Ruins of the walls of Constantinople
"I only need one thing, and that is Constantinople." When the 19-year-old Mehmed II became sultan of Ottoman Turkey in 1451, Constantinople, the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire, became what he wanted most. Two years later, the elaborately prepared Mehmed II led the Ottoman Turkish army to capture Constantinople, which had a profound impact on the history of the world that followed.
Constantinople was first a colonial city founded by immigrants from the Greek city-state of Megara in the 7th century BC, named Byzantion, and Byzantium is its Latin name. From 326 to 330 AD, Constantine the Great of the Roman Empire spent five years rebuilding and expanding Byzantium, making it a grand and luxurious metropolis. On 11 May 330, Constantine the Great announced the move of the capital to Byzantium and renamed the city Constantinople after himself.
Map of Constantinople
After the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 AD, Constantinople continued to carry the fate of the Roman Empire as the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire, which included most of the Balkans, Asia Minor, Syria, Palestine, Egypt, and Transcaucasia. For more than 800 years, Constantinople was the center of world trade and a bridge to Eurasia, and the Eastern Roman Empire was known as the Byzantine Empire by later generations.
But at the beginning of the 13th century, the Eastern Roman Empire gradually split into many states inherited by the Greeks. Over the next 200 years, the Eastern Roman Empire declined and its territory shrank sharply due to internal friction and the rising Ottoman Turkish Empire. By the time the last Emperor, Constantine XI, ascended the throne in 1449, the territory of the Eastern Roman Empire had shrunk to only Constantinople and part of the Peloponnese Peninsula, which was divided and unconnected. The Ottoman Turks not only seized most of the territory of the Eastern Roman Empire, but also basically surrounded Constantinople. Thus, when Mehmed II succeeded him as Sultan of the Ottoman Turkish Empire in 1451, he made the capture of Constantinople and the opening of the door to Europe his greatest goal.
Ottoman Turkish Sultan Mehmed II
As a first step in his conquest plan, Mehmed II built a huge and fortified castle in the European part of the narrowest side of the Bosphorus from April to August 1452, the famous Rumeli Castle. Together with the Anadoru Castle (built by Sultan Bayezid I, the grandfather of Mehmed II), built on the Anatolian coast just 6 miles south of Constantinople, it blockaded the Bosphorus. At the same time, Mehmed II ordered his fleet to enter the Sea of Marmara to the south, thus completing the maritime encirclement of Constantinople.
Next, Mehmed II began recruiting from the Ottoman Turkish Empire. From the winter of 1452 to the spring of 1453, the Ottoman Turkish army was assembled on the Adrian Plain, with a total strength of about 150,000 men, including 6,000 to 10,000 of the most elite Jechenian Janissaries.
In order to break through the thick and strong walls of Constantinople, Mehmed II set his sights on the artillery that had just appeared at that time. He sent people around looking for artillery experts to create a super cannon powerful enough to collapse the walls of Constantinople. The effort paid off, and later a Hungarian gun expert named Urban was found (some sources say that Urban was a Germanic). According to historical records, Urban was extremely keen on developing new weapons. Under his auspices, one of the largest cannons that humans could have produced at that time was introduced. The barrel of this giant gun is more than 8 meters long and has a caliber of about 750 mm, which can fire a 1200-pound shell to a distance of 1 mile. But the cannon was also notoriously complex and bulky—it required 60 cows and 400 men to operate at the same time, and it took 2 hours to reload the shells. In order to fight as quickly as possible with the most complex technical weapons in the world at that time, Mehmed II ordered the construction of more than 60 large foundries to build huge cannons day and night.
At the end of March 1453, Mehmed II led an Ottoman Turkish army to Constantinople. On the march, the Ottoman Turkish army destroyed many small towns defended by the Greeks that blocked their advance. On 5 April 1453, Mehmed II and his Ottoman Turkish army reached the city of Constantinople.
For Constantine XI, the last emperor of the Eastern Roman Empire, the defense of Constantinople was pitifully small, and the only thing he could rely on was the strong walls left for him by his ancestors. The walls of Constantinople were about 20 kilometers long (5.5 km long on the west side of the Theodosius Wall, 7 km on the shores of the Golden Horn in the north, and 7.5 km on the Marmara Sea in the south), which was known as the strongest city wall in the world at that time, and the Theodosius Wall was the "backbone". This is because the Thracian plains outside the city to the west are undefendable, so this section of the city defense system is designed to be extremely complex. The outer city wall is about 8 meters high, and the inner city wall is about 12 to 20 meters high. The outer side of the city wall stands steeply, made of granite boulders, and the top of the wall is a sidewalk and combat platform, and there are pheasants to cover the soldiers. The inner side of the city wall is sloped with rock parapets, caves and warehouses. On the outer and inner walls stand 96 towers, more than 300 corner towers and pillboxes, and the towers protrude from the city wall by about 5 meters, with an average spacing of more than 60 meters, forming a powerful fire support system. Outside the city walls is a moat about 18 meters wide. Before the advent of artillery, the only thing that could pose a threat to the walls of Theodossi was the earthquake.
