Overview

Overview

This news account from 1453 is fictional, but the siege of Constantinople actually happened as described. The siege began with the arrival of 80,000 Ottoman troops at the city walls and ended with the victorious entry into the city of Muhammad II, sultan of the Ottoman Empire. Constantinople was the capital of the 1,000-year-old Byzantine Empire, then called the East Roman Empire, and its fall completed the empireís collapse.

The Ottomans renamed the city Istanbul and made it the capital of their empire, which became the world's most powerful empire in the 1500's and 1600's. At its height, the Ottoman Empire controlled what is now Turkey and parts of northwest Africa, southwestern Asia, and southeastern Europe. The empire slowly declined in the 1700's and 1800's. It ended in 1922, after it was defeated by France, Russia, the United Kingdom, the United States, and other Allies in World War I (1914-1918).

The Byzantine Empire was Eastern Orthodox Christian, but the Ottomans were Muslims, and they spread their religion, Islam, throughout their empire. Their victory at Constantinople thus set the stage for the conflicts between Eastern Orthodox Christians and Muslims that raged in southeastern Europe more than 500 years later, including the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina in the early 1990's and the fighting in Yugoslaviaís Kosovo province in the late 1990's.