In 1453 the Ottomans under the command of Sultan Mehmet II took the ancient capital of the Eastern Roman Empire. What led to the decline of Byzantium? How did the Turks manage to capture Constantinople?
The fall of Constantinople in 1453 was the result of a long siege that ended with the conquest of the Byzantine capital by Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II. This historic event marked the end of the Byzantine Empire and is considered a turning point between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.
Istanbul celebrated on May 29 the 567th anniversary of the fall of Constantinople after the conquest by the Ottoman Empire of the capital of the Byzantine Empire: a historical event that marked the end of a millennial empire -heir to Rome itself- and the beginning of another multicultural empire that would proclaim itself its successor, and which for many historians represents the transition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance.
What happened in the fall of Constantinople in 1453?
It was on May 29, 1453 when Sultan Mehmet II, at only 21 years old, conquered what was for more than a thousand years the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire, called in the West by modern historians -although not by its inhabitants or by its contemporaries- “Byzantine Empire” in reference to the ancient name of Constantinople: Byzantium. But what led to the decline of the Eastern Romans or Byzantines? How did Constantinople end up in the hands of the Ottoman Turks?
Mehmet II’s rise to the Ottoman throne was not easy. As a child he had a reputation for being rebellious and undisciplined; in 1444, his father Murat II announced by surprise that he wished to abdicate the throne and named Mehmet -who was then only 12 years old- as his successor, and Halil Pasha as Grand Vizier. However, as soon as he came to power, Mehmet wanted to launch an attack on Constantinople, which Halil Pasha used as an example of Mehmet’s inability to govern, asking Murat to return to power, something he finally did in 1446.
In 1451 his father finally passed away, and Mehmet ascended the throne again after having learned many lessons about palace politics as well as about past mistakes made by the Ottomans. Wanting to prove his worth, and moved by his desire to become part of history, the young Mehmet set his eyes again on Constantinople, capital and almost last redoubt of the Byzantine Empire, despite the fact that his contemporaries considered that conquering the city was a task almost impossible.
The first fall of Constantinople
Once the splendid capital of the Eastern Roman Empire, we must bear in mind that when Mehmet II definitively succeeded his father, Byzantium was nothing but a shadow of its glorious past. In 1451 all that was left of the empire was the city of Constantinople itself and its most adjacent territories in Europe, as well as the territories in Despotate of the Morea (the Peloponnese), which had not been fully recovered until 1430.
In fact the Byzantine decline had begun a long time ago, with the Arab invasions of the 7th century -which had already get to siege Constantinople- and especially after the defeat in 1071 before the Seljuk Turks in the Battle of Manzikert, which deprived the empire of most of the valuable territories in Anatolia, which were its main source of soldiers and wealth.
The coup de grace however came with the Crusades. During the Fourth Crusade, Alexius, son of the deposed Roman emperor Isaac II Angelos, asked for help from the crusaders who were going to the Holy Land to regain the throne; they accepted the offer and turned their attention to Constantinople, where, believing the fall of the city imminent, the Byzantine emperor fled, and Alexius was appointed co-emperor along with his father, who was released from the prison he was in.
Alexius (Alexius IV) found that he had to fulfill the promises made to the Crusaders, which included the submission of the Orthodox Church to Rome, which made him very unpopular among his subjects; also to pay the crusaders he had to raise taxes and strip several churches of their treasures. In February 1204 an uprising broke out that ended with the death of Alexius and his father, and with the enthronement of a new emperor, Alexius V Doukas.
Two months later the crusaders, eager for the city’s legendary riches and determined to put a Latin emperor on the throne, attacked Constantinople and managed to breach its walls. The chroniclers of the time speak of unimaginable destruction and looting: most of the population was massacred, their property and those of the church looted, and the Byzantine nobles fled to Asia where they founded the Empire of Nicaea. In 1261 Constantinople would be recaptured by the Nicean emperor Michael VIII Palaiologos, but the city would never recover from that destruction.
The final years of the Byzantine Empire
These events were a severe blow to the aspirations of the crusaders -who neither recovered the Holy Land, nor were they able to maintain a Latin emperor in Constantinople- but even more so for the already difficult survival of Byzantium throughout the late Middle Ages.
