Fall of Constantinople

On 29 May 1453 the Ottoman army under Sultan Mehmed II stormed the land walls of Constantinople and ended the Byzantine empire, an event conventionally taken as the end of the Middle Ages in Europe. The city had stood for eleven hundred years as the capital of the eastern Romans, but by 1453 it was a reduced rump holding little beyond the walls themselves. Mehmed, twenty-one years old, brought perhaps eighty thousand men, a great bombard cast by the Hungarian engineer Urbina, and a fleet to control the Golden Horn. The defenders, led by the Genoese captain Giustiniani and the emperor Constantine XI, numbered perhaps seven thousand and held out for seven weeks against mining, artillery and repeated assaults. On the final day the walls were breached at the Gate of St Romanus and the emperor died fighting; the city was then sacked for three days. Mehmed made Constantinople his capital, converted Hagia Sophia into a mosque and brought Greek scholars west, helping to stimulate the Italian Renaissance. The conquest closed the land route to Asia for Christian merchants and encouraged Portuguese and Spanish sailors to seek the sea route around Africa, while the patriarchate of Constantinople became the core of the Orthodox world under Ottoman rule.