Dr. Anthony Kaldellis, welcome back to the channel.
So, I want to talk about the title of your book, 1453: The Conquest and Tragedy of Constantinople. I think many people, especially our listeners, will have heard of the year 1453, especially in the context of the end of the Byzantine Empire, and indeed the end of the Middle Ages. I think it's often used as that bookmark. So, I wanted to start by asking, what is the significance of the year 1453 to you?
To me, it used to mark the end of the period that I studied, like that basically the limit point of my expertise. So, as someone who is trained to study the Eastern Roman Empire, also known as Byzantium, that's when we traditionally brought the story to a close. I mean, there's some small parts of the Greek world that survived beyond that as kind of constituted as sort of quasi-Roman states or Roman states, but yeah, it's a very strong symbolic marker in that sense.
Now, of course, we all know that history doesn't, you know, stop at particular moments like this. Though, perhaps we can talk about this, the history of Constantinople does for a few days in a very dramatic sense, and for a few years until the Sultan Mehmet who conquered it decided to use it as kind of capital into which it had evolved later, the capital of the Ottoman Empire.
But as a symbolic turning point, that is the end of the longest, one of the longest-lived states in world history, 1453 is an important marker. And also, as you mentioned, it has been used by many historians as a kind of symbolic end point for the Middle Ages broadly, even though we associate the Middle Ages generally more with Western medieval Europe rather than the Eastern Mediterranean or Constantinople. Nevertheless, it started to be used that way already in the 17th century.
So, if you just think of the kinds of things that begin to happen very quickly after that point and are in some ways associated with it, right? Like the rise of the Ottoman Empire, the rise of the Spanish Empire, the discovery of the New World by the Spaniards, how they saw it, right? The gunpowder empires, the printing press, the Reformation, the Renaissance and Reformation, right? All of these things tend to happen like pretty soon after that. So, it's taken as a kind of end point of the period that came before and then all of those events lead to the creation of the modern world afterward.
So, any of our viewers who are familiar with your work know that you've written, of course, extensively on Eastern Roman and Byzantine studies. So, I guess this is a two-part question. What led you to decide to tell this story now about the fall of Constantinople? And how did the research for this kind of differ from what you were used to? Did anything jump out at you that maybe you weren't expecting?
So, things did jump out at me. I did kind of expect them because I have been reading about this period, also the 15th century. I have already conducted extensive research on an author and a historian of the 15th century. This is Laonikos Chalcocondyles, who is one of our sources for the siege, though not an eyewitness. So, I was pretty familiar with the 15th century and one of its most striking aspects is just how much more information we have from it and about the people who lived in it and their interconnections than we do even for just a century earlier.
It's just a phenomenally stark contrast, at least for the material that I study. So, the 15th century for me, it's almost kind of modern in just the way we can access documents and archives that link all of these people together even through their financial interactions, which is not something you can do for say the 10th century really. So, it has a kind of a depth and density and almost immediacy to it.
Another thing that took me outside of my normal comfort zone is that our main sources, that is the eyewitness sources, are not the ones in Greek. So, there are let's say three historians in Greek of the fall of Constantinople, but they weren't there. Now, they were writing in the immediate aftermath. They knew people who were there. They interviewed people who were there, but they're not eyewitnesses. The eyewitnesses were writing in Latin, Italian, one is in the Venetian dialect, which is a real pain to read. There's one Russian and there's one Ottoman.
Unfortunately, they have been, like the Ottoman has been translated competently, albeit into French, but very, very well with annotations. So, we can actually access these sources now. And so, just using sources in so many different language traditions was an interesting challenge. By the way, I'm not sure that there is any siege in history before the siege of Constantinople in 1453 that we can access through sources written in so many languages from so many different cultural points of view. So, it makes for an interesting sort of kaleidoscope of perspectives.
Yeah, that's really interesting. Especially, I don't know, especially when I've heard the story told, you know, in Western classrooms, I don't think I've ever really heard it told from the Ottoman perspective. So, that must have been an interesting sort of read to go through. Yeah, I guess I'd like to start by if you could set the scene kind of. What was kind of going on prior to the siege? Why did the siege take place? What led to this whole story?
The Eastern Roman Empire had been in an almost terminal spiral of decline in the 14th century. There was just a series of civil wars and losses of territory to foreign conquerors and the Black Death. Then more civil wars, more losses of territory. So as the 14th century is winding down, it looks like it's game over. Constantinople is blockaded by a sultan. This is Bayezid. And it looks like the city is about to surrender in 1402 when just out of the blue Bayezid is defeated by the Central Asian warlord in the Mongol tradition named Timur Tamerlane.
And this just breaks the Ottoman Empire into pieces for a while. And this allows the Romans to reconstitute. And it gives Constantinople a 50-year, that's half a century, extension on its life as a free Roman city. And in that 50 years, they managed to reconstitute like who they are, like what they're doing. What is the point of Constantinople, right, as a Roman city?
