The walls of Constantinople

For 53 days in the spring of 1453 the twenty-one-year-old Ottoman sultan Mehmed II besieged the greatest walls of the medieval world. When they finally broke, the Roman Empire, unbroken for 1,123 years, ended. The Prophet ﷺ had promised its conqueror paradise. Mehmed had trained for that promise since childhood.

The Prophet Muhammad ﷺ, according to a hadith preserved in the Musnad of Ahmad ibn Hanbal, said of Constantinople: "You shall conquer Constantinople. What a wonderful prince its prince, and what a wonderful army its army." Every Muslim ruler from the first attempt on the city in 674 CE onward had aspired to be that prince. Seven previous Muslim sieges had failed. The Umayyads had tried in 674 and 717. The Abbasids had tried in the 780s. The Bulgarians and Rus, using Muslim advisers, had tried. The Ottomans themselves under Bayezid I had tried in the 1390s and had been called away by the Timurid invasion.

Mehmed II ibn Murad ascended the Ottoman throne in 1451 at 19. He was the second son of Murad II. He had been raised in the palace of Manisa in Anatolia, tutored by scholars from the Ottoman ulama and by Persian and Byzantine expatriates. He was fluent in Turkish, Arabic, Persian, Greek, and Serbian. He had read Alexander of Macedon. He had read Julius Caesar. He had studied every previous siege of Constantinople in detail. He arrived at the throne with a project already fully worked out: he would be the prince the Prophet ﷺ had named.

He spent his first two years preparing. He commissioned the great cannons from a Hungarian engineer named Orban whom the Byzantines had refused to hire. Orban's largest cannon required 60 oxen and 400 men to move; it fired a stone ball of 600 kg. Mehmed built a fortress at Rumeli Hisari on the European bank of the Bosphorus, upstream from Constantinople, to cut the city off from Black Sea shipping. He recruited a fleet.

He arrived outside Constantinople with 80,000 troops on 6 April 1453. Constantine XI, the last Roman emperor, held the city with about 7,000 defenders. The Genoese held Galata across the Golden Horn. The Byzantines drew a great chain across the Golden Horn to prevent Ottoman ships from entering the harbour. The Theodosian walls, the double land walls of Constantinople, built in 413 CE by Theodosius II, had never been broken by any army in a thousand years.

The siege lasted 53 days. Mehmed's cannons pounded the walls day and night. The Byzantines repaired the walls at night as fast as the cannons broke them by day. The Ottomans probed with mines. The Byzantines counter-mined.

The move opened a second front along the sea walls, which had been undefended because they had never before had a fleet against them. The Byzantines had to spread their tiny garrison thinner. On the night of 28-29 May, Mehmed launched his final assault at three points at once.

The Christian Genoese commander Giovanni Giustiniani, defending the Gate of St Romanus at the point of heaviest Ottoman pressure, was wounded and withdrew for treatment. His men followed him. The line at St Romanus wavered. The Ottoman Janissaries flooded through. Constantine XI, the last Roman emperor, was killed fighting in the breach, the sources disagree on how, but all agree he threw away his imperial insignia and died in the front rank. His body was never identified.

Constantinople fell on the morning of 29 May 1453. Mehmed entered the city on horseback. He rode straight to Hagia Sophia, the great church built by Justinian in 537 CE, the largest domed space in the Christian world. He prayed the first Zuhr salat in the church-become-mosque. The dome that had watched twelve emperors crowned, watched the great schism of 1054, watched Latin crusaders sack the city in 1204, now watched a young sultan of the Ottomans lay his forehead to its floor.

Mehmed's conduct after the conquest is remembered as reasonably lenient by the standards of medieval sieges. Three days of sanctioned pillage followed, as was the classical convention of a stormed city, but Mehmed intervened repeatedly to stop the worst excesses and to protect the Christian populations. He confirmed the office of the Greek Orthodox Patriarch, giving Gennadios II Scholarios the patriarchal throne and formal legal jurisdiction over all Greek Orthodox subjects of the Ottoman Empire, an office that lasted 469 years, until the fall of the Ottoman Empire in 1922. He confirmed the rights of the Armenian and Jewish communities under their own patriarchs.

He renamed the city Islambol, later corrupted to Istanbul, and made it the imperial capital of the Ottoman Empire. He rebuilt the walls. He rebuilt the neighbourhoods. He resettled the population by inviting Greek, Armenian, Jewish, Serbian, and Muslim families in from all corners of the empire. Within a generation Istanbul had recovered to its Byzantine population; within a century it was the largest city in Europe.

Mehmed was called al-Fatih, the Conqueror, from the day of the conquest onward. He continued expansion for the rest of his life: Serbia (1459), Trebizond (1461), Bosnia (1463), Albania under Skanderbeg (contested through the 1460s), Karaman (1468), Crimea (1475), and campaigns against Venice and the Papal States. He died in 1481 at 49 on his way to a campaign whose target he had kept secret. Some sources say he was heading for Rome, to complete, in his own mind, the sequence of Roman capitals that would leave him the last Roman emperor.

What the story teaches

The fall of Constantinople is remembered by Muslims for a specific theological reason. The Prophet ﷺ made a promise. Eight hundred years of Muslim rulers had aspired to fulfil it. Mehmed II fulfilled it at 21. The classical Muslim historians take from this a doctrine about prophetic promises: they are answered, but often across generations, and often through a person who was prepared with total specificity from childhood for a task he had no natural right to expect he could complete. Mehmed had been raised on the promise the way another child might be raised on a family debt. He believed himself, from perhaps the age of ten, to be the intended recipient. That belief, and the ruthless practical preparation that flowed from it, is what took the city that seven previous armies could not take. Every Muslim young person who reads the story is being taught the same lesson: the prophetic promises of Islam are not for the abstract "one day." They are, potentially, for you. The Prophet ﷺ named a prince and named an army. Mehmed spent his childhood becoming the prince. The classical Muslim tradition asks every child who reads his story: for which prophetic promise will you spend your childhood becoming the answer?