For a thousand years Constantinople was called the Second Rome and was thought of as the eternal bulwark of Christendom. Its triple walls had never been taken by any enemy; it was guarded, as its inhabitants believed, by the very veil of the Mother of God. Even when, in essence, only the city and its environs remained of the great empire, this belief in impregnability stayed almost untouched: let the enemy be at the gates, let the treasury be empty and the troops a mere handful — the walls would hold, as they had always held. The first beat does not apply here: those who perished had built no idol; the node enters the law at the third beat — captivity and return. The author of the blow does not stand at these walls: the wound had been dealt in 1204, by fellow Christians, two and a half centuries before the fall.
In the spring of 1453 Sultan Mehmed II came up to the city with an army many times larger than the handful of defenders. And the eternal walls met with something they had never known before: heavy cannon, cast expressly for this siege — the first artillery bombardment of a city in history. Cannonballs shattered masonry that battering rams had failed to overcome for centuries. On May 29, after weeks of siege, the Turks burst into Constantinople. The last emperor, Constantine XI, fell in battle like a common soldier; the thousand-year Eastern Roman Empire ceased to exist. Mehmed rode into the conquered city and entered Hagia Sophia — the greatest church of the Christian world — which became a mosque.
The captivity stretched on for centuries. The Orthodox East — the Greeks, the Slavs of the Balkans, whole peoples — found itself under the power of the Ottoman state. Christians were not exterminated wholesale, but they lived as subject communities under the sultan's hand: tolerated but second-class, paying special taxes, giving up their children, deprived of a state of their own. The faith survived, but it became the faith of the conquered — prayer under a foreign power, the memory of a greatness that no longer existed either on earth or in stone.
But the legacy of the fallen City of the Caesars did not vanish — it flowed into new vessels. In the north Moscow was rising, and its sovereigns took up the fallen banner: the marriage of Ivan III to Sophia Palaiologina, the niece of the last Byzantine emperors, the double-headed eagle in the coat of arms, and the nascent idea of Moscow as the "Third Rome" — the new bulwark of Orthodoxy in place of the fallen one. And westward fled Greeks bearing the manuscripts of ancient authors, and their learning nourished the Italian Renaissance. The fall of the Second Rome did not cut short its work: one half of it came to life as knowledge in Italy, the other as faith and the idea of empire in Rus. The stone fell — but the spirit it had guarded found new walls for itself.