the eventual emergence of the Renaissance and the Reformation.
The Empire at the End
The Long Decline
The fall of Constantinople in 1453 was the culmination of a long process of decline that had begun with the loss of Anatolia after the Battle of Manzikert in 1071 and had been dramatically accelerated by the Fourth Crusade and the sack of the city in 1204. The restored Palaiologan dynasty, which had ruled from 1261, had been unable to recover the empire’s lost territories, and by the middle of the fifteenth century, the Byzantine state consisted essentially of the city of Constantinople itself, a thin strip of land around it, and a few Aegean islands.
The economy of the late empire was in shambles. The loss of the Anatolian heartland had destroyed the empire’s tax base and recruiting ground, and the closing of the Black Sea trade routes by the Ottoman blockade had cut off the city from its commercial hinterland. The population of Constantinople had fallen from perhaps half a million in the eleventh century to perhaps fifty thousand in the fifteenth. The walls, although still formidable, had not been adequately maintained.
The political situation was equally dire. The emperors of the late period were caught between the rising Ottoman power in the east, the Bulgarian and Serbian states in the north, and the Latin powers in the west, especially the Republic of Venice, which had long contested Byzantine commercial supremacy. The emperors sought repeatedly, and ultimately without success, to negotiate a union of the Eastern and Western churches, hoping that the resulting alliance with the Latin powers would save the empire. The union of Florence in 1439, accepted by the emperor but rejected by the majority of the Byzantine clergy and laity, was a desperate gamble that produced no military assistance.
The Ottoman Threat
The Rise of the Ottoman State
The Ottoman emirate, originally a small principality on the frontier of the Seljuk Sultanate of Rum, had grown steadily through the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The capture of Bursa in 1326, Nicaea in 1331, and Adrianople in 1362 gave the Ottomans control of northwestern Anatolia and the southern Balkans. The victory of Bayezid I at the Battle of Nicopolis in 1396 and the defeat of the Crusader army at Ankara in 1402 by Timur briefly halted the Ottoman expansion, but the recovery of the Ottoman state in the fifteenth century resumed the assault.
By the time of Mehmed II, the Ottomans controlled a vast empire stretching from the Danube to the Euphrates, including the former Byzantine territories in the Balkans and Anatolia. The Byzantines were essentially a vassal state, paying tribute and providing military support to the Ottomans in exchange for a precarious independence.
The Siege
The Preparations
Sultan Mehmed II, who came to the throne in 1451 at the age of nineteen, was determined to take Constantinople. The young sultan had been educated by scholars and was an admirer of Alexander the Great, but he was also a pragmatic and ruthless commander. He spent the months between his accession and the siege preparing a vast military force, including a new cannon, the famous basilica, cast by the Hungarian engineer Orban.
The cannon, which could fire a stone ball of several hundred pounds, was the largest in the world at the time. It took two hundred men to position it, and it could only be fired a few times a day, since it had to cool between firings. Yet its destructive power was unprecedented, and its arrival at the walls of Constantinople in April 1453 marked a new era in military history.
The Defenders
The defenders of the city were commanded by the emperor Constantine XI himself, supported by a small force of perhaps seven thousand men, including Greeks, Italians, and a few hundred Genoese archers under the command of Giovanni Giustiniani Longo. The walls, although formidable, were too long to be properly defended by the small garrison. The city had food for at most three months and depended on a continual resupply from the sea, which the Ottoman fleet attempted to prevent.
The defense of the city was heroic. The inhabitants, including monks, nuns, and civilians, helped to repair the walls at night after the day’s bombardment. The Genoese commander Giustiniani was seriously wounded during a sortie, and his departure from the walls demoralized the defenders. The emperor refused offers of safe passage and vowed to die defending the city.
The Final Assault
The final assault came in the early hours of 29 May. The Ottoman army attacked the land walls at multiple points, focusing on the section near the Mesoteichion, where the wall had been weakened by the bombardment. After several hours of fighting, the defenders began to give way, and the Ottoman troops poured into the city.
Constantine XI, according to the tradition, charged into the breach with his remaining guard and died fighting. The great church of the Hagia Sophia, the church of the Holy Apostles, and the libraries of the city were looted, and thousands of the inhabitants were killed or enslaved. The patriarch, who had been absent during the siege, returned to find the city in Ottoman hands.
