The Impossible 53-Day Defense of Constantinople (Fall of Roman Empire 1453)

On the 29th of May 1453, an army of perhaps eighty thousand stood outside Constantinople. Behind the land walls, which had never been broken from outside in a thousand years, about seven thousand defenders waited. The Sultan in charge, Mehmed II, was twenty-one. This is how he broke them. He didn’t fight the whole defence at its strongest point: he stretched it until it couldn’t cover everything, then hit it where it was thinnest. First the ground and the three lines of walls. Then the siege, step by step, on a model of the real city: the fortress on the Bosporus, Orban’s great gun, the ships over the hill, and the final assault in three waves. 0:00 Before dawn, May 29, 1453 0:49 The ground 1:12 Three walls, not one 1:37 The obvious attack 2:27 The rule: hit the thinnest point 2:58 Cutting the sea and breaking the wall 4:32 Ships over the hill 5:24 The final assault 6:24 The count 7:07 Four things that could have broken it Sources Nicolò Barbaro, Diary of the Siege of Constantinople 1453 (eyewitness, trans. J. R. Jones, 1969) George Sphrantzes, The Fall of the Byzantine Empire: A Chronicle (trans. Marios Philippides, 1980) Kritovoulos, History of Mehmed the Conqueror (trans. Charles T. Riggs, 1954) Steven Runciman, The Fall of Constantinople 1453 (1965) Roger Crowley, Constantinople: The Last Great Siege, 1453 (2005) Army sizes are estimates; the medieval sources give larger numbers. The positions of troops, guns and ships are a reconstruction. The open Kerkoporta gate is a later, debated story.