The End of an Empire

The Byzantine Empire had ruled from Constantinople for over a thousand years — through the Persian Wars, the Arab conquests, the Crusades, the Mongol invasions. It had outlasted every other ancient institution. Justinian's Code still formed the basis of European law. The Hagia Sophia was still the greatest building in the world. The emperor still bore the title Augustus, wore the purple, and claimed the inheritance of Rome.

But the empire had been dying since 1204, when the soldiers of the Fourth Crusade — men who had sworn to fight for Christ's Holy Land — turned north instead and sacked Constantinople. They looted the greatest treasury in Christendom, ruled as Latin emperors for fifty-seven years, and left behind an empire so weakened that it never recovered. The Byzantines retook their capital in 1261, but the restored empire was a hollow shell: stripped of its provinces, its trade routes, its wealth, and much of its population.

By the time Constantine XI took the throne in 1449, the 'empire' was Constantinople and a few scattered islands. The city of a million people that had been the richest in the medieval world now held perhaps 50,000. The magnificent Theodosian Walls — built to protect a metropolis — now enclosed streets full of ruined buildings and empty fields where suburbs had once stood. The tax base was gone. The army was gone. And on the throne across the Bosphorus sat a 19-year-old Sultan who had been thinking about the city since he had learned to think at all.