The Capture of the City
The City’s Transformation
Mehmed II entered the city the day after the assault, riding through the streets to the great church of the Hagia Sophia, where he ordered it to be converted into a mosque. The conversion involved the addition of a minaret, a mihrab, and a minbar, but the great dome and the principal mosaics were left intact. The church remained the city’s principal mosque for almost five centuries, until it was converted into a museum in 1934 and then reconsecrated as a mosque in 2020.
The city, which had been the largest and most cosmopolitan in the medieval world, was largely emptied of its Christian inhabitants. Many of them were enslaved, and many of those who had fled before the siege settled in the Latin West, especially in Italy, where they brought with them a knowledge of Greek language and literature. The famous cardinal and humanist Bessarion, who had been archbishop of Nicaea and who had supported the union of Florence, was one of many who settled in the West, where he contributed to the collection of Greek manuscripts in the Vatican Library.
The Consequences
The Eastern Mediterranean
The fall of Constantinople transformed the eastern Mediterranean. The Ottomans became the dominant naval power in the eastern Mediterranean, and within a few years they had extended their control over the Aegean, the Crimea, and the southern Black Sea. The Empire of Trebizond, the last Greek state on the Black Sea, held out until 1461, when it too was absorbed into the Ottoman Empire.
The Greek population of the former Byzantine lands was subjected to the millet system, in which the non-Muslim communities were organized as religious minorities under their own leaders. The Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, who had remained in the city, became the ethnarch of the Greek millet and was responsible for the civil as well as the religious affairs of his community. The millet system gave the Greek community a substantial degree of autonomy, and the Orthodox Church became the principal institution preserving Greek identity through almost four centuries of Ottoman rule.
The Western Response
The fall of Constantinople produced a profound shock in Western Europe. Pope Nicholas V is said to have wept when he heard the news. The pope and the Western Christian powers had, in many ways, contributed to the catastrophe. The Latin West had refused to come to the aid of Constantinople in 1453, even though the Byzantine emperor had agreed to the union of the churches. The Latin West had been guilty of the sack of Constantinople in 1204, which had destroyed the empire’s ability to resist the Ottomans.
The fall of Constantinople also accelerated the end of the Eastern Mediterranean as a major center of European trade. The Ottoman control of the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles made the traditional trade routes to Asia difficult and expensive, and European powers began to seek sea routes to the East. The voyages of Columbus, Vasco da Gama, and other late-fifteenth-century explorers were, in part, responses to the Ottoman blockade of the East. The rise of the Atlantic powers of Portugal, Spain, England, and the Netherlands, and the eventual decline of the Italian city-states, were all in part consequences of the events of 1453.
The Russian Response
The most striking political consequence of the fall of Constantinople was the rise of Moscow as the self-styled Third Rome. The Russian Orthodox Church, freed from the authority of the now-Islamized patriarch of Constantinople, was made an autocephalous church in 1589, and the Russian tsars adopted the title of Caesar, soon Russified as Tsar. The claim of Moscow to be the heir of Byzantium was articulated most famously by the monk Philotheus of Pskov in the early sixteenth century: “Two Romes have fallen. The third stands. And there shall be no fourth.”
The Russian Orthodox Church became the principal defender of Orthodox Christianity in the centuries after 1453, and the Russian Empire, which emerged from the Grand Duchy of Moscow in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, was deeply influenced by the Byzantine inheritance. The Byzantine legacy in Russia is, in many ways, a consequence of the fall of Constantinople.
The Aftermath
The fall of Constantinople was the end of the Byzantine Empire, but it was not the end of the Byzantine legacy. The Orthodox Church, the legal tradition, the art, the architecture, and the political vocabulary of Byzantium all survived the catastrophe and continued to influence the world. The story of the fall is thus not only a story of destruction but also a story of transmission, of the ways in which the inheritance of a thousand-year empire was preserved, adapted, and passed on to the modern world.
Related Articles
- History of the Byzantine Empire — the broader context
- Byzantine Emperors: A Study of Power — the rulers who preceded the fall
- The Fourth Crusade and the Sack of Constantinople — the catastrophe that made the fall possible
- The Battle of Manzikert — the disaster that began the decline
- The Fall of Trebizond: Last Byzantine Stronghold — the final Greek state
- The Donation of Constantine — the great Byzantine forgery
- Byzantine Legacy in Russia and Eastern Europe — the Third Rome
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