Byzantium's Legacy in the Fall of Constantinople and Renaissance Learning

The Ottoman conquest of Constantinople on 29 May 1453, under Sultan Mehmed II after a siege of some fifty-three days, ended the eleven-century political existence of the Byzantine Empire (traditionally dated from Constantine the Great's dedication of Constantinople in 330), with the last emperor, Constantine XI Palaiologos, dying, according to most contemporary accounts, in the final defense of the city walls rather than surrendering. The city's principal Orthodox cathedral, the Hagia Sophia — built under Justinian I in 537 and long the largest enclosed space and grandest church in Christendom — was converted into a mosque immediately after the conquest, a transformation emblematic of the broader civilizational transition the event marked, even as Mehmed II subsequently permitted the reconstitution of an Orthodox patriarchate under his rule, appointing Gennadios Scholarios as the first Ottoman-era Ecumenical Patriarch in January 1454.