Victor Davis Hanson
Despite bouts of destructive bubonic plague, the pillaging of the city by fellow Christians from Western Europe during the aborted Fourth Crusade (1204), and a tidal wave of Turkish invasions that finally under the Ottoman Sultanate had surrounded Constantinople, the eternal city of 1453 and its vestigial outlands still held out.
Under its last emperor Constantine XI, the embattled capital remained determined to keep what was left of its once grand Byzantine empire and thereby remain the Christian, Hellenic, Greek-speaking, guarantor of Romanity in the east.
Outside the walls, at the head of a huge army that with attendants might have numbered somewhere between 150,000-200,000, Mehmet II, the new 21-year-old sultan, was assured that even the massive Theodosian walls, the greatest fortifications of the ancient and medieval worlds, would fall to his cannons, his Janissaries, and his horde of conquered Christians and Turkish peasants. The city, he knew, was boxed in, a mere 50,000 still inside the walls.
To the east, the Bosporus passage to the Black Sea was now blocked by Ottoman forts on both sides of the strait. To the west and the wider Mediterranean, the Dardanelles, the ancient Hellespont, was likewise cut off, patrolled by Ottoman galleys that were protected by forts on both sides of the channel.
Prior sultans had largely left alone the once one-million-person Christian city, convinced it would eventually fall without the need to lose tens of thousands butting against the legendary walls.
But Mehmet was young, hasty, and inherited an empire at its near apex, already consolidating almost all the old Asian and Balkan empires of the Byzantines. And yet here it still was, stalled after two months, with summer looming, while the city remained defiant and intact given some 50,000 Ottoman attackers were already dead.
Finally, on May 29, 1453 (“Black Tuesday”), the sultan’s generals asked for one last assault on the worn-out defenders on the ramparts. For most of the day, the subsequent waves of Muslim soldiers broke, pelted from far above by gunfire, arrows, rocks, and oil—until the anchor of the Byzantine defense, the Genovese mercenary Giovanni Giustiniani, fell wounded, and was carried off to his anchored ships.
The result of his absence and the disappearance of his bodyguard was a sudden panic on the walls, as swaths of the ramparts were left unguarded when the Genovese retreated. Immediately in response, the Janissaries focused on the gaps, now redoubled their efforts, scaled the walls, and almost instantly collapsed the Byzantine defense of the inner walls.
What followed were three days of looting, destruction, slaughter, rape, torture, and hostage-taking. When it was over Sultan Mehmet II assumed control of the city, executed many of its most prominent survivors, and sent captive rich boys and girls to his harem. He finally saved a few of the inhabitants, once he discovered a need for expert Byzantines and Italians to restore urban services and help transform the 1,100-year-old Roman and then Byzantine city into the Islamic capital of an ascendant Muslim empire.
Could Constantinople have survived?
It certainly had endured this far—even in a weakened state for over 200 years after the recovery of much that was lost to the Franks and Venetians after the Fourth Crusade. Had the Western Christians sent a small army of even 20,000, with plentiful cannons and gunpower, or had a fleet of 100 Venetian galleys arrived, or had East and West agreed to cease their religious differences and reunited Christianity, then certainly the Sultan would have failed.
Instead, a millennium of civilization disappeared. Within 40 years, most of the Greek-speaking surviving scattered enclaves in mainland Greece, the Balkans, and along the Black Sea shoreline were conquered, wiped out, and vanished. For the next century-and-a-half, the Sultanate systematically swept away Byzantine culture from the Mediterranean Crete to the Dodecanese Islands, ensuring that Asia at least would be forever non-European.
It is easy to talk pejoratively of “Byzantine”—a modern synonym for bureaucratic rot. In truth, the eastern, Greek-speaking half of the Roman Empire survived for a millennium, even as its western half fell. It was in Constantinople that most of the classical Greek texts from antiquity survived, where the greatest cathedral in the Christian world, the emperor Justinian’s Hagia Sophia (the church of “Holy Wisdom”) had remained the world’s largest and most impressive church for over a thousand years, and where the modern European tradition of a codified set of laws was first established.
Yet the road to May 29 was familiar from earlier civilizational erasures. There was a sense of Byzantine complacency, of denial that what had never fallen, and never had been breached, would somehow endure—if perhaps in extremis descending archangels would save their favorite emperor and city. In reality, the city was broken, its population fractious and scattered, distrustful of Western Christians as much as of Muslims, and the too few defenders squabbling and torn by internal strife.
Even during the last week of the city’s life, after nearly two months of heroic but increasingly doomed defense, those on the walls believed they would still see any day a Western fleet of savior Christians, no doubt fighting their way through the Ottoman fleet and rescuing the city. Surely the Pope would not let the bulwark of Christendom fall, and thereby expose Europe to the Islamic onslaught.
The elite of Constantinople for too long had underestimated the young sultan. They naively assumed that he was to be like his father and earlier rulers, who preferred to allow the overripe city in a few generations to drop in their laps rather than lose thousands trying to storm it.
Only too late did Constantine XI realize that Mehmet was a destroyer, determined to be enshrined in Islamic memory as the hero who finally expunged ancient Christianity from Asia.
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