Constantinople

By the 14th century little of that grandeur was left. Michael VIII had doubled the population to about 70,000 after retaking the city from the Latins in 1261, but civil wars, earthquakes and the Black Death, which arrived in 1347, wore it down again. The Castilian envoy Ruy González de Clavijo, who saw it in 1403, found the space within the walls broken into small neighbourhoods separated by orchards and fields, while across the Golden Horn the little Genoese colony of Galata was crowded with fine mansions.

Mehmed II opened the siege on 6 April 1453, battering the walls with a great cannon cast by the Hungarian gunsmith Urban, while fewer than 8,000 defenders tried to hold twelve miles of fortifications. The city fell on 29 May. Mehmed rode to Hagia Sophia, which his orders had kept from the pillage, and had the call to prayer chanted there, making it a mosque. He then set about refilling the half-empty city, moving in thousands of households from across his lands and later letting deported Greeks return. By the 16th century, crowned with the great mosque complexes of Suleiman the Magnificent, Constantinople had regained its old pre-eminence as an imperial capital.