29th May 1453, as FDR might have said, "a date which will live in infamy". The Roman Empire ends (although it has been something more and less than 'Roman' for centuries at this point).
Around three hours before dawn the final assault of the 53 day siege began. The first wave were irregulars and Azap conscripts. Cannon fodder in other words with little or no protection from the iron greeting that spat from the crossbows of the defenders as they charged the filled-in ditch of the Fosse. No official casualty figures were made but we can estimate thousands fell in that initial rush. Sultan Mehmed hardly cared, the purpose was to exhaust the defenders. Next he sent better trained and armed troops - his Sipahi. These fared little better. One must feel a degree of sorrow for the Sipahi, they were cavalry troops and no very suited to what they were being asked to do here. The final attack, several hours into the assault, were the elite Janissary. Even with this unceasing pressure the defenders appear to have not buckled until their General, Giovanni Giustiniani Longo, was struck by a bullet that penetrated his armour. Mortally wounded he told his adjutant John Dalmata to unlock the postern and get him to his ship.
It's important to note that most of the hand to hand combat has occurring in a very narrow section of the three mile wall called the Mesotechion. This area had seen the focus of the cannon barrage and the walls there were reduced to basically rubble and a hastily built stockade of barrels and anything else the desperate defenders could arrange. Prior to this assault, the Genoese mercenary troops and the Emperor's elite bodyguard had taken position in this area and locked the postern gates to their rear. Thus making the psychological statement of no retreat, stand or die. Giustiniani's action betrayed that mindset and triggered a complete collapse. Seeing their leader being carried from the field, the Genoese (who made up the majority of armoured troops) bolted after him. A stampede crushed several in the narrow postern gateway and this area became a massacre.
Tradition has it that this was the moment that Janissaries in another section of the wall (close to the Blachernae palace section where the double walls become a single set) discovered a postern (the Kerkoporta) had been left open (deliberately or not). As morale in the Mesotechion collapsed, the first Turk banners mounted the towers at the Kerkoporta and the Emperor, seeing the day lost, threw himself onto the swords of the Janissary as they broke the last resistance at the Mesotechion stockade.
From there the sack of the city began. The surviving Genoese and Venetians fled to their boats and some managed to escape, including the mortally wounded Giustiniani. They were able to do so largely because the Ottoman navy had abandoned its blockade to join in the looting of the city.
Under Islamic laws of conquest, soldiers were entitled to three days of unchecked looting (ie. the time between the fall and the fourth dawn) when a city fell in such a way. Even had he wished to, Mehmed could not have allowed things differently but it should be noted that he did specify that the buildings of the city were to be his prize and were not to be burned. Thus the sack of Constantinople in 1453 was probably less destructive than the prior one by Crusaders in 1204. Legend has it that Mehmed found a disobedient soldier hacking at a mosaic as he arrived at Hagia Sophia and had the man promptly hung.
Legend also has the Sultan entering the great church and uttering lines of a long forgotten Persian poem: "The Spider weaves his curtain in the palace of Caesars, the owl calls the watches in the towers of Afrasaib". Given Mehmed's own poetic output there's every chance he was moved to the lyrical by his achievement.
Who was John Grant? It was this question that drew me into the history of Constantinople in the first place. Grant - the legend goes - was a Scotsman, far from home in the thick of the action when the Roman Empire fell. It is a legend added to by Dorothy Dunnett and Mika Waltari but it is one of those pieces of historical trivia that balance on precariously little solid evidence.
Two separate eye witness accounts (Leonard of Chios & George Sphrantzes) attest to the presence of a John (or Johannes) Grant among the defenders of Constantinople in 1453. He is identified as being associated to General Giovanni Giustiniani's Genoese contingent. He is also credited with heroics in the counter mining effort in the final weeks of the siege. This is about the sum total of contemporary information we have on the man. How he came to be there and what was his fate are complete mysteries, as is his origin.
