Fifty-three days in 1453 ended a fifteen-hundred-year Rome
On 29 May 1453, after a siege begun on 6 April, Mehmed II’s outnumbering Ottoman army took Constantinople from Constantine XI Palaiologos. The conqueror made the city his capital in place of Adrianople, and many historians treat the day as medieval Europe’s full stop.
Consecrated under Constantine the Great in 330, the city had shrugged off countless sieges yet fallen only once before—to the Fourth Crusade in 1204, which installed a shaky Latin regime. Nicaean Greeks clawed it back in 1261 under the Palaiologoi, then spent two centuries fending off Latins, Serbs, Bulgarians, and Turks with ever fewer resources.
Plague between 1346 and 1349 killed nearly half the inhabitants; economic and territorial rot finished the emptying. By 1453 Constantinople was a necklace of walled villages and open fields still wrapped by the fifth-century Theodosian Walls—impressive stone around a hollowed demography.
By 1450 the empire had shrunk to a few square kilometres outside the city, the Princes' Islands and the Peloponnese around Mystras. When nineteen-year-old Mehmed II succeeded his father in 1451, European courts hoped his inexperience would keep the Ottomans quiet, and his friendly words to envoys encouraged them; by early 1452 he was building the fortress of Rumeli Hisarı. Constantine XI begged the West for help, promising to enforce church union with Rome, which a half-hearted court declared valid on 12 December 1452.
Help barely came. Pope Nicholas V lacked the sway over Western rulers that the Byzantines imagined, and a Venetian fleet voted in February 1453 did not sail until April, too late to matter. Seven Italian ships carrying some 700 men who had sworn to defend the city slipped away instead. Constantine stretched a chain floating on logs across the mouth of the Golden Horn to bar Turkish ships from the harbour, because the Fourth Crusade had broken in from that side in 1204. The fall is widely treated as the effective end of a Roman state begun around 27 BC, and as a turning point in military history.
Source: Fall of Constantinople
