Mehmed II Takes Constantinople and Ends the Byzantine Empire
A 21-year-old sultan breaches the Theodosian Walls after an 800-year-old empire's final defense
Quick facts
- Date
- 29 May 1453
- Ottoman sultan
- Mehmed II, "the Conqueror," age 21
- Empire ended
- Byzantine Empire (Eastern Roman Empire)
- New Ottoman capital
- Constantinople (later Istanbul)
What happened
On 29 May 1453, Ottoman forces under Sultan Mehmed II breached the Theodosian Walls of Constantinople after a weeks-long siege, ending the Byzantine Empire and giving the Ottomans a capital at one of the most strategically placed cities in the world. Mehmed made Constantinople the new Ottoman capital and used it as a base to launch further campaigns that brought Serbia, Greece, Bosnia, and the Crimean Tatars under Ottoman authority within a generation, securing Ottoman domination of Black Sea trade for the next three centuries. The conquest is treated by historians as the definitive end of the medieval Roman state that had run continuously, in its eastern form, since the 4th century.
Why it matters
The fall of Constantinople gave the Ottoman beylik that Osman I had founded a century and a half earlier an imperial capital and imperial legitimacy, and it is the conventional dividing line between the Ottoman state's frontier period and its rise as a Mediterranean and eventually a three-continent empire. That empire's own long history, from Suleiman's Vienna campaigns to its 19th-century reforms, is told in full elsewhere and only briefly summarized here.
How we know
The siege and fall of Constantinople are documented by eyewitness Byzantine and Ottoman chroniclers writing within years of the event, and the Theodosian Walls that Mehmed's artillery breached still stand in modern Istanbul as physical evidence of the siege.
Sources
- World History Encyclopedia. Ottoman Empire · Reputable sourceworldhistory.org · The domain "worldhistory.org" is on our Reputable source registry. · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
- Federal Research Division, Library of Congress. Turkey: A Country Study (Library of Congress Country Studies), Ch. 1 · General sourcecountrystudies.us · Cited as a "reference" source (no stronger domain match). · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
See something wrong? . Corrections with a source get fixed fastest.
Related timelines
- The Ottoman Empire → · 1453 opens the Ottoman Empire's imperial period in full; see that timeline for Mehmed II's reign and everything that follows through Suleiman's peak and the empire's long 19th-century reforms.
- The Byzantine Empire → · See the Byzantine Empire timeline for the fall of Constantinople from the defenders' side and the thousand-year empire that ended that day.