During the Late Middle Ages, Central Asia was still abuzz with periodically migrating peoples, laying waste to everything in their path. The Turks were one of them. After becoming Islamized, they began to invade the Middle East. Divided into various tribes, part of them settled on the borders of Asia Minor during the 13th century, harassing the Byzantine Empire. The most important of the tribes was that of the Ottomans.
Without actually taking Constantinople, the Ottomans took over their possessions. Hungary, Bosnia, Bulgaria, Serbia, Wallachia...
In the mid-15th century, Mehmet II, later nicknamed the Conqueror, inherited the Crown and decided that Constantinople had to be taken. The Byzantine emperor was Constantine XI, but the power of him was almost symbolic. He was barely able to gather 5,000 defenders among the 25,000 that were of fighting age – out of a total population of almost 100,000 souls – due to the enormous demoralization that reigned.
It received little help from the Christian West, concerned only with its internal rivalries. Only Venice, Genoa, and the pope lent him any support. The first for commercial reasons, and the prelate for the promises of religious reunification, although he limited himself to sending two hundred soldiers.
Meanwhile, the sultan prepared 100,000 men for the attack, 15,000 of whom were select janissaries. In 1452 he landed a large group of fighters and workers on the European shore of the Bosphorus, just north of Constantinople, in order to build a castle that would isolate the Byzantine capital from its only remaining communication: the Black Sea.
Constantine's only hope lay in the solid walls that surrounded the city by land and sea. They totaled more than twenty kilometers. The one raised on land that protected it from the west, dating from the times of Theodosius II in the 5th century, was still impressive and was made up of a set of moats and parapets that made it difficult to overcome. The port of the capital, in the sea inlet called the Golden Horn, which bounded it on the north, was protected by a thick chain that isolated it from the Bosphorus.
There were few human forces to defend such a wide perimeter. At the beginning of 1453, to partially alleviate the situation, the help of various mercenaries was received, which brought the number of defenders to 8,000. The 200 soldiers of the Pope and a good number of Venetians, as well as 700 Genoese under the orders of Giovanni Giustiniani, who received the supreme command of the troops, were able to circumvent the Turkish siege.
Some Spaniards residing in the city also took up arms, such as the Castilian nobleman Francisco de Toledo, who claimed to be a relative of the emperor, and the Catalan consul Pere Julià.
In spring the Turks began their advance. On April 6, the sultan was able to deploy his formidable army before the wall of Theodosius, divided into four army corps. He was determined to deliver his blow on the central sector of the walls, around the gate of San Romano, in the small valley of the Lycus River that ran through the defenses. There he posted his janissaries, while in the rear he pitched his tent. Constantine moved the bulk of his forces to that point and prepared to resist.
On the 12th, the Ottomans opened their cannons. Huge bronze cannons had been made by Hungarian and Vlach renegades, and the largest had to be cast right there, where the stone bullets were to be fired, weighing more than 400 kilos, with a range of barely 200 meters. Although these tremendous bombards took two hours to reload (and therefore could only fire six or eight shots a day), their concentrated fire gradually demolished part of the walls.
Impatient, Mehmet ordered the attack on the 18th, but the emperor was prepared and a hail of fire fell on the attackers, driving them back. A simultaneous naval offensive against the chain enclosing the Golden Horn was similarly unsuccessful.
These military setbacks led the Turk to realize that the Christian defenses of the earthen wall needed to be dispersed. To do this, they would also have to attack from the sea, which made it imperative that their ships penetrate the Golden Horn. His way of circumventing the thick chain and the defenses posted in his mouth was by taking his ships by land. After leveling the ground, he managed to pass 72 ships overland, sliding them on planks impregnated with ox fat, to the bottom of the Golden Horn.
Constantine was proposed to escape from the city, which he refused, hoping for miraculous relief that still did not arrive. The firm determination of the emperor breathed new spirits among his own. The offensives against the Theodosian wall continued, but, although they were repulsed by Giustiniani, the numerical disproportion in favor of the attackers was overwhelming.
Faced with the destructive slowness of the artillery, Mehmet resorted to a huge siege tower, but it was destroyed by the defenders after throwing burning barrels of gunpowder on it. The besiegers opted for new stratagems and began to dig mines. This measure also failed due to the countermines of the besieged. All these failures, as well as the difficulty of feeding his huge army, led the sultan to consider abandoning the siege, but after listening to his generals, he decided to hold it.
At the end of May the final attack was planned. It would be carried out from land and sea, which would force the defenses to disperse. And it would be done without interruption, day and night, exhausting the defenders while the attackers took over. On the night of the 27th, the Turks had prepared more than 2,000 ladders to storm the walls. Excitement and optimism reigned among the assailants.
The inhabitants of Constantinople, whose defenders had been reduced to 4,000, were in despair. The emperor had refused a humiliating ultimatum. The afternoon of the following day, seeing everything lost, Constantine addressed his family, calling them to die with honor. They all left for their posts on the wall, in the Lycus sector, where, once again, the most intense attack would take place.
At half past one in the morning the assault began. There were 70,000 Turks who were prepared to attack that point. Mehmet had arranged his troops in three lines that would have to attack in successive waves. In the first were the less seasoned and in the last the janissaries.
The objective of this provision was to tire the defenders, and although he foresaw that the first two attacks would be repulsed, he knew that the third would win, as he found himself facing exhausted forces. Meanwhile, from the Golden Horn, his men were also attacking the walls, although more than to take them, with the intention of preventing their defenders from coming to reinforce those who were resisting on the wall of Theodosius.
For several hours the Christians commanded by Giustiniani repelled the enemy attacks, but in the midst of fighting with the Janissaries, the Genoese captain received a serious wound that forced him to abandon the wall. At the same time, about a hundred Turks who had managed to breach the parapets some 1,500 meters to the north, flanked the defenses of the San Romano gate. The sultan took the opportunity to order a new attack, managing to seize this time the imperial positions.
Seeing the situation totally lost, Constantine XI launched himself to die in combat. Mounted on his horse and accompanied by Francisco de Toledo and other captains, he pounced on the Ottomans only to fall down minutes later.
The news of the emperor's death spread like wildfire, so the conquest of the city was already an easy task. At dawn on the 29th, the Turks broke into several points and began to loot. It lasted for days, and led to the murder of some 4,000 inhabitants. The population that could not escape on the ships, almost 50,000 people, was reduced to slavery.
Hagia Sophia was immediately consecrated as a mosque, and Mehmet, for amusement, bought the Byzantine nobles who had failed to flee from his men and had them executed in his presence, then assembled their heads on a table exposed to public ridicule. In this way, Constantinople became Istanbul.
As the city was left deserted, thousands of Anatolians were ordered to come to repopulate it. Mehmet cleverly appointed a new patriarch of the Orthodox Church, tolerating his religious practice, thus continuing to maintain the division within Christendom.
The consequences of the fall of Constantinople were evident. The Ottoman Empire and the Muslim religion were firmly established in the Balkans, and Vienna itself was nearly conquered twice. The culture that the Eastern Roman Empire had represented was replaced by the Turkish, and the religious division between the two branches of Christianity became irreversible.
From that moment on, commercial traffic through the Mediterranean and with the East was practically blocked, and the coasts began to be periodically assaulted by Barbary pirates, vassals of the Turks.
Very important would be the attempts that, in later decades, were made to find new communication channels with the distant Indies, and that would lead to the geographical expeditions at the end of the century. Undoubtedly, the fall of the Byzantine Empire advanced the discovery of America by many years.
This text is part of an article published in number 467 of the Historia y Vida magazine. Do you have something to contribute? Write to us at redaccionhyv@historiayvida.com.
