The Byzantine Empire — the Greek-speaking Christian successor to the eastern Roman Empire — finally fell when Constantinople was captured by the Ottoman Turks. In what year, and under which sultan?
Mehmed II — then 21, having just succeeded to the Ottoman throne — besieged Constantinople from April to May 1453 with a substantial army (perhaps 80,000) and a previously-unknown size of siege cannon. The walls were breached on 29 May 1453. The last Byzantine emperor, Constantine XI Palaeologus, died fighting on the walls; Mehmed entered the city the same day and converted the cathedral of Hagia Sophia to a mosque. 1204 was the Fourth Crusade's sack of Constantinople (which substantially crippled but did not end the Byzantine state). 1071 was Manzikert (the catastrophic Byzantine defeat that lost Anatolia to the Seljuks). 1492 was Granada and Columbus.
Read the full facts →The Byzantine Empire was the eastern continuation of the Roman Empire, centred on Constantinople, that survived the fall of the western Roman Empire in 476 AD and continued for almost a thousand years thereafter, until the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453. It preserved Roman law, Greek learning, and Orthodox Christianity through the European Middle Ages.
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