The Fall of Constantinople

The historian Doukas, who favoured the union, relates that the emperor Constantine XI Palaiologos had sent from Constantinople to Rome, asking for help and for the union made at the Council of Florence Proclaims Reunion to be confirmed. A papal legate, Cardinal Isidore, arrived in November 1452, and on 12 December, by Doukas’s dating, a liturgy was celebrated in Hagia Sophia by Greeks and Latins together with the pope commemorated (Doukas, History 36.1–6 (Bekker pp. 252–255)); the translation of Sphrantzes used here puts the commemoration on 12 November (Sphrantzes, Chronicle 36.6). Doukas says that most of the clergy, monks and nuns refused it, and that the monk Gennadius, the former George Scholarios, nailed to his cell door a warning to the citizens that, along with the city, which was about to be destroyed, they had lost the faith of their fathers (Doukas, History 36.1–6 (Bekker pp. 252–255)). Doukas also attributes to the grand duke, the emperor’s chief minister, the remark that it would be better to see the Turkish turban in the city than the Latin mitre (Doukas, History 37.10 (Bekker p. 264)).

Mehmed II brought his army before the walls in the first days of April 1453. The Venetian surgeon Barbaro, who was inside, reckoned it at about a hundred and sixty thousand men (Barbaro, Diary 5 April). George Sphrantzes, who counted the defenders at the emperor’s order, puts them at 4,773 Greeks and some two hundred foreigners, and the besiegers at two hundred thousand (Sphrantzes, Chronicle 35.6–8). Neither says how he arrived at his figure for the Ottoman army.

The general assault began three hours before daybreak on 29 May. Barbaro describes three waves, the last of them the janissaries, and the moment the sultan’s flag was raised on a tower and the defenders knew the city was taken (Barbaro, Diary 29 May). Constantine was killed. Sphrantzes says only that he was not at the emperor’s side (Sphrantzes, Chronicle 35.9). Doukas has him cut down unrecognised, as a common soldier (Doukas, History 39.13 (Bekker pp. 286–287)), and Kritoboulos, a Greek who served the sultan, says that he fell fighting with those around him (Kritoboulos, History 1.235).

Crowds took refuge in Hagia Sophia and were carried off as captives (Doukas, History 39.17–20 (Bekker pp. 289–292)) (Kritoboulos, History 1.252). Kritoboulos describes the plunder of houses and churches and the enslavement of the people. He reports that nearly four thousand died and more than fifty thousand were taken, and says that Mehmed, entering the city, wept at what had been done to it (Kritoboulos, History 1.239–256). Doukas relates that the sultan went into Hagia Sophia, struck a soldier who was breaking up the marble floor, had one of his clerics mount the pulpit to call out the Muslim prayer, and himself prayed at the altar; the church, he laments, had become a house of Muhammad (Doukas, History 40.1–2 (Bekker pp. 298–299)).

Soon afterwards, Kritoboulos writes, Mehmed sought out Gennadius, who had been found a captive at Adrianople, and made him patriarch of the Christians, granting him authority over the church no less than it had enjoyed under the emperors (Kritoboulos, History 2.2). The Greek church lived on under Ottoman rule with an opponent of the union at its head.