Turning the Ottoman Tide - John III Sobieski at Vienna 1683

By Anthony Pagden | MHQ  | 5 comments  |  Print This Post  |  Email This Post

Muslims battle Christians outside Vienna. The Art Archive/Museum der Stadt Wien/Dagli Orti.

By the end of the fourteenth century, Byzantium lacked any strategic importance and certainly represented no threat to the ambitions of the resurgent Ottoman Empire. Constantine’s great city, and what little remained of the crumbling Byzantine Empire, had never fully recovered from the Latin occupation from 1204 to 1261.

Despite its dilapidated condition, Constantinople was still the “Golden Apple,” the capital of the ancient Roman Empire. Muslims and Christians alike reckoned it to be the greatest power the world had ever known. For the Ottoman ruler Mehmed II, it was the most treasured prize of all, whose possession would make him master of the world. Constantinople was the capital of the oikoumene, the “inhabited world,” over which Mehmed, the Amir al-Mu’minin, “Commander of the Faithful,” and his descendents would soon rule until the end of creation.

On April 5, 1453, Mehmed’s army reached the outer walls of the city. His forces, according to the Venetian merchant Nicolò Barbaro, who saw them arrive, numbered some one hundred sixty thousand. Other accounts, all of them Christian, put the figure anywhere between two and four hundred thousand. Most were Muslims, marshaled from all over the empire, but their ranks were swollen by others in the expectation of rich pickings: Latins, a large contingent of Serbs, even some Greeks.

Inside Constantinople a state of terror now reigned. The able-bodied male population of the city numbered some thirty thousand, but the Byzantine statesman George Sphrantes estimated that fewer than five thousand of these were able and willing to fight.

Mehmed moved no fewer than fourteen batteries of artillery into place along the entire length of the outer line of walls, known as the Wall of Theodosius. Day after day, the Ottoman guns fired massive stone balls that carried away great chunks of masonry, sometimes entire towers. Although the entire population turned out each night to rebuild what they could, hour by hour the city’s defenses steadily crumbled.

About three hours before dawn on May 29, Mehmed gave the order for a final assault. The Greeks managed to drive back the first two waves of attackers. But the outer walls of the city were now virtually in ruins. The Janissaries, the sultan’s crack troops, broke through the Kerkoporta, or “Gate of the Circus,” and poured into the city. The fighting was fierce, but Ottoman victory was certain.

For three days, Mehmed’s victorious army was allowed to pillage the city. The Greek chronicler Kristovoulos lamented that the Turks fell upon the defenseless population, “stealing, robbing, plundering, killing, insulting, taking and enslaving men, women, and children, old and young, priests and monks—in short, every age and class.” The blood ran in the streets “as if it had been raining,” wrote the merchant Barbaro, and “bodies were tossed into the sea like melons into the canals of Venice.”

Ever since the armies of the caliph Umar II had been forced to abandon the first sustained siege of Constantinople in 718, prophecies had spread throughout the Muslim world of the inevitable day when the great city, the last bastion of the ancient enemy, would pass into the dar al-Islam. Now, under a sultan who bore the name of the prophet himself, these predictions had finally come to pass. Thereafter both Muslims and Christians alike referred to Mehmed II as “the Conqueror.”

For the West, the fall of Constantinople was a calamity. It was not only a great Christian city, the last bastion of Constantine’s empire in the East, that had fallen. Gone too was the last living link with the ancient Greek world. And all this glittering past had been snuffed out by a horde of Muslim barbarians from the depths of Asia.

Help HistoryNet by bookmarking to

Tags: 17th - 18th Century, Historical Conflicts, Historical Figures

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.