The Byzantines also had to fight off outside enemies. The Bulgarians renewed their old-time warfare and nibbled away at the shrinking empire. A great Serbian king proclaimed himself Roman emperor as well as Serbian monarch. He almost succeeded. The Byzantines had to fight the Genoese, and sometimes the Venetians, and even the Frank barons, descendants of the crusaders.
Finally the Ottoman Turks appeared upon the scene, and that was the last blow. These wonderful fighters conquered all of Anatolia and then step by step they worked their way into Europe. It was not long before the Byzantine Empire was only Constantinople itself with a few square miles of the surrounding countryside. The Byzantines soon couldn’t even raise an army without Turkish permission, and usually that permission wasn’t granted.
In 1453, which is one of the famous dates in history, even that much freedom seemed too much to the Turks, and their young ambitious sultan, Mohammed II, decided to take the city. Slowly and carefully he laid plans to do so.
First he built one tower here and another there, ringing the city and cutting off escape from it. Then he brought up a mighty navy of 493 ships, and a great army of 200,000 men. It was the first army in history to be equipped with siege guns, and one of these was so big it took 100 oxen to drag it. Mohammed, too, was so determined to take Constantinople that when his ships could not break through the iron chain the Byzantines had laid across the Golden Horn, he had a whole fleet of them dragged overland, with the crew still sitting at the oars—and all this in a single night.
What could the Byzantines do against all this power? They had only 8,000 soldiers, and many of these were monks and untrained citizens. To be sure, they were led by two heroes, one an Italian mercenary, the other the last Byzantine emperor, Constantine XI. Both of them heroically lost their lives in the battle to defend Constantinople.
But heroism was not enough, and the city’s walls, mighty as they were, could be smashed by cannon balls. After a month of siege the howling Janizaries entered it. Once again, Constantinople was sacked and looted, and although the Turks were not nearly so ruthless as the crusaders had been, this time it did not rise again.
The empire did not rise again either. On May 29, 1453, Constantinople, which had once been Byzantium, became Istanbul. It has been Istanbul ever Since.
On that day, the Byzantine Empire ended too.
For more than a thousand years, it had carried the torch of Western civilization, a torch that had been given to it by the Greeks and Romans. Now, new nations took up the burden. Spain, France, and England had become united and powerful. Italy was filled with all the wonderful art and thought and writing and wealth that came with the Italian Renaissance. Germany was stirring with new ideas. Even in distant Poland, Copernicus would soon be looking through his telescope and teaching us that the sun did not revolve around the earth, but rather that the planets revolve around the sun. In only forty years Columbus would discover America.
