The Fall of Constantinople (1453) and What It Meant for Orthodox Christianity

On Tuesday, 29 May 1453, the army of the Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II broke through the land walls of Constantinople. The last Byzantine emperor, Constantine XI Palaiologos, died fighting at the walls, and the city that had been the capital of Orthodox Christendom for more than a thousand years became the capital of a Muslim empire. Hagia Sophia, the great church of the Holy Wisdom, became a mosque.

For Orthodox Christians the fall was not only the end of an empire. It raised hard questions. Had God abandoned the city because of the union with Rome signed at Florence? Could the Church live without a Christian emperor? Who would now protect and lead the Orthodox world? This article tells the story from the sources, labels each one honestly, and follows what the fall meant for the Church under the sultans and in Moscow.

In brief

By 1453 the Byzantine Empire was little more than its capital. Emperor John VIII had accepted union with Rome at the Council of Florence in 1439, hoping for Western help. The union required the Orthodox to accept the Filioque and the pope's supremacy, and most Orthodox clergy and people rightly rejected it. In late 1452 the union was proclaimed in Hagia Sophia, yet almost no aid came. Mehmed II besieged the city from early April 1453, with artillery and an army far larger than the defenders, and took it by storm on 29 May. The city was sacked for three days. Our main sources are Greek and Latin eyewitnesses with clear loyalties: George Sphrantzes, a friend of the emperor; Kritovoulos, a Greek in the sultan's service; Doukas, a supporter of union who was not in the city; and the Venetian diarist Nicolò Barbaro. In January 1454 Mehmed installed the anti-union monk Gennadios Scholarios as patriarch, and the Church continued under Ottoman rule. In Moscow, whose Church had already rejected Florence, the idea of Moscow as a "Third Rome" appeared about seventy years later. It was far less important in its own time than later historians claimed.

Thesis: The fall of Constantinople ended the Christian empire but not the Orthodox Church, which survived because its faith had never depended on an emperor, and the later "Third Rome" idea is better understood as a minor monastic theme than as the founding ideology of Russia.

A city alone: Florence and its aftermath

By the fifteenth century the Ottomans held most of the Balkans and Asia Minor. Emperor John VIII went to Italy to seek help, and the union of the Churches was proclaimed at Florence on 6 July 1439. Several Greeks, "with Mark of Ephesus at their head, refused to sign the decree," as A. A. Vasiliev writes, and on the delegates' return "many of those who had signed withdrew their signatures."¹ The decree, Laetentur caeli, bound the Greeks to the Latin teaching that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son, and defined that the Roman pontiff "holds the primacy over the whole world." Both are errors, and St Mark of Ephesus was right to refuse them. The site's article on the Council of Florence tells that story in detail.

Constantine XI, emperor from 1449, faced the same dilemma. George Sphrantzes, his friend and official, explains in his chronicle what was decided. The emperor would not appoint a pro-union patriarch, because "the appointed patriarch requires the obedience of all; otherwise riots and war ensue," but he "consented to have the pope's name commemorated in our services, by necessity, as we hoped to receive some aid." Those who were willing would commemorate the pope in Hagia Sophia, and "the rest would incur no blame." Sphrantzes dates the service to 12 November 1452, though most modern accounts place it on 12 December. He adds bitterly: "Six months later we had received as much aid from Rome as had been sent to us by the sultan of Cairo."² The union service was led by Cardinal Isidore, the former metropolitan of Moscow, and Vasiliev says it "aroused the greatest agitation in the city population."

One saying from these months became famous. The senior official Loukas Notaras is reported to have said, in Vasiliev's rendering, "It is better to see in the city the power of the Turkish turban than that of the Latin tiara."³ It is usually quoted as proof that the Orthodox preferred the Turks to the West. That is too simple. It is a reported saying, not a document, it reflects the memory of 1204 (see The Sack of Constantinople (1204)), and the same Orthodox citizens then fought and died on the walls.

Mehmed II and the siege

Mehmed II became sultan in 1451. Vasiliev notes that historians "vary in their estimation" of him, from denying him any good qualities to calling him a genius, and that the desire to conquer Constantinople "was an obsession with the young sultan."⁴ In 1452 he built a fortress on the Bosporus.

