The Fall of Constantinople

May 1453 saw the siege that would lead to the fall of the Eastern Roman Empire. It was the culmination of an age-long struggle between Christianity and Islam for control of the Eastern Mediterranean. The Ottoman leader Mehmed II had dreamed of possessing the city since he was a boy, and now the shining light of Christian civilization, which had lasted 1100 years, fell into the hands of Ottomans. In this episode of Gone Medieval, Matt Lewis is joined by Prof. Marc David Baer to delve into this epochal moment in medieval history. This episode was edited and produced by Joseph Knight and Rob Weinberg. The senior Producer was Elena Guthrie. Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

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• 0:00Dan Snow?

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• 2:17Dan Snow?

  Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. In this episode, I'm going to hand over to a far better qualified, a much more brilliant podcaster. He's Matt Lewis, he's host of Gone Medieval, History Hit's medieval podcast. Today, he's talking to Professor Mark David Baer to delve into that extraordinary, that epochal moment, arguably that terminal moment for the medieval world. It's the fall of Constantinople in 1453. It matters, one of the most important dates in European history. And interesting, I think the insistence on the importance of that date has endured. It has survived the revisionism. It's still considered as one of the most epic, extraordinary seismic turning points in the history of Europe and Asia. This is the second of two episodes that we've released in this last week on the wonderful city of Istanbul.

• 3:02Dan Snow?

  Our first episode was called appropriately, The Origins of Istanbul. It's a sweeping history of that magnificent city with wonderful Jonathan Harris. So definitely go back and check that one out. But now let's scoot ahead to the other end of the Constantinople story. Well, another big milestone in it, the fall in 1453. Enjoy.

• 3:25Speaker 03

  The sound of cannon fire rang out in the deep like a thunder from the heavens, is how one witness described it.

• 3:33Speaker 03

  Piercing crash, the air was thick with billowing smoke. The screams of innocents awoken from their slumber drowned out by the death knell of the guns. The sky burnt red by the rising sun and streaked with fireballs launched through catapults, all portents of doom. It was the morning of the 29th of May, 1453. The city of Constantinople lay under siege.

• 4:01Speaker 03

  It marked the culmination of an age-long struggle between two totemic powers for control of the eastern Mediterranean. A titanic clash between the forces of Christianity and Islam. At first, Christian Byzantium was ascendant, allied with crusaders and standing tall from their glittering capital city. The Byzantines imposed control across the Balkans, Anatolia and into the Holy Land. But then the tide turned and the Muslim Ottoman Empire pushed deep into Christian lands. By 1453, the once triumphant city of Constantinople stood alone, an island surrounded on all sides by a sea of Ottoman territory.

• 4:43Speaker 03

  The Ottoman leader Mehmed II had dreamed of possessing Constantinople since he was a boy. It was, after all, the eastern capital of Christendom, the home of the Roman Empire, and the beating heart of a vast Mediterranean trading network. With more than a hundred thousand men at his back, it was only a matter of time before Mehmed took control. The defenders, a ragtag band of residents and some Italian mercenaries, were outnumbered ten to one. Armed with just crossbows, they offered little against the might of Mehmed's cannon. It was, in fact, one of the largest cannons the world had ever seen, cast by a Christian defector from Hungary specifically to blow Constantinople to pieces.

• 5:26Speaker 03

  For more than a thousand years, the ancient city's walls, built by the Romans, had been heralded as impregnable, the most awesome defences in the western world. Now, they lay ruined, pockmarked with the scars of the relentless aerial barrage.

• 5:48Speaker 03

  Having lasted for more than two months, those man in the walls were gradually picked off by arrows raining down from on high. Commanders were felled, and the gates eventually gave way. Panic spread as wave upon wave of Ottoman soldiers piled into the city. Desperately seeking refuge, survivors crammed into the magnificent church of Hagia Sophia, an enduring symbol of Constantinople's once glorious past. But they were followed. As Ottoman axes pounded against the church's old wooden doors, those within lifted up their prayers. And as the chants inside intensified, so did the pounding of the axes, until the doors splintered and Constantinople's fate was sealed.