A century after the plunder, the Emperor of Constantinople controlled only the Thrace region and some cities in north-western Anatolia. Morea and Crete were still in the hands of the Latins, Trebizond had become independent in its own empire, and almost all of Anatolia was controlled by Turkish tribes, who did not recognise the Seljuk or Mongol power over Anatolia, and who had become independent in small emirates.
It was in one of these emirates located in the northwest of Anatolia on the border with the last Byzantine territories in Asia, where Osman emerged, a Turkish leader who, after defeating the Byzantines in 1302 at the Battle of Baphea, seized the territories around the last cities that Byzantium conserved in Asia: Prusa (Bursa), Nicaea and Nicomedia, giving name to a new dynasty (the Ottoman dynasty, or osmanli) and laying the foundations of the future Ottoman State.
Despite Byzantine efforts to encourage an attack by the Mongol rulers in Persia against the Ottomans, Prusa and Nicaea fell in 1326 to their son and successor Orhan, and in 1337 they took Nicomedia, thus ending the Byzantine presence in Asia Minor.
The Roman emperors of Byzantium were forced to recognise the increasing power and influence of the Ottomans, who began to intervene more and more in the internal affairs of the Byzantines; and these in turn turned to the Turks to resolve their palace disputes. To the point that during the government of Emperor John V Palaiologos (1379-1390) Byzantium became a vassal state of the Ottoman sultan Murat I (son and successor of Orhan), being forced to pay tribute to the Ottomans and send them soldiers for their campaigns in Europe.
The first Ottoman sieges to Constantinople
In 1391, the new Ottoman sultan Beyazit I, annoyed by the appointment of the new Emperor Manuel II Palaiologos without being consulted previously, decided to initiate the first Ottoman siege of Constantinople so that Manuel II complied with his demands, which he did after 7 months of siege. In 1396, after rejecting an invitation from Beyazit to attend an audience with other vassal Christian kings from Eastern Europe in which Manuel feared he was going to be executed, Beyazit decided to send his armies back to encircle Constantinople, devastating the surrounding fields and blocking access to the city.
This second Ottoman siege on Constantinople lasted 6 years, and the city survived once again thanks to the arrival of supplies by sea. Only the arrival in 1402 of the fearsome Turkish-Mongol army from Timur to Anatolia saved the Byzantine capital, since Beyazit was forced to lift the siege to face this new Mongol invasion.
The defeat of Beyazit in the Battle of Ankara and the subsequent internal struggles for the Ottoman throne, eased for some years the Ottoman pressure on the Byzantines, who were even able to recover -briefly- some territories in Greece.
However this revival of Byzantium was nothing but an illusion, and when in 1422 Emperor Manuel believed himself strong enough to support a prince who aspired to the Ottoman throne, the new sultan Murat II sent an army of 10,000 soldiers to besiege again Constantinople, launching a hard assault against its walls. However after several hours of battle, the Ottomans realised that the city could not be captured, and ordered the retreat saving Constantinople once again.
The decline of Byzantium
Faced with the growing threat that the Ottoman Turks posed for the survival of Byzantium, the successor of Manuel II, John VIII Palaiologos (1416-1448), attempted an approach to the West seeking the reunification of Catholics and Orthodox: this again unleashed revolts in the Byzantine population among those who supported the maneuver of the new emperor for political interests, and those who rejected it outright for considering it a betrayal of their faith.
In 1448 John died and in 1449 his brother, Constantine XI Palaiologos, succeeded him as emperor, who in the end would be the last Roman-Byzantine emperor. Popular figure for having led the Byzantine resistance in Morea (the Peloponnese) against the Ottomans, he nevertheless decided to follow his brother’s policy of approach to the Pope in Rome, which again generated mistrust among the Byzantine clergy and the population.
This mistrust was also shared by Murat II, who clearly saw that the political-religious maneuver of the emperors of Constantinople threatened to unleash the intervention in Eastern Europe of the western European powers, jeopardising the Ottoman expansion through southeast Europe.
When two years later, in 1451, Murat II was succeeded by his son Mehmet II for the second time, he promised at first to the Byzantines that he would not attack their territories, and transmitted to his own military command that he had dismissed his childhood dream of taking Constantinople.
Constantine’s challenge to Mehmet
However, falling into the same mistake as his predecessors a few years earlier, Constantine saw this as a false illusion of strength, and believed itself to be powerful enough to demand that the Ottomans pay an annual “ransom” in income for keep an Ottoman prince who was held hostage in Constantinople. Furious at Constantine’s challenge, Mehmet II decided to start preparations to once again besiege the Byzantine capital.
