I know the Latins took it before them but I seem to recall they were invited in by the Emperor so it was hardly a great achievement to overthrow him from within. Before the Turks tried (and before they succeeded they had a few failures) offhand there were the Goths, the Bulgarians, the Arabs and many more who tried to crack the nut both from the European and Asiatic side.
So what did Mohammed II do differently? Greater numbers? Weaker opposition? New methods of siege warfare? The guy pulled off such an incredible feat that he’s still remembered as a hero in modern-day Turkey. How did he do it?
I’d always believed it had been due to the decline of the Byzantine empire in the preceding century. Hadn’t it shrunk to a rather small city-state by that time?
At any rate, I’m looking forward to some expert opinion here.
Guns and Gold. Artillery made walls less defensible and the Byzantine no longer had the ability to buy off their enemies, as they had often done in the past.
The Byzantines had been in decline almost from the beginning, slowly losing all their territory. Some Emperorrs, such as Justinian, fought back against it but in the end they were crippled by the loss of too much of Anatolia, which was not only a sort of the heart of Orthodox Christianity, but a source of much of the Empire’s wealth, soldiers, and horses.
The Turks were (for the moment) a rising power without a lot of other foes on the table, so they were able to repeatedly focus on Byzantium exclusively. They weren’t alone, either, as Venice had been taking Byzantine territory and had even led the sack of Constantinople in 1204.
The Ottomans brought a very large force to the siege, but in addition had new, western cannon cast for them. However, while these did manage to weaken the defense, the defenders held out. Probably the most critical advantage the Ottomans had was that they had already taken a sizable chunk of of the lands north and west of the city, and therefore could cut it off from every side. While the Ottomans didn’t entirely control the strait, they established a fairly tight perimeter there, both north and south of the city. Eventually, the city was taken by a direct assault by soldiers, however, not by bombardment or starving out the defenders.
The traditional thought is that the defense of the city was hopeless, but this isn’t necessarily so. Had a few other powers been able to offer aid sooner, they might have been able to resupply the city. Both the Pope and he Venetians were attempting to do just that.
More or less as above and while that particular siege may not have been successful ( but odds of holding out at that point were looonnngggg ), falling eventually I suspect was virtually inevitable. Likely the only reason it had survived fifty years earlier when Bayezid I was closing in was my namesake shattering the Ottoman state at Angora. The long internecine conflict that then erupted among rival claimants to the Sultanate bought Constantinople another couple decades of relief. The Byzantines survived for a bit more on their wiles - backing alternative Ottoman princes in rebellion and allying with every other Turkish emirate that feared the Ottomans. But as each rival prince failed and each independent emirate was eaten and each Balkan state beaten back, the Ottomans just became that much more unified and powerful. By the 1450’s it was really unlikely that what had functionally become a impoverished city-state occupying a valuable strategic position could hold out much longer.
If the Byzantine state was ever to have survived you’d probably really have to roll back to the mid to late 13th century at the very least, when the Palaiologoi still controlled western Anatolia and could field a substantial army. Once the “terra firma” was lost it was probably just a matter of time.
The Turks brought huge fuckoff cannon, for one thing (not this specific one, but a few much like it).
For another thing, the Byzantines were very isolated - they had little in the way of a navy left, the Latin powers were either noncommital or flat out hostile to them, and the city was attacked both from the strait and the Balkans.
