Constantinople — the eastern Roman capital that had outlived the western empire by almost a thousand years — finally fell to the Ottoman sultan Mehmed II. The walls were breached by the largest siege gun ever made up to that point. What year?
29 May 1453, after a 53-day siege. The last Byzantine emperor, Constantine XI Palaiologos, died fighting at the walls; his body was never reliably identified. The siege gun — built by the Hungarian engineer Orban — had a 27-foot bronze barrel and fired stone balls weighing 600 pounds. The 1204 sack was the Fourth Crusade's catastrophic detour; the Byzantines recovered the city in 1261. Manzikert (1071) was the earlier Seljuk Turkish victory that lost most of Anatolia. The 1683 Siege of Vienna was 230 years later, after the Ottomans had become a different kind of empire.
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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