On 29 May 1453 the Ottoman Empire under the young Sultan Mehmed II took Constantinople, the Byzantine capital, after a siege of about seven weeks2. Enormous cannon battered the ancient land walls until the final assault broke through. The last emperor, Constantine XI, died in the fighting, and with the city fell the Byzantine Empire, the last living piece of the Roman world, after more than a thousand years.
For a thousand years the great land walls of Constantinople had never been carried by storm (the crusaders who sacked the city in 1204 broke in from the harbour side). In the spring of 1453 a 21-year-old sultan arrived with the largest guns the world had yet seen, determined to take the city that had defied his ancestors, and to end the Roman Empire once and for all.
The last Roman city
By 1453 the Byzantine Empire, the Greek-speaking eastern half of the old Roman Empire, had shrunk to little more than the city of Constantinople itself. Around it the Ottoman Empire had spread across the Balkans and Anatolia. The new sultan, Mehmed II, still only 21, was determined to take the great city and make it his capital.
Mehmed's great guns
Constantinople was protected by the Theodosian Walls, a triple line that had held for a thousand years. Mehmed's answer was artillery on a scale never seen before, including a monstrous bombard cast by the engineer Orban3 that hurled stone balls weighing hundreds of kilograms1. Day after day the guns pounded the ancient walls, and what took years to build began to crumble in weeks.
The 53-day siege
The defenders, perhaps seven thousand men under Emperor2 Constantine XI and the Genoese commander Giovanni Giustiniani, held the breaches with desperate courage, repairing by night what the cannon smashed by day. A great chain closed the harbour of the Golden Horn, until Mehmed famously hauled his ships overland1 on greased rollers to get around it. Still the walls held, week after week.
The final assault
Before dawn on 29 May, Mehmed launched his last and greatest attack in waves, wearing the defenders down until his elite janissaries poured through a breach1. Giustiniani was badly wounded and carried from the wall4, and his men's line broke. Constantine XI, the last Roman emperor, is said to have thrown off his imperial insignia1 and died sword in hand in the final melee. By morning the city was Mehmed's.
The end of an empire
The fall of Constantinople ended the Byzantine Empire and, with it, the last continuous thread of the Roman state, more than a thousand years after the fall of Rome in the west. Mehmed, now called the Conqueror, made the city his capital, and it remains the heart of a great city today. To many, the event marks the close of the Middle Ages5 and the dawn of a new age in Europe.
