(And The 1,480 Years Leading To It)

The world's first super-gun brings down the Roman Empire just over 550 years ago, 39 years before Christopher Columbus discovered the Americas. Hard to believe?

What happened to the fall of the Roman Empire in 476, w hen the last emperor (Romulus Augustulus) was deposed by a Germanic warrior named Odoacer? Who is this Roman Emperor Constantine whose massive, ancient capital city walls (built by ancient Roman emperors) are now under terminal threat? In history, often nothing is what it seems, and all sorts of surprising cross-currents create a surprising future. The fall of Constantiple in 1453 is a key historical event, with many surprises we'll sample in this article.

Imagine that, as dawn replaces night on May 29, 1453 over the Sea of Marmara (Marble), we're standing on a grassy hill looking east toward the impregnable walls of Constantinople. It is still night on the distant western horizon--a sliver of blackness twinkling with stars--while it is already blue daylight far away on the eastern horizon, where shafts of golden sunlight rise from the Anatolian (modern Turkey) mountains. A light wind, with some drizzle, combs through the grass and raises a sweet smell. Birds chirp, squirrels dart, a fox stalks, a wild pig roots. The sky overhead is gray, damp, overcast, as it has been for much of the unusual spring of 1453--a season of ill omens for the Byzantines, including a sacred icon of Mary Theotokos (God-Bearer) that falls to the ground and cannot be lifted.

The deafening blast of the world's first super-gun stuns the silence. We hold our ears in shock and pain. A gray cloud of gunpowder smoke drifts up from a point west of the city. The Muslim armies of the Ottoman Sultan Mehmet II are camped in a semicircle that stretches from the waters of the Golden Horn, in the north, down to the coast of the Sea of Marmara, to the south, a length of about five miles behind the city. From that gray cloud, a boulder arcs with slow majesty through the air. It weighs over half a ton and twirls in the gray light like some outer-space asteroid. With a deep, somber rattling noise in the air, like the rumbling of a modern freight train, the boulder flies toward the city walls and disappears in a splatter of dust and pulverized brick. A roar of triumph rises from the Sultan's army, while a cry of deathly horror escapes the doomed defenders manning the ramparts. It is not their first such cry, nor will it be their last as the great bombard of Mehmet and his artillery genius Orban, a Hungarian Christian, pounds the ancient walls.

Today is the last day of the Byzantine empire. It is May 29, 1453, by the old Julian calendar to which the Eastern Romans cling in defiance of the Western Church's Gregorian reformed calendar. In fact, in their final years of impending doom, the official religion of the Roman Empire in the East, Orthodox Christianity, has put an evanescent bandage on the Great Schism of 1054, during which Eastern Christianity centered at Constantinople has nominally reunited with the Catholic Church in Rome. It's a desperation move by the last Byzantine emperors, and meets with profound disapproval from their people and clergy. Nevertheless, it extends to the West a signal that there is much to be gained by not letting the East totally slip into Ottoman hands. The West, as we know, took little action, aside from the arrival of several Genoese and Venetian galleons with a few hundred mercenaries. The city had been protected many times in its history by direct intercession of Mary Theotokos (God-Bearer). In the 10th Century, for example, when the city was on the verge of falling to a Persian army, the Khan broke off and fled. He told his friends later that he had been scared off by a disturbing dream in his tent, in which he saw a beautiful young woman in fine clothing floating in the air before the city walls. This time would be different.

There is much that lurks behind the scenes in this historic tale. Perhaps most significant is the fact that the Turkish conqueror, Mehmet II, abandoned the primacy of all other cities of the Ottoman Empire, including such historic jewels as Baghdad and Damascus, to make his capital in this queen of cities. The name he gave it, Istanbul or Stambul, comes from a Greek usage meaning simply 'the city' or 'of/to the city': eis ten polin, where polis means city. The Muslim nations had coveted and besieged Constantinople many times over nearly a thousand years, and even the Prophet Mohammed prophecied that one day it would belong to his followers. Mehmet II was suffering from a world-class case of city-envy. And indeed this city was great beyond all others, so much so that it remains in name simply (in Turkish) 'The City.'