On the night of May 22nd, 1453, the citizens of Constantinople watched their city's moon go dark. A lunar eclipse slid across the sky and to a people already stretched thin by fifty-three days of Ottoman siege, it looked exactly like an omen. An old prophecy held that Constantinople would never fall while the full moon shone. Now the moon itself seemed to be abandoning them.
The city they were defending was no longer the gleaming capital it had once been. Constantinople in 1453 was a ghost of empire, a walled peninsula with a population of perhaps 50,000, surrounded by the ruins of what had been the greatest metropolis in the Christian world. The empire it governed now consisted, almost entirely, of itself. The Roman Empire had been dying for centuries, and everyone knew it. But the walls still stood. And for a thousand years, walls had been enough.
"The city fell, but no one can say it fell without a fight. It fell the way all great things fall — slowly, then all at once, and with a great deal of arguing about who was to blame."
— on the last days of Byzantium
The man trying to save it was Emperor Constantine XI Palaiologos (the last emperor of Rome), a title that carried enormous historical weight and, by 1453, almost no practical power. He had roughly 7,000 defenders. Facing him was Sultan Mehmed II, age 21, commanding an army estimated between 60,000 and 100,000 men, a siege artillery train that included the largest cannons the world had ever seen, and an ambition that he had caried his entire life...
A Day-by-Day Reckoning, May 22–29, 1453
May 22
The lunar eclipse. Defenders interpret it as divine abandonment. A fog rolls in the next morning; IT was so thick that Venetian sailor Nicolo Barbaro records that men cannot see each other on the walls. The city grows quieter.
May 23
A Venetian ship slips through the Ottoman blockade and returns to port empty... It had been sent ten days earlier to find the promised relief fleet from Venice. There is no fleet. There is no relief. Constantine is told quietly. He does not share this news publicly.
May 24–25
Mehmed makes a final offer: surrender, and the inhabitants will be spared. Constantine's reply (according to Sphrantzes, his own secretary) was essentially: "I cannot surrender the city, but I can surrender my life." Diplomacy is finished.
May 26–27
The Ottoman camp erupts in celebration. Fires, music, prayers audible from the walls. The defenders understand what this means. Mehmed has chosen the date. A final assault is coming. Many defenders spend the night in the Hagia Sophia, perhaps 10,000 people packed into the great church, praying together for the last time.
May 28
Constantine XI walks the walls, bidding farewell to his commanders. He attends one final service in the Hagia Sophia, Greeks and Latins worshipping together, their theological disputes momentarily set aside. He returns to the walls. He will not leave them.
May 29, 1:30am
The assault begins. Three waves hit the walls. The first two, irregular troops and Anatolian infantry, they are repelled at enormous cost. Then the Janissaries go in. A small gate, the Kerkoporta, is found unlocked. Fifty Ottomans pour through. The cry goes up: the city is taken. Within the hour, it is true.
The Unlocked Gate
Here is the detail that historians still argue about: the Kerkoporta. It was a small postern gate in the northern section of the walls, used for sallies. Somehow, during the chaos of repelling the second Ottoman wave, it was left open (or unlocked, or unguarded). The accounts disagree on specifics. But the result was the same: a gap in a thousand-year-old wall, exploited immediately.
The defenders on the main walls had not been broken. They were still fighting. But the shout that the city had been entered from behind "The City is taken!" spread faster than any cavalry. Panic is its own kind of weapon, and on May 29th it worked perfectly.
Constantine XI died in the final fighting near the Gate of Saint Romanos. His body was never definitively identified. Some sources say he tore off his imperial insignia and charged into the Ottoman troops like a common soldier. He was 48 years old. He had been emperor for four years. He is the last Roman emperor, and he died like the first soldiers of Rome, on the walls, with a sword.
What They Were Actually Arguing About
One of the more philosophically inaccurate things people believe about 1453 is that the defenders were united in noble last-stand solidarity. They were not. They were arguing, constantly, about almost everything.
The Greeks and the Latins (Catholic and Orthodox Christians) had spent the preceding decades locked in bitter theological dispute over whether to formally unite their churches in exchange for Western military support. They had nominally agreed to union in 1439. Most of the Greek population never accepted it. There were clergy in Constantinople who reportedly said they would rather see Turkish turbans in the city than Roman cardinal hats. This was, as it turned out, a poor negotiating position.
The Genoese colony at Galata, just across the Golden Horn, maintained an official neutrality that its individual citizens heroically violated, the great Genoese commander Giovanni Giustiniani arrived with 700 soldiers and became the backbone of the defense. But when he was gravely wounded in the final assault and asked Constantine's permission to withdraw, the emperor let him go. Morale collapsed with him. He died on Chios a few days later, almost certainly from his wounds, though some sources have been less charitable.
"Giustiniani's departure is one of those moments in history where the right thing and the effective thing were probably not the same thing, and nobody involved was in a position to see that clearly."
— on the last night of the walls
The City Mehmed Entered
Mehmed allowed his troops three days of plunder; this was standard Ottoman practice for a city taken by assault rather than surrender. The three days, in practice, appear to have lasted somewhat less. Mehmed entered the city on the afternoon of May 29th, rode to the Hagia Sophia, and according to multiple sources, climbed to its highest point and stood there for a long time looking at the city he had just taken.
He reportedly wept, or said something elegiac about the ruins of empire, or quoted Persian poetry about the transience of kingdoms. The accounts vary. What is consistent is that he seems to have felt the weight of what he had done, not just conquered a city, but ended something. He was 21 years old. He would rule for another 28 years and continue conquering for most of them. He called himself Kayser-i Rûm (Caesar of Rome) and he meant it seriously.
The Hagia Sophia was converted to a mosque by Friday prayers, just four days after the conquest. The mosaics were plastered over rather than destroyed, they would not be revealed again for nearly five centuries…
Mosaic of the Archangel Gabriel
A Note on Sources
The primary sources for the fall are fascinatingly contradictory. Nicolo Barbaro (Venetian, pro-Greek), Doukas (Byzantine historian writing in retrospect), George Sphrantzes (Constantine's secretary, eyewitness), Leonard of Chios (Catholic archbishop, deeply partisan), and Kritovoulos of Imbros (wrote a biography of Mehmed, so take his framing accordingly) all tell the same events with remarkably different emphases and details. The Kerkoporta story comes from sources written after the fact and has been questioned by modern historians. History, as ever, is several people arguing at once.
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