Hello everyone and welcome to the history of Byzantium, episode 340, questions 17.

So let's get into your questions about the final siege and the events surrounding it.

Listener M.R. asks whether Constantine the 11th could have searched for aid from the east as well as the west,

as his father had done when Timor came to the rescue by defeating Bayezet.

He also asks what happened to the eastern threat to the Ottomans after

Timor's death. The answer here is fairly predictable. Timor was a one-off. The Romans got lucky that he was

at the height of his power and ready to march hundreds and hundreds of miles from his home base just to

slap the Ottomans down.

With his death in 1405, his realm broke into its constituent parts and no new strong man emerged.

Half a century later, there was no credible eastern enemy menacing the Ottomans,

nor, I should add, did Byzantine ambassadors play much role in Timor

taking on Bayezid? Once he was on the border, they rushed to curry favour, but if he didn't want

to fight, there's nothing they could have done to persuade him.

Listener DB, asks an interesting one.

As a purely tactical approach, why didn't Mehmet bring a Byzantine pretender with him,

as the Crusaders did in 1203?

Given the success of this approach in the past,

surely it couldn't have hurt as an attempt to get someone to open a gate for him.

It's a good thought experiment, and Constantine had two brothers in the Peloponnese,

whom Mehmet could probably have suborned for this process.

I think the main reason he didn't was that he wanted the glory of conquering this great city.

Though he kept offering peace terms, I wonder if he would have taken them.

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