The siege began at the start of April 1453. Sphrantzes, who was asked by the emperor to count the defenders in secret, gives figures that are still quoted: the sultan brought "200,000 men on the land side," while "our defenders amounted to 4,773 Greeks, as well as just about 200 foreigners."⁵ His figure for the Ottoman army is surely a guess, and his count of foreigners is hard to square with other reports, such as the arrival of the Genoese commander Giovanni Giustiniani with seven hundred men.⁶ {{strong: The defenders were vastly outnumbered, and Ottoman artillery broke the land walls in a way earlier besiegers could not.}}

The Venetian Nicolò Barbaro kept a diary of the siege. He describes cannon at the gate of St Romanos, "the weakest part of the whole city," one of which "threw a ball weighing about twelve hundred pounds."⁷ His diary is vivid and also partisan. He praises the Venetians, calls the Genoese of Pera "treacherous dogs," and says of one gate that the guard had "not a Greek among them, because the Greeks were cowards."

On 22 April the defenders saw Ottoman ships in the upper Golden Horn: the sultan had dragged them overland on a wooden track to get past the chain that closed the harbor.⁸ In the last days, as Vasiliev describes from the sources, the city "spent the eve of the great day in prayer and tears," with processions along the walls singing "O Lord, have mercy on us." Quoting the historian Edwin Pears, he describes a last Christian service in Hagia Sophia at which the emperor and his followers received Communion.⁹

29 May 1453

The final assault came in the early hours of Tuesday, 29 May. Giustiniani was badly wounded and carried from the walls, a loss Vasiliev calls "irreparable."¹⁰ Kritovoulos, writing for the sultan, describes the moment Mehmed saw the stockade empty and shouted: "Friends, we have the City! We have it!"¹¹

How Constantine XI died is not known. Sphrantzes, who was elsewhere on the walls, writes only that "my late master and emperor, Lord Constantine, was killed," and calls him "the martyr." Kritovoulos says he "fell in gallant combat" and reports, as something "stated," his last words: "The city is taken and it is useless for me to live any longer."¹² Vasiliev is careful: "No exact information exists about the death of the last Byzantine Emperor; for this reason his death soon became the subject of a legend which has obscured the historical fact."

Kritovoulos, though in Mehmed's service, did not hide what followed. He describes soldiers killing "without any rhyme or reason," women and children dragged from their homes, and "the desecrating and plundering and robbing of the churches," with icons burned and "holy and divine books" sold "for two or three pieces of money." In Hagia Sophia the soldiers found "a great crowd of men, women, and children taking refuge and calling upon God," and carried them off as captives. He gives about four thousand dead and "a little more than fifty thousand" taken prisoner.¹³ Vasiliev states that the sack, as the sultan had promised his soldiers, "lasted for three days and three nights."¹⁴ {{very-strong: Constantinople fell to Mehmed II on 29 May 1453 and was sacked, and Constantine XI died in the fighting.}}

Sphrantzes himself was enslaved with his family. He was ransomed in September, but his children were bought by the sultan.¹⁵ Kritovoulos describes Mehmed entering the ruined city in tears, saying: "What a city we have given over to plunder and destruction!" That scene comes from a writer who dedicated his book to the sultan, and it should be read with that in mind.

Who tells us: the sources and their loyalties

Every source for 1453 has a point of view, and it helps to name them.

• George Sphrantzes was the emperor's friend and opposed the union. His genuine chronicle, the short Chronicon Minus, is brief on the siege. A much longer version, the Chronicon Maius, was long treated as his work. Leonora Neville's Guide to Byzantine Historical Writing (2018) states that "the Maius was composed in the sixteenth century, by Makarios Melissenos," though Margaret Carroll argued that parts of its siege narrative go back to Sphrantzes.¹⁶ Many famous speeches and scenes come from the Maius, and they should not be cited as eyewitness testimony.
• Kritovoulos of Imbros was a Greek who served Mehmed and dedicated his history to him, though, in Vasiliev's words, "he did not attack his Greek countrymen."
• Doukas was a Greek of Asia Minor and "a supporter of the union," who wrote "from a standpoint favorable to the West."
• Nicolò Barbaro was a Venetian eyewitness with strong views about Greeks and Genoese.
• Latin writers such as Leonard of Chios interpreted the fall "as a punishment for the Greeks' secession from the Catholic faith," as Vasiliev summarizes him.¹⁷

Some Latins thus blamed the fall on Orthodox refusal of the union, while some Orthodox, as we will see, blamed it on the union itself. Neither reading can be proved from the military record. The Orthodox did not reject Florence for its results but because its doctrine was false, and they would have been right to reject it had the West sent a fleet.