And I think they actually did a fairly good job of it. And so this is something that I argue in the first chapters of the book. That Constantinople actually found a place for itself in this new world of the 15th century. It's not just a place that's waiting to be conquered like some sort of inevitable, you know, end of Roman, of East Roman history. But that they managed to leverage the cultural assets that they had and make the connections that they needed to make and even the compromises that they needed to make in order to, you know, put themselves back on the map and imagine themselves as living in the center of their world.
Now, it's just a city with very little territory, right? It's surrounded by the Ottoman Empire on both the European and the Asian side, right? It doesn't have much control over the trade that passes through. This is in the hands of the Italians, right? It doesn't have much of an army or anything like that. What it does have is these impregnable fortifications and ancient cultural traditions. And so, it uses those to remind people of its cultural preeminence. And I think they do a fairly good job of it.
They're generally pretty good when it comes to diplomacy, gathering information. They make some terrible blunders. And so, what emerges during that half century is a kind of peace between Romans and Turks that keeps being renegotiated back and forth, but there was no particular reason to think that all of a sudden the Turks would decide to conquer the city.
And so, yeah, there was a kind of equilibrium among the... So, the three main people who are the protagonists of this book are the Romans, called Greeks in the West, the Italians, and the Turks. And they're all interested in very different kinds of things. This is the key point here, that these are asymmetrical relationships, right? So, the Romans want to survive, the Italians want to profit, and the Turks want to conquer.
But the Turks are conquering along their frontiers, that is further east and further to the northwest, not at the heart of their realm, which is Constantinople. It was generally perceived as relatively harmless. So, that's the kind of scene that I set in the first chapter, is just kind of describing this tense equilibrium that existed and lasted for almost half a century.
Wow. Just thinking about the time it took for the Byzantine Empire to fall is kind of a lot to take in. But as you say, like taking a whole half century to lead up to the siege, I wonder if you had any comments about that just generally.
Well, so a few years ago, I published a large comprehensive history of the Eastern Roman Empire. It's a thousand pages. It's the whole history of Byzantium and so forth. And I have to be honest, when I was writing the 14th century, I was almost like cheering on the Turks. I was like, 'Come on, guys. Wrap this up.' And but I knew that that was not going to happen in the 14th century, even though the kind of logic was pointing in that direction, and that I would have another half century to add to the book.
And yeah, after so many years of working on that book, they could have sped it up a little bit. But no, that's not how history happens. So, I felt that in this book, I had to kind of do justice to the particular circumstances of the early 15th century.
And I wonder, you mentioned all these groups, the Romans, the Italians. I wonder if you could paint a brief picture of what life was like in the city of Constantinople, maybe in the years leading up to the siege for, you know, maybe the everyday person, maybe the lords and ladies, but just in general.
Oh, yes. So, Constantinople is a bit of a paradox in this period in all kinds of ways. Like the major capital of an empire that doesn't exist. It's a city whose hinterland is inside the walls. Like most of the land inside the walls is not occupied because the population is like a tenth of what it had been at its peak. So, peak population of Constantinople something like half a million back in the 6th century, maybe then back up to 300,000 in the 12th or something like that. Now, it's between 35 and 50,000.
So, really, really, so you have to picture... I mean, I don't want to say that like nine out of every 10 apartments were empty because that, you know, over the centuries, that's not how it worked. But it definitely felt empty because it was so huge. And many travelers describe it as a city of villages that are surrounded by fields and orchards and all kinds. So, they could grow its own food internally, or a lot of it.
And so the life of the city is primarily oriented around the harbor. That's the Golden Horn right to the north of the city between it and the Genoese colony of Pera or Galata. And so, there's a lot of activity going on along the harbor side. This is where ships come in and cargoes are unloaded and reloaded onto other ships for the most part. But there's also some other nodes of interest. So, Hagia Sophia is where it is today, the center of the focus of attention for like religious pilgrims and ceremonies.
And then the Imperial Palace is way up in the north at Blachernae, which is the corner at the very top. And there the emperors had like the last phase palace is more like a taller building with courtyards rather than a sprawling, you know, kind of late Roman expanse that we have from like late antiquity or something like that.
And a lot of the aristocracy that served the emperor had their manors around that palace up there in the north. So, not far from where the Hora church would be today. And then there are lots of pockets of monasteries that are still active in various places. So, this is a period when a monastery can still be like inside the city of Constantinople, but still kind of isolated in a rural landscape.
And then we know of certain high officials who had their own mansions at just at various places throughout, like Lucas Notaras. We now know where his house was. And his house was in fact, well, about 900 years old. We know other people who had lived, well, not in it because it's a sort of like Theseus's ship. This house just kept getting additions and, you know, whatever repairs and all of it, but we know officials who lived in that house since like 400 AD. So, like a thousand years.
It's remarkable. Like only in a city like Constantinople could you have something like this. So, a lot of the population was active in trade and sort of food either production or retail, but many of them also worked for the Italian shipping, let's loosely call them companies. Not so much sharing in the profits, but as investors, though some were. But mostly doing all of the kind of logistical work or grunt work or, you know, that sort of thing.
So, there are a lot of foreign travelers. So, you will encounter people there from everyone in Europe, including some Turks from Central Asia. It's a node and a hub for pilgrims, Christians coming to see Aya Sophia and relics, Italian scholars who want to learn Greek, all kinds of diplomats, spies, just travelers who wanted to see the sites.