Since the situation clearly indicated that the main direction of the Ottoman army's attack was the Walls of Theodosius, Constantine XI focused his defenses here, and Constantine XI personally led the main defenders to defend at Gate 5 of the middle of the Walls of Theodosius (which crossed the Lycos River). Despite his extremely limited strength, Constantine XI did not deploy all his soldiers on the city walls, but left two reserves, one behind the land walls in the area of Patra and one near the Basilica of the Holy Apostles.
Although the defenders were also armed with more than 70 guns, they were much smaller than the giant cannons designed by Urban, and worse, the recoil generated by these guns when fired damaged their own walls, so they played little role in actual defensive operations.
On April 6, 1453, the Ottoman army began to attack Constantinople, and dozens of huge artillery pieces, under the orders of Mehmed II, sprayed heavy shells and flew towards Constantinople. With a loud thud, black holes appeared on the walls of Constantinople. But the city wall did not collapse, it was too strong!
Undeterred, Mehmed II ordered the cannons to continue bombarding, and by the afternoon a section of the city wall near the Gate of Charisius, north of Constantine XI's location, had collapsed. But after nightfall, Constantine XI mobilized all the soldiers and civilians in the city to repair the damage to the walls.
Constantine XI
For more than 10 days, a similar scene was staged: during the day, the huge cannons of the Ottoman army blasted out large holes in the city wall, and even partially collapsed; at night, the soldiers and civilians in the city repaired the damage to the city wall one by one. The main reason why the Ottoman artillery could not collapse a large section of the city wall was that the rate of fire of the cannon was too slow, the accuracy was too low, and there was no concentrated fire, so that the defenders had more time to repair most of the damaged walls.
On 12 April, the Ottoman fleet sailed from Gallipoli, Italy, to the Golden Horn, preparing to attack Constantinople by sea. The fleet consisted of nearly 200 warships of varying sizes and displacements, and the commander of the fleet was Suleiman Baltuglu, who had defected from Bulgaria. However, the Ottoman fleet was blocked by the Sea Cable set up by the Eastern Romans and the Genoese fleet stationed in the Golden Horn, and could not enter at all.
On land, under the continuous bombardment of Ottoman Turkish cannons, by 18 April, the walls of Constantinople were increasingly damaged, especially the walls of Constantine XI, which were the most severely damaged, and the moats in front of the walls were almost filled. So on the night of 18 April, Mehmed II ordered the Ottoman army to launch the first official assault on the walls of Theodosius. In the face of the surging Ottoman army, Constantine XI led the Eastern Roman soldiers and the Genoese mercenaries led by Gu istianiani to resist desperately. After 4 hours of bloody fighting, they finally drove the attackers back. Men, women and children in the city used all sorts of things — wool, leather, wood, furniture, etc. — to step up the restoration of the city walls. For those walls that were most badly damaged and could not be repaired for a while, the Eastern Romans strengthened their defenses by erecting deer.
On 20 April, 3 Genoese and 1 Greek transport broke through the encirclement of much more Turkish warships and entered the Golden Horn to reinforce the city. This news infuriated Mehmed II, who dismissed Baltugru early in the morning of 21 April and took over from his confidant, Hamza. At the same time, the battle also made the sultan understand that Constantinople was stronger than expected, and his sea encirclement ability was not strong enough.
In order to completely cut off the city's shipping routes, Mehmed II recruited thousands of coolies and built a huge land trough from Galata on the north shore of the Golden Horn along the walls of Pella to the "Valley of the Great Tide", using greased large logs. On the night of 22 April, more than 70 warships of the Ottoman Turkish fleet were quietly towed into the Golden Horn through the tanks. Thereafter, the Ottoman Turks completely prevented Genoese ships from delivering supplies to the city. On the night of 28 April, the Turks set fire to many of the ships entering the Golden Horn in an attempt to burn the city walls with fire, but were spotted by the defenders on the way and met with fierce resistance, which ultimately failed.
On land, the Ottoman shelling continued throughout the night, and on the night of 7 and 12 May, two major attacks were launched on the walls of Theodosiusi, but both were repulsed. Seeing little success in ground shelling and assault, and no progress in sea attacks, Mehmed II ordered underground operations to try to enter Constantinople by digging tunnels.
