On May 29, 1453, as Ottoman forces broke through the walls of Constantinople, thousands of Christians made a desperate c...

On May 29, 1453, as Ottoman forces broke through the walls of Constantinople, thousands of Christians made a desperate choice. Believing the sacred buildings would offer sanctuary, most fled to Hagia Sophia, the greatest church in Christendom. Greek historian Doukas, one of the closest sources to those events, recorded that the Christians had only made their own capture easier by crowding together inside. The doors were broken down. Muslim soldiers entered and began binding prisoners in chains, overwhelming any resistance immediately. Some captives were marched to the Turkish ships, others to the camp outside the walls. According to Critobulus, another historian of the siege, soldiers argued openly over the most beautiful women. The historian Phrantzes, an eyewitness, called the desecration of Hagia Sophia the greatest misfortune of all, describing the church as the Earthly Heaven and Throne of the Glory of God, defiled by what he witnessed that day. Books were burned, trampled, or sold for almost nothing. Critobulus recorded that both religious texts and works of philosophy and science were destroyed. According to Doukas, ships in the Turkish fleet carried an enormous quantity of looted books. Ten volumes of Plato and Aristotle together sold for a single coin. The sack of the city lasted three days. The Ottoman source Hoca Sadeddin Efendi, writing in The Crown of Histories, recorded that soldiers acted under the instruction to slaughter the aged and capture the youth, and that the general plunder ran for three days and nights with the sultan's permission. Leonard put the number of captives bound for distribution at sixty thousand. Critobulus estimated that four thousand Greeks and Italians were killed during the siege and its aftermath, with more than fifty thousand of the remaining population enslaved. When Mehmed II entered Hagia Sophia, he summoned an imam who ascended the pulpit and declared the Islamic faith. At that moment, the church, which had stood as the center of Orthodox Christianity for nearly a thousand years, became a mosque. To repopulate the devastated city, Mehmed ordered five thousand families relocated from the provinces, including ma...