The Last Roman

The Last Empire

By 1453, the Byzantine Empire was a ghost. Once it had ruled the entire eastern Mediterranean — from Egypt to the Balkans, from Syria to Italy. It was the continuation of the Roman Empire, unbroken since Augustus Caesar. Constantinople, its capital, had been the greatest city in the world for a thousand years: a million people behind the most formidable walls ever built.

Now the empire was just the city itself and a few scraps of territory. Constantinople’s population had collapsed to perhaps 50,000 people rattling around in a metropolis built for twenty times that number. Entire neighborhoods were abandoned. Fields and orchards grew inside the city walls. The treasury was empty. The army barely existed.

Emperor Constantine XI Palaiologos knew what was coming. Sultan Mehmed II of the Ottoman Empire — 21 years old, brilliant, ruthless, and obsessed with taking the city — had spent two years preparing. He built a fortress on the Bosphorus to cut the city’s supply lines. He assembled an army of 60,000 to 80,000 men. And he commissioned the largest cannon the world had ever seen.

Constantine XI had 7,000 fighting men. Of those, perhaps 5,000 were Greek, and 2,000 were foreign volunteers — mostly Genoese under the brilliant soldier Giovanni Giustiniani, who brought 700 armored mercenaries and became the city’s de facto military commander.

The Emperor sent desperate appeals for help to every Christian power in Europe. Almost nobody came.

The Great Bombard

Mehmed’s secret weapon was a Hungarian cannon-maker named Orban (Urban). Orban had first offered his services to Constantine XI, but the Emperor couldn’t afford him. So Orban went to Mehmed, who paid him four times what he asked.

Orban built a monster. The Great Bombard was 27 feet long (8.2 meters), weighed 17 tons, and fired stone balls weighing 1,200 pounds (544 kg) over a mile. It required 60 oxen and 200 men to move. It could only fire seven times a day because the barrel needed hours to cool between shots.

It was the largest cannon ever built up to that point. And it was aimed at walls that had been designed to resist battering rams and catapults, not gunpowder weapons that didn’t exist when they were built.

Mehmed also had 60 to 70 smaller cannons. Together, they represented the most concentrated artillery barrage the world had ever seen.

The Ottoman army arrived on April 6, 1453. They stretched for miles. The defenders, looking out from the walls, could see the tents and campfires of an army that outnumbered them ten to one. And in the center of it all, the Great Bombard, being hauled into position.

53 Days

The siege lasted 53 days. It was a grinding, brutal affair.

The Ottoman cannons pounded the Theodosian Walls day after day. The Great Bombard blew holes in walls that had stood since the 5th century. Each hit sent shockwaves through the fortifications. Stone blocks the size of wagons were hurled into the air. Sections of wall collapsed in clouds of dust.

But the defenders were extraordinary. Every night, under cover of darkness, teams of Greeks and Genoese repaired the breaches. They filled the gaps with earth, timber, and rubble. They hung hides and bales of wool to absorb the cannon impacts. They erected wooden palisades behind the shattered stone. Every morning, the Ottomans would find the walls partially rebuilt.

Mehmed tried everything. He launched infantry assaults against the breaches — they were repelled with heavy losses. He tried to mine under the walls — the defenders counter-mined and flooded the tunnels. He tried to force the Golden Horn harbor by dragging 70 ships overland on greased logs around the chain boom that blocked the harbor entrance — one of the most audacious military engineering feats of the medieval era.

Giustiniani, the Genoese commander, was everywhere. He organized the defense of the weakest sections, personally led counterattacks, and maintained discipline among the exhausted garrison. Constantine XI spent every night on the walls alongside his men.

For 53 days, 7,000 men held an empire at bay.

May 29, 1453

On the night of May 28, Mehmed ordered a final all-out assault for dawn. The entire army would attack simultaneously along the full length of the walls. Three waves: first the irregulars (expendable), then the Anatolian regulars, then the elite Janissaries.

At 1:30 AM on May 29, the attack began. The first wave of irregulars — tens of thousands of men — charged the walls with ladders and grappling hooks. They were poorly armed and poorly trained, but there were so many of them that the exhausted defenders had to fight continuously without rest. After two hours, the irregulars were called back. They had accomplished Mehmed’s goal: wearing down the garrison.

The Anatolian regulars hit next. They were better equipped and more disciplined. They fought at the walls for another hour. At one point they almost breached the inner wall before being driven back. But the damage was done — the defenders were reaching the limit of human endurance.

Then disaster struck. Giustiniani was hit — a crossbow bolt or bullet struck him in the chest, piercing his armor. Severely wounded, he asked to be carried to a ship. Constantine begged him to stay. Giustiniani refused. As he was carried through the gate, the Genoese soldiers saw their commander leaving and panicked. They streamed out after him.

At almost the same moment, a small group of Ottoman soldiers discovered that the Kerkoporta, a small sally port in the wall, had been left open. They poured through. At the same time, the Janissaries hit the main breach in full force.

The defense collapsed. Ottoman troops flooded through the walls from multiple points. The battle became a rout.

The Last Emperor

When Constantine XI saw the Ottoman flags rising on the walls, he knew the city was lost. According to the accounts that survive, he said: “The city has fallen and I am still alive.”

He stripped off his imperial regalia so he would not be recognized, drew his sword, and charged into the mass of Ottoman soldiers pouring through the breach. He was never seen again.

His body was never positively identified. Some accounts say he was killed in the fighting at the gate. Others say he was trampled in the crush. Ottoman sources claim his head was later found and presented to Mehmed. Greek sources say he simply vanished — that the last Roman Emperor walked into the fury of battle and was swallowed by history.

Whatever the truth, Constantine XI Palaiologos died fighting. The last Emperor of Rome — a line stretching back to Augustus in 27 BC — died with a sword in his hand, in the breach of his own walls, on the last day of his empire.

He was the 93rd Emperor of Rome. There would not be a 94th.

The End of Rome

The sack of Constantinople lasted three days. Between 30,000 and 50,000 civilians were enslaved. Churches were looted. Libraries containing irreplaceable ancient texts were destroyed. The Hagia Sophia — the greatest church in Christendom, built in 537 AD — was converted into a mosque.

Mehmed II rode into the city on May 30 and went directly to the Hagia Sophia. He was 21 years old. He had just ended the Roman Empire.

The fall of Constantinople is one of the true hinge points of world history. It marked the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the modern era. It sent Greek scholars fleeing to Italy, carrying ancient texts that helped ignite the Renaissance. It cut off the overland trade routes to Asia, driving Europeans to seek sea routes — leading directly to Columbus and the Age of Exploration. It proved that gunpowder artillery could destroy any fortification, ending a thousand years of castle-based warfare.

And it ended Rome. The Roman Empire, in one form or another, had existed for 1,480 years — from 27 BC to 1453 AD. It had survived civil wars, barbarian invasions, plagues, crusades, and the collapse of its western half. It had outlasted every empire that had tried to destroy it. Until the morning a 21-year-old sultan brought a 27-foot cannon to its walls and a 49-year-old emperor died in the rubble.

Constantinople became Istanbul. The Ottoman Empire ruled from there for the next 470 years. But the Greeks never forgot. In Greek folklore, there is a legend that Constantine XI didn’t die — that an angel turned him to marble at the last moment, and he waits beneath the Golden Gate, ready to rise and reclaim the city when the time comes.

He’s still waiting.