Constantinople fell in 1453; a forgery shaped its legend

Constantinople fell to the Ottoman sultan Mehmed II on 29 May 1453, after a siege of about two months, ending the Byzantine Empire — the eastern Roman state that had ruled from the city since Constantine the Great refounded it in 324 and dedicated it as his new capital in 330, more than 1,100 years earlier.

The mechanics are well established. Mehmed arrived before the walls in April 1453, and his guns and far larger army wore down a small garrison for weeks. The end came in an assault that began around midnight on 29 May: when the Genoese commander Giovanni Giustiniani was wounded and left the field, his troops withdrew and the attackers broke through. Mehmed made the city his capital and converted Hagia Sophia into a mosque, though the city itself was only officially renamed Istanbul in the 20th century.

How do we know what happened in 1453?

From a small, tangled set of witnesses. Historians Marios Philippides and Walter Hanak count twelve known eyewitness accounts, and show that many later Greek narratives lean on one of them, by Leonardo Giustiniani, the Latin archbishop of Mytilene. The most influential Greek narrative, the long Chronicon Maius once credited to the emperor’s friend George Sphrantzes, is now known to be a 16th-century fabrication by Makarios Melissourgos, a bishop of Monemvasia who also forged documents.

Was the last emperor really found by the eagles on his shoes?

Treat it as legend. Chronicles from East and West agree that Constantine XI fought hard and died in the final assault. But the vivid extras — his stirring last speech and the identification of his body under a heap of corpses by the imperial eagles embroidered on his shoes — reach us through the Melissourgos tradition; the British Library holds a 16th-century copy attributed to him. What became of the emperor’s body spawned so many stories that Philippides and Hanak devote much of a chapter to his “legendary burial places”.