1453: The Holy War for Constantinople and the Clash of Islam and the West

by Roger Crowley

The Ottoman soldiers acted, according to Sad-ud-din, in accordance with the precept, “slaughter their aged and capture their youth.”

In a few hours a thousand years of Christian Constantinople largely disappeared.

If there is any precise moment when Byzantium could be said to have died, it is now with the final blow of an axe.

After portraits of Kemal Ataturk, it is probably the single most famous image in Turkish history, endlessly memorialized in poems and pictures.

It was the iconic moment at which he assumed the name by which he has always been known in Turkish – Fatih, the Conqueror – and the instant at which the Ottoman Empire came fully into its own. He was twenty-one years old.

If the day had unfolded in pitiful scenes and terrible instances of massacre, there was nothing particular to Islam in this behavior. It was the expected reaction of any medieval army that had taken a city by storm.

according to custom, Mehmet as commander was entitled to a fifth of everything that had been taken. His share of the enslaved Greeks he settled in the city in an area by the Horn, the Phanar district, which would continue as a traditional Greek quarter down to modern times.

If there is any moment at which it is possible to recognize a modern sensibility in a medieval event, it is here in the account of reactions to the news of the fall of Constantinople. Like the assassination of Kennedy or 9/11 it is clear that people throughout Europe could remember exactly where they were when they first heard the news.

It reached the farthest corners of Europe and the humblest people: in due course even the Lutheran prayer book in Iceland would beg God’s salvation from “the cunning of the Pope and the terror of the Turk.”

For those who cared to look, the fall of Constantinople or the capture of Istanbul – depending on religious perspective – was largely the symbolic recognition of an established fact: that the Ottomans were a world power, firmly established in Europe.

The Ottoman peril was seen as the continuation of the perceived assault of Islam on the Christian world; the word Turk replaced the word Saracen as the generic term for a Muslim – and with it came all the connotations

The flow of refugees after the fall would be largely one way: from the Christian lands to the Ottoman Empire. Mehmet himself was more interested in building a world empire than in converting that world to Islam.

“there are no ties of kinship between princes” goes the Arab saying.