Università Roma Tre

Constantinople, May 29, 1453: fall or conquest? The "clash of civilizations" that sealed the beginning of the modern era in the testimony of the sources.
Course description
There are days that can change history, dates that become a symbol, a hologram, a mantra. Think of the initials Nine Eleven, on 11 September 2002, of the fall of the Twin Towers, which gave the 21st century the seal of what is called a "clash of civilizations". Or even less chilling, but equally symbolic dates, such as those to which the birth of the modern age is usually referred: 1492, when the discovery of America projected the Europeans far from the area of irradiation of the former Roman and later Byzantine empire, that is, of what Fernand Braudel called the Greater Mediterranean, the trade routes that for centuries had fought against Genoa and Venice; or 1517, when Martin Luther posted his ninety-five theses on the portal of the church of the castle of Wittemberg. These two events are closely linked to a third party: indeed, they could be considered epiphenomena. If we wanted to indicate the date that really marks the beginning of the modern age, because it is also the cause of the other two, because it changed course to the Mediterranean trade, because it freed papacy from an antagonist – orthodoxy - and left space to the Protestant Reformation, and for a thousand other reasons, we should mention another date: that of May 29, 1453, the day of the fall - or conquest, depending on the point of view with which we want to look at it - of the Byzantine Empire, that is, ultimately, the Roman Empire. Through the reading and exegesis of the sources of both sides in the field, namely not only the Byzantine and Western, but also the Islamic ones, and in particular the Ottoman chroniclers of the court of Mehmet II, and through the analysis of facts and phenomena that preceded and determined on the one hand the Ottoman expansion towards the Mediterranean, on the other the growing isolation of the millennial "Roman" empire of Byzantium with respect to the new European powers, the course aims to induce students to develop an independent opinion, historical, methodologically founded and critically articulated, on this epochal event, which changed the history of two civilizations and which violently and powerfully inserted Islam into our European history: an event that has also acquired a new topicality in the contemporary geopolitical framework, and that is often evoked by the media, but in an almost always inexact manner, influenced by prejudice and ideological conditioning as well as, more simply, by the superficiality with which our Western historiography - almost always deprived of the tools available today of the young Byzantine discipline - wanted to simplify and disseminate it.

Bibliography
A) Mandatory texts

- S. Ronchey, Lo Stato bizantino, Torino, Einaudi, 2002
- A. Pertusi (a c. di), La caduta di Costantinopoli, 2 voll., Fondazione Lorenzo Valla / Mondadori, Milano 1976

B) Additional (optional) texts

- G. Ostrogorsky, Storia dell’impero bizantino, Einaudi Tascabili 2005
- A. Pertusi, Testi inediti e poco noti sulla caduta di Costantinopoli. Edizione postuma a c. di A. Carile,
Pàtron, Bologna 1983
- A. Pertusi, Fine di Bisanzio e fine del mondo. Significato e ruolo storico delle profezie sulla caduta di
Costantinopoli in Oriente e in Occidente. Edizione postuma a c. di E. Morini, Istituto Storico Italiano per il
Medio Evo, Roma 1988
- S. Runciman, Gli ultimi giorni di Costantinopoli (trad. it.), Piemme, Casale Monferrato, 1997
- I. Djuric, Il crepuscolo di Bisanzio (1392-1448) (trad. it.), Donzelli, Roma 1989
- F. Babinger, Maometto il Conquistatore, Einaudi, Torino 1970
- N. Gürsel, Il romanzo del Conquistatore, Pironti, Napoli 1997

C) Texts in foreign languages

- E. Pears, The Destruction of the Greek Empire and the Story of the Capture of Constantinople by the
Turks, London 1903
- G. Schlumberger, Le siège de Constantinople en 1453, Plon, Paris 1922
- G. Walter, La ruine de Byzance (1204-1453), Albin Michel, Paris 1958
- D.M. Nicol, The End of the Byzantine Empire, Edward Arnold Publishers, London 1979
- D.M. Nicol, The Immortal Emperor. The Life and Legend of Constantine Palaiologos Last Emperor of the
Romans, Cambridge University Press, 1992
- R. Crowley, 1453. The Holy War for Constantinople and the Crash of Islam and the West, Hyperion, New
York 2005;
- C. Imber, The Ottoman Empire, 1300-1650. The Structure of Power, Palgrave Macmillan, New York 2002