573 Years Ago Today, Constantinople Fell to the Ottomans
On May 29, 1453, Ottoman forces under Sultan Mehmed II broke through the walls of Constantinople after a siege that began on April 6 of that year. The Byzantine Empire, which had endured for over a thousand years, ceased to exist before dawn that morning.
Emperor Constantine XI Palaiologos commanded the city's defense with a small but determined force, aided by the Genoese military commander Giovanni Giustiniani. When the final Ottoman assault came in the early hours of May 29, the resistance collapsed. Constantine fell fighting, and the phrase "Η Πόλις εάλω" ("The City has fallen") passed into Greek collective memory as the words that marked the end of an era.
"Η Πόλις εάλω" ("The City has fallen") passed into Greek collective memory as the words that marked the end of an era.
The fall did not come without warning. The Crusader sack of 1204 had already gutted the empire, and its restoration in 1261 never fully recovered its former power. By 1453, Constantinople was a shadow of the city that Constantine the Great had founded, surrounded on all sides by a rising Ottoman state. The city that had served for centuries as the political, spiritual, and religious center of the Greek-speaking Christian world fell in a single morning.
The conquest of Constantinople was followed by the fall of Trebizond and the capture of Mystras, completing the Ottoman consolidation of the region. For Greeks worldwide, May 29 remains a day of mourning and memory, 573 years on.
