Constantine XI last fight on the walls of Constantinople (MED0050)

The Fall of Constantinople, 29 May 1453

At dawn on that Tuesday the siege had lasted fifty-three days. Constantine XI Palaiologos, the last Roman emperor in the East, was defending a city of a few tens of thousands with roughly seven thousand men, a substantial share of them Genoese and Venetian. Facing him, Mehmed II fielded an army that the sources agree was ten times larger, and above all a siege train unlike anything ever brought against those walls.

Walls against guns

The Theodosian fortifications had held for a thousand years: a triple circuit, a ditch, towers at regular intervals. They had been designed against rams and catapults, not against bombards throwing stone shot of half a ton. The great gun cast by the Hungarian Orban — who had first offered his services to the Byzantines, and found they could not pay — took hours to reload, but over weeks it opened breaches that the defenders repaired at night with earth, barrels and timber. It was a race between destruction and repair that numbers made unequal.

The last defence

Giuseppe Rava depicts the emperor during the final assault, when the breach near the gate of St Romanus gave way and the defence disintegrated. The sources record that Constantine XI stripped off his imperial insignia to fight as an ordinary soldier; his body was never identified with certainty. His equipment is that of a late Byzantine warrior, layering Western and Eastern influences accumulated over centuries of contact.

What ended that day

The fall of the city closed the Eastern Roman Empire after eleven centuries. The consequences were wide and partly unforeseen: Greek scholars emigrating to Italy fed humanist study, Ottoman control of the eastern routes pushed Atlantic powers to seek alternative passages to the Indies, and the city became the capital of an empire that would last another four and a half centuries.