Thanks for downloading the Inartime podcast. For more details about Inartime and for our terms of use

Please go to bbc.co.uk forward slash radio for I hope you enjoy the program

Hello, when Sultan Mehmet the second wrote into the city of Constantinople on a white horse in 1453

It marked the end of a thousand years of the Byzantine Empire after holding out for 53 days the city had fallen

And as one contemporary witness described it quote

The blood flowed in the city like rainwater in gutters after a sudden storm

Unquote, it seemed to mark the end of the classical world and the crowning of an Ottoman Empire that would last until 1922

Constantinople was a city worth fighting for its position as a bridge between Europe and Asia and its triangular shape with a deep water port

Made it ideal both the trade and defense. It was also rumoured to harbor great wealth

It was a place of fabled splendor. Whoever conquered it would reap rewards birth material and political

Earlier attempts to capture the city had largely failed. So why do the Ottomans succeed this time?

What difference did the advances in weaponry such as cannons make any outcome of the battle?

And what effect did the fall of Constantinople have on the rest of the Christian world with me to discuss this?

Roger Crowley an author and historian Judith Herring professor of late antique and Byzantine studies at King's College London and

Colin Imber formerly reader in Turkish at Manchester University Roger Crowley in the 15th century the Byzantine

Emperor was in decline. It had lost most of his territory. Briefly, why was that?

In a nutshell, it was the result of an extremely long process of external pressure and internal decline

that goes back many centuries

At the end of the 11th century the Empire started to come under pressure

externally from the east and the west from the east

This came in the form of Turkish tribal raiders and started to push into

Anatolia, Asia Minor

...