Fall of Constantinople

By 1453 the Byzantine Empire consisted of little beyond Constantinople itself and the Morea, an enclave inside Ottoman territory whose emperors had long paid the sultans tribute. Mehmed II, who had taken the Ottoman throne definitively in 1451 at age nineteen, made the city's conquest his first great objective. In 1452 he built the fortress of Rumeli Hisari on the European shore of the Bosporus, closing the straits to relief from the Black Sea, and assembled a siege train that included very large bombards cast by the Hungarian gun-founder Orban, weapons on a scale not previously used against city walls.

The siege opened on 6 April 1453. The defenders, a few thousand Greeks reinforced by Italian contingents under the Genoese captain Giovanni Giustiniani, held the Theodosian land walls against weeks of bombardment and assault, while a chain barred the Golden Horn. In late April Mehmed had ships hauled overland on greased timbers into the Horn, forcing the defense to stretch along the sea walls as well. Mining and counter-mining, naval skirmishes, and failed relief hopes filled May.

The final assault came before dawn on 29 May. After successive waves were repulsed, the janissaries broke through near the gate of St. Romanus, where the bombardment had done its worst; Giustiniani was carried wounded from the walls, and the defense collapsed. The emperor Constantine XI died in the fighting, his body never reliably identified. The city endured the customary sack, limited by Mehmed to a shortened term, and the sultan entered Hagia Sophia, which was converted to a mosque. The conquest ended the Roman imperial state after more than a millennium at Constantinople, gave the Ottomans an imperial capital, and earned the twenty-one-year-old sultan the title by which history knows him, Fatih, the Conqueror.