10/23/2023 0 Comments Battle of vienna polish hussars![]() It was not only a great Christian city, the last bastion of Constantine’s empire in the East, that had fallen. Thereafter both Muslims and Christians alike referred to Mehmed II as “the Conqueror.”įor the West, the fall of Constantinople was a calamity. ![]() Now, under a sultan who bore the name of the prophet himself, these predictions had finally come to pass. The Greek chronicler Kristovoulos lamented that the Turks fell upon the defenseless population, “stealing, robbing, plundering, killing, insulting, taking and enslaving men, women, and children, old and young, priests and monks-in short, every age and class.” The blood ran in the streets “as if it had been raining,” wrote the merchant Barbaro, and “bodies were tossed into the sea like melons into the canals of Venice.”Įver since the armies of the caliph Umar II had been forced to abandon the first sustained siege of Constantinople in 718, prophecies had spread throughout the Muslim world of the inevitable day when the great city, the last bastion of the ancient enemy, would pass into the dar al-Islam. How One Mother Managed to Save Her Son at Guadalcanal - From Ohioįor three days, Mehmed’s victorious army was allowed to pillage the city. The fighting was fierce, but Ottoman victory was certain. The Janissaries, the sultan’s crack troops, broke through the Kerkoporta, or “Gate of the Circus,” and poured into the city. But the outer walls of the city were now virtually in ruins. The Greeks managed to drive back the first two waves of attackers. Although the entire population turned out each night to rebuild what they could, hour by hour the city’s defenses steadily crumbled.Ībout three hours before dawn on May 29, Mehmed gave the order for a final assault. Day after day, the Ottoman guns fired massive stone balls that carried away great chunks of masonry, sometimes entire towers. Mehmed moved no fewer than fourteen batteries of artillery into place along the entire length of the outer line of walls, known as the Wall of Theodosius. The able-bodied male population of the city numbered some thirty thousand, but the Byzantine statesman George Sphrantes estimated that fewer than five thousand of these were able and willing to fight. Inside Constantinople a state of terror now reigned. Most were Muslims, marshaled from all over the empire, but their ranks were swollen by others in the expectation of rich pickings: Latins, a large contingent of Serbs, even some Greeks. Other accounts, all of them Christian, put the figure anywhere between two and four hundred thousand. His forces, according to the Venetian merchant Nicolò Barbaro, who saw them arrive, numbered some one hundred sixty thousand. On April 5, 1453, Mehmed’s army reached the outer walls of the city. Constantinople was the capital of the oikoumene, the “inhabited world,” over which Mehmed, the Amir al-Mu’minin, “Commander of the Faithful,” and his descendents would soon rule until the end of creation. For the Ottoman ruler Mehmed II, it was the most treasured prize of all, whose possession would make him master of the world. Muslims and Christians alike reckoned it to be the greatest power the world had ever known. Constantine’s great city, and what little remained of the crumbling Byzantine Empire, had never fully recovered from the Latin occupation from 1204 to 1261.ĭespite its dilapidated condition, Constantinople was still the “Golden Apple,” the capital of the ancient Roman Empire. ![]() (The Art Archive/Museum der Stadt Wien/Dagli Orti)īy the end of the fourteenth century, Byzantium lacked any strategic importance and certainly represented no threat to the ambitions of the resurgent Ottoman Empire. Muslims battle Christians outside Vienna. How the King of Poland Turned the Tide Against the Ottoman Empire Close
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