The Ottoman Turks take Constantinople
The eastern empire ends
The city has been Christian for eleven hundred years. Constantine built it as a Christian capital, dedicated it to the Virgin Mary, filled it with relics and churches and the greatest building in the world. The Byzantine Empire that ruled from its walls was the direct continuation of the Roman Empire that Constantine converted.
On May 29, 1453 AD, the Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II enters Constantinople through a breach in the walls.
The last Byzantine emperor, Constantine XI Palaiologos, reportedly throws off his imperial insignia and charges into the fighting. His body is never definitively identified.
Mehmed enters Hagia Sophia — the greatest church in Christendom, the building whose beauty converted Russia — and orders it converted to a mosque. The mosaics are plastered over. The Christian symbols are removed. The call to prayer sounds from its minarets.
The fall of Constantinople sends shockwaves across Europe. The Eastern Empire is gone. The city that had been the center of Orthodox Christianity for over a thousand years is now the capital of an Islamic empire.
The Greek scholars who flee west carry their manuscripts — texts of ancient Greek philosophy and literature that Western Europe has not seen for centuries. They arrive in Italy just as the Renaissance is beginning. The texts they carry fuel it.
The fall of the East helps light the West.
“The city is fallen, and I am still alive.”
— Constantine XI Palaiologos, attributed last words, May 29, 1453 AD
“How does the city sit solitary, that was full of people! She has become as a widow, who was great among the nations! She who was a princess among the provinces is become tributary!”
The fall of Constantinople in 1453 is the end of a world. The city that had been Christian for eleven hundred years fell to an Islamic empire and has never returned to Christian governance.
And yet the Eastern church survived. The Patriarch of Constantinople continued. The Orthodox churches of Greece, Russia, Serbia, Bulgaria, Ethiopia — the Christianity that Constantinople spread to the world — continued and continues.
The city fell. The church did not.
This is the pattern the whole devotional traces: the institutions that seemed permanent are temporary, and the faith that seemed fragile is not. Constantinople is under Muslim governance but Orthodox Christianity is the largest Christian tradition in the world after Roman Catholicism.
What you think is the essential container of the faith may not be. The faith itself is less fragile than you think.