Above : author pic Anthony Kaldellis
This is a magnificent opus detailing the siege and fall of Constantinople in 1453, a watershed year that closed the book, once and for all, on the Roman Empire and confirmed for Europeans their worst fears about an expanding Ottoman Empire.
Anthony Kaldellis’s narrative is revolutionary, its account quite at odds with historians both Occidental and Oriental. By the fifth century, Constantinople had seen better days, though still retained its vibrant centre of learning, worship, commerce, and information. 1453 sketches the tense but exciting shared world of Italians, Turks, Greeks, and Romans that was thrown into turmoil by Mehmed II’s decision to conquer the mighty polis.
Kaldellis showcases a detailed schematic reconstruction of the following events, on a day-by-day basis, extracted from gripping eye-witness testimonies in Latin, Italian, Greek, Russian, and Turkish. He weighs the strategies of both the attackers and defenders, proving that, contrary to the fatalism that marks almost all the narratives written with hindsight, in reality the defence was hardly a lost cause. The defenders knew exactly what they were doing, willing to risk their lives, but it was not their intention to become martyrs. Instead, it was the sultan who was pushing to neutralise a seemingly impregnable defence, that he did so was a testament to his tenacity and ingenuity.
Interestingly it is the final chapters of 1453 that trace the fate of the vanquished and their captivity, weighing the impact of the city’s fall on the conquerors, the conquered, centering this geopolitical and geographical shockwaves onto world history. 1453 was not merely a symbol for the passing of the Middle Ages and the onset of early modernity, changing the very nature of the Ottoman Empire, redirecting the transmission of cultural legacies, especially those in Greek Classical scholarship. The fall of Constantinople is therefore a nexus of convergent pathways between East and West, medieval and modern, ends and beginnings.
The fall of this epicentral city is also known as a conquest depending on how you parse the implication. It was a capture after a gruelling 53-day siege, where the Ottoman Army significantly outnumbered the city’s defenders. Commanded by the 21-year-old Sultan Mehmed II, he laid the city to waste by constant bombardment and starvation described as a watershed moment in effectively ending the Roman Empire, a state which began roughly in 27 BC after lasting nearly1500 years. The city’s fall also stood as a turning point in military history considering that since ancient times, cities and castles had depended upon ramparts and protective walls to repel invaders. The walls of Constantinople had protected the city for 400 years and were considered some of the most advanced systems of the world at the time.
However, these fortifications were overcome by Ottoman infantry with the support of gunpowder (from China) and specifically the size and quantities of canons and bombards brought to bear against the so called impregnable walls, significantly heralding a seismic change in siege warfare. The Ottoman repeatedly fired day and night barrages of massive cannon balls weighing 500 kilograms (1,100 lb) over 1.5 kilometres (0.93 Miles) which tore gaps in the Theodosian walls.
Disease and starved of food and water, the insiders succumbed in numbers proportional to the depopulation by the Black Death which killed half the inhabitants in 1346 and 1349. The city’s further struck by economic and territorial decline of Empire, that by 1453, the city consisted of a series of walled villages separated by vast fields encircled by the fifth century Theodosian walls. Mehmed built two fortresses on the European side of the Bosphorus, several miles North of Constantinople which ensured complete control of sea traffic and also defended against attack by the Genoese colonies on the Black Sea coast. He also did the unthinkable of crossing the mountain terrain rolling and pulling their ships to the inner sea.
The army defending Constantinople was relatively small numbering about 7000 men, of whom 2000 were foreigners and sailors to defend a perimeter wall of 12 miles. The garrison used small-caliber artillery pieces, too few to offer a challenge. The Ottomans had huge standing army of between 50-80,000, 70 cannons, an elite infantry corps and thousands of foreign Christian troops.
Their cannon power had a disadvantage in that, as massive as they were, they lacked precision and were extremely slow to fire. The Byzantines were able to repair the damage to the walls quickly after each shot, mitigating the effect of the Ottoman artillery. Mehmed’s fleet probed and attacked but failed to enter the Golden Horn due to the chain across the entrance attached to floating logs. Within the besieged city panic ensued resulting in mass religious processions attended by nobilities of Latin and Greek churches.
Engagingly fresh and vivid writing by the author who paints the sultan as a ruthless but innovative, irascible, but versatile, and above all, indefatigable personality. The book offers a critical reassessment of the event commonly viewed as both tragic and inevitable, contextualising the city’s significance as the last bastion of an Eastern Roman polity. It further reflects on how modern interpretations from Turkish celebrations to subdued Greek remembrances— reflect ongoing national and political identities shaped by the conquest. The biases and deficiencies in primary accounts and previous modern histories show the continued reliance on outdated or problematic sources. Anthony Kaldellis’s prolific revisionist historian background, follows meticulous research and analysis and in this story his fresh investigation makes for a high-stakes dramatic narrative, with twists and turns, showing us the readers that history’s choices and actions have consequences.
