On This Day: Watershed in history- End of Roman Empire after nearly 1500 years - May 29, 1453
(edited from Wikipedia)
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Roman Empire
The Roman Empire was the post-Republican state of ancient Rome. It included territories in Europe, North Africa, and Western Asia and was ruled by emperors. The fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 AD conventionally marks the end of classical antiquity and the beginning of the Middle Ages.
The Eastern Roman Empire survived for another millennium with Constantinople as its sole capital, until the city's fall in 1453.
Due to the Empire's extent and endurance, its institutions and culture had a lasting influence on the development of language, religion, art, architecture, literature, philosophy, law, and forms of government across its territories.
Fall of Constantinople
The fall of Constantinople, also known as the conquest of Constantinople, was the capture of the capital of the Byzantine Empire by the Ottoman Empire. The city was captured on 29 May 1453 as part of the culmination of a 53-day siege which had begun on 6 April.
The attacking Ottoman Army, which significantly outnumbered Constantinople's defenders, was commanded by the 21-year-old Sultan Mehmed II (later nicknamed "the Conqueror " ), while the Byzantine army was led by Emperor Constantine XI Palaiologos. After conquering the city, Mehmed II made Constantinople the new Ottoman capital, replacing Adrianople.
[End of Medieval period]
The conquest of Constantinople and the fall of the Byzantine Empire was a watershed of the Late Middle Ages, marking the effective end of the Roman Empire, a state which began in roughly 27 BC and had lasted nearly 1500 years. For many modern historians, the fall of Constantinople marks the end of the medieval period and the beginning of the early modern period.
[Turning point in military history]
The city's fall also stood as a turning point in military history. Since ancient times, cities and castles had depended upon ramparts and walls to repel invaders. The Walls of Constantinople, especially the Theodosian Walls, were some of the most advanced defensive systems in the world at the time. For 800 years, the Theodosian Walls, regarded by historians as the strongest and most fortified walls in the ancient and medieval era, protected Constantinople from attack.
However, these fortifications were overcome with the use of gunpowder, specifically from Ottoman cannons and bombards, heralding a change in siege warfare. The Ottoman cannons repeatedly fired massive cannonballs weighing 1,100 lb over 0.93 mi which created gaps in the Theodosian Walls for the Ottoman siege.
The Byzantine Empire
Constantinople had been an imperial capital since its consecration in 330 under Roman emperor Constantine the Great. In the following eleven centuries, the city had been besieged many times but was captured only once before: the Sack of Constantinople during the Fourth Crusade in 1204. The crusaders established an unstable Latin state in and around Constantinople while the remainder of the Byzantine Empire splintered into a number of successor states, notably Nicaea, Epirus and Trebizond. They fought as allies against the Latin establishments, but also fought among themselves for the Byzantine throne.
The Nicaeans eventually reconquered Constantinople from the Latins in 1261, reestablishing the Byzantine Empire under the Palaiologos dynasty. Thereafter, there was little peace for the much-weakened empire as it fended off successive attacks by the Latins, Serbs, Bulgarians and Ottoman Turks.
Between 1346 and 1349, the Black Death killed almost half of the inhabitants of Constantinople. The city was further depopulated by the general economic and territorial decline of the empire, and by 1453, it consisted of a series of walled villages separated by vast fields encircled by the fifth-century Theodosian Walls.
By 1450, the empire was exhausted and had shrunk to a few square kilometers outside the city of Constantinople itself, the Princes' Islands in the Sea of Marmara and the Peloponnese with its cultural center at Mystras. The Empire of Trebizond, an independent successor state that formed in the aftermath of the Fourth Crusade, was also present at the time on the coast of the Black Sea.