In the face of these events, Constantine sent messages requesting help from the western European powers, believing that he would get such help; this help in fact arrived, although it was never by far the one that the Roman emperor surely expected: all that he got was the dispatch of three Genoese ships paid by the Pope equipped with weapons and provisions.
The Venetians, who like the Genoese had strong commercial interests in Constantinople and feared losing their position if it fell into Ottoman hands, would later also send 15 ships with supplies and 800 soldiers. Also many Venetians and Genoese who lived in the Pera neighbourhood (current Beyoğlu) since the time of the Latin Empire (after the Fourth Crusade), accepted to participate in the defence of the city, among them the Genoves nobleman Giovanni Giustiniani Longo, who with 700 Soldiers assumed the defence of the eastern wall.
Preparations for the siege to begin
Emperor Constantine then wished to know what forces he had to defend Constantinople, and he ordered a census in the city. Sadly, the result could not have been more disappointing: Constantinople, which in its splendour between the 5th and 6th centuries became one of the largest cities in the world with half a million inhabitants, barely had then 50,000 residents, and no more than 7,000 could be recruited as soldiers.
The Ottomans also began the preparations, and Mehmet II did so by leaning on his History studies and the lessons he had learned from his predecessors on the throne. To prevent the arrival of supplies by sea, he built two fortresses (Rumeli Hisarı or “Roman Fort”, and Anadoluhisarı or “Fortress of Asia”) on both sides of the Bosphorus Strait to prevent the arrival of ships from the Black Sea.
The sultan, whose domains covered much of Anatolia in addition to Thrace and the Balkans, assembled an enormous army believed to be made up of about 100,000 men (some chronicles speak of as many as 200,000), which included both professional Ottoman soldiers -including the famous Janissaries– as well as thousands of Christian allies and mercenaries from vassal kingdoms in Europe.
Also in early 1452 a Hungarian artillery engineer named Orban offered his services to the Sultan, having done so to Constantine, who was however unable to pay for his services or provide him with the necessary materials. Orban assured Mehmet that he could build an immense cannon like never seen before, 9 meters long and called a great bombard, which could “tear down the very walls of Babylon” and -of course- those of Constantinople.
Mehmet told Orban that he would have everything he needed to build this great cannon, which was built in Adrianople -then the Ottoman capital- and carried to the walls of Constantinople by a contingent of one hundred men and hundreds of oxen. Orban would also build other smaller cannons used in the siege for the Ottomans.
Start of the siege
The siege of Constantinople officially began on April 7, 1453, when the great bombard built by Orban made the first shot at the wall at the height of the Lico river valley, located next to the Gate of Saint Romanus, in the centre of the line of walls; these, built in the 5th century, had not been designed to withstand modern artillery attacks, so in a few days they began to fall.
Although the size of the army and the preparations put together by Mehmet exceeded everything seen in several centuries, at the beginning of the siege the Byzantines achieved a couple of victories that notably raised their morale; on April 12 a Byzantine fleet rejected an attempt by the Ottoman admiral Süleyman Baltoğlu to enter the Golden Horn estuary, where the walls were weaker; 6 days later the Genoese commander Giustiniani rejected in numerical inferiority an assault against the damaged wall in the Lico Valley.
These setbacks were a severe setback for Mehmet, who wished to open a new front in the part of the walls that protected the Golden Horn; not because he planned a disembark from sea, but to force the Byzantines to divert part of their limited human resources and thus leaving more unprotected the main wall, which also had to be rebuilt every day after the damage caused by the cannons. To achieve this, in the face of frustrated attempts to enter the estuary, the sultan carried out an inconceivable plan.
The maneuver, actually devised by his general Zaganos Pasha, consisted of circumventing the entrance to the Golden Horn -guarded by a huge chain that blocked the entrance to the ships- by making the ships on April 22 climb up the hill of Pera-Galata -then a Genoese merchant colony- pushed by thousands of men who smeared the keel of the ships with animal fat, and dragged by oxen. In this way, the Byzantines woke up with the Ottoman ships stationed in the Golden Horn.