• 6:32Speaker 03

  The coveted city was finally conquered, and with it came a new dawn. Gone was the Byzantine Empire, the shining light of Christian civilisation that had lasted 1,100 years. Now was the time of the Ottomans.

• 6:53Speaker 03

  I'm Matt Lewis and in this episode of Gone Medieval, I'm delighted to be joined by Mark David Bear, Professor of International History at the London School of Economics, and author of The Ottomans, Khans, Caesars and Caliphs, to delve into this epochal moment in medieval history. Welcome to Gone Medieval, Mark.

• 7:10Speaker 04

  Thank you for having me.

• 7:12Speaker 03

  It's wonderful to have you here and to talk about one of the most seismic moments in medieval history, I guess, for an awful lot of people who lived through it. It must have seemed like a real turning point in history for them, the fall of Constantinople in 1453. I guess to start us off with, our audience will have heard a bit about how Constantinople developed and became one of the most important cities in Europe at the heart of this new Roman Byzantine empire. But how did people view the city of Constantinople by the middle of the 15th century? And did that perception differ to its east and to its west?

• 7:49Speaker 04

  What do we mean by people? Are we thinking of the inhabitants of the city? Are we thinking of the Ottomans who wished to conquer it? Constantinople has a huge place to play in visions of east and west. So, of course, as your listeners will know, it was the Second Rome, of course. But then for Muslims, it's also a city of great desire because from the beginning of Islamic history, the Prophet Muhammad had sent armies to besiege it and to conquer it. And no Arab or Muslim army had ever succeeded, of course, until

• 8:29Speaker 04

  here we are in the 15th century and the Ottomans are viewing this city as something that they have to take. We have to think about the situation now. It had once been a great city. It had once had perhaps half a million inhabitants. But by this point, in the middle of the 15th century, it is down to perhaps 50,000 people. It's surrounded on all sides by the Ottomans. And so it's really just an island sitting there with the Ottomans just really dying to take it. The people in the city are beginning to see all kinds of visions of the end of days, as if this is going to be the end of time, because they feel like the Antichrist is about to sweep down upon them.

• 9:14Speaker 03

  So I guess we need to consider the Ottoman assaults on Constantinople as almost the culmination of, by this point, I guess, nearly 800 years of a Muslim desire to conquer this city. They've been going at it for centuries by this point.

• 9:26Speaker 04

  That's right. And as I said, the city of Constantinople sits right in the middle of Ottoman territory, splitting Ottoman territories east and west. And we have to think a little bit about the personality of the man who conquered the city, Sultan Mehmed II, who would be called the conqueror, Fatih, later in history, of course. So he was a young man. He was about 20 years old when he became Sultan, actually for the second time, and he had a chip on his shoulder. He was someone who wanted to prove himself, as all young lads do. But he wanted to prove himself against the memory of his father, Murat II, because his father had put him on the throne when Mehmed was a teenager, but then took him

• 10:11Speaker 04

  off the throne and sat himself back on the throne when they were facing campaigns east and west against the Hungarians in the west and the Karamatids, Muslim empire in the east. So Mehmed II already felt like he had been cheated once out of his role in history in the mid 1440s. Then, when his father died in 1451, he was able to reclaim the throne. But again, like I said, he wanted to prove himself against the memory of his father. He wanted to prove himself to all the ministers of government, to the leaders of the army. So this was, we have to think about this man and his mental state, his emotional state, as he looks at Constantinople as well.

• 10:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, so I guess he's looking then at the city as a way to prove himself to his father, even though his father's gone, you know, how can I prove that I didn't deserve what my dad did to me and that I'm better than him? Well, I can do something that nobody's done in centuries of Muslim efforts to take the city.