The great Byzantine historian, Steven Runciman suggested he might have been Scottish but tantalizingly offers no evidence for this. One might guess Runciman is basing it on the Scottish surname. Sphrantzes identified Grant as German, although it's quite possible he used that term in a sweeping generalisation for northern Europeans - as Byzantine historians were wont to do. 'German' would have been a description applied to any northern European of a particular height and appearance. Germany of course did not exist. Leonard, who also being of the Genoese faction seems the best source - calls him 'grandi', which again could simply be in reference to his size or the size of his deeds at the siege. It's certainly credible that a Scottish (or Germanic) soldier of fortune had found his way into the Lombard Wars and the muster rolls of a Genoese mercenary company.
Whilst Grant was (possibly) the last Briton to defend the walls of Constantinople he was far from the first. A long tradition dating back to the post-Hastings conquest of England in 1066 saw hundreds of Saxons make the trek to the Byzantine court to sell their sword-and-axe-arms. There they joined Danes, Norwegians and various other 'Germanic' mercenaries in the famous Varangian Guard unit, the elite bodyguard of Emperors for centuries. The last Varangian units recorded were still active around 100 years prior to the fall.
Which is to say that absolutely nothing about John Grant is firmly established fact except his involvement in the defenses, in particular in detecting and destroying the mining efforts around the Caligaria Gate on 24th May 1453.
The 28th May was the last full day of the Byzantine Empire. After 52 days of pounding away at the walls with an unprecedentedly large battery of cannon the defenses had been ground to dust. A ramshackle stockade of rubble and earth-filled barrels had plugged the holes but to intense and purposes the great Walls of Theodosius had been demolished. The Sultan believed one final assault would break through and from the 26th the Ottoman camp fell into preparations for this. The defenders knew it too. On the 28th they held a final solemn ceremony in Hagia Sophia. The great church had been abandoned by the Orthodox congregation since its consecration to the Latin church on 12th December 152 by Isidore of Kiev.
Isidore had been sent by the Pope as a legate to arrange the reunion of the Eastern and Western churches -a capitulation by the Greek faith in an attempt to secure a rescue Papal fleet. The fleet never came.
The people, deeply upset at the desecration of their holiest of churches boycotted Hagia Sophia from December until the 28th May. The final ceremony was something of a reconciliation between the rival religious factions within the city. Within twelve hours the city defenses would be overrun and the Sultan would enter Hagia Sophia, ending its 916 year term as a church and beginning its 478 years as a mosque.
The Fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Empire took place on 29 May 1453 after a 53-day siege. The Ottomans were commanded by the then 21-year-old Sultan Mehmet II (who became known as the Conqueror), the seventh sultan of the Ottoman Empire. The defenders had been lead by the last Byzantine Emperor, Constantine XI Palaiologos.
The capture of Constantinople effectively marked the end of the near 1,500 year Roman Empire and dealt a massive blow to Christendom, as the Muslim Ottoman armies thereafter were left unchecked to advance into Europe without an adversary to their rear. After the conquest, Sultan Mehmet II transferred the capital of the Ottoman Empire from Edirne to Constantinople.
The conquest of Constantinople and the end of the Byzantine Empire was perhaps the key event in the Late Middle Ages and marks for some historians the end of the Middle Ages.
Having taken the Byzantine capital, Mehmet turned his attention to picking off the last small remnant kingdoms of the Empire. The Morea fell in 1460 and the Empire of Trebizond in 1461. Mehmet continued his conquests, invading Wallachia in 142 and Bosnia in 1463.
Prior to the fall, the maritime republics of Genoa and Venice had maintained an uneasy policy of trade and sometimes co-operation with the Ottoman state. Whilst a Genoese general, Giovani Giustiniani, commanded the defenses along the Land Wall of Constantinople during the siege, Genoa remained officially neutral - and used its concessionary territory of Galata (Pera) across the Golden Horn to sell arms and equipment to both sides during the siege. Venice also made no official contribution to the defense of Constainople - a rescue fleet was belatedly dispatched but far too late. However the sizable Venetian community within Constantinople, led by their bailio, fought alongside their old Genoese rivals both at the wall and as a patchwork flotilla of ships defending the Golden Horne.
After the fall, Venice's policy began to change and La Serenissima began preparations for the inevitable military confrontation with the Ottoman empire. War was officially begun in 1463 and lasted until 1479, a conflict which became known as The Long War.
