To take Constantinople, Mehmed II moved his fleet over land.

1453

A chain blocked the Golden Horn, so in 1453 some 70 ships were dragged on greased logs over a hill and straight into the harbour.

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The event

• Fall of Constantinople1453 · Constantinople. After a siege of nearly two months, the army of Ottoman sultan Mehmed II stormed Constantinople; the last emperor, Constantine XI, died in the fighting. Byzantium fell, the city became the Ottoman capital, and Moscow later claimed Byzantium's legacy.

15th century

More amazing facts

• 1450 · 1564 Ivan Fyodorov's Apostol (1564), the first precisely dated Russian printed book, came out more than a century after Gutenberg's press.
• 1450 Machu Picchu and Gutenberg's press are the same age: around 1450 the Incas were building their mountain estate while Mainz printed its first books.
• 1450 · 1453 When Constantinople fell in 1453, Gutenberg was already printing in Mainz: the last Roman Empire vanished in the first years of the printed book.
• 1452 · 1453 The guns that smashed the walls of Constantinople were first offered to the Byzantines.
• 1453 Two epochs ended in the summer of 1453: the Ottomans took Constantinople in May, and in July the Battle of Castillon ended the Hundred Years' War after 116 years.
• 1455 · 1829 Those who fought the Wars of the Roses never called them that.

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