• 11:07Speaker 04

  And again, he's also, he's 20 years old, 21 years old. And this, as we've already mentioned, this city was desired by Muslims for centuries. Now, during the siege of the city in 1453, Muslims would find, they would claim to find, you know, the remains of...

• 11:24Speaker 04

  A tomb from a seventh century warrior that the Prophet Muhammad had sent. This was a yuq. So this was like a miraculous thing for the Muslim side, saying that, well, this is actually linked to our Islamic past. So it gave more legitimacy to the claims of besieging and conquering the city.

• 11:43Speaker 03

  And that's quite similar to what Christians had done in the Crusades in the Holy Land, I guess, because they had miraculously found relics and things like that at locations that gave then that same kind of sense of legitimacy in being there. So it's interesting that both faiths are using those same kind of, I don't want to say tricks, but ideas.

• 12:00Speaker 04

  Meanwhile, inside the city, as the Ottomans besieged, there are all kinds of strange things are happening. And the Christians in the city see these as omens of doom. So for example, there's a procession in the streets of the city to ask for God's help, Jesus's aid, and they drop the cross. And then there's also, there's a fog that covers the city and they feel like this is the fog of death. So there's really high emotions at this time on both sides, expectations of Muslim victory, also fear of Christian loss. But at the same time, we don't want to only depict this as a battle between Christians and Muslims, because of

• 12:39Speaker 04

  course, the Ottomans have Christian allies, and the Ottomans also themselves are a multi-religious empire where the majority of the subjects are actually Christian. And Christians are serving, as I mentioned, on the Ottoman side. We'll talk about how the Ottomans took the city. One of the ways they took the city was that they had a Hungarian Christian man casted or created the greatest cannon the world has ever seen. So here's a Christian man helping the Muslim army take over the Second Rome.

• 13:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, interesting. So before we get on to how the siege actually plays out, I want to talk in a moment about how the people inside Constantinople viewed themselves. So we thought about how the people to the east, the Muslims and the Ottomans viewed them. How did people further to the west view Constantinople? It had become, as you mentioned, an island of Christianity amongst the Ottoman Empire. My interest is in kind of the Wars of the Roses, Richard III. And obviously, Richard III kind of talks about, he wishes his kingdom was on the borders of the Ottoman Empire so that he could fight the Turks. So there is this kind of Appeal in England to a crusading ideal, I guess. But how widespread was concern for Constantinople? And how serious were any thoughts of trying to help it from the West?

• 13:57Speaker 04

  No crusade would rescue Constantinople then or after. The last crusade had been at the end of the 14th century. And we see that a crusader army defeated at the Battle of Nacopolis in 1396. No crusading army is going to save them. It's also the case that, of course, there was a split between Catholics and Orthodox Christians. Of course, the Byzantine Empire, Constantinople is the seat of the Orthodox Church. So this doesn't help Christian unity at all. And we do see some Christians from Western Europe coming to Constantinople to help defend it. People from what is now Spain, for example, Catalans in other words, but it's a very small number.

• 14:42Speaker 04

  So pretty much the Byzantines are left to their own devices with some Italian and some Spanish military help. But the Ottomans would outnumber them, probably 10 to one. So the Ottomans would have over 100,000 soldiers against the Byzantines might have 10,000 soldiers.

• 14:58Speaker 03

  It's terrifying and you wonder how much they must have hoped that help would come from the West. But we know that it would never ever arrive for them.

• 15:05Speaker 04

  Well, they hoped that help would come from God. So there were visions that this divine intervention, an angel would come and would bring a massive sword and deliver to the city a statue of Constantine, that this angel would deliver the sword. A Christian would then be able to grab the sword and with that single sword would be able to defeat the entire Ottoman army. But unfortunately, that angel didn't appear.

