Original subtitles

Spring 1453,

one of Europe's ancient cities

braces for a terrible confrontation,

Constantinople, the jewel of the Byzantine Empire.

It is not a question of if it gets conquered,

but when it gets conquered.

The ruler of the Ottoman Empire,

Sultan Mehmed II, is determined to make the city his.

He has an army of 80,000 men

and an innovative new weapon.

For the time, it is really quite something.

And no one has ever cast out of iron such a huge cannon.

But the Byzantine Emperor, Constantine XI,

will do whatever it takes to hold his city.

The troops have no option but to die.

There is no going back.

For more than a thousand years,

the fortress of Constantinople has defeated

anyone who tried to besiege it.

The Walls of Constantinople

are the a apogee of defensive construction.

Now, in more than 50 days of brutal combat,

the two sides will clash before the city walls

under the ground and out at sea.

The siege of Constantinople will change

the fate of two huge empires, East and West,

and the course of history.

80,000 men stand before the huge walls of Constantinople.

At their head is a young sultan,

just 21 years old, Mehmed II,

the brand-new occupant of the Ottoman Empire's throne.

He has one goal: conquer the city.

It's the great dream to take it.

Mehmed seems to have believed that he was the one.

It's one of these ideas that get lodged into his head

very early, that he's almost destined to take the city.

He says there should only be one empire in the world,

and one capital city, Constantinople,

which is fit to be capital of the world.

Within a few centuries,

the Ottomans have gradually conquered

almost all of the Byzantine Empire,

which has ruled Eastern Europe for a thousand years.

By 1453, only one point of resistance remains,

Constantinople.

Constantinople is not just a city.

It is the city of the Roman Empire,

and we know that the Roman Empire

had crumbled several centuries ago,

and the Byzantine Empire was just a shadow

of the Roman Empire.

The Byzantine Empire by 1453 is in very bad shape.

In fact, everyone knows that it is not a question of

if it gets conquered, but when it gets conquered.

This Christian city is the point

through which all world trade must pass,

a strategic border between East and West.

It's a city almost perfectly situated to command,

to be the center of an empire.

It's almost as if the city was designed

to be an imperial seat.

It is called the city of the world's desire.

It seems to have been designed by geography and history

to be the capital of a great empire.

Inside his fortress, Emperor Constantine XI

bears the weight of centuries of history.

He has a deep sense of the history of his empire.

He knows that the throne he sits on

goes all the way back to Augustus Caesar.

And he is aware of having this deep inheritance

that he will defend to the very end.

The emperor is well aware

of the danger facing his city,

but he also knows

all the ancient fortresses' assets and resources.

At least 23 major sieges had taken place,

and all of them had been repulsed.

In fact, the city had never been taken

in its entire 1100 plus year history.

One of the assaults

that the Byzantines repelled

came from the young sultan's own father.

So it's revenge that Mehmed's plotting to.

Mehmed hasn't forgotten

how his predecessors failed, including his father,

who tried to take Constantinople back in 1422.

Driven by his tiring ambition,

the sultan has been planning this siege for two years.

Mehmed is an extremely astute military strategist.

He has studied the layout of Constantinople

in a great deal of detail.

Mehmed knows that Constantinople's

access to the sea

has always been an insurmountable obstacle

for any would-be conqueror.

To take it, he'll need to block

any aid coming from outside,

especially from Italy, the seat of Christendom,

but it won't be easy.

Constantinople, it is really hard to isolate.

Siege is not just attack.

Siege is a blockade, so you have to be able to block it

lest other people not help the city.

So, in order to make sure that the Genoese ships

in the Black Sea, not to carry armaments

and soldiers and food to the city,

you have to be able to control the Bosphorus.

This strait is the city's

most important supply point.

As long as it's open,

Constantinople can withstand any siege.

So, Mehmed comes up with a new way

to try to neutralize the strait.

At the Bosphorus' narrowest point north of the city,

on territory he's already conquered,

he will build a fortress, the Rumeli Hisari Castle.

It will stand at the top of a hill,

the ideal place to monitor and destroy all ships

heading towards the Byzantine city.

He gathered about 6,000 men to the building project.

The logistical ability of the Ottomans

to gather men and material was extraordinary.

They build the fortress

in just four and a half months,

a record at the time.

