Constantinople falls to the Ottoman Turks, ending the Byzantine Empire
On this day · 29 May 1453
On 29 May 1453, Mehmed II's army breached the great walls of Constantinople, closing the book on a 1,000-year empire.
On 29 May 1453, after a siege of roughly two months, the army of Sultan Mehmed II broke into Constantinople, capital of the Byzantine Empire. The Ottomans, numbering tens of thousands, vastly outmatched a defending force of only a few thousand strung along miles of ancient land walls.
The last emperor, Constantine XI Palaiologos, threw off his imperial insignia and died fighting in the breach. By eyewitness accounts his body was later identified among the dead only by the embroidered eagles on his shoes.
One state, traceable to the Roman Empire of antiquity, had endured nearly a thousand years in this city — and ended in a single morning.
Mehmed, just 21, made the captured city his new capital and earned the title “the Conqueror.” The great church of Hagia Sophia was converted into a mosque, and an event long dreaded across Christendom became a hinge between the medieval and early-modern worlds.
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