The Fall of Constantinople

Byzantine military commander defending the Theodosian Walls

You are a Byzantine strategos, born in Constantinople, raised on stories of Roman glory that you can see crumbling around you. You've served the Emperor since you were old enough to hold a sword, fighting Turks on the frontier where the empire shrinks a little more each year. Now the frontier has come to the capital. Constantine XI has placed you in command of the critical Mesoteichion section of the walls — the lowest, weakest stretch in the Lycus Valley, exactly where the Ottoman guns are concentrated. You have two thousand men, a Genoese engineer named Giustiniani who is the best soldier you've ever met, and a wall that gets a little shorter every day.

Constantinople in 1453 is a ghost of its former glory — a city built for a million souls now inhabited by fewer than fifty thousand, its great forums and aqueducts crumbling, entire districts abandoned to weeds and stray dogs. But its walls remain. The Theodosian Walls are a triple fortification: a moat, an outer wall, and an inner wall sixty feet high and fifteen feet thick, studded with ninety-six towers. For a thousand years, no army has breached them. Sultan Mehmed II intends to change that. He is twenty-one years old, brilliant, ruthless, and obsessed with the city he calls the Red Apple. He has built the fortress of Rumelihisar on the Bosphorus to cut off naval supply. He has commissioned Urban the Hungarian to cast a cannon twenty-seven feet long that fires stone balls weighing half a ton. His army of eighty thousand encircles the land walls while his fleet blockades the Sea of Marmara. Inside the walls, Emperor Constantine XI Palaiologos commands perhaps seven thousand defenders — Greeks, Venetians, Genoese, and a handful of Catalans and Castilians. Giovanni Giustiniani has brought seven hundred Genoese soldiers and the finest military engineering mind in Christendom. The Golden Horn is blocked by a massive iron chain. The churches pray day and night. And every morning, the Ottoman guns open fire and another section of wall that has stood since the fifth century collapses into rubble.