Hagia Sophia

Vasiliev writes that on the day of the capture, "or perhaps the next day," the sultan entered the city "and went into St. Sophia, where he offered up a Muhammedan prayer."¹⁸ The church became the chief mosque of the city: a temple built for the worship of the Holy Trinity was given over by conquest to a religion that denies the Trinity and the divinity of Christ. A popular Christian legend told that a priest celebrating the Liturgy when the soldiers broke in walked into the wall of the sanctuary, and will come out to finish the service when the city is Christian again.

In 1934 the Turkish Republic under Mustafa Kemal Atatürk made the building a museum. On 10 July 2020 Turkey's Council of State annulled that decision. As the Hürriyet Daily News reported, the court "based its verdict on the fact that the Hagia Sophia was a property of the Fatih Sultan Mehmet Han Foundation and registered to be used only as a mosque," and President Erdoğan issued a decree the same day.¹⁹ For many Turkish Muslims this restored the building's status as a mosque of the Conqueror. Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, whose see is still in Istanbul, had argued that Hagia Sophia belongs not only to those who own it at the moment but to all humanity, and that as a museum it was a "symbolic place of encounter, dialogue, solidarity and mutual understanding between Christianity and Islam."²⁰ For Orthodox Christians the 2020 decree reopened the wound of 1453. Hagia Sophia was built as a church of Christ, and it is a mosque only by right of conquest.

The Church under the sultan

Mehmed did not abolish the Orthodox Church. According to Vasiliev, the first patriarch under the new rule "was elected by the clergy soon after the capture of the city by the Turks, and he was recognized by the sultan." The choice fell on Gennadios (George) Scholarios, who had attended Florence as a supporter of union "but later he changed his mind and became a zealous defender of Orthodoxy." Vasiliev adds: "With his accession, the Greco-Roman union entirely ceased to exist."²¹ Jonathan Harris, reviewing Tom Papademetriou's study of the early Ottoman Church, dates the appointment to January 1454.²²

Older histories, following Steven Runciman, described this as the founding of a "millet system" in which the patriarch governed all Orthodox subjects as their civil and religious head. Harris reports that recent work questions that picture: the Ottomans, he summarizes, valued the Church "as a source of revenue" rather than as a kind of sub-government. {{moderate: The idea that Mehmed created a complete "millet system" in 1454 is a later simplification, though he did restore the patriarchate and work through it.}} The long story of how Orthodox Christians lived under Ottoman rule is told in How Did Christianity Survive Under Islamic Rule?, so it is not repeated here.

Moscow and the "Third Rome"

The Russian Church had already rejected Florence. When Cardinal Isidore had the decree read in Moscow, Vasiliev writes, the Grand Prince called him "a ravening wolf" and had him arrested; he escaped to Rome.²³ In December 1448 Russian bishops consecrated St Jonah as metropolitan in Moscow. The Orthodox Church in America's life of St Jonah notes that "This was the first time that Russian bishops consecrated their own Metropolitan."²⁴ Later the grand prince Ivan III married the niece of the last emperor.

The phrase "Third Rome" comes from a monk named Filofei of Pskov. The historian Marshall Poe dates the key letter to 1523/24. In most copies it reads: "all Christian empires have come to an end and are gathered together in the singular empire of our sovereign ... because two Romes have fallen, and a third stands, and a fourth there shall not be."²⁵ Poe notes that Filofei believed the Ottomans had triumphed in 1453 "because the Greeks had given the Orthodox church over to Catholicism." Earlier, in 1492, Metropolitan Zosima had called Ivan III "the new Emperor Constantine of the new Constantinople."

The idea is often presented as the ideology of Russian imperial expansion. Poe argues that this reading was largely created by nineteenth-century historians. "Third Rome," he writes, "began its career as an admonitory rhetorical flourish" and "enjoyed no official favor in Old Russia." The Russian Church continued to recognize Constantinople's seniority, and when the Moscow patriarchate was founded in 1589 it took fifth place among the patriarchates. A Church council of 1666/7 condemned the legend that carried the idea, and it survived mainly among the Old Believers until Filofei's letters were published in the 1860s.²⁶ {{debated: How much the "Third Rome" idea shaped Russian policy is debated; the strongest recent scholarship treats it as marginal before the nineteenth century.}}

Objections and replies

"The Orthodox brought the fall on themselves by rejecting union." Some Catholic writers then and since have said so. But the union was proclaimed in Hagia Sophia in 1452, and Sphrantzes complains that almost no aid followed. The Western powers had their own wars and rivalries. A military defeat by a much larger army with modern artillery does not need a theological cause.

