Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
HOW AND WHY DID BYZANTIUM FALL TO THE OTTOMAN TURKS?
One of history's enduring puzzles is whether the lives of civilizations parallel the lives of
those who inhabit them. Do civilizations, like humans, grow from infancy to old age, from
youthful strength to a sclerotic death? In its life span of 1,113 years, Byzantium grew, flour-
ished, contracted, and then died. The immediate cause of death was conquest in 1453 by
the armies of Memmet II. But it was a death foretold by the conquest of Constantinople in
1204 when a crusade led by Venice and blessed by the Pope looted the city and sent the
Byzantine emperors into fifty-seven years of exile. The invasion was inspired by greed but
also by the enmity between western and Orthodox Christianity. Whatever the motives of
the invaders, Byzantium never recovered its lost strength or its sense of invincibility. The
Black Death of 1347 killed almost two-thirds of Constantinople's population, and by 1397,
Byzantium encompassed only the city itself and small patches of land north of the city and
in the Peloponnesus. Even so, Constantinople did not go down without a fight.
WHO WERE THE OTTOMANS?
Fierce nomadic horsemen, the Turks appeared on the Mongolian fringes of the Chinese
Empire sometime around 500 CE. It was the Chinese who named them. Sometime around
900, one of the several Turkish clans, the Seljuks, conquered northeastern Persia; and in
1040, with 16,000 horsemen, they completed the conquest of the Persian (Iranian) Em-
pire and imposed Islam on their subjects. (It was a Seljuk ruler of Jerusalem whose edicts
against Christian pilgrims led to the more than 200 years of Crusades and Crusaders.)
By the 1200s, Seljuk power began to wane, and in 1299 a new leader, Osman, began
the conquest of the Byzantine territory of Anatolia, the Asian part of today's Turkey. From
Osman derives the term Ottoman: “followers of Osman.” Ottoman armies moved into south
Turkey, conquered today's Izmir, and from there claimed the Gallipoli peninsula. In 1389
at the Battle of Kosovo, they defeated the Serbs, thereby igniting the flames of Serbian an-
ger that lie behind the most recent wars in the country once known as Yugoslavia.
Osman's successor (Murad) annexed Serbia in 1439 and besieged Belgrade in 1440.
Murad's son, Mohammed (Memmet) II took the throne in 1451 and began preparations for
his assault on Constantinople.
HOW DID MEMMET CAPTURE CONSTANTINOPLE?
Constantinople's walls were formidable. Memmet hired a Hungarian engineer, Urban, to
take down the walls. Urban designed huge cannons; the largest had a twenty-six-foot-long
barrel and could fire balls of more than one-half ton. Byzantine defenders stood at 7,000;
the attackers were an army of 80,000. The Turkish cannon smashed at the walls for six
weeks, but the defenders managed to repair the walls after each assault. Then Memmet
changed tactics. The weakest sections of the walls were protected by the waters of the
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