the anniversary of 1453 today, the fall of Constantinople and the birth of Istanbul

Added: 2026-05-30

[00:00:01]The fall of Constantinople is commemorated today.

[00:00:06]It was both a tragedy and a turning point. On the 29th of May in 1453 after a siege of 53 days and with the astonishing story of the boats being dragged over the hills into the harbor of the Golden Horn, the armies of Sultan Mehmed II entered Constantinople and the last Byzantine emperor, Constantine the 11th Palaiologos, died fighting in the streets. The uh Byzantine uh family of Palaiologos then moved to the palace at Mystras in Greece in the Peloponnese.

[00:00:49]And the city which had stood for more than a thousand years as the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire had finally fallen. For Christians, especially Orthodox Christians, this remains a day of mourning. Hagia Sophia, the greatest church in Christendom for centuries, became a mosque. Churches were looted, thousands died, others were enslaved. A civilization which traced its roots directly to Rome disappeared from history. Yet we should remember that Byzantium itself had already been mortally wounded long before the Ottomans arrived. The catastrophe of 1204, when the armies of the Fourth Crusade sacked Constantinople, arguably inflicted greater long-term damage than the Ottoman conquest. Libraries were destroyed, churches desecrated, civilians murdered, and the empire never fully recovered from the sack of Constantinople by the Catholic Crusaders.

[00:01:49]By 1453, the empire was a shadow of its former self. The population had collapsed. The territory had shrunk to little more than the city itself. The once mighty Roman Empire had become a lonely island surrounded by Ottoman power.

[00:02:06]And one should admire the astonishing achievement of the Ottomans. Mehmed II was only 21 years old. Most European rulers thought him inexperienced. They were wrong, spectacularly wrong.

[00:02:21]He assembled an army of perhaps 50,000 to 80,000 men, deployed giant cannon, built fortresses to control the Bosphorus, and carried ships over greased logs into the Golden Horn itself. It was one of the most audacious military occupations and operations in history.

[00:02:41]It It It's one of the It's one of the fabled um success stories of military achievement.

[00:02:51]And And And And And I think the If If If you think If you go there and you look at the mighty Theodosian Walls that protected Constantinople for eight centuries, uh Attila the Hun failed, Arabs failed, Bulgarians failed, Rus' princes failed, Crusaders only entered through treachery and chaos, yet Mehmed succeeded where all of those had failed. And the conquest marked the end of the medieval world and the beginning of something new. Historians often regard 1453 as one of those dates marking the end of the Middle Ages. And the fall of Constantinople encouraged Europeans to seek alternative routes to Asia, helping stimulate the Age of Exploration that eventually led directly to Columbus and the discovery of the Americas. Mehmed didn't simply conquer a city, he adopted it, however.

[00:03:49]He made Constantinople the Ottoman capital, he repopulated it, he confirmed it, he rebuilt it, he transformed it into the beating heart of an empire stretching across three continents. And the greatest legacy of the conquest is not military, but civilizational.

[00:04:09]So, when people visit Istanbul today, they often arrive expecting to find either a Christian city or a Muslim city, and instead, they find something altogether more fascinating. They find layers.

[00:04:23]The ghost of Rome, the splendor of Byzantium, the ambition of the Ottomans, the dynamism of modern Turkey.

[00:04:32]Nowhere symbolizes this better than Aya Sophia itself. Built by the Emperor Justinian I in 537, its vast dome staggered the world. Contemporary writers described it as hanging from heaven by a golden chain.

[00:04:54]Um it it's mosaics speak of Byzantium, its minarets speak of the Ottomans, and inside so many of the so many of the frescoes or the mosaics which were on the walls have disappeared, and you think, "Oh, this is the result of the um conquest of 1453." Not at all.

[00:05:20]Not at all. It was the result of the iconoclast controversy uh so many centuries before, when uh partly uh pa- partly as the Byzantine world looked towards Islam and thought, "What is Islam doing right that we are doing wrong?" And decided, "Ah, it must be the second commandment to have no graven images, so let's get rid of all these icons."

[00:05:46]And they went about tearing down the icons, and many of them were never put back.

[00:05:54]Uh after the after the icons were were were were were were proudly uh restored um in the in a celebration which at the beginning of Lent would be celebrated the triumph of Orthodoxy uh under the influence of St. John of Damascus.

[00:06:12]But today tourists can go to uh Istanbul to Aya Sophia.

[00:06:21]And it speaks not only of the Ottomans and the Byzantines, but also of the modern world if you look at the restoration work which is going on there.

[00:06:32]Few buildings on Earth contain so much history within a single structure. And there are of course uh surrounding Aya Sophia, there are the great imperial mosques, the masterpieces of Mimar Sinan, the architect Sinan, that dominate the skyline.

[00:06:51]The Suleymaniye Mosque, the Selimiye Mosque.

[00:06:58]These rank as the greatest achievements of world architecture. Sinan did for Ottoman architecture what Michelangelo did for Renaissance Italy.

[00:07:09]And if you walk through Istanbul, every age will speak. The Roman cisterns, the Byzantine walls, the Ottoman palaces, the Republican boulevards, the ferries crossing the Bosphorus from Europe and Asia, the city remains what it has always been, a bridge between worlds. And that is why simplistic slogans such as make Constantinople Constantinople again miss the point. Constantinople is not gone.

[00:07:40]Nor is Byzantium entirely dead. Its walls, its churches, its mosaics, its literature, its law and theology survive.

[00:07:49]Its influence lives on in Orthodoxy, in art, uh in the architecture, even in the modern city itself, in the person of the in in the person of the Ecumenical Patriarch.

[00:08:05]At the same time, Istanbul is not merely a conquered Christian city. It is the mastered the masterpiece of Ottoman civilization and one of the great cities of the modern Turkish Republic.

[00:08:17]Uh it is uh one one should mourn the deaths of 1453. One should lament the end of Byzantium, but one should uh and one should honor Constantine the 11th who died defending his city, but one should also recognize the genius and celebrate the genius of Mehmed the Conqueror, the achievements of Ottoman civilization, and the extraordinary modern nation that has emerged from that legacy.

[00:08:49]The walls near Fatih may have fallen, the empire may have vanished, yet the city endures. Rome, Byzantium, the Ottomans, modern Turkey all speak through these stones of history.

[00:09:06]And that is why Istanbul remains one of the most astonishing cities on Earth. Not because one civilization triumphed over another, but because so many civilizations have left their mark upon this remarkable city and upon this remarkable country. And you only have to walk through um Istanbul, you only have to travel through Turkey to marvel at the way that civilization, the different civilizations are building on each other, not conquering or suppressing each other, but building on each other. I remember traveling up to the north of the Black Sea, up to Sinop.

[00:09:59]And there's a very tiny little statue of Diogenes, the the man who lived in a barrel.

[00:10:04]And but he it's standing near the seaside.

[00:10:09]And you you suddenly think, "Here is a man who traveled all the way from the Black Sea on foot all the way to Athens just to tell Alexander the Great to get out of the light."

[00:10:28]It's that is fairly remarkable.

[00:10:32]These people that we remember from history, we remember them for for a good reason.

[00:10:43]Diogenes, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk.

[00:10:50]Uh I I don't expect you to "When I expect you to die" is what he said to his troops in Gallipoli.

[00:10:58]We remember these people because they were larger than life.

[00:11:03]Because this is a land that has been fortified by giants.

[00:11:11]And and and of course it's in the middle of Turkey that Alexander the Great came across the Gordian knot and cut cut into it. How how how do you How do you unravel this astonishing knot?

[00:11:30]And Alexander the Great did what Alexander the Great would always do.

[00:11:34]He cut through a problem, literally.

[00:11:37]That's how I do it. Wham.

[00:11:40]And he went on to conquer most of the known world.

[00:11:45]And then die suddenly of disease and leave his empire scattered.

[00:11:53]But defined by him. And and you go you go to Egypt and you go to Alexandria.

[00:12:03]And and again, you see cities and places that have been influenced by giants of the past.

[00:12:16]In that case, by Alexander the Great, by Julius Caesar.

[00:12:20]Not always a positive influence.

[00:12:23]But you feel the impact of these people.

[00:12:27]Rome as well, of course.

[00:12:30]And Athens.

[00:12:32]But I think Istanbul has a particular pride of place.

[00:12:37]Because it sits on two continents. And it sits over so much history. And it does the job, of course.

[00:12:50]Uh as as we're getting to the point where uh Nolan's film is being is being [snorts] about to be released.

[00:12:59]It does the point that Troy did.

[00:13:02]In deeply ancient history.

[00:13:07]Cuz Troy was a real place.

[00:13:09]Uh and Istanbul, Byzantium, was controlling the trade route from the Black Sea through to the Mediterranean.

[00:13:21]Exactly as Troy was. That is what made Troy rich. That is what made Istanbul and Constantinople rich. It's the trade route from the east through to the west.

[00:13:37]And on that trade route so much is left behind. Uh and and the other day I was I was in um uh northern Turkey and I came across another mosque which had been built by Mehmed II's uncle.

[00:13:56]And in that there was a camel uh shed with with this terribly thin gate that was used to measure whether or not camels were over laden.

[00:14:12]And and and that was built just before the fall of Byzantium the fall of Constantinople.

[00:14:23]And and and it shows the same spirit of the Ottomans defining their society.

[00:14:35]And and doing so in stone and with determination and thinking of trade and thinking of fairness and thinking of rules which embrace society.

[00:14:53]And today we often think of rules as things we write down on paper.

[00:14:58]The Ottomans the rules were written in stone.

[00:15:03]They were on paper as well, but they were written in stone. You walk through the rules. And you go to Istanbul and you walk through history.