• 15:29Speaker 03

  And does the idea of those kind of prophecies, does that speak to a realisation that their situation was becoming increasingly hopeless? They're not holding out for the arrival of some great army that will help them. They're now reliant on a single Christian who is going to be able to wield this sword sent from heaven to defeat the entire army. Is that a realisation that they're on their own and that they're going to have to rely on some kind of miracle to resist any longer?

• 15:55Speaker 04

  Yeah, if not divine intervention. They are sitting in the city and they are thinking, okay, well, the land walls are actually thirty meters high, ten meters thick, they've lasted a thousand years. It's scary, but perhaps we can survive this. That's what they believe. But then, of course, the cannon from the west is tearing holes through that wall. Then they also have this mighty chain that they stretch across the Golden Horn from the tip of the old peninsula of Istanbul, the ancient core of the city, across the Golden Horn. So that chain actually also protects them. It prohibits Ottoman ships from entering the Golden Horn and attacking the city from inside.

• 16:38Speaker 04

  So they do have some defensive mechanisms in place that give them some sense of security.

• 16:44Speaker 03

  And we've talked a little bit about Sultan Mehmed the Second and why he was focused on Constantinople and perhaps what he had to gain from attacking the city. What do we know about Emperor Constantine, who is inside the city trying to defend it? Is he trying to marshal efforts? Do we see signs of him being genuinely terrified this is the end of Constantinople?

• 17:03Speaker 04

  Well, again, he's doing his best and he's doing his best and he will perhaps take part in the fighting, in the final assault on the city. So he's doing his best to rally his faithful, he's doing his best to rally his troops. The problem being that his populace is seeing all these negative omens and losing faith in their ability to defend the city, especially, as I mentioned, when that giant wall in the west begins to be penetrated by these huge metal cannon balls from that enormous cannon. Also, Mehmed the Conqueror, along with casting that cannon, he also builds very rapidly a fortress on the European side of the city at a place called Rumelihissar,

• 17:44Speaker 04

  opposite fortress that had been built by Bayezid the First at the end of the 14th century. It's probably the most narrow point in the Bosphorus. So the Ottomans actually build a fortress on the European side of Constantinople. And with that, they're able to cut off traffic from the Black Sea. So they're able to blockade the city.

• 18:04Speaker 04

  After they build this fortress, maybe in four months, in record time, Mehmed II is supposed to have also participated, actually putting stones in place. After that, then he comes up with the idea of a way to get around that chain stretching across the Golden Horn. And what they do is, he's able to transport 50 ships, 50 battleships, probably small ships, but 50 ships from the Bosphorus overland, up and then downhill into the Golden Horn by building rails and putting grease on the rails and having thousands of slaves pull these ships by land and then drop them into the Golden Horn. It must have been just phenomenal.

• 18:47Speaker 04

  The way the Ottoman Greek historian who writes a chronicle of Mehmed II's life describes it as if these ships were sailing on land with their sails blowing in the wind as they went down the hill from Galata to the Golden Horn. It must have been just absolutely shocking for the Byzantine defenders to see all of a sudden the Ottoman navy right there in the centre of the city.

• 19:10Speaker 03

  So it feels very much as the Ottomans really focus their attention on Constantinople in 1453, that this is the coming of an important moment. You've got kind of the unconquerable Christian city trying to resist this immense Muslim army, perhaps the original unstoppable force meeting the immovable object. Is that a fair way to sum it up as they're coming to conclusion that Constantinople felt fairly secure because it had been for a thousand years? The Ottomans felt like they could take it because they got the numbers and so both believed in their causes, but also both had a lot to lose. The city, obviously if it's lost, falls under Muslim control and for Mehmed, this

• 19:51Speaker 03

  would be a severe setback to his plans if he was to fail in this big attempt in an effort to prove himself.

• 19:59Speaker 04

  Because again, we have to remember that most of the Byzantine Empire has been taken by the Ottomans. There are only a couple of islands of Byzantine rule remaining in the Balkans or in Anatolia. In today, the city is called Trabzone, then it was called Trebezone. That will hold out until 1461. But the Byzantine territory is very, very small and the Ottomans just cannot stomach or suffer to have this Byzantine island in the midst of their empire.

