The Fall of Constantinople

The fall of Constantinople took place on 29 May 1453, when the Ottoman sultan Mehmed II captured the Byzantine capital after a siege of some seven weeks, using massive siege cannons to breach walls that had protected the city for over a thousand years. The city's capture ended the Byzantine Empire, the last direct continuation of the Roman state, and gave the Ottoman Empire a capital, later renamed Istanbul, from which it would dominate the eastern Mediterranean and southeastern Europe for centuries. Historians conventionally treat the fall of Constantinople as marking the end of the medieval period in European history, partly for its symbolic weight as the end of Rome in any form, and partly because Byzantine scholars fleeing the city carried Greek manuscripts and learning westward, feeding into the Renaissance already underway in Italy.