"Ottoman rule was tolerant, so the fall was no disaster for the Church." Mehmed did restore the patriarchate and allowed Christian worship. But the sack, the enslavement of tens of thousands, the loss of Hagia Sophia and the Church's later dependence on Ottoman favor were real losses. Under the sultans Orthodox Christians lived as a conquered people, dhimmis, protected but subordinate and paying a poll tax, as the article on Christianity under Islamic rule explains. It was the subjection of Christians by a Muslim conqueror, and the Church honours the new martyrs who died under it rather than deny Christ.

"The Church depended on the emperor, so it should have died with him." This is the most serious theological question. Orthodox Christians had prayed for emperors for over a thousand years, and some wondered whether the Church could exist without one. The answer of history is that it did. The bishops, the Liturgy, the sacraments and the faith of the Councils continued, under a Muslim ruler, as they had in Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem for centuries.

What it meant for Orthodox Christianity

The fall ended the idea of a single Christian empire as the earthly frame of Orthodoxy. It also ended the Union of Florence in the East. It left the Ecumenical Patriarchate in Istanbul, where it still is today, as the first see of the Orthodox Church under non-Christian rule. It made Russia the most powerful Orthodox state, and that shift still shapes Orthodox life, as the site's article on Orthodox jurisdictions explains.

The conquest did not make the conqueror's faith true. Islam denies what the Church confesses: that God is Father, Son and Holy Spirit, that Jesus Christ is the eternal Son of God made man, and that He was crucified and rose again. "Whoever denies the Son does not have the Father either" (1 John 2:23, NKJV). The Ottoman victory no more proved Islam true than the victories of pagan Rome had proved its gods true. The Church's word to Muslims, then and now, is the call to faith in Christ and to baptism.

It also taught the Church something it had always known in principle. The Letter to the Hebrews says: "For here we have no continuing city, but we seek the one to come" (Hebrews 13:14, NKJV). The Church is not the empire. Her unity is the unity of faith and of the Eucharist under her bishops, which is why the Orthodox could reject Florence after 1453 and keep their communion without an emperor to enforce it.

What we can say confidently

• The union of Florence (1439) was rejected by most Orthodox, and its proclamation in Hagia Sophia in 1452 brought little help.
• Mehmed II besieged the city from early April and took it on 29 May 1453, after which it was sacked.
• Constantine XI died in the fighting, though how is not known.
• Hagia Sophia became a mosque, was a museum from 1934, and was declared a mosque again in 2020.
• Gennadios Scholarios, an opponent of the union, became the first patriarch under Ottoman rule.
• Filofei's "Third Rome" letter dates from the early sixteenth century.

What remains disputed

• The size of the Ottoman army and the number of the dead.
• How far the Chronicon Maius preserves anything from Sphrantzes.
• How systematic the Ottoman arrangements for the Church were in 1454.
• How important the "Third Rome" idea was in Muscovite thought.
• Whether Notaras's famous saying is authentic.

Conclusion

The fall of Constantinople is mourned in the Orthodox world to this day, and rightly. A Christian city of eleven centuries was taken, its people killed or enslaved, and its great church turned to another worship. Yet the Orthodox faith did not fall with the walls. The Church that had confessed Christ under pagan emperors before Constantine confessed Him under the sultans, gave martyrs, kept the Liturgy, and outlived the empire that had once protected her. The last emperor died defending his people, and his friend called him a martyr. The Church's hope was never in the city of Constantine but in Christ, "Whose Kingdom shall have no end."

