The 53 Days That Ended the Roman Empire

The year is 1453. For more than a thousand years, one city has stood at the meeting point of two continents. Its walls have survived Persians, Avars, Arabs, Bulgars, and Crusaders. Emperors have been born in its palaces and buried in its churches. Its people still call themselves Romans, even though Rome, the original Rome, fell almost a thousand years earlier. And now, on a cold spring morning, the people of that city look out from their walls and see something that no medieval city has ever seen. An army so large it seems to swallow the horizon. And in front of it, a cannon so huge that it takes dozens of oxen to drag it into position. They have fifty-three days. This is the story of the fall of Constantinople.