The beginning of the end
That vision caused despair to spread among the defenders and was a hard blow to their morale. In a last desperate attempt, on April 25 they attempted a surprise attack to set the Ottoman ships on fire in the Golden Horn, but their plan was thwarted by spies, and besides the Byzantines also lost many soldiers who were vital to the defence of the city.
Furthermore, a day earlier, on the night of April 24, there had been a bad omen that had made even more dent in the morale of the besieged: a lunar eclipse reminded the Byzantines of an ancient prophecy, according to which the city would resist only while the moon shines in the sky; and the next day during a procession to claim victory against the Ottomans, an icon of the Virgin Mary fell to the ground. This together with the failures of the defenders, and the delay in the arrival of Venetian reinforcements, ended up pushing the resistance of the besieged to the limit.
However, things were not easy on the other side of the walls either. Mehmet II had to face the immense costs of maintaining an army of about 100,000 men during a siege that lasted for several weeks, and was increasingly pressured by his generals to reach some kind of agreement -as his predecessors already had done- if he didn’t want to lose his army, his throne, and even his empire.
The Ottoman sultan then decided to issue an ultimatum to the besieged: he would spare their lives if Constantine surrendered the city; as he rejected this option, the emperor was also offered the possibility of paying a huge tribute of 100,000 gold bezant coins (a Byzantine coin) every year, in exchange for ending the siege on Constantinople. However, the sum was immense and Byzantium, ruined for years, was unable to collect such a quantity, so Constantine also had to reject it.
Keep in mind that 1 gold bezant was equivalent to about 25 of the old Roman silver denarii; If we take into account that 1 denarius is equivalent -comparing bread prices- approximately to 10 current euros, and that the pay of a well-paid legionary of the High Empire was about 10 denarii a month, the annual tribute requested was about 25 million euros… or to give us a more exact idea, the pay equivalent to maintaining an army of 250,000 men for a month, probably more.
The final assault on Constantinople
Faced with Constantine’s rejection, Mehmet decided to launch a final assault against the walls at the end of May in which everything was at stake: if he won, the Byzantine capital would be his at last -as an Islamic prophecy promised- but if he lost, his prestige and his own forces would be so weakened that he would probably have to face uprisings in his army and throughout the empire, and possibly a new offensive by the European powers.
As his astrologers prophesied that May 29 would be a dire day for non-believers (non-Muslims), Mehmet ordered his troops to rest on May 28 to attack the next day; to break the silence and boost morale, the Byzantines, foreseeing a great attack, rang the bells of all the churches of Constantinople throughout the day, and Constantine prayed together with the inhabitants of the city in Hagia Sophia.
The final assault began before dawn on May 29. For about two hours, Mehmet’s Christian troops attempted to penetrate the walls but were rebuffed by the defenders under command of Giustiniani, who were better equipped. Mehmet then decided to launch the core of his army, made up of some 80,000 regular Ottoman troops including the Janissaries themselves. It was a very risky bet: either everything, or nothing.
After more than two hours of fierce fighting, the great bombard managed to breach the wall at the height of the Lico Valley, and the Ottomans concentrated their attack there. In doing so, the Byzantines neglected the defence of other areas of the wall.
In the heat of the assault hundreds of meters further south, a small detachment of Janissaries away from the main battle that walked between the first and second wall of the northernmost main wall, discovered by chance that -in an inexplicable oversight- the Byzantines had left the Kerkaporta open and defenseless. It was a small gate of no importance, just the size of a person, used in times of peace; but it gave access to the city.
Giustiniani’s flight and the death of the last Roman emperor
It is said that an Ottoman soldier named Hassan was the first to enter and place his flag on the inner wall at the height of the Kerkaporta, before being shot down by the arrows of the Byzantines; these, upon seeing the main wall in the hands of the Ottomans, panicked thinking that they had been betrayed, and fear began to take hold of the defenders as word spread that the city had fallen, despite the fact that the main battle was still developing further south.
At that moment, another devastating blow took place for the defenders: Giustiniani was seriously wounded and was quickly evacuated by his soldiers, leaving Constantinople on a ship despite Constantine’s pleas, who in vain tried to convince him to stay. When the other Genoese saw that Giustiniani was leaving, they also abandoned their posts to escape from the city, while rumours of the taking of the wall were already spreading.
