Ever since that day the city, today called Istanbul, has been a Muslim city.
Raymond Ibrahim at PJ Media gives a fascinating account of the battle. He begins by discussing the significance of its fall:
[Not] only was Constantinople a living and direct extension of the old Roman Empire and current capital of the Christian Roman Empire (or Byzantium), but its cyclopean walls had prevented Islam from entering Europe through its eastern doorway for the previous seven centuries, beginning with the First Arab Siege of Constantinople (674-678).
When Muslim forces failed again in the Second Arab Siege of Constantinople (717-718), conquering the ancient Christian capital became something of an obsession for a succession of caliphates and sultanates. However, it was only with the rise of the Ottoman sultanate — so named after its eponymous Turkic founder, Osman (b.1258) — that conquering the city, which was arguably better fortified than any other in the world, became a possibility, not least in thanks to the concomitant spread of gunpowder and cannons from China to Eurasia.
By 1400, his descendants had managed to invade and conquer a significant portion of the southern Balkans — thereby isolating and essentially turning Constantinople into a Christian island in an Islamic sea.
Enter Sultan Mehmet, or Muhammad II (r. 1451-1481) — “the mortal enemy of the Christians,” to quote a contemporary prelate. (Note: “Mehmet” is simply an English transliteration of the Turkish pronunciation of “Muhammad.”)
On becoming sultan in 1451, Constantinople sent a diplomatic embassy to congratulate him; the 19-year-old responded by telling them what they sought to hear. He “swore by the god of their false prophet, by the prophet whose name he bore,” a bitter Christian contemporary retrospectively wrote, that “he was their friend, and would remain for the whole of his life a friend and ally of the City and its ruler Constantine [XI].”
Although they believed him, Muhammad was taking advantage of “the basest arts of dissimulation and deceit,” wrote Edward Gibbon. “Peace was on his lips while war was in his heart.”
What was in his heart soon became apparent. Throughout the spring of 1453, the city watched helplessly as Ottoman battalion after battalion made its way to and surrounded Constantinople by land and sea. One contemporary remarked that Muhammad’s “army seemed as numberless as grains of sand, spread . . . across the land from shore to shore.”
In the end, some one hundred thousand fighters and one hundred warships came.
Few Western Europeans came to Constantinople’s aid. In the end, less than seven thousand fighters, two thousand of whom were foreigners, made ready to protect fifteen miles of walls, while only twenty-six Christian ships patrolled the harbor.
Read Ibrahim's account at the link. Also, if you're looking for fascinating summer reading and are interested in the conflict between Muslims and the West from the seventh century to modern times, his book Sword and Scimitar is highly recommended.