End of the Byzantine Empire
The end of the Byzantine Empire did not seem inevitable to contemporaries. As late as 1444, a mere nine years before the Fall of Constantinople, there were high hopes that the Turks would be driven out of Europe. The Byzantines that pinned their dreams of restoration on the West had hoped that they could reap the benefits of another "First Crusade" that would cut a swathe through Asia Minor and allow Byzantine troops to re-occupy the empire's ancient heartlands. However, by the late 14th century, the Byzantine Empire did not possess sufficient resources for the task, and in any case such Western undertakings would have required Byzantium to submit to Rome. If the price for political freedom was religious freedom, certain emperors such as Michael VIII were willing to pay it. In the long run though, the Byzantines were not prepared to surrender their ancient customs and beliefs willingly.
The proximate cause of the problem lay in Byzantium's numerous enemies, who combined during the course of the 14th century to overwhelm what remained of the empire's core territories. With each passing decade, the Byzantine Empire became weaker and lost more land. There were fewer resources available to deal with the Empire's opponents. Her power base was consequently ruined. While the empire had experienced difficulties before (in the 8th century much of Byzantium's lands were occupied by Avars and Arabs), by the later 14th century the empire no longer possessed any significant territories (such as Asia Minor) to form the basis of a recovery. As a result, many attempts at driving back the Ottomans and Bulgarians failed, while the lack of territory, revenue and manpower meant that Byzantium's armies became increasingly obsolete and outnumbered.
However, the most serious problems arose from the internal political and military organisation of the empire. The empire's political system, based as it was around an autocratic and semi-divine emperor who exercised absolute power, had become obsolete, while the civil wars the system produced severely weakened the empire from within, leaving it disastrously exposed to outside attack. Furthermore, the empire's military system had become increasingly disorganised and chaotic, following the demise of the theme system in the 11th–13th centuries. The result was persistent failure and defeat on every frontier.
Byzantium could only lose and decline for so long before it destroyed her; by the late 14th century, the situation had become so severe that Byzantium surrendered her political independence. By the mid 15th century, restoring both the religious and the political freedom of Byzantium was ultimately an impossible cause.
[Shock]
The fall of Constantinople shocked many Europeans, who viewed it as a catastrophic event for their civilization. Many feared other European Christian kingdoms would suffer the same fate as Constantinople. Two possible responses emerged amongst the humanists and churchmen of that era: Crusade or dialogue. Pope Pius II strongly advocated for another Crusade, while the German Nicholas of Cusa supported engaging in a dialogue with the Ottomans.
[Blow to Christendom]
The loss of the city was a crippling blow to Christendom, and it exposed the Christian West to a vigorous and aggressive foe in the East. The Christian reconquest of Constantinople remained a goal in Western Europe for many years after its fall to the Ottoman Empire.
[Jubilation]
The news spread rapidly across the Islamic world. In Egypt "good tidings were proclaimed, and Cairo decorated" to celebrate "this greatest of conquests." The Sharif of Mecca wrote to Mehmed, calling the Sultan "the one who has aided Islam and the Muslims, the Sultan of all kings and sultans,". The fact that Constantinople, which was long "known for being indomitable in the eyes of all," as the Sharif of Mecca said, had fallen and that the Prophet Muhammad's prophecy came true shocked the Islamic world and filled it with a great jubilation and rapture.
[Great transfer of knowledge into the Renaissance]
The migration waves of Byzantine scholars and émigrés in the period following the sacking of Constantinople and the fall of Constantinople in 1453 is considered by many scholars key to the revival of Greek and Roman studies that led to the development of the Renaissance humanism and science. These émigrés were grammarians, humanists, poets, writers, printers, lecturers, musicians, astronomers, architects, academics, artists, scribes, philosophers, scientists, politicians and theologians. They brought to Western Europe the far greater preserved and accumulated knowledge of Byzantine civilization. According to the Encyclopædia Britannica: "Many modern scholars also agree that the exodus of Greeks to Italy as a result of this event marked the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the Renaissance".
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Empire
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fall_of_Constantinople
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantine_Empire_under_the_Palaiologos_dynasty
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