By Thomas Filbin

Anthony Kaldellis recasts the fall of Constantinople as a long process of attrition, shaped by strategy, fear, and the limits of Western indifference.

1453: The Conquest and Tragedy of Constantinople by Anthony Kaldellis. Oxford University Press, 334 pp. $29.99.

When I was an undergraduate, decades ago, I enrolled in a summer course on Eastern Europe for the least noble of reasons: it fit my schedule. The professor—a fusty, faintly antiquarian man of Armenian descent, with a Harvard PhD and formidable expertise in Eastern European history—faced the initial challenge of persuading us that Europe, as shaped by the Roman Empire, was not a monolith. Most of my classmates were familiar with Britain and Western Europe, but largely ignorant of the eastern half of the Roman world, which developed its own identity and outlasted Rome by nearly a millennium. Its inhabitants included Greek-speaking Romans alongside Albanians, Armenians, Bulgarians, Serbs, Croats, and Levantine Arabs, among others. Over time, successive Islamic conquests gradually eroded this empire, until it was reduced to Constantinople and its surrounding territories.

Anthony Kaldellis’s compelling study of the final collapse of the Eastern Roman Empire advances a striking reassessment of both its demise and its broader historical significance. Like the so-called “fall of Rome,” the end was not a single catastrophic event but the result of a prolonged process of attrition and transformation. Over centuries, the expanding Islamic world—and ultimately the Ottomans—absorbed what remained of “Rome,” at least as it persisted in the cultural imagination. Kaldellis centers his narrative on Ottoman strategy, tracing how it systemically dismantled a once formidable empire. The book emphasizes military history, not at the level of technical minutiae, but as a means of clarifying how victories are secured and defeats incurred. Constantinople’s formidable walls were only one part of its defensive system; moats, ditches, and tunnels reinforced the city’s resilience. Yet these advantages were undercut by a critical weakness: a limited and often poorly trained defending force, composed as much of necessity as of military discipline.

The defense of Constantinople was fueled by a profound fear of what Ottoman rule would bring. For its Christian inhabitants, conquest signaled not only political defeat but the prospect of enslavement, the fracturing of families, and the wholesale transfer of land and property to the victors. The failed Ottoman siege of 1422 had bolstered confidence that the city could again withstand attack, encouraging a belief—ultimately misplaced—in its own resilience in 1453. At moments of panic, some considered surrendering Constantinople to a Latin power — such as Venice — yet this pragmatic possibility was never realized. Meanwhile, Western Europe had little economic incentive to intervene; ongoing trade interests with the Ottomans — combined with the long shadow of failed crusades — had convinced many rulers that reclaiming or dominating the eastern Mediterranean was no longer a feasible option. The result was a city left largely to its fate, caught between fading confidence and geopolitical neutrality. (Yes, delusions of controlling the Middle East continue to this day.)

The fifteenth century marked the arrival of gunpowder warfare, and Kaldellis underscores its decisive impact on Constantinople’s fall. The sultan deployed thirty-seven cannons, including the enormous “Big One,” which eyewitnesses say was enormously intimidating. Its blasts did more than batter walls—they shattered morale. “Although the defenders had heard cannon fire in the past,” explains the historian, “…this bombardment was on a different scale of volume, frequency, and duration.” It produced fear among civilians as walls and towers cracked under the siege. Debris was scattered everywhere; the entire city became a war zone. The din and the staggered interludes of shooting left civilians unhinged.

This turned out to be a one-sided battle. The city’s defenders became increasingly desperate trying to beat overwhelming odds:

Bells sounded throughout the city, calling men, women, and children to their assigned duties. They carried stones to the battlements to throw down upon the Turks who were scaling the ladders; a slightly later source refers to vats of scalding oil…There was not much more that they could do. Many were weeping and shaking in terror.

Kaldellis argues that the Ottoman army was built to excel at two tasks: defeating opposing forces and extracting wealth from conquered territories. In 1453, those aims were realized with brutal efficiency. Much of Constantinople’s population was enslaved, its riches seized as spoils, and violence—including sexual violence—was treated as an extension of victory. The city itself was not simply captured but remade: churches became mosques, new languages took hold, and its cultural character shifted decisively. Yet the historian resists the notion of a seamless succession from Rome to Ottoman rule, noting that the empire did not conceive of itself as a continuation of its Roman predecessor. Identity, he suggests, is never so easily overwritten. Indeed, Constantinople reshaped the Ottomans even as they transformed it, with consequences that far exceeded the city’s modest size and population at the time of its fall. “Constantinople changed the Ottomans as much as they changed it,” notes Kaldellis, “… it had an impact that was far out of proportion to the small territory and few people who were conquered in 1453.”

Emperor Constantine XI fought to the end as Constantinople fell to the Ottomans on May 29, 1453, marking the collapse of the Byzantine Empire. Credit: Theophilos Hatzimihail, Wikimedia Commons

Thomas Filbin’s reviews have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The Boston Sunday Globe, and The Hudson Review. He teaches writing at Suffolk University in Boston.