The Fall of Constantinople, 1453

In the spring of 1453 Mehmed the Second, the Ottoman Sultan, brought an army against Constantinople, the capital of the Roman Empire and very nearly all that was left of it.

The walls had never failed. That is the thing to hold onto, because everyone inside the city was holding onto it. The Theodosian Walls had stood for a thousand years and turned away Avars, Arabs, Bulgars, Rus and Turks in their turn. Armies came, sat down in front of them, ran out of food or patience or time, and went home. The city had been taken once, by Christians in 1204, and even that was through the harbour rather than the land wall. To the men standing on the ramparts that spring, the wall was not a fortification. It was a fact about the world.

What arrived in April was different, and they knew it within a week. Mehmed was twenty-one and had brought guns. Not the little bombards of the last century: a foundry’s worth of them, including one that took sixty oxen to move and threw a six-hundred-pound stone. Guns like that did not knock a wall down in an afternoon. They knocked it down over seven weeks, and every night the defenders went out into the rubble and rebuilt what had been broken that day with earth and barrels and timber, and every morning it was shot away again.

There were about seven thousand of them to hold twelve miles of circuit. Roughly two thousand were foreigners, Genoese and Venetian, and the best of them was Giovanni Giustiniani Longo, who had come with seven hundred men of his own and been given command of the land walls because he was the only person present who had done this before. Against them, somewhere between sixty and eighty thousand fighting men, and a fleet.

The Emperor, Constantine, was the eleventh of his name. He was offered terms more than once and could have walked out of the city alive and titled. He did not go.

The last assault came at half past one in the morning on the twenty-ninth of May. It went in waves, by design: the irregulars first, to be used up, then the Anatolian troops, and only then the Janissaries. Two things then happened within minutes of each other, and which of them mattered more is still argued. Giustiniani was hit, badly, and was carried down off the wall and out to a ship, and the Genoese saw their commander leaving and the line began to come apart. And at the Kerkoporta, a small postern in the Blachernae section, a gate was found unbarred, and a party of Ottoman soldiers went through it and got onto the fortifications from behind.

After that the wall was just masonry. Constantine put off his imperial insignia so that nobody could find him afterwards and went into the fighting at the Gate of Saint Romanos, and no one ever identified his body. Around four thousand of the defenders were killed. The city was given over for three days.

And that was the Roman Empire. Not the medieval remnant, not a successor state: the institution itself, counting its emperors back to Augustus, ended that morning in the street fighting around a gate. Fourteen hundred and eighty years. A man dying in the rubble that dawn was the last Roman soldier, and he did not know it, and neither did the one behind him.

They asked me to carry them. Not all of them; they seldom ask. But that morning, in a city where the bells had stopped and the last service in the Great Church had been said the night before by Greeks and Latins together who had spent the whole siege refusing to pray with each other, a great many of them asked.

I took the Roman and I took the Ottoman. They fell in the same streets and they weighed the same.