A 21-year-old sultan, a 49-year-old emperor, the biggest gun on Earth and a city that had never been taken by land. The story of the 53 days that ended eleven centuries of Rome — and the myths they left behind.
Explore the seven chapters
For eleven centuries Constantinople was the largest, richest and best-defended city in Europe. Its triple land wall, built in 413, had turned back Avars, Arabs, Bulgars and Rus'. Only once, in 1204, had it fallen — to Christian crusaders who came by sea.
By 1453 the walls still stood, but almost nothing else did. Plague, civil war and the Ottoman advance had reduced an empire that once reached from Spain to Syria to a single city of fewer than 50,000 people, a handful of islands and a province in southern Greece. Fields grew inside the walls. The Great Palace was a ruin. The emperor could not pay a gun-founder's wages.
Hover the chart to watch the empire shrink.
The fall was not a sudden catastrophe but the last act of a long one. Choose a chapter to follow the timeline; the most important events are marked in bold.
Along twenty kilometres of wall, fewer than eight thousand defenders — a third of them Italian volunteers — faced the largest army and the largest guns the Ottomans had ever assembled. Numbers below are modern estimates; eyewitnesses claimed far more.
The chain across the Golden Horn had stopped every fleet for centuries, and it stopped Mehmed's. So he went around it.
On a single night the Ottomans laid a greased wooden track from Tophane on the Bosporus, over the ridge behind Galata, and down to Kasımpaşa inside the harbour. By morning about seventy ships had been hauled across, sails up and oars beating in the air, to the astonishment of both sides. The defenders now had a second front along the harbour walls, and the city's last secure flank was gone.
A Venetian attempt to burn the ships on 28 April was betrayed or discovered; forty captured sailors were impaled in sight of the walls, and the defenders beheaded 260 Ottoman prisoners in reply.
Seven eras, a slider through all 58 days, the chain, the camps, the overland route and the three assault waves. Every marker links to its source.
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On 28 May the Ottoman camp fell silent for prayer. In the city, Catholics and Orthodox worshipped together in Hagia Sophia for the first and last time. The emperor took communion, asked forgiveness of his officers, and rode back to the Mesoteichion. The attack came soon after midnight.
Thousands of bashi-bazouks are thrown at the stockade in the Lycus valley. After two hours of slaughter they are pulled back. Their job was to tire the defenders.
Disciplined provincial regiments attack under a thunderous bombardment. Three hundred break through the stockade and are killed to a man.
Mehmed leads his elite infantry to the breach himself. Giustiniani is hit; carried to a ship, his men follow him. Somewhere to the north, Doukas says, a small gate stands open.
The emperor throws off his purple and vanishes into the fighting. By midday the Ottoman banner flies over the walls, the ships are escaping down the Marmara, and the sack has begun.
“All of us have reached the mutual decision to die.”Constantine XI to his officers, 28 May 1453
Some consequences were immediate and total. Others are credited to 1453 by habit more than by evidence. Each card carries a verdict.
Counterfactual history is speculation, and these scenarios are labelled as such. Each one asks what would plausibly have followed, and rates how much the world would have changed. Click to open.
In Greece 29 May is a day of mourning and Tuesday is still unlucky; in Istanbul the same date is Fetih, the Conquest, celebrated with fireworks. The building at the centre of both stories has changed its name three times in a century.
The name — from the Greek eis tin polin, "to the city" — had been used for centuries. It became the only official one in 1930.
Mosque in 1453, museum under Atatürk in 1934, and a mosque again from 24 July 2020.
Greek legend says an angel turned Constantine to marble and hid him beneath the Golden Gate, to wake when the city is Greek again.
Re-enactments, concerts and the banner of Ulubatlı Hasan: the conquest is a founding story of modern Turkey.
Every event, person and fact on this site links to its source. Dates for 1453 follow the Julian calendar (29 May Julian = 7 June Gregorian). Figures for troops, guns and casualties vary between sources and are given as ranges.
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