Notes

1. A. A. Vasiliev, History of the Byzantine Empire, trans. S. Ragozin (Madison, 1928-29), chapter "The Union of Florence," online at ellopos.net. The decree of union (Laetentur caeli, 6 July 1439), trans. Norman P. Tanner, Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, as given at papalencyclicals.net (Council of Basel-Ferrara-Florence), is cited for its terms; it is quoted here as Rome's own text, not as an ecumenical council.
2. George Sphrantzes, Chronicon Minus, in The Fall of the Byzantine Empire: A Chronicle by George Sphrantzes 1401-1477, trans. Marios Philippides (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980), excerpt republished at De Re Militari, "The Siege of Constantinople in 1453, according to George Sphrantzes." For the December date: Encyclopaedia Britannica, "Isidore of Kiev" (britannica.com), which places the proclamation in December 1452.
3. Vasiliev, "Constantine XI (1449-1453) and the Capture of Constantinople." The saying is usually traced to the historian Doukas; see notes-for-owner.
4. Vasiliev, "Constantine XI and the Capture of Constantinople."
5. Sphrantzes, Chronicon Minus, trans. Philippides, De Re Militari excerpt, sections 1, 6-8.
6. Vasiliev, "Constantine XI and the Capture of Constantinople."
7. Nicolò Barbaro, Diary of the Siege of Constantinople 1453, trans. John Melville-Jones (New York, 1969), excerpt republished at De Re Militari, entries for 11 April, 24 April, 12 and 14 May.
8. Vasiliev, "Constantine XI and the Capture of Constantinople," following Barbaro.
9. Vasiliev, "Constantine XI and the Capture of Constantinople," quoting Edwin Pears on the last service in Hagia Sophia.
10. Vasiliev, "Constantine XI and the Capture of Constantinople."
11. Kritovoulos, History of Mehmed the Conqueror, trans. Charles T. Riggs (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1954), 66-82, excerpts at Ballandalus, "Michael Kritovoulos of Imbros on the Fall of Constantinople."
12. Sphrantzes, Chronicon Minus, section 9-10; Kritovoulos, trans. Riggs.
13. Kritovoulos, trans. Riggs.
14. Vasiliev, "Constantine XI and the Capture of Constantinople."
15. Sphrantzes, Chronicon Minus, sections 11-12.
16. Leonora Neville, "George Sphrantzes," in Guide to Byzantine Historical Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 302-307 (opening of the chapter as shown on Cambridge Core).
17. Vasiliev, "Constantine XI and the Capture of Constantinople," on the sources.
18. Vasiliev, "Constantine XI and the Capture of Constantinople."
19. "Hagia Sophia Converted into Mosque as Erdoğan Signs Decree," Hürriyet Daily News, 10 July 2020.
20. "Turkey Turns Hagia Sophia Basilica Back into Mosque," Vatican News, 10 July 2020.
21. Vasiliev, "The Question of the Council of St. Sophia."
22. Jonathan Harris, review of Tom Papademetriou, Render unto the Sultan: Power, Authority and the Greek Orthodox Church in the Early Ottoman Centuries (Oxford University Press, 2015), Reviews in History, no. 1851 (October 2015).
23. Vasiliev, "The Union of Florence."
24. Orthodox Church in America, "Repose of Saint Jonah, Metropolitan of Moscow and All Russia" (March 31), oca.org.
25. Marshall Poe, "Moscow, the Third Rome: The Origins and Transformations of a 'Pivotal Moment'," Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 49, no. 3 (2001): 412-429 (checked in the author's accepted manuscript, University of Iowa repository).
26. Poe, "Moscow, the Third Rome."

Bibliography

Primary sources

• Barbaro, Nicolò. Diary of the Siege of Constantinople 1453. Trans. John Melville-Jones. New York, 1969.
• Kritovoulos. History of Mehmed the Conqueror. Trans. Charles T. Riggs. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1954.
• Sphrantzes, George. The Fall of the Byzantine Empire: A Chronicle by George Sphrantzes 1401-1477. Trans. Marios Philippides. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980.
• The Holy Bible, New King James Version. Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1982.

Orthodox sources

• Orthodox Church in America. "Repose of Saint Jonah, Metropolitan of Moscow and All Russia." oca.org.
• Orthodox Church in America. "Symbol of Faith" (Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed). oca.org.
• Bartholomew I, Ecumenical Patriarch. Statements on Hagia Sophia, as reported by Vatican News and Hürriyet Daily News, July 2020.

Other scholarship

• Encyclopaedia Britannica. "Isidore of Kiev." britannica.com.
• Harris, Jonathan. Review of Tom Papademetriou, Render unto the Sultan. Reviews in History 1851 (2015).
• Neville, Leonora. Guide to Byzantine Historical Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018.
• Poe, Marshall. "Moscow, the Third Rome: The Origins and Transformations of a 'Pivotal Moment'." Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 49 (2001): 412-429.
• Vasiliev, A. A. History of the Byzantine Empire. Trans. S. Ragozin. Madison, 1928-29. Online at ellopos.net.

Sources from the Turkish and Catholic side

• "Hagia Sophia Converted into Mosque as Erdoğan Signs Decree." Hürriyet Daily News, 10 July 2020.
• "Turkey Turns Hagia Sophia Basilica Back into Mosque." Vatican News, 10 July 2020.