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
Keep Reