From a Euro-Mediterranean perspective, the conquest of Constantinople led by the Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II in 1453 not only marked the end of the Byzantine empire that had lasted more than a millennium, but also the end of the European Middle Ages. Rightly considered a ‘moment of great historical significance’1 by both contemporaries and modern researchers, the conquest of Constantinople ‘had repercussions that went far beyond its walls’2 not only politically and economically, but also culturally and socially.
Continue reading Prophecies and (Hi)Stories: Telling the Conquest of Constantinople in 1453Author: Rike Szill
She is a research assistant at the Chair for the History of the Early and High Middle Ages and Auxiliary Sciences at Kiel University. Her Ph.D. examines the narrative processing, interpreting, and attribution of meaning to the conquest of Constantinople in 1453 in late Byzantine historiography. For this, she was granted two three-month scholarships at the German Historical Institutes in London and Paris between October 2020 and March 2021. Her further research interests focus on the history of historiography, the cultural transfer between Byzantium and the Latin West, otherworld journeys, medieval cartography, and trauma studies.