The Siege of Constantinople: Islam Triumphant

Constantinople was the capital of the thousand year Byzantine Empire. It was the gateway to the West and it had long been a thorn in the side of the Ottoman Empire, not because the Ottoman’s feared it but because they resented this beacon of Christendom in the heart of their Islamic Empire. Its capture they believed would herald the beginning of dominant Islam in its inexorable march west, and the new Sultan Mehmed II was determined to take it, and by 1453, the great Byzantine Empire was a shadow of its former self. It was fragmented and its Emperor Constantine XI wielded little power beyond the walls of the great city itself.

Situated on the Bosphorus at the far end of the Hellespont (modern day Dardanelles) Constantinople separated the Aegean Sea from the Sea of Marmara and has always been considered to be of great strategic value. Surrounded by water on three sides and defended by a series of walls on its landlocked southern end it was easily defendable and had only once been previously captured by western Crusaders in 1204, more by deceit than conquest.

The Ottoman Turks had been for many years hemming in Constantinople by surrounding it with a series of fortresses with the intention of choking off its supply lines. Constantine XI, was well aware of Mehmed’s intentions and knew that the building of the latest fortress was merely the precursor to a full-scale attack on the city itself. He dispatched a series of increasingly frantic pleas to the Pope in Rome for military help; but it would be internal European politics as much as the armies of Mehmed II that would seal the fate of the Byzantine Empire. The schism between the Orthodox Christian Church in the East and the Roman Catholic Church in the West had led to considerable bitterness between the two. The Catholic Church was determined to be the one and only Christian Church and had long sought to impose a union on the Byzantines which they had dismissed with some contempt, and it was only in extremis that Constantine XI agreed to such a union as payment was for western military assistance, but by this time no one quite believed him. Pope Nicholas VI, so close to achieving the union the Catholic Church had so long sought, nevertheless did his best to rally support for the Byzantines. His appeals, however, fell on deaf ears. Spain was in the throes of the Reconquista (ejecting the Moors from the south of the country), France was still recovering from the Hundred Years War, England was was destabilised and riven by the on-going War of the Roses, and the Germans were too busy fighting among themselves. The Pope was unable to raise an army for the defence of Constantinople, it would be on its own.