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Aftermath Mehmed had promised his troops they could loot the city for three days, in accordance with ancient military tradition. Many civilians were slaughtered by the Turks when they first burst through the walls and captured the towers on the land walls, although order was quickly restored. After the initial assault, the Ottoman army fanned out along the main throughfare of the city, the Mese, past the great forums, and past the mammoth church of the Holy Apostles, which Mehmet wanted spared to provide a seat for his newly appointed patriach which would help him better control his Christian subjects. Mehmet had sent an advance guard to protect key buildings such as the Holy Apostles, as he had did not wish to establish his new capital in a thoroughly devastated city. The Army converged upon the Augusteum, the vast square that fronted the great church of Haghia Sophia whose bronze gates were barred by a huge throng of civilians inside the building, hoping for divine protection at this late hour. After the doors were breached, the troopes separated the congregation according to what price they might bring on the slave markets. A few of the elderly and some infants were summarily slain with a commercial ruthlessness. Soldiers fought over the possession of richly clad senators or for the comely youth or maiden. There are many legends in Greece surrounding the Fall of Constantinople. One of them holds that two priests saying divine liturgy over the crowd disappeared into the cathedral's walls as the first Turkish soldiers entered. According to the legend, the priests will appear again on the day Constantinople returns to Christian hands. Another legend refers to the Marble King, Constantine XI, holding that, when the Ottomans entered the city, an angel rescued the emperor, turned him into marble and placed him in a cave under the earth near the Golden Gate, where he waits to be brought to life again. Constantine XI: the last emperor.Although Mehmet II allowed the rape, pillage and looting of the city, as was the custom of all armies during that age, he changed his mind after seeing the great structures of the city being destroyed and stopped the activities after 24 hours; unfortunately at that point a large part of the populace was either raped, despoiled, or enslaved. Of the estimated 50,000 people residing in the city at the time of its capture, approximately half were still free when Mehmet issued his order to cease the pillage of the city. The reason that so many of the civilian population escaped enslavement was primarily due to the topography of the city at the time. Far from being in its heyday, Constantinople was severely depopulated for years following the depredations from the bubonic plague and especially from the disaster of the Fourth Crusade inflicted on it by the Christian army two centuries before. Therefore, the city in 1453 was a series of walled villages separated by vast fields encircled in whole by the fourth century Theodosian walls. When the Ottoman troops first broke through the defenses, many of the leading citizens of these little townlets submitted their surrender to Mehmet's generals[citation needed], thereby falling within the proscriptions of honored Islamic traditions of voluntary submission. These villages, specifically along the land walls, were allowed to keep their citizens and churches from molestation by the Ottoman troupes and were protected by Mehmet's special contingents of Jannissaries. It was these people who were to ransom their fellow citizens after Mehmet's general cessation of the looting of the city and who formed what the Ottomans' called a Millet, or self governing community in the multi-national empire of what would become Ottoman Istanbul. The "Church of the Holy Wisdom", or Hagia Sofia, was converted into a mosque.Mehmed waited until the area was secured and entered the city in a ceremonial procession where the local population brought him flowers in congratulations. His initial impression was that the city had fallen into disrepair, a trend that began after Constantinople was conquered in the Fourth Crusade. In Mehmed's view, he was the successor to the Roman Emperor. He named himself "Kayzer-i Rum", the Roman Caesar, but he was nicknamed "the Conqueror". Constantinople became the new capital of the Ottoman Empire. Hagia Sophia was converted into a mosque, although the Greek Orthodox Church remained intact, and Gennadius Scholarius was appointed Patriarch of Constantinople. Many Greeks fled the city and found refuge in the Latin West, bringing with them knowledge and documents from the Greco-Roman tradition that further propelled the Renaissance. This is true to some extent, but the influx of Greek scholars into the West began much earlier, especially in the Northern Italian city-states which had started welcoming scholars in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. The chancellor of Florence Coluccio Salutati began this cultural exchange in 1396 by inviting a Byzantine Scholar to lecture at the University of Florence. It was the Italians' hunger for Latin Classics and a command of the Greek Language that fueled the Renaissance. Those Greeks who stayed behind in Constantinople were mostly confined to the Phanar and Galata districts. The Phanariots, as they were called, provided many capable advisors to the Ottoman sultans, but were seen as traitors by many Greeks. The Morean (Peloponnesian) fortress of Mystras, where Constantine's brothers Thomas and Demetrius ruled, constantly in conflict with each other and knowing that Mehmed would eventually invade them as well, held out until 1460. Long before the fall of Constantinople, Demetrius had fought for the throne with Thomas, Constantine, and their other brothers John and Theodore. Thomas escaped to Rome when the Ottomans invaded Morea while Demetrius expected to rule a puppet state, but instead was imprisoned and remained there for the rest of his life. In Rome, Thomas and his family received some monetary support from the Pope and other western rulers as Byzantine emperor in exile, until 1503. In 1461 the autonomous Byzantine state in Trebizond fell to Mehmed. Scholars consider the Fall of Constantinople as a key event ending the Middle Ages and starting the Renaissance because of the end of the old religious order in Europe and the use of cannon and gunpowder. The fall of Constantinople also severed the main overland trade link between Europe and Asia. As a result, more Europeans began to seriously consider the possibility of reaching Asia by sea — this would eventually lead to the European discovery of the New World. Down to the present day, many Greeks have considered Tuesday (the day of the week that Constantinople fell) to be the unluckiest day of the week. |