On May 29, 1453, the city of Constantinople disappeared. Anthony Kaldellis, a professor at the University of Chicago’s Department of Classics, writes this in 1453: The Conquest and Tragedy of Constantinople, a book that is riveting, passionate, indignant, eloquent, and notably revisionist.
Kaldellis, born in Athens, holds a philhellene perspective—a deep affection for the Greek-speaking Orthodox Christians who once ruled the Eastern Roman Empire. His narrative places the defenders of Constantinople on the battlements of history: “climbing, dodging, thrusting, shouting, hacking, slipping, falling, bleeding, and dying” against the Ottoman armies.
The book challenges the long-held view that the fall was inevitable or preordained. Kaldellis argues that the city’s resistance was not “ineffectual,” “futile,” or “doomed to fail.” In fact, Emperor Konstantinos XI Palaiologos and his defenders managed to counter all of Sultan Mehmed II’s assaults until the last day.
Kaldellis’s revisionism is particularly sharp in its critique of The Fall of Constantinople 1453, Steven Runciman’s 1965 classic. “Runciman’s narrative,” Kaldellis writes, “is outdated in many respects, more than I can list here.” Yet the older work remains cited as an adequate account.
Constantinople, at the time of its fall, was the capital of a “east Roman polity” and a center of Greek scholarship and Orthodox Christianity for over a millennium. By the mid-15th century, it was still “one of the most visited places on earth,” drawing traders, pilgrims, diplomats, spies, explorers, and scholars.
However, devastating events—such as the Fourth Crusade in which crusaders destroyed the city and deadly plagues that killed a third of its population in 1347—had reduced Constantinople’s population by a tenth by 1453.
Kaldellis meticulously uses terminology from the Byzantine perspective. The defenders called themselves “Romans,” though Western Europeans referred to them as Greeks. To distinguish them from the Latins (Christians using Latin rites), Kaldellis employs this precise historical language.
The city, Kaldellis explains, had become “visibly in decline” by 1453 but was still fiercely defended. Its emperor ruled almost no territory, yet its people “proudly clung to their heritage and foundations.” This resilience ended on May 29, 1453—a day of tragedy for the defenders and triumph for Sultan Mehmed II.
Kaldellis draws on eyewitness accounts in Latin, Italian, Greek, Russian, and Turkish to argue that Constantinople’s fall was not inevitable. The defenders did not choose resistance out of a desire for death; they fought with tenacity and strategy. “Konstantinos XI did not choose to resist the sultan because he wanted to die fighting,” Kaldellis states. Instead, the defenders “made Mehmed work for the prize.”
The historian also highlights the enduring legacy of that day. Modern Turkey celebrates May 29 as Fetih Day—Conquest Day—since 1953. Under President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, these celebrations include parades featuring “janissary cosplay,” a nod to Ottoman shock troops who were once Balkan Christian boys converted to Islam.
Kaldellis notes that the Ottoman conquest transformed the empire from nomadic raiders into a centralized state. Constantinople, he argues, “de-nomadized” the Ottomans, turning them into “palace-obsessed civilian rulers.” The city’s fall, in fact, changed the Ottomans as much as they changed it.