It can hold about 400 soldiers,

and above all, it has cannons that will be pointed

at all the ships that might cross the Bosphorus

to reach Constantinople.

No ship from the Black Sea

will be able to supply the Byzantine city.

With Constantinople's coastline now under his control,

Mehmed positions his man on the other side of the city,

ready to attack it by land.

It's the best defended part of the city

and the most challenging area to besiege

because here, he's faced with the huge imposing walls

that surround and protect Constantinople.

The Walls of Constantinople are really

the most impressive fortifications ever known

in the medieval and the ancient world.

In some ways, they are the apogee of defensive construction.

Constantinople is fully fortified.

More than 12 miles of defensive rampart

surround and protect the city.

To its west, the Wall of Theodosius

is the main bulwark against land attacks.

This huge wall stretches for four miles

from the Golden Horn in the north

to the Sea of Marmara, which borders the city to the south.

In reality, it's not one wall, but three.

The first and innermost of them is called the Great Wall.

It's 40 feet high, at its top, crenellated walkway

with nearly a hundred towers, allows soldiers

to observe the enemy for miles around.

Terraces between the different levels

allow the Byzantine troops to circulate easily.

The second or outer wall is over six feet thick,

with room for a series of arrow slits.

The third low wall sits just in front

of a 60-foot wide moat.

This fortification has provided the Byzantine city

with unbreachable defenses for centuries.

But it must be defended properly.

So, Constantine turns to a formidable warlord,

Giovanni Giustiniani Longo.

The armies of this time in the West

do not have a regular army.

So they often call upon mercenaries.

It so happens that Giustiniani

is a mercenary like any other.

And he comes to offer his services

to the Emperor Constantine.

Born into one of the great families of Genoa,

he's eager to join the fight.

So he wants to make a name for himself.

He has a band of followers who fights for money,

but then these guys came here in a spirit of crusades

and they wanted to fight, and they fought very well.

He is going to become the mastermind

of the defense of the Theodosian Wall.

Very, very skillful man.

And he effectively becomes

Constantine's general during the siege.

But Giustiniani has a problem.

At its peak, the city had half a million inhabitants.

Now, however, it has only 90,000,

and only a few thousand soldiers

to defend more than 12 miles of walls.

It becomes a disadvantage

when you have so few people inside.

By the time the Ottomans come

to the walls of Constantinople in 1453,

the great empire of Byzantium has shrunk to almost nothing.

They have, not a great deal of cash,

and they have not a large amount of manpower.

And yet, Constantine could have taken advantage

of an unexpected opportunity for help

in standing up to the Ottomans.

A few months before the siege began,

a stranger asked to see the emperor.

A Hungarian called Orban

comes to the city of Constantinople

with an offer to Constantine.

Orban is a technical mercenary.

He has a skill to sell.

Constantine was impressed

by the engineer's proposal,

but he was forced to refuse it.

Unfortunately, the Byzantine Empire

is so poor by this point

that he can't pay what Orban needs.

And so he leaves the city of Constantinople

and offers his services to the Turks.

By changing sides, Orban,

the engineer, could reverse the city's fate.

He knew that previous sieges had failed

because the attackers' weapons weren't powerful enough

to break through the city walls.

In the past, people had come to the walls

with trebuchet stone-firing catapults,

but these were ineffective.

And so, really, until the advent of gunpowder warfare,

nobody could tackle this war.

But Orban's speciality is the cannon.

He tells the Sultan,

"You know, I've spent almost a year

looking at the fortifications of Constantinople.

I can guarantee you, I can build a cannon

that can bring down those walls."

And this is exactly what Mehmed wants to hear.

And so he immediately orders the construction

of a simply monstrous cannon.

Orban builds a cannon

of unprecedented dimensions,

a bronze monster, more than 25 feet long.

It's divided into two parts,

a rear segment for the powder, and a front end

into which the cannon ball is loaded.

According to legend, the gun way is no less than half a ton

and is so wide that a man could fit inside it.

For the time, it is really quite something.

No one has ever cast out of iron such a huge cannon.

The cannon is impressive, but experimental.

Mehmed wants to be sure it's up to the challenge

posed by Constantinople's walls.

So he orders a test at Edirne,

143 miles west of Constantinople.

He orders pregnant women to stay in the city,

in case they miscarriage with the sound of this mighty gun.