• 20:25Dan Snow?

  They both have reason to be concerned at the idea of failing in this campaign.

• 20:29Speaker 04

  Absolutely, because the Byzantine city of Constantinople also contains the largest building in the world, which is the Church of Holy Wisdom, Hagia Sophia. This is the symbol of Christendom. And so if the Ottomans take this, they're going to turn it into a mosque. And so the Muslims will have control over this holy spot. There is a lot at stake for both sides.

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• 24:07Speaker 03

  And how does the actual siege of the city begin? So we've got Mechema building this fortress, finding a way around that chain. How does he actually begin his assault on the city?

• 24:16Speaker 04

  Well, it takes place in these different areas. So there's the building of the fortress to the north of the city. After that, there will be the putting the naval ships into the Golden Horn, bringing them over land. At the same time, from the west, they are besieging the land walls, the ancient Theodosian land walls and attacking there. So the Byzantines are fighting on several different fronts. So from the west and north of the city, and of course then there also will be Ottoman naval galleys south of the city. Of course, Istanbul's a peninsula, surrounded, of course, on three sides by water. So they are having to fight from the sea as well as from land.

• 24:58Speaker 04

  Siege lasts something like fifty-four days, I believe. So it takes less than two months. So it is relatively quick, in fact, and the city will fall on the twenty-ninth of May, fourteen fifty-three.

• 25:09Speaker 03

  And would you put that down to the preparations that Mehmed's made, or simply the state that Constantinople is in by this point?

• 25:15Speaker 04

  It's a combination. It's also the great army that the Ottomans have put together over the centuries. The core force of the Ottomans are known as the Janissaries, the infantry corps, and they have the latest technology, they have firearms, they also are slave soldiers. So these are, at that point in history, Christian-origin soldiers. So they were taken away from their homes within Ottoman territories. They were circumcised, converted to Islam, and trained in the art of war in the Ottoman palace and given, as I mentioned, the best, most advanced weaponry. So these are people who are absolutely loyal to the Sultan.

• 25:58Speaker 04

  They've lost their religion, their language, their homeland, and they've given all that up, and now they're completely devoted to the Sultan. So that's his core fighting force. And these men are nearly undefeatable for centuries. The Janissaries would be loyal, wouldn't rebel against the Sultan, and would be a formidable fighting force. So he has them. He also, as I mentioned, he has the cannons and the other artillery weapons. He's also this 20-year-old, 21-year-old with a chip on his shoulder. So he makes these bold military decisions. And he also has a vision for the future. He has a vision for his empire. He himself wants to be Caesar.

• 26:40Speaker 04

  We talked a little bit about what this is going to mean when the city falls for Roman culture, Roman ideology. Well, the Ottomans are actually going to absorb all of that. So after the fall of Constantinople, the Ottoman ruler, the Sultan, will begin to call himself Caesar. I mean, literally. And they will begin to claim that they are the rightful inheritors of Rome and of ancient civilization.

• 27:07Speaker 03

  And so during that 54 days of the siege, I mean, are there any setbacks for the Muslims? Do they hit any real problems during that time?

• 27:14Speaker 04

  Well, it's a very difficult siege. It's a very difficult battle. There are great losses also on the Ottoman side. I mean, anytime you besiege a medieval walled city, this was actually the first time that the Ottomans used artillery to conquer a walled city. So this is also perhaps moving into modern warfare in a sense.

• 27:34Speaker 03

  And were there any moments during that 54-day period when perhaps the people inside the city thought they had a chance? I mean, I'm guessing no magic sword turned up for them to wield and defeat the Muslim army. But were there any points at which they might have had more hope? Or was it just a slow grind towards ultimate failure?

• 27:51Speaker 04

  Well, I think it was a slow grind. There were some setbacks within the Ottoman camp in that the Grand Vizier, the prime minister, was actually part of a peace faction. He actually was much older than the Sultan. He also came from a family that had served as minister to the Sultan for a long time. He actually wanted peace between the Byzantines and Ottomans and find a way for them to live together. Mehmed was, of course, from the war party. He absolutely wanted to defeat and destroy the Byzantines. So there was some internal dissent between the peace and the war camps. The war camps, of course, winning. And Mehmed had his Grand Vizier executed. And thereafter...

• 28:33Speaker 04

  Would almost for centuries, the Ottomans again would just have ministers who came from these converted Christian backgrounds. They wouldn't have Turkish or Muslim born noble type individuals from old families, but only the slave ministers. So they had slave soldiers and slave ministers. Those were the only ones that they would trust to be completely loyal to the dynasty. What's also interesting is that Mehmed also after conquest would absorb some of those Byzantine noble families. Most of them converted to Islam, these noble men, some did not. And they would serve as Grand Vizier again as Prime Minister,

• 29:17Speaker 04

  or they would serve in the treasury or other ministries of government. So Mehmed II sees himself as a Caesar. He's incorporating elements of Byzantine society that can help make his empire stronger.

• 29:30Speaker 03

  And just before we move away from the siege altogether, how does it end? Is there a huge pitched battle? Is it a bloody and atrocious affair?

• 29:38Speaker 04

  Yes. So the Ottoman forces now with Mehmed leading, break through at the gate, which today is called Edirne Gate in the western walls of the city. That's where they break through. That's where they enter the city. That's where they take their revenge on the people defending the city. Traditionally, medieval warfare, the victorious army is given three days of pillage. Mehmed lets his troops pillage for one day. So they rape women, they rape nuns, they rape boys, they take women and children as slaves. They loot churches, they destroy holy relics, they take the gold from churches. They rape and pillage for a full day.

• 30:23Speaker 04

  But Mehmed surprisingly calls an end to it after a day and rides into the city. And he is actually quite upset at the state of the city and seeing what had happened to it because of the years of decline, but also the siege. And also he will ride. On his horse, it's a long ride from the western walls. He will ride through the city on the main avenue, which is still the main avenue today. He will ride all the way into the city, all the way to Hagia Sophia, the Church of Divine Wisdom, where thousands of people had taken refuge. And when the Ottomans broke through, you know, they forced the doors open.

• 31:04Speaker 04

  And there's lots of accounts of this, also from Ottoman sources, you know, they raped the women who were hiding there, taking refuge there in the church. So all kinds of horrible things happened. So Mehmed enters the city one day later, goes all the way to Hagia Sophia, and he weeps. His chronicler, his historian depicts him as crying. He's crying because this once great city, this once great church, had fallen into such a poor state. His chronicler depicts him, this young 21-year-old hothead, contemplating the fact that all empires and all emperors pass away. So it's a moment of sadness amidst the celebration.

• 31:48Speaker 03

  It's an interesting juxtaposition to what sounds like a really keen, as you've said, kind of hot-headed young man, desperate to get in there and fight and defeat this supposedly undefeatable city. And then a man who is suddenly forced to perhaps mature a little bit by having the consequences of that victory put right in front of his face.

• 32:08Speaker 04

  And then he has to decide at that moment, then, what is he going to do? He's captured this city, he's captured this church. What will we do? How will he rule it? How will he rebuild it? And again, reflecting Ottoman practice, he could have done anything, right? He could have made this into an all-Muslim city, for example. He could have converted all the churches to mosques and not allowed Christians to resettle within the walls of the city, which is something the Ottomans would do later in history in places like Cyprus or the island of Rhodes. But what he decides to do is to deport Christians, Jews, and Muslims from the rest of his empire to the city to repopulate it.

• 32:49Speaker 04

  And that's what he does. He brings in thousands of people so that within decades, the city will triple in population. It might have 150,000 people by the end of the century. It's going to become one of the largest cities in Europe within a century. And what we see is something what we should not be seeing if we think Muslim societies only act according to Islamic law, which is the construction of new churches and new synagogues, which in theory is not supposed to happen when a Muslim conqueror conquers another city. So but that's what happens. So he builds the city, he invites people in, he actually forcibly deport his

• 33:29Speaker 04

  subjects in, and then he creates the covered bazaar. He turns Hagia Sophia from the greatest cathedral in Christendom to the greatest mosque in the Islamic world. But he also, as I mentioned, he builds markets, he rebuilds aqueducts and waterways and sewage systems and roads and houses. So the city very quickly will prosper and will become perhaps even more multi-religious, multi-racial, multi-ethnic than it had been under Byzantine rule.

• 34:00Speaker 03

  Fascinating. Do you think there's an element in him doing that of having an eye to that idea of being the new successor to Rome? Does that speak to a desire to continue to move west, to continue to expand Ottoman influence into where Rome used to be? So an effort not to appear too cruel or restrictive to those people because maybe he's signaling an intention to keep going?

• 34:23Speaker 04

  Absolutely. And he did desire the conquest of Rome, and he did send a naval campaign to the eastern coast of Italy towards the end of his reign. In 1480, Ottoman troops would capture Otranto and remain there for a year. So there was this idea of the Ottomans as being, well, they're they wanted to unite the world under one religion and under one emperor, and that religion was Islam, and the emperor was a Sultan. So they would continue their conquest east and west in the following centuries.

• 34:54Speaker 03

  And what do you think we should consider to be the long-lasting legacies of the fall of Constantinople? You know, it sits there at the gateway between Europe and Asia. For a long time, it was the frontier between Christianity and Islam. What is the legacy of its fall?

• 35:11Speaker 04

  Then it becomes not the dividing line between Islam and Christendom, but a meeting point, a meeting place. I mean, the population of the city would be perhaps 20 or 30% Greek Christian through the centuries. Perhaps 10% of the city would be Jewish, another 5% would be Armenian. So it was this multi-religious place. The neighbourhood of Galata, which is today, people go there for shopping and entertainment. That neighbourhood at the beginning was 40% perhaps Italian. So the Genovese remained for a while. So what it did in the immediate term was to make it great again, to make it a great Roman city again, now under the Ottomans.

• 35:54Speaker 04

  But it would have further importance because as the capital of the Ottoman Empire, it would also become the seat of government and the seat of the Sultan. And that physical place would be Topkapi Palace, the Cannon Gate Palace, which again tourists go to today. So Ottoman history would play out right there at the tip of the peninsula of Constantinople in Topkapi Palace. And that's where the Ottomans would articulate their ideology, their system of government for the following few centuries.

• 36:27Speaker 03

  I think that's a really nice thought, that it transformed, albeit that the siege and the fighting was a terrible affair, that it transforms it from being a frontier into a meeting place is actually quite a nice way to describe what happened there in the aftermath. I think that's a really nice way to view the transition from being on the frontier of a fight to suddenly being a melting pot, a meeting place for lots of different ideas and religions.

• 36:55Speaker 04

  But this wasn't the way contemporary Christians in Western Europe viewed it for a number of different reasons. So a lot of the Greek humanist scholars from Constantinople fled and ended up in the rest of Europe and Italy and elsewhere, where they propagated ideas of Muslims and Ottomans and Turks as being barbarians and barbaric and... They painted a very dark picture of what this conquest meant. And their view of the Ottomans as barbarians is an antecedent to today's Islamophobic ideas about the East, about Easterners, about Muslims and so on. So there was a lot of, of course, negative propaganda about it as well.

• 37:39Speaker 04

  But as a historian, I see it more as a meeting point and the shaping of a new world order, where the most powerful empire on the planet among them was this Muslim-led empire known as the Ottomans. So if we think of world history, this is also a very important moment because the Ottomans would last 600 years. And this is the moment at which they become a world-leading empire.

