The Fall of Constantinople (1453)
In brief
On 29 May 1453 the Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II captured Constantinople after a siege of fifty-three days, ending the thousand-year Roman Empire of the East. The last emperor, Constantine XI, died fighting at the walls; the great church of Hagia Sophia, where the city had gathered for a final liturgy, became a mosque. For the Orthodox it was a day of almost unimaginable loss — yet the Church did not die with the empire. Under Ottoman rule it endured, carrying the faith of a captive people for four centuries.
The last siege
By 1453 the Byzantine Empire had shrunk to little more than the city of Constantinople and its outskirts — a Christian island in an Ottoman sea. The young Sultan Mehmed II, later called “the Conqueror,” brought against it a vast army and enormous cannon — some of the largest yet cast — that could batter the ancient land walls which had guarded the city for a thousand years and had turned back besieger after besieger.
Against him stood the last Roman emperor, Constantine XI Palaiologos, with only a few thousand defenders, Greek and Italian together. For fifty-three days they held the walls. In the early hours of 29 May 1453 the final assault broke through; Constantine, by the accounts that survive, cast off his imperial insignia and died as an ordinary soldier in the breach, his body never certainly found.
The last liturgy
On the night before the fall, as the end drew near, the people of the City gathered in Hagia Sophia for what proved to be the last Christian liturgy served beneath its great dome. Emperor, court, soldiers, and common people came together — Greeks and the Latins who had come to help — to receive the holy Mysteries and to ask one another’s forgiveness, many of them weeping. The recent union with Rome proclaimed at the Council of Florence had bitterly divided the City; on that last night the divisions were, for a few hours, set aside.
When the City fell, Mehmed rode to Hagia Sophia and ordered the church of Holy Wisdom turned into a mosque. The building that had been, for nine centuries, the heart of Orthodox worship passed out of Christian hands. To this day a tradition of the Greek people holds that the priest who was serving that last liturgy stepped into the sanctuary wall, which closed behind him, and will come out to finish the interrupted service when the City is Christian again — a legend, not history, but one that carries the grief and the stubborn hope of a whole nation.
After the City
The fall of Constantinople was the end of the Christian Roman Empire, and the Orthodox have mourned it ever since; folk tradition kept alive the legend of the “marble emperor” who slept and would one day return. Yet the conqueror did not destroy the Church. Within a year Mehmed appointed a respected scholar-monk, Gennadios Scholarios, as Patriarch of Constantinople, and granted the Christians a measure of self-rule under their own bishops.
So began the long centuries of the Church under Islam. The Patriarch of Constantinople became the head of the whole Orthodox people within the empire, the Rum millet, answerable for them before the Sultan. It was an age of heavy burdens and of many new martyrs — yet the faith survived, and far to the north a free Orthodox realm at Moscow would come to see itself as heir to the fallen City. Christ had promised that the gates of hell would not prevail against His Church: the empire perished, and the Church remained.