Fifty-three days, one twenty-one-year-old sultan, and the end of a thousand-year empire — the siege that closed the Middle Ages.
On 29 May 1453, the Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II — just twenty-one years old — conquered Constantinople after a fifty-three-day siege, ending the Byzantine Empire after more than a thousand years. The fall of the “New Rome” sent shockwaves through Christendom and is conventionally taken as the moment the Middle Ages ended.