Without the leadership of Giustiniani and his well-equipped Genoese soldiers, the Byzantine defenders were left alone and demoralised before the onslaught of the Janissaries, who were already beginning to seize the wall. Emperor Constantine XI himself is said to have unsheathed his sword, stripped off his imperial insignia and, after pronouncing a final harangue at his troops, went out to fight to the death with the defenders near the Gate of St. Romanus.
That is at least the version given by the Greek historian Michael Critobulus, who would later serve at Mehmet’s court. However, today it still remains unclear what happened to the last Byzantine emperor; although the Greek tradition says that he died fighting on the walls, there are chroniclers who say that he committed suicide and others point out that he died not on the walls but near Saint Sophia. There are also those who say that pretending to be a simple civilian, he fled from the city as his nobles had asked him to.
It is also unclear what became of his alleged body. According to many historians it was never identified, a reason why any of the previous hypotheses would be possible; others, however, point out that Mehmet II ordered to search for his corpse, and that after identifying his supposed body thanks to his purple boots -only the emperor could use that color- he was either buried with all the honours -according to some versions- or on the contrary, beheaded, walked through the city and buried in a mass grave so that he would not be venerated, although his own subjects denied that this was the body of his emperor.
The fact is that there was no witness to confirm his death, nor anyone from his entourage or who was with him survived or testified what had happened to him, so his final destination is and will always be part of the legend of the the siege and conquest of Constantinople in 1453. Giustiniani would also later die from his injuries on the Greek island of Chios.
Constantinople, new Ottoman capital
After three days of looting following the custom of the time, Mehmet II ordered his soldiers to stop and entered the city at sunset; he then decreed that the Basilica of Hagia Sophia be transformed into a mosque, and gave the Byzantine population permission to continue living in the city under the authority of their own Orthodox patriarch, guaranteeing the safety of their property and themselves and the freedom of worship, for which quickly gained the trust of many Orthodox Christians, who actually did not want an approach to Rome as was pretended by the last emperors.
Mehmet II, who saw himself as a new Alexander the Great, named the city his new capital and proclaimed himself “Emperor of the Romans” (Kayser-i Rum, in Ottoman Turkish) and successor to the dynasty of the emperors of Rome which had started with Caesar and Augustus, despite the fact that in the West the seizure of Constantinople was seen as a disaster that caused a great commotion, and for centuries it has been considered the end of the last vestige of the Roman Empire.
Those events were also seen in the eyes of Christian Europeans as the dominance of one religion over another, similar to what the fall of Jerusalem into Muslim hands had supposed. It was feared that it would mark the beginning of the end of Christianity, but although there were attempts to organise a new crusade to expel the Turks from Constantinople, the truth is that no European nation had the strength to face such an immense task.
The last vestiges of Byzantium
However, although Constantinople had fallen and Constantine had died -or disappeared- without leaving a successor, the truth is that the Byzantine civilisation continued to last for several more years: in the last territories in the Despotate of the Morea (conquered in 1460 with little resistance, except that of Salmeniko Castle), and especially in Trebizond, where since the Fourth Crusade its rulers proclaimed themselves legitimate successors to the imperial dynasty of the Komnenos.
For eight years after the fall of Constantinople, the Empire of Trebizond -present-day Trabzon- was the last vestige of the glory of Byzantium, until it was conquered by the Ottomans in 1461 when the last emperor of Trebizond, David Megas Komnenos, surrendered the city to the troops of sultan Mehmet II after more than a month of siege, being executed two years later in Constantinople accused of conspiracy.
The fall of Constantinople also interrupted trade routes from the Middle East and Asia, and forced the Europeans to look for alternative ways to import fabrics such as silk or highly valued goods such as spices, which would lead the Portuguese to launch their expeditions along the coasts of Africa, and later to the Kingdom of Castile to finance the Columbus expedition that led to the discovery of America.
In addition, the flight of Byzantine erudites to Europe caused them to take their knowledge to the old continent, triggering the Renaissance. For all this, the fall of Constantinople in 1453 represented much more than the end of one empire and the beginning of another: it was a key historical event that had an enormous influence in History and ushered in a new era.
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As a history lover, Pablo Gómez was captivated by Turkey from the first day he visited it in 2006: he got married there, has a house there… and has since become an expert on Turkey’s current affairs. With a long experience in media, he has been at the helm of hispanatolia.com since 2011.
