On the night before Sultan Mehmed II's final assault, Constantinople's exhausted defenders and citizens gathered in Hagia Sophia for a service blending Orthodox and Catholic rites, a brief unity forged by desperation. Constantine XI addressed his commanders, urging them to hold the walls one more night. By dawn on May 29 the city would fall, ending the 1,123-year-old Byzantine Empire.
For fifty-three days the Ottoman army of Sultan Mehmed II, barely twenty-one years old, had battered the ancient Theodosian Walls with massive bronze cannons cast by a Hungarian engineer named Orban. Inside the city, perhaps 7,000 defenders faced an Ottoman force numbering in the tens of thousands. On the night of May 28, sensing the end was near, Emperor Constantine XI Palaiologos gathered his Greek and Italian commanders and soldiers for what amounted to a farewell.
That evening, thousands packed into Hagia Sophia, the great cathedral that had stood for nine centuries, for a solemn liturgy uniting Orthodox and Latin Christians who had been theologically estranged for centuries. Eyewitnesses described weeping in the pews, incense thick in the air, mosaics of Christ Pantocrator gazing down as if in judgment. Constantine himself reportedly asked forgiveness of his household before riding out to inspect the walls one final time.
By the next morning, Ottoman troops poured through a breach near the Gate of St. Romanus. Constantine died fighting, his body never definitively identified. The fall marked the end of the Roman Empire in any continuous form, a rupture that sent Greek scholars fleeing west with manuscripts that would help fuel the Renaissance.
Key people: Constantine XI Palaiologos, Mehmed II