This is an enormously impressive display

of what the cannon can do.

The first shot is impressive.

The ball lands well over half a mile away

and buries itself more than six feet into the ground,

forming a deep crater.

The trial has been a success.

Now, the Sultan can take his cannon

to the foot of the fortress walls.

There is 60 different oxen to pull it this long voyage.

He sends 200 men ahead, 200 engineers to reinforce bridges,

to pave roads, to kind of smooth the way for it.

Mehmed makes quite sure that word of this cannon,

it got back to the walls of Constantinople,

to tell Constantine, this is what is coming for you.

At the beginning of April 1453,

from the top of the city walls,

Constantinople's inhabitants

see the Turkish army approaching,

with the Sultan himself at its head.

Mehmed II sets up camp near the walls.

The young Sultan reckons that,

at last, he is holding all the cards.

He's blocked all maritime access to the north of the city.

He's in possession of the biggest cannon ever seen.

He's built a force of 80,000 men.

He's convinced he'll succeed

where all the others have failed.

Mehmed does not want to fail.

And he, in fact, cannot fail in taking the city

once he launches it, because he is so young

and relatively insecure on the throne,

that a defeat would certainly mean his overthrow.

The greatest siege in history can now begin.

Mehmed II's Ottoman army is about 80,000 men,

which is considerable for the time.

Led by General Zaganos Pasha,

one of the most important warlords of his time,

the Ottoman army is the most powerful in the eastern world.

And among its troops are the best-trained soldiers

recognizable by their red and white uniforms

and their distinctive swords, the Janissaries.

The Janissaries were technically slaves.

They had no individual rights,

but they were extremely powerful.

They had a lot of prestige and respect as a group.

The Janissaries are Mehmed's standing army.

They're very highly trained.

They're very highly motivated.

They are the elite forces,

and they're also personal forces of the Sultan.

They are simply the best fighters he has.

The Byzantine defenders

seem to pale in comparison.

The Byzantine Emperor Constantine

has less than 5,000 men that he can count on.

There are about 2,000 foreign mercenaries

in the city as well,

which brings his entire number

to just less than 7,000 men

to defend roughly 13 miles of wall.

The city is shrinking.

So there's no longer the manpower to defend it

as there had been so many times before.

The disparity is about 10 to one,

10 Ottoman soldiers for every Byzantine soldier.

Emperor Constantine can only pray

that military aid will arrive from Italy,

the seat of Christendom.

The great game now is,

can Mehmed break through the defenses

before the great relief army arrives,

and can Constantine hold out long enough

until the great relief army arrives?

The day after his arrival,

Mehmed starts to position his men

out in front of the Theodosian Wall.

From the north, in front of the Blachernae Gate,

to the south of the city, towards the Sea of Marmara,

covering almost four and a half miles of territory,

70 cannons are ready to start firing.

For five days,

the first cannonades are fired.

Day and night, the cannons, about 70 of them,

will bombard the city walls to bring them down.

It seemed like the end of the world was coming.

So the sheer sound of the cannons firing, hitting the walls,

the explosions would have been incredibly frightening.

The army is positioned

a few hundred yards in front of the can.

Right in front of Mehmed's tent,

so the Sultan could see its effectiveness for himself,

is Orban's cannon.

To protect themselves from a return fire,

the Ottomans have dug a trench

out in front of their position.

It's surely by a rampart of earth,

topped with a low wooden palisade.

The city walls immediately begin to crumble

under the bombardments,

but to the Ottoman's surprise,

the Byzantines are able to rebuild them

almost as quickly as they fall.

Giustiniani drives wooden stakes down into the walls

and piles rubble and dirt and whatever he can

to make a makeshift barrier in place of this solid wall.

Day and night, Giustiniani's troops

scramble to clear the rubble from the wide ditches,

repair the damaged walls,

and fill in the breaches in their defenses,

while from the top of the towers,

the Byzantine's arches and artillery

retaliate to the assault.

A week of bombing, walls destroyed,

but the Christians hang on, making repairs day and night.

Men, women, children, all have been called upon

to help the city hold together.

And it is holding.

Giustiniani's troops

are putting up a strong resistance,

but there's also an unexpected problem for the Sultan.

Orban's cannon isn't suitable for repeated firings.

It's huge and heavy and very difficult to handle.