We know some Turks, including members of the Ottoman dynasty, who either wanted to learn classical Greek and, you know, study ancient texts or just sightsee in the city because even in the Ottoman Empire at the time, there still was no city that was comparable to it. And in fact, when the war started, the final siege, there were some Turkish officials who got trapped inside the city because they were sightseeing. And they went to the emperor and said, 'What are we supposed to do now?' Anyway, so it's a kind of busy, vibrant place in that sense. So you can find people from all over.
Leading us into the specific war that leads to the siege, what immediately led to that? And then I guess what was the Ottoman plan? How many troops did they bring? What exactly did they hope would happen by laying siege to Constantinople?
It's very clear that the decision to attack Constantinople lay with the sultan. This is Mehmed II. We have to be very careful in assessing his reasons or motivations. So, one thing that I insist we avoid is psychologizing. He was young. He was kind of insecure on the throne. It's reasonable to think that he believed that a victory here would grant him the kind of prestige and authority that he needed in order to enforce his own control over his own court and his own armies, which were not entirely under his control. They were kind of unruly.
Also, an expedition—it's not an expedition as I said, but like a campaign of this magnitude would require the marshaling of resources, both human and material, on the vast scale. So, that would give him the opportunity to start exerting control over these resources. I make a calculation in the book.
I mean, of his forces, you ask the size, I think unlikely he had more than 60,000 sort of able-bodied fighting men, as it were. Then, there's a whole bunch of auxiliary personnel, including the fleet. You know, he might have at the very maximum brought 100,000 people to the general vicinity. Though the sources talk about 300,000 or 400,000, I don't believe that's logistically even possible. So, this was a huge operation. There's no doubt about that. It was probably an attempt by him to marshal those resources.
But there were also strategic reasons for why he would want to do that. Constantinople could be used as a very disruptive control base at the heart of the Ottoman Empire. And so, you can remember the Ottoman Empire exists in two halves, in Europe and in Asia. And so, a Christian fleet, mostly Italian, could essentially cut the empire in half by preventing the sultan from crossing the straits. And they had tried to do so just a decade earlier.
So, this was a kind of potential threat because the Ottomans do not yet have the naval capability to successfully fight against Christian galleys. So, there are a number of reasons why he might have wanted to do this, but it was his choice. Now, there are various pretexts. So, for example, there was a kind of failed negotiation over an Ottoman princely pretender who was in Constantinople. The Constantinopolitans sometimes liked to use these people to kind of extort money, you know, kind of payments from the sultans, and Mehmed took that very, very badly.
It's to me, it's kind of amazing to think about what a siege of this magnitude might have looked like, just surrounding a city as big as Constantinople, thinking about how each side, I would assume, is full of like multinational, multiethnic troops. So, what would the sort of siege have looked like once the Ottomans got there and set up? I guess what were the first weeks, months, what did it look like?
Interesting. I wouldn't go with sight as the first sense. I would go with sound because what was different about this siege, and this is noted by all of the sources, were the cannons. So, this was Mehmed's ace. No foreign attacker had successfully breached or overcome the land walls in the history of Constantinople. Not by force at any rate. And so, there was probably no way that his army could overcome the walls and get into the city without cannon, that is by first leveling the walls so that his soldiers could get over them.
And so for the duration of the siege, the cannons were firing constantly. Now, he had some big ones, he had a lot of small ones. And they did find a way of using them in kind of a triad to sort of take down towers and stretches of the wall. Of course, his cannons couldn't be fired continuously. They needed a lot of time to cool down. And you had to pour oil on them so that cold air doesn't get into the cracks after, and therefore, you know, the sudden switch from heat of the explosion to the cold of the April air can cause the cannon to just crack in half. And so, they needed a lot of downtime.
Nevertheless, they were constantly firing. And this caused, yeah, some degree of, you know, let's say panic at first. Remember, these are the loudest sounds that anyone at the time would ever have heard. Ever. You know, they'd never been to a Metallica concert or anything. Like, there's nothing quite that loud, right, in existence. And so, we're told about these panic reactions, but the thing is about human beings, they kind of adjust to loud noises.
And by the end of the siege, the cannons were important because they were bringing down the walls, not because they were scaring the defenders. The next interesting sense would have been smell because the explosions produced, you know, gunpowder smoke that wafted over the city. And so, we're told about these like clouds of smoke that are coming toward the city. And sometimes the fighting was taking place and like that kind of burning smell, that was also new to most people at the time. They'd never smelled anything like that. So, these were the new sensations.
Otherwise, even if you take 60,000 men, which is a lot, stretching them out across the walls of Constantinople would have made it all look very, very thin. I mean, this is a very, very long stretch of walls. Now, what I think is that they were concentrated in pockets. So, some facing the palace, most facing the mid-wall section, which was the most critical and vulnerable section, then some more toward the south. So, you would have gotten, I think, probably just a very dispersed, empty kind of feeling. You would know what's going on from the sound of the cannons.
