Constantinople's fall and the gate left open -- The Holy War

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http://www.calendarlive.com/printedition/calendar/cl-et-book9aug09,0,7711660.story?track=tottext

BOOK REVIEW
Constantinople's fall and the gate left open
The Holy War for Constantinople and the Clash of Islam and the West Roger Crowley Hyperion: 304 pp., $25.95
By Michael Standaert
Special to The Times

August 9, 2005

The terminal events surrounding the fall of great empires have long been studied, pondered and argued over. Edward Gibbon's "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" comes to mind as one of the best documentations of these eventual apocalypses, as does the more recent seven-volume series on the history of political violence by William T. Vollmann called "Rising Up and Rising Down."

But while these arduous reads likely scare away anyone but the scholarly or somewhat masochistic reader, Roger Crowley's "1453: The Holy War for Constantinople and the Clash of Islam and the West" is an exercise in focused attention on the events surrounding the final year of the Byzantine Empire.

Though long having fallen into decay, the last days of that empire as told in "1453" may have come down to a single gate left unlocked during the height of battle. Certainly the sheer numbers of the attacking Turks, their mighty cannons, the religious zeal of jihad and their superior organization factored highly into how the battle was won. But if not for this turning point in the final attack on Constantinople — — the unlocked gate allowed the Turks to overcome the wall of Theodosius — the Byzantine Empire may have withstood. If only a short while longer.

Crowley's fascinating account of the years leading up to and the final sacking of Constantinople by the Ottoman Empire reads more like lively fiction than dry recounting of historical events. The characters, led by Mehmet II, the young leader of the Ottoman Turks, and Constantine XI, the wearying 57th emperor of a weakening Byzantium, are drawn in great detail from historical source material to bring them to life on the page.
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...I'll have to check that one out. Another good one on the topic is "The Fall of Constantinople 1453" by Steven Runciman. It also presents a lead-up to the fall, and goes into quite a bit of detail about the siege.

An interesting note about the siege, is that many times the impression is given that when the Ottomans got into the city, they sacked it wholesale. That really wasn't the case. By the then the city was very depopulated, and was separated into separate quarters. These quarters even had walls around them, and access gates to them. Some of these quarters had made a separate peace with the Sultan. When the Turks broke through the main walls, the Sultan sent crack troops to guard the quarters that had made a separate peace, so that they wouldn't be touched or harmed. And life pretty much went on as usual in those areas, only they were paying taxes to the Sultan instead of the Emperor. In fact, given the deteriorated state of the late Byzantine Empire, the quality of life of those who were now under Ottoman rule, no doubt greatly increased.