Imagine the logistics.

It takes three hours to reload.

Imagine also moving the piece on its base

for a new shooting orientation.

That also takes a lot of time.

This is an extremely difficult process

because of the weight of the gun.

There is a pulley system which has to raise it

and lower it into the kind of the bath of oil,

and then it has to be out and dried.

The upshot is it can only be fired

about seven times per day.

Despite these weaknesses,

the Sultan commands that it increase its rate of fire.

It leads to catastrophe.

Orban's big gun keeps on firing for just a few more days,

then overheats and cracks.

The cannon had not had time

to cool down enough,

and it exploded with a deafening noise,

killing many men around it,

and especially Orban, who was among the victims.

For the young Sultan,

it's a mortifying failure.

The siege has only just begun.

Without his super weapon,

Mehmed II ramps up his ground assaults

against the city walls.

Cavalry, heavy infantry, javelin throwers,

arches, they all throw themselves at the walls.

Some of them set ladders to climb the ramparts,

while others storm into the breaches

created by the Turkish cannons.

The Janissaries' war cries mix

with the sounds of symbols and drums,

a sonic assault the Ottomans use to destabilize the enemy.

There's also an important

psychological dimension.

A lot of noises made with drums, with symbols,

to stop the people from sleeping, to terrorize them.

But Giustiniani proves to be

an outstanding leader, and inspired by his courage,

his troops defend the city heroically.

The Byzantines hold out for hours

until, at last, the Turks retreat.

The first ground assault is a failure.

After the first week, it becomes apparent

that this is not going to be a quick siege.

And despite his immense advantage with these cannons,

the walls are holding their integrity.

It's the Sultan's confidence that's crumbling.

He's afraid to lose the support of his men.

He has a reputation for extreme ruthlessness,

and it is possible that the army may not support him

if things go badly during the siege.

Mehmed has already lost all hope

of taking the city quickly by tearing down its walls,

when he finds himself faced with a new danger.

Despite the fortress he erected two years earlier,

he now faces major difficulties at sea.

Constantinople doesn't only have land borders to defend.

The Byzantine city is also bordered by the sea,

with more than six smiles of coastline.

Constantinople is a city of water,

a huge peninsula with the Sea of Marmara to the south,

the Golden Horn to the north,

and the Bosphorus to the east.

To counter possible assaults from the sea,

the city has ramparts all along its coastline.

The ones to the south and east

are relatively low, but still effective.

What makes them difficult to attack

is the prevailing winds tend to blow ships

away from two of those sides.

So it's very hard for ships to get close enough

to the walls to be able to scale them.

The walls were lower.

The towers were lower,

and the defense could correspondingly be less ferocious

than on any other section of the wall.

No army had ever tried, in all the 23 sieges,

to create a maritime attack along that coast.

If such an attack is to take place,

the Byzantines know that it will be

via the city's most vulnerable coast,

the Golden Horn, an elongated bay flooded by the sea,

a natural harbor located between Constantinople

and Pera, the Italian colony that's part of the city.

Since vessels can be easily docked there,

the Golden Horn is the best place

to mount an amphibious assault.

But here, too, Constantinople is well prepared

to fend off any enemy.

Its main weapon here is totally invisible.

It's a kind of dam, a huge cast iron chain

that stretches underwater from Pera

right over to the opposite shore.

At the first sign of intruders,

all the defenders have to do

is raise the chain and seal the harbor.

Imagine the huge links

that would be ready to break the fragile Turkish galleys.

It is impossible,

and it's the best guarded gate of Constantinople.

So they didn't have to use any manpower

to defend one of the three sides

of the city at all.

And this was incredibly useful.

Just two weeks after the siege begins,

three Genovese ships and a Byzantine cargo vessel

approached the city.

April the 20th,

a miraculous event for the Byzantines.

Sails are seen on the horizon.

A small Genovese fleet arrives

in front of the Golden Horn.

The Italian aid the emperor

has hoped for has finally arrived.

As it sails north from the Sea of Marmara,

the small fleet is greeted with a swarm

of Turkish galleys waiting in the Bosphorus.

The Sultan may have a hundred ships out there,

but he's relying on one man,

Suleiman Baltoghlu, the admiral who commands his fleet.

Mehmed instructs him to attack the Genovese ships.