From mid-May to the 25th, many Serbs in the Ottoman Turkish army dug tunnels in the direction of Constantinople. But the Eastern Romans counterattacked in the same way, digging tunnels and letting soldiers in to kill the Turkish tunnel diggers. As a result, all the tunnels dug by the Ottoman Turkish army were destroyed.
The protracted war made Mehmed II impatient. On 25 May, he called a military conference and decided to launch a final, large-scale decisive assault on Constantinople in order to succeed. To boost morale, Mehmed II also promised the soldiers that the city would be free to loot for three days.
Over the next few days, Ottoman artillery bombarded the Walls of Theodosius with even more intense fire, opening more and more gaps for the final assault. And everyone in Constantinople realized that the final moment was coming, and they either prayed silently in the church or in their homes, or struggled to repair the walls.
At midnight on 28 May, the final assault of the Ottoman army began. The first wave consisted of thousands of forcibly recruited civilians whose main role was to deplete the defenders. The second wave was of Anatolian soldiers led by Ishak Pasha, who concentrated on attacking the city walls of Blancheon in the northwest. The third wave was the Sultan's most elite force, the Yechenia Janissaries, tasked with delivering a fatal blow like an exhausted Eastern Roman after the first two waves of attacks.
Under the continuous ferocious attack of the Ottoman army, the Eastern Roman defenders were finally unable to resist, and the outer walls of the Walls of Theodosius were breached. Immediately, the swarming Janissaries of Jechenia fought fiercely with the Eastern Roman defenders between the inner and outer walls.
When light was about to end on 29 May, a group of Jesenia Janissary soldiers inadvertently discovered that the Corkpota Gate of the inner city wall was not sealed, and rushed into the city. Soon, a large number of Jechenia Janissaries and other Ottoman soldiers also poured into the city from the Cockpota Gate. Constantinople, the capital of a thousand years, has finally been breached!
Constantine XI, realizing that the tide was over, led several of his own soldiers to a decisive assault on the tide of Ottoman troops. In an instant, they were engulfed.
On the afternoon of 29 May, Sultan Mehmed II entered Constantinople under the escort of the Janissaries of Jesenia. On 30 May, he ordered the city as the new capital of the Ottoman Empire and renamed it Istanbul.
The fall of Constantinople marked the complete demise of the Eastern Roman Empire and the end of the European Middle Ages. As a famous turning point in history, its impact on future generations is extremely far-reaching, and it can almost be described as shocking:
1. The fall of Constantinople deprived Europe of its barriers and made the Ottoman Turkish Empire glorious. In the thousand-year history of Constantinople, it has always been like a shield to protect Europe, blocking the invasion of the heartland of Europe by outsiders, allowing the West to freely develop its own civilization. After the fall of Constantinople, there was nothing left to stop the Ottoman army's hooves and machetes. In just 76 years, the Ottoman Empire invaded Vienna, the center of Europe, and seized the eastern coast of the Mediterranean Sea and the Main Route of the Red Sea, gradually expanding into a vast empire spanning three continents: Europe, Asia, and Africa. And the whole of Europe trembled under the pressure of the Ottoman Empire for more than 200 years before it calmed down a little.
2. After the fall of Constantinople, the Ottoman Empire controlled the land passages of Eurasia, the Silk Road was forced to close, and the sea passage to Asia through North Africa was also under the threat of the Ottoman Empire. In order to continue to obtain silk, porcelain, gold and spices from the East, Europeans were forced to rush west, out of the Mediterranean, through the Strait of Gibraltar to the fierce Atlantic Ocean, in search of a new route to the East. Thus began the Great Age of Discovery, which led to a series of great geographical discoveries.
3. The fall of Constantinople caused many famous Greek scholars of the Eastern Roman Empire to flee to Western Europe, and they brought knowledge and books of the Greco-Roman tradition to the local area, thus effectively promoting the European Renaissance.
4. The great role played by cannons and gunpowder in the battle to capture Constantinople made it jump from a supporting role in the war to a protagonist in the war. Since then, artillery has been the decisive force in winning successive battles.
5. From the perspective of the development of civilization, the fall of Constantinople eventually forced Europe to achieve the transformation from an agrarian civilization to a maritime civilization, and made Christian civilization increasingly strong in the world; while Islamic civilization was intoxicated by its own glory and became conservative and proud, slow to respond to historical opportunities, and gave up the ocean, which eventually led to the decline of Islamic civilization. Looking back at this history today, it is safe to say that the day of the fall of Constantinople was a watershed in the development of Christian and Islamic civilizations. S
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