THE DEATH OF CONSTANTINE
AND THE FALL OF CONSTANTINOPLE
In the early hours of 29 May 1453 a gate in ancient walls was breached at last. Through the portal of the Christian city of Constantinople poured Muslim warriors thrilled by the thought of fulfilling a prophecy of conquest made many centuries before by their prophet, Muhammad.
'The city is fallen! they cried. "The city is fallen!' Constantine Palaiologos, in Christ True Emperor and Autocrat of the Romans, was with a remnant of his army when the dread sounds of disaster reached his ears. Looking towards the Gate of St Romanus he saw the banners of the Ottoman Sultan Mehmet II appearing on one high point after another, like licking flames driven by the wind. He called out to the defenders around him, urging them to stand and fight once more.
Every other time, day after day, they had obeyed, and willingly; now they turned and ran, joining a flood of civilians seeking escape even when there was no hope.
According to the legend that outlived him, Constantine was last seen alone on the battlements of the city, perhaps near the Gate of St Sophia and overlooking the tens of thousands of enemy soldiers crowded below and awaiting their chance to come in. He had cast off any vestige of his imperial garb and was dressed as a simple soldier. Taking a sword from the dead hand of a defender, he leapt from the walls - out and down like a drop of rain into an ocean.
Later in the day Mehmet would parade a severed head, telling one and all it was that of the emperor. In truth no one could tell if his claim was true or false, and in any event no other trace of Constantine, last of the Romans, was ever seen again.
Prophecy had always stalked the streets of Constantinople. It had been named after Constantine I (the same that was hailed emperor in York, by the army of his father, Constantius) and rumour had always had it that the life of the city would begin and end with emperors of the same name.
Theodosius II had had a great double wall raised to protect the landward side of the city, so great it was named after him. Constantinople occupies the tip of a peninsula, where the Bosphorus holds Europe and Asia at arm's length.
Two bodies of water to the south - the Sea of Marmara and the Golden Horn - form the apex of a triangle that points roughly east. From above, through eyes half shut, the landform has the look of a hippo's head, blunt snout sniffing towards the Bosphorus. It is across the neck of the peninsula, forming the base of the triangle as it were, that the Wall of Theodosius lies. Constantinople then is Istanbul now, the cultural capital of Turkey, and the history of east and west is marbled through the place like fat through beef.
From beginning to end, the citizens of Constantinople called themselves Romans. It was a New Rome Constantine had built and until its falling, dying day it was assumed by all in the Christian west that it would, somehow, always be there. 
Emperor Justinian had dedicated the Church of St Sophia - greatest of all churches, the same that won the hearts of those Russian Vikings - in 537. It was the Orthodox faith that was cradled there - literally the true and correct form of Christianity.
Before 1453 and Sultan Mehmet, Constantinople had withstood more than thirty sieges. Like a mountain range or some other natural feature on a geological scale, the Wall of Theodosius was regarded as permanent, immovable, for ever. The centuries came and went and Constantinople und the Byzantine empire changed, right enough, their fortunes ebbing and howing, but always they seemed certain to survive. Always too, until the end, it remembered it was Roman. In 800 the Pope made an emperor of Charlemagne, in the west, but the Autocrat of the Romans was always and only in the east.
The Battle of Manzikert in 1071 had shown that soldiers of Islam could defeat those of Christ. In 1204 the climax of the Fourth Crusade - that awful scourge unleashed by the shock of Manzikert - saw the sacking of the city by brother Christians. Those crusaders shared the imperial territories between them and yet still Constantinople prevailed, stubborn as the Wall.
In little over half a century, by 1261, the Byzantine empire was restored - a relative shadow of its former self, but restored nonetheless.
Far away and long ago, in China at the beginning of the tenth century, the Tang dynasty had stumbled and fallen. The power vacuum left by the Tang had set dominoes toppling, entire peoples moving. Out of Central Asia then had come the Oghuz Turks, and from among them the Muslim Seljuk clan.
Also from the Oghuz, in all likelihood, came Osman, a prince among his people - a ghazi in their tongue. Those he led came to be called Osmanlis and then Ottomans.
Among his successors was Bayezid I who besieged Constantinople, styled himself Sultan-i-Rum - Sultan of Rome - and was a significant threat to the empire until 1402 when he boasted of being the greatest ruler in the world. Word reached the ear of Timur the Lame, the last great Mongol khan, who brought Bayezid to battle at Ankara and utterly destroyed him.
Bayezid tried to flee in the aftermath but was captured and brought to Timur. Long afterwards there persisted, in Europe at least, the legend that Timur had kept his captive in an iron cage that was pulled behind his dogs.
The intervention of Timur was a last reprieve for those Romans of Constantinople. Christians in the west disapproved of the Orthodox ways of those Christians in the east and so had long turned a blind eye and a deaf ear to the diminution of the empire, its surrounding and erosion by the heresy of Islam. Mehmet II was Bayezid's great-grandson and just twenty-one years old when he arrived before the Wall of Theodosius with a host uncountable. He brought heavy guns in his train and for the best part of two months used them to pound the ancient defences and the city within. In the end it was a door left open (by mistake or by treachery) in the Gate of St Romanus that made all the difference.
After more than a thousand years, the city had fallen. After 2,000 years a direct line of descent from the Classical world of Athens and Rome had been cut through with an Ottoman scimitar. Into slavery went 50,000
Christian souls, and the Church of St Sophia, the greatest church in Christendom, was turned into a mosque. East was east and west was west and nothing could ever be the same again.
Source ~ The story of the world in 100 moments ~ Neil Oliver
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