Baltoghlu had an overwhelming responsibility,

to lead the most powerful fleet in the Mediterranean.

He has probably controls around 200 ships and his task

is one of the most important from Mehmed's perspective.

He tells hi Admiral Baltoghlu that,

"You do not come back alive

if you do not take these ships."

The battle commences.

The Genovese ships are much taller

than the Ottoman galleys,

and easily put their enemies in difficulty

by raining arrows down on them.

There are only four of them,

but they hold off a hundred Ottoman ships.

And the Christians have another notable advantage.

They possess a super weapon of their own, Greek fire.

The ships were wooden.

So a Greek fire was extremely useful

as a pre-modern bomb.

Then you actually,

you can put an entire armada on fire.

It's like the ancestor

of the modern flame thrower.

The flammable mixture even burns in water.

It was a kind of a form of early napalm.

It was a chemical burn and it would ignite on contact.

And so what the Byzantines would do

is they would fill clay pots with it

and then lob those clay pots with catapults

toward their enemies.

If it hit a ship, of course, the deck,

it would break open and spread all over the deck

and then start burning.

From the shore, Mehmed watches in fury

as his fleet is slowly reduced to ashes.

Baltoghlu knows what the price of failure is.

And Mehmed is so firm in this

that he actually rides his horse into the wave,

screaming at Baltoghlu to do this or that during the battle.

As night falls, the final incredible scene

in the Battle of the Bosphorus plays out.

A strong wind arises and allows the imperial ships

to split the Ottoman galleys.

In the darkness, Admiral Baltoghlu is unable

to reassemble his remaining fleet

and must retreat to his anchorage in the Bosphorus,

while the victorious ships reach the safety

of the Golden Horn.

The chain is opened by the defenders,

the ships make it into the Golden Horn.

It will be a terrible failure for the Turks

because they will not succeed in preventing

the smaller , which comes to supply the city,

from getting into the Golden Horn.

Four ships have taken on

the entire Turkish Navy and succeeded.

And this obviously cannot happen.

Humiliated, the Sultan summons his admiral,

and gives the order to behead him.

Baltoghlu falls on his knees

and his sailors come to his defense,

and they point to his wounds and his conspicuous bravery,

which again, everyone has seen how brave he's been.

And so the sentence is commuted to, I think, 40 lashes.

He's beaten with a rod.

On the Byzantine side,

the glory of the Battle of the Bosphorus

reflects on all the troops

and strengthens the emperor's hope of victory.

This is quite a morale-boosting moment for Constantine.

Unfortunately, as it turns out,

it will be one of the last

morale-boosting moments for Constantine.

Ever since the siege got underway,

the Ottomans have been waging this war on all fronts,

on land, in front of the walls,

at sea, in the Bosphorus,

but also underground, in secrecy.

Well, the tactics that you have to use

while besieging a city is to try to go underground.

Mehmed had extraordinary resources at his disposal,

one of which was a large group of Serbian silver miners.

These guys were extraordinarily skillful

and they started tunneling, you know,

maybe from about a hundred yards back towards the walls,

propping out the tunnel as they went with wooden props

and working their way under the walls.

If you need to get into a city that has walls,

you tunnel under the walls,

and then you collapse the tunnels

and that'll bring down sections of the walls,

even more efficiently sometimes than cannon balls.

The sappers place explosives in the tunnels

to make the walls collapse in on themselves.

But once again, Giustiniani's men

managed to thwart these underground assaults.

As soon as they realize what the Turks are doing,

they start digging counter-mines.

And so the war really switches

from above ground to underground.

A Scottish miner employed by the Byzantines

named Johannes Grant proves an expert

in the art of spotting Turkish mines.

He uses a very simple method.

He put buckets of water under the walls.

And when the surface of the water

started to ripple slightly from a vibration,

he knew that there was tunneling going on in that area.

Giustiniani and his troops managed to locate

the Turkish miners and blow them up

right there in their tunnels.

A month after the beginning of the siege,

the Christian city is still holding out

against the young Sultan.

All those cannonades, all that bombing,

have not brought down the walls of Constantinople.

The Sultan has lost all hope of a victory underground

and suffered a terrible defeat in the Golden Horn.

Mehmed had problems on his side.

The conquest was going much slower than expected.

He's just 21 years old in 1453.

