Università Roma Tre

The second section of the Byzantine civilization teaching, addressed to graduate students of Classics, History and Art, aims to re-open the historical dossier on the fall/conquest of Constantinople after forty years from the premature death of the best scholar on this subject, Agostino Pertusi, trying to complete his research on unedited and edited historical sources on the event.

Firstly, this section shall try to reconstruct the different phases of the siege and of the final battle on the 29th of May 1453, in which the Osman Turks of Mehmet II Fatîh brought to an end, at least politically, the Byzantine empire and the eleventh centuries of Byzantine life.

The analysis of the events shall be done by a comparative reading and a precise exegesis of ‘official’ sources of both the sides, namely Byzantine (George Sphrantzes, Doukas, Critobulos, Laonikos Calcondilas) and western sources (Isidore of Kiev, Leonard of Chios, Niccolò Barbaro) but also islamic ones, particularly those of the Ottoman Chroniclers of the cohort of Mehmet II (Tursun Beg e Ibn Kemâl).

To this first group of sources, which, although they are known to the historians, could yet still be given other interpretations, we shall add the exploration of less known attestations, which are either partially edited or still unedited. These attestations are actually memorials of different sort that various observers from different lineage and nations wrote, to be used by powerful people of whom they were or could be considered emissaries: the so-called ‘spies’voices’ that are yet to be considered in the historical evaluation of the battle of the 29th of May 1453.

- 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