On Easter Monday in 1453, an Ottoman army led by the young and ambitious Sultan Mehmed II arrived at the gates of the Byzantine capital Constantinople. This marked the beginning of a siege characterized by the determination of leaders, a city with extraordinary fortifications, and the most extensive siege artillery the world had seen to this day. The fall of Constantinople was a true watershed in history. It cemented the position of the Ottoman empire as the major power in the Balkans and the eastern Mediterranean and it ended the long chapter of Roman history for good. The Roman Empire had in some ways outlasted the so-called fall of Rome in 476AD almost for a thousand years as it continued to exist as what we nowadays call the Byzantine Empire.

Up to this day thousands of pages have been written on the fall, or conquest, of Constantinople, and barely any other siege in history has received more attention by scholars and history buffs alike. In this video we tell the story of the staggering siege of Constantinople by weaving together the insights of the most recent scholarly literature. This required – given the many controversies about this siege - quite a lot of reading.