Byzantium Yet Fallen
The Critical Lessons for Christians in the Long Shadow of 1453
by Paul J. Cella III
Round about five and a half centuries ago, the Roman Empire was at last extinguished. By then the Empire was, of course, Greek, not Roman; Christian, not pagan; and no longer strong, but pitifully weak. Dispossessed of all of its Anatolian and Asian provinces, and most of its European ones, all that remained was the great city of Constantinople, much of which was reduced by privation, disease, and depopulation to overgrown ruins.
The Ottoman Turks, under a great conqueror, Mehmet II, besieged the city beginning in April 1453, on the day after Easter. They outnumbered the defenders ten to one; possibly the fell Janissaries, the special forces of the world’s finest military, alone outnumbered the defenders.
A pious, brave, and noble man, by grim irony named Constantine, was the last Byzantine Emperor: He led his small force of Greek and Italian soldiers with stoic dignity and courage. He died on the very walls of the city with which he shared a name.
The Last Day
A series of omens shook the city in her last days: a lunar eclipse; thick fog for days, a phenomenon unheard of in those lands; an eerie red glow around the dome of Hagia Sophia. Some historians now attribute this glow to the local effects of a massive volcanic eruption in the Pacific Ocean, but pious and mystical Byzantines naturally interpreted it as the withdrawal of the protection of divine providence from the Second Rome.
A Mass was said at Holy Wisdom on Monday, May 28; at last, in this final hour, Catholics and Orthodox joined together in worship of the Risen Lord. Greeks who had sworn oaths never to darken the doors of a church contaminated by Romish heretics heard liturgy next to Italians who had declared the Orthodox more loathsome than the infidel Turk.
There, in that last agony of the Roman Empire, Christendom was unified, and the Church breathed with both her lungs. There, in the person of the ragged remnants of Constantinople’s defenders, the sons of the Church Universal joined in true fellowship. There, in this greatest of tragedies, and only at the bitter end, was a true Christian brotherhood of Greece and Rome.
The lineaments of the emperor’s final speech are known to us. John Julius Norwich, near the end of his three-volume history of Byzantium, gives us perhaps the most moving construal:
Paul J. Cella III is a writer living in Atlanta, Georgia, and editor of the website Cella's Review ( www.cellasreview.blogspot.com).
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