And the longer the siege takes,

the harder it will be for Mehmed to conquer it,

and the harder it will be to retain the loyalty of his army,

and he's almost certainly faced

with being overthrown if he fails at this.

But the young Sultan

has no intention of giving up.

After the failure of the Battle of the Bosphorus,

Mehmed has a trick up his sleeve.

If you can't go past that,

you have to have a second plan.

He starts to come up with a very, very bold plan.

And that is, if he can't ram the chain,

and his navy is apparently inefficient

at stopping ships getting through,

then he simply has to take this harbor,

and he does so in a way that is remarkable

and really, only an Ottoman sultan could have done

with the resources he had at hand.

If the Sultan can't get his ships

through the Golden Horn's gate by sea,

he'll do it by land.

First, he has thousands of trees felled

all around Pera, and cuts them into logs.

Then he flattens a path past the Italian colony.

A very unusual journey can thus begin.

These are long ships.

They're not that high.

And also, you can remove the oars and the sails

so that they're easy to carry.

He dragged about 70 of his largest warships

up over the slope of the hill and slid them down

into the water of the Golden Horn.

The Sultan has been cooking up this plan

for months, and now it takes the Byzantines by surprise.

The day after the Battle of the Bosphorus,

Ottoman ships attack the port of the Golden Horn.

It's an amazing victory for the Sultan.

This is an extraordinary coup for him,

and it takes the Byzantines completely by surprise.

The chain is now useless.

He's now got his ships into the Golden Horn,

and it tilts the balance back in his favor.

The Byzantines now have to defend

an extra three and a half miles of wall

that they did not have to.

And they're already stretched too thin

trying to defend the 13 miles of the land walls.

So life has suddenly gotten much, much worse for them,

and it nearly breaks them.

One month after the siege began,

the Byzantines' morale is at an all-time low

and their reserves are practically exhausted.

The soldiers are finding it increasingly difficult

to defend the city,

and Constantinople is completely surrounded.

So Mehmed now decides to offer the emperor

an honorable way out.

He has to find some way to save face,

and what he really wants,

what he has promised and told everyone,

is he will take the city of Constantinople.

He tells Constantine,

"If you will surrender the city,

I will allow the entire population to depart in peace

with some of their belongings.

And I will let you depart in peace as well."

On the 25th of May, 1453,

the young Sultan sends an emissary to the emperor,

suggesting that he surrender.

The emperor and his dignitaries

would be safe, as well as the population,

but they would have to leave the city.

And finally, it is the emperor who decides.

It is out of the question for him to give in.

He's ready to die, sword in hand.

He could not, as emperor, leave his city.

Abandoning his thousand-year-old empire

is unthinkable.

In the Ottoman camp,

they've been expecting Constantinople to surrender.

So, when the emperor refuses,

Mehmed gathers his council of war and his troops.

The aim was to psych the men up

with religious fervor to be prepared to do or die.

At the end of May 1453,

Mehmed decides to launch a final assault

on the walls of Constantinople.

Both sides know this is the end.

It's going to be the final push.

One o'clock in the morning, there is the wall of noise,

the banging of drums, and a vast blast of cannon fire.

The first disposable troops have no option but to die.

There is no going back.

The atmosphere is apocalyptic.

The Turks come at the city in waves.

The first waves consist of

the less experienced soldiers,

but who have this capacity to disturb the opponent.

And it is only in the final assault

that the Janissaries will be sent.

Mehmed sends the Janissaries,

the cream of the crop of his troops,

the elite of the elite.

Facing the best army of its time,

the Byzantines defend themselves brilliantly.

Giustiniani knows that in this last battle,

the fate of the whole Eastern Christian Empire is at stake.

Giustiniani calls on locals to volunteer

for this ultimate defense of the city.

They're all given weapons and sent up to the parapets.

The women and children shelter in the city's large church,

which as a place of worship will be spared the fighting.

It is said that when Constantinople

was taken, the population took refuge in St Sophia,

because an angel would appear to protect them.

The general himself stands

at a strategic point in the city.

Giustiniani would defend the so-called St Roman Gate,

one of the main city gates.

On several occasions,

he advanced to the second rampart,

in front of the moat itself,

to prevent the Ottoman troops from advancing.

As both sides launch

into a hand-to-hand struggle,

chaos consumes the city.