• 38:05Speaker 03

  This really is a turning point. It's the end of Eastern Roman Empire, Eastern Christianity. It's a moment of potential fear for Western Christians, which we are probably still living with some of the aftermath of today in terms of our view of the East and some of our views of the Islamic religion sometimes. I don't mean ours and yours and ours, but the views that some people have. And for the East, it's a moment of great progress. They've achieved this thing they've been trying to do for hundreds of years. And we see that in their use of it as a capital, which, as you say, would stand then for hundreds and hundreds of years. I mean, I think we're only 100 years away now from the end of the Ottoman Empire, having that as their capital.

• 38:48Speaker 04

  That's right. And then they make it into this very prosperous city. And from there, like I said, then they're able to develop their own unique architectural style. They're able also to launch naval campaigns that will take the Ottomans into the Red Sea, that will take them to allow them to conquer the Mamluk Empire, which enables them to conquer Cairo, but also Mecca, Medina, Damascus, Jerusalem, the Middle East. From the Red Sea, then they'll launch naval campaigns across the Indian Ocean. Within a century, the Ottomans will be sending navies to Indonesia in the East. In the West, they'll be allying with France. Against the Habsburgs and Habsburgs controlled territories.

• 39:32Speaker 04

  France and the Ottomans will plan a naval campaign against Rome, even the Pope. So this moment in time, this geographical location enables the Ottomans then to really become a player in world politics in east and west for the next couple of centuries.

• 39:50Speaker 03

  And I think in history, we have to be careful of trying to find these genuine turning points, these critical moments that in an instant almost change everything. And we tend to think of 1066, Battle of Hastings, being one for England. It feels like perhaps the fall of Constantinople in 1453 is one of those moments on a continental level, rather than just how it affects one country.

• 40:12Speaker 04

  Because I can't imagine, because the Ottoman capital at the time was the city which today we call Edirne. In those days, it had been the Byzantine city of Adrianople, which is landlocked, which is small. I can't imagine the Ottomans launching a world empire from that frontier city. Now, from that frontier city, they were able to launch all their campaigns into the Balkans and conquer a great amount of territory. But it really is the conquering of this large city that sits on, what is today the Sea of Marmara and the Bosphorus, connected to the Black Sea. This really enables them to play an even bigger role militarily, economically, as well as ideologically in the world.

• 40:51Speaker 03

  It's almost like we see the renewed phoenix of one empire rising from the ashes of the slowly fading and depleted Byzantine empire. A real switch over.

• 41:00Speaker 04

  Yeah, now this is the Roman Empire, but now in Muslim garb.

• 41:03Speaker 03

  Well, thank you so much for joining us, Mark. It's been incredibly interesting to think about these aspects of the siege, but also the greater geopolitical business that's going on all of around it. So thank you very, very much for your time.

• 41:13Speaker 04

  Thank you for having me on the program.

• 41:16Speaker 03

  Mark's book, The Ottomans, Khans, Caesars and Caliphs, is available wherever you get your books. If you'd like to uncover more about the events surrounding the fall of Constantinople. There are new episodes of Gone Medieval every Tuesday and Friday, so please join us next time for more from the greatest millennium in human history. Don't forget to also subscribe or follow us wherever you get your podcasts from and to tell all of your friends and family that you've gone medieval. If you have a moment, please do drop us a review or rate us anywhere that you listen to podcasts. It really does help new listeners to find us. Anyway, I'd better let you go. I've been Matt Lewis and we've just gone medieval with history hits.

• 42:01Dan Snow?

  Well, thanks for listening to that, folks. I hope you enjoyed that. And remember, if you want to hear more about the history of this fascinating city, do go back and listen to our episode from last week called "The Origins of Constantinople", which traces the story of that city from ancient times right across the millennia.

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