Volume 5, Number 6 · October 28, 1965
The Siege of Byzantium
By R.C. Smail
The Fall of Constantinople 1453
by Steven Runciman
Cambridge, 256 pp., $5.00
The Crescent and the Cross, The Fall of Byzantium: May, 1453
by David Dereksen
Putnam's, 315 pp., $5.95
In 1453 Constantinople was the capital of a Byzantine emperor who had no empire. Outside the city his authority was accepted in parts of the Peloponese, and nowhere else. Eastwards in Asia Minor, westwards in Thrace and beyond, the lands ruled by his predecessors were firmly held by the Ottoman Turks, who during the fourteenth century had extended those conquests which were to make them, for five hundred years, the major power in south-eastern Europe and the eastern Mediterranean. Constantinople was isolated from the rest of Christendom, except by sea. Its population had shrunk to a fraction of its earlier level and some of its finest buildings were in ruins. The fall of the city to the Sultan Mehmet in 1453 was an event which had long been expected and which changed nothing. It was certainly not the starting point of the Renaissance, or of voyages of discovery, or of modern times, or of any of the other phenomena which have been attributed to it.
Review, 1825 words
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