Title: The Fall of Constantinople: A Turning Point in Modern History?
Headings: The Fall of Constantinople: A Turning Point in Modern History?
The Fall of Constantinople: A Turning Point in Modern History?
Constantinople was deeply weakened by 1453 and its eventual fall to the Ottoman Turks shouldn’t have come as a surprise to anyone. Its fall was inevitable, really only a question of time. Yet the fall of Constantinople proved to be a turning point in modern history. So, what were the consequences or effects of the fall of Constantinople?
The Fall of Constantinople Created a Vacuum
The Fall of Constantinople Prompted Successive Bids to become the Universal Empire
Russia, the Third Rome?
Fall of Constantinople Prompts the World’s Political Map to Be Redrawn
Common Questions about the Impact of the Fall of Constantinople
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Content: Most important of all was that the Greek scholars who arrived in the West taught the Greek language to the Italian humanists and enriched their understanding. Further, the fall of Constantinople presented a geographic problem for Europeans. Trade routes with the Orient, which had run through the Byzantine Empire, were now in the hands of the Ottoman Turks. These routes were not entirely closed, because trade continued, in part helped by the merchants of Venice and Genoa trading with the Turks. But the desire of Europeans to outflank the Turks and to find alternate routes for the trade would spur European voyages of discovery, including the voyage which led Columbus to what was for him a new world. This drive to outflank the Turks also had a strategic and religious dimension, which recalled the Crusades. The key geopolitical location of earlier authority, Constantinople, had been lost, and the religious and political imperative was to find a way around that fact, the end of the Roman Empire. The loss of Rome had created a gap in the mental map of the world, and that gap was the turning point. Common Questions about the Impact of the Fall of Constantinop