The aftermath of the fall of Constantinople in southern Europe c.1500

author: cartesdhistoire/instagram, added on: 2025-04-18

cartesdhistoire:

Byzantium, bulwark of Christianity, R. M. Kean, Thalamus, 2006

🇬🇧 The whole of Christendom received the news of the fall of Constantinople with horror. And yet Western Europe was largely unaffected. The Italian mercantile city-states suffered from the immediate curtailment of trade, but the rest of Europe would have to wait a little longer to feel the full impact of the Ottomans' victory.

Among those who escaped were several of the Palaeologi, John and Demetrius Cantacuzenus, two Comneni, two Lascaris and many other members of distinguished families. Some settled on Chios to where they were first taken on a Genoese ship; others stopped off at Monemvasia in Morea, Corfu and Italy. But the influx was so great at the northern end of the Adriatic that Venice became the chief city of the Byzantine diaspora.

Those of the people who had escaped the initial massacre were organised as a self-governing commune within the Ottoman Empire under a leader elected by themselves. In the absence of any Greek nobility, the community elected the patriarch to lead them. Mehmet made George Scholarios Patriarch, because of his hostile stance towards the Union of the Orthodox and Catholic Churches. He was enthroned in January 1454 in the Church of the Holy Apostles (St Sophia had already been rededicated as a mosque).

Ambassadors of the neighbouring Christian states poured into Constantinople seeking the best advantage possible from Mehmet, but to little long-term gain. The Knights of St John faced the sultan's forces in 1480, but held on until 1520, when Mehmet's son Suleiman took Rhodes by storm. Morea, already ravaged by the antagonism of the despot brothers Demetrius and Thomas Palaeologus, fell in 1460. On 15 August 1461 David Comnenus, last emperor of Trebizond, surrendered the last throne of the Byzantine world to Mehmet.

Collection: european-history - Tags: europe, 15th-century - Source: instagram.com