Vasilief, A History of the Byzantine Empire

The fall of Byzantium

Constantine XI (1449-1453) and the capture of Constantinople

Page 11

The fall of Constantinople made a terrible impression upon western Europe, which first of all was seized with dismay at the thought of the future advances of the Turks. Moreover, the ruin of one of the chief centers of Christianity, schismatic though it was from the point of view of the Catholic Church, could not fail to arouse among the faithful of the West anger, horror, and zeal to repair the situation. Popes, sovereigns, bishops, princes, and knights left many epistles and letters portraying the whole horror of the situation and appealing for a crusade against victorious Islam and its representative, Muhammed II, this precursor of Antichrist and second Sennacherib.

In many letters the ruin of Constantinople was lamented as that of a center of culture. In his appeal to Pope Nicholas V the western emperor, Frederick III, calling the fall of Constantinople a general disaster to the Christian faith, wrote that Constantinople was a real abode (velut domicilium proprium) of literature and studies of all humanity. Cardinal Bessarion, mourning the fall of the city, called it a school of the best arts (gymnasium optimarum artium). The famous Enea Silvio Piccolomini, the future Pope Pius II, calling to mind numberless books in Byzantium which were still unknown to the Latins, styled the Turkish conquest of the city the second death of Homer and Plato.

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