26 October 1452 – 5 April 1453
Before the siege, 1452–1453
On 26 October 1452 the papal legate Cardinal Isidore arrives in Constantinople with Leonard of Chios, the Latin archbishop of Mytilene, and 200 archers. On 12 December 1452 Isidore celebrates a Catholic liturgy in Hagia Sophia, with Constantine XI and his court present, and proclaims the union of the churches agreed at Florence in 1439. Many of the city’s Greeks oppose the union.
Bishop Abraham of Suzdal in the retinue of Metropolitan Isidore, in the Illustrated Chronicle of Ivan IV, 1568–1576Wikimedia Commons, anonymous Russian illuminators, Public domain (Авраамий Суздальский в свите митрополита Исидора.png)
In January 1453 the Genoese captain Giovanni Giustiniani Longo arrives with two ships and 700 men, 400 of them from Genoa and 300 from Chios. Constantine gives him command of the land walls and promises him the island of Lemnos. The captains of the Venetian ships in the harbour agree to stay and fight, but in February seven Venetian and Cretan ships slip away with about 700 men.
Constantine Palaiologos in a 15th-century fresco at the monastery of the Taxiarches in AigialeiaWikimedia Commons, unknown painter, Public domain (Konstantinos XI Palaiologos fresco.jpg)
Karaca Pasha, Mehmed’s beylerbey of Rumelia, marches with 10,000 men against the Byzantine towns outside the city. Mesembria and Anchialos on the Black Sea surrender to him, and Selymbria on the Sea of Marmara holds out. His men repair the roads and bridges from Edirne for the guns, and Orban’s great gun is drawn by 60 oxen. Baltaoğlu Süleyman Bey gathers the fleet at Gallipoli, and on 23 March 1453 Mehmed leads the army out of Edirne.
Sources
- Nicolò Barbaro, Giornale dell’assedio di Costantinopoli (1453).
- Leonard of Chios, Historia Constantinopolitanae urbis a Mahumete captae (1453).
- Doukas, Historia Turco-Byzantina (about 1462).
- Michael Kritovoulos, History of Mehmed the Conqueror (about 1467).
- George Sphrantzes, Chronicon minus (about 1477).
- Steven Runciman, The Fall of Constantinople 1453 (1965).
- Franz Babinger, Mehmed the Conqueror and His Time (1978).
- Donald M. Nicol, The Immortal Emperor: The Life and Legend of Constantine Palaiologos (1992).
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