The Fall of Constantinople 1453 by Steven Runciman

Mehmet II, whose great-grandfather Bayezid I had previously built a fortress on the Asian side of the Bosphorus called Anadolu Hisarı, now built a second castle outside the walls of Constantinople on the European side called Rumelihisarı. The Empire of Trebizond, a completely independent successor state formed in the aftermath of the Fourth Crusade, also survived on the coast of the Black Sea. In 1453, the 'empire' consisted of little more than the city of Constantinople and a portion of the Peloponnese (centered on the fortress of Mystras). In the following two centuries, the greatly weakened empire was gradually taken apart piece by piece by a new threat, the Ottoman Empire. The Crusaders, however, had not originally set out to conquer the entirety of the empire, and the Romans re-established themselves in the city in 1261. Lewis, “Myth, Literature and the African World” by Wole Soyinka and “The Decipherment of Linear B” by John Chadwick.In the 1,123 years of Constantinople's existence, the city had been besieged many times, but had only been captured once, during the Fourth Crusade in 1204. Runciman’s exceptional history is one of the first releases from Cambridge University’s new “Canto” imprint: Other titles include “Studies in Words” by C.S. By capturing Constantinople, Mehmet II inadvertently fostered the rise of one of the powers that would dismantle the Turkish Empire four centuries later. The fall of the “Second Rome” bolstered the position of the self-proclaimed “Third Rome”: Moscow became the focus of Eastern Orthodoxy and helped legitimize the nascent Russian empire. The Turks already controlled most of the Balkans and the Middle East, and the Western monarchs couldn’t or wouldn’t answer the emperors’ increasingly desperate appeals for aid. Although sympathetic to the plight of the last Emperor, Constantine XI Paleologus, Runciman demonstrates that the fall of the city was the inevitable result of broad, historical trends. Traditionally, historians have used the capture of Constantinople by Sultan Mehmet II to mark the end of Middle Ages contemporary chroniclers believed that the destruction of the Byzantine Empire by the Turks was a sign of God’s displeasure and the imminent destruction of the world. THE FALL OF CONSTANTINOPLE 1453 by Sir Steven Runciman (Canto: $10.95, illustrated).

The Fall of Constantinople 1453 by Steven Runciman