An original BookTrail recap.Late Middle Ages · Eastern Mediterranean · 1453
The 1453 siege ended the Roman imperial line that had endured for over a millennium and confirmed the Ottomans as the dominant power of the eastern Mediterranean.
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By 1453 the Byzantine Empire had shrunk to little more than the city of Constantinople itself, a fortress capital ringed by legendary walls but starved of soldiers, money, and allies. The young Ottoman sultan Mehmed II, determined to make the city his own, assembled a large army and a formidable siege train, including enormous cannon cast for the purpose. Against him stood the last emperor, Constantine XI, commanding a defending force far too small to man the walls fully, aided by a modest contingent of Genoese and Venetian volunteers. For weeks the great guns battered the ancient land walls while the defenders repaired breaches by night. The Byzantines strung a heavy chain across the Golden Horn to protect their harbor, but Mehmed famously hauled ships overland to bypass it. In the final assault the defenders were overwhelmed and Constantine died fighting. Mehmed entered the city and made it his new capital. The fall extinguished the Byzantine state, sealed Ottoman ascendancy in the region, disrupted old trade routes, and sent Greek scholars and manuscripts westward, feeding currents that fed the Renaissance.
The 1453 siege ended the Roman imperial line that had endured for over a millennium and confirmed the Ottomans as the dominant power of the eastern Mediterranean. It marks a conventional dividing line between the medieval and early modern worlds.
By the fifteenth century Byzantium had been reduced by centuries of decline, civil war, and earlier Latin conquest to the capital and a few scattered holdings. Its emperors ruled a shadow of the old Roman state, dependent on foreign mercenaries and fragile alliances. The city's population and resources were a fraction of what its vast walls had been built to defend.
Why it matters: The outcome was less a sudden collapse than the last act of a long, slow contraction.
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