The defenders under Giustiniani have little gateways

from which they amount guerilla attacks out of the walls.

In one of these raids,

they forget to shut the door behind them.

50 Men rush through this door

and managed to climb onto an open part of the ramparts.

A number of Ottomans are able to get through this gate

and take a tower and hoist the Turkish flag over.

At this point,

the Christians' fate hangs in the balance.

Then a major event suddenly makes matters worse.

Just before sunrise, Giustiniani is wounded.

Giustiniani has been fighting nonstop for 45 days.

He'd been slightly wounded the day before,

but during the course of this final attack,

he's hit probably by a bullet,

which penetrates his armor or gets under his armor.

It doesn't look like a mortal wound at first,

but it is excruciatingly painful.

And he decides to have himself taken down,

understandably, decides to have himself

removed from the walls.

His departure weakens his men's spirit.

Despair spreads through the Byzantine ranks.

Military order begins to fall apart.

This is one critical moment

when a very valued soldier was wounded.

And then that actually created a huge decline in morale

among the Byzantine troops.

The Byzantines dreamt of a miracle of God helping them,

of the Virgin Mary helping them as they had in the past,

but it didn't happen.

Inside the fortress, everything's in chaos.

When the men notice the Ottoman flag flying,

they believe that part of the city

is already in enemy hands.

The clamor rises, "The city is taken."

At this very moment, the emperor himself,

with a band of his most trusted men,

attempts one final counter assault.

It's the last time he's ever seen.

He simply disappears.

After the battle, Mehmed orders his body

to be found and decapitated,

he does find a corpse that he claims to be Constantine's.

It does not convince people who knew him in life.

And so, his remains are never found,

although there are plenty of legends

as to what happened to him afterwards.

The emperor's disappearance

marks the end of the siege.

After 55 days of fighting, Constantinople falls

into the hands of the Ottomans.

It's the end of one of the most violent episodes in history.

It was said that the streets ran with blood

as if it was rainwater, horrific scenes of slaughter.

They might have killed, you know,

maybe 10,000 people out of a population of 90,000,

but they quickly realized that rather than killing people,

you would capture them, and slaves were of value,

so they stopped the slaughter

and they just started rounding people up.

On the 29th of May, 1453,

Mehmed II makes a triumphant entry into the city.

The Sultan celebrates his victory,

but in some ways, is surprisingly lenient.

He enters in triumph.

He tries to stop his soldiers

destroying some Byzantine churches.

So already, he has respect for the monuments

of another civilization.

Normally, looting was allowed for three days,

but Mehmed II asked after one day to stop the looting.

Mehmed II's idea was to keep the city intact,

because mind you, this is not some city.

This is the seat of Constantinople.

This is where you will find Hagia Sophia

and all these, you know, prestigious buildings.

After all, he intends to make this his imperial capital.

It wouldn't do to destroy it completely.

Mehmed's perseverance

and his tactical and diplomatic choices

right up till the final victory

now earned him the name of Mehmed the Conqueror.

From this day on, Mehmed II

is no longer just the Sultan.

He's also the heir to, and the ruler of

the ancient Eastern Roman Empire.

Now, the Ottomans have a large empire,

uninterrupted by the presence

of a very strategic located city.

And now, the Mehmed II could actually

put his grand strategy to work.

This is a great catastrophe for the West.

After the capture of Constantinople,

the Ottomans will rule for almost three centuries

over much of Europe and North Africa.

The Ottoman conquest of the Byzantine Empire,

kind of extinguishing that last vestige

of the Roman Empire, shuts off the West from the East,

in terms of trade, and forces the West

to take the long route around Africa.

These new trade routes and new influences

all mark the end of an era.

Many historians consider Tuesday, May 29th, 1453

to be not just the fall of the Roman Empire,

but to be the end of the Middle Ages themselves.

The conquest of Constantinople

is a turning point in world history,

'cause it makes the Ottoman Empire

clearly a major power in Europe,

the Middle East, and the Mediterranean,

really for the next 400 years.

Over time, the face of Constantinople

will be transformed.

Mehmed II makes it the capital of his new empire.

It becomes known as Istanbul, literally the city.

The world has changed dramatically,

and it will never be the same again.

And five centuries

after this unforgettable siege,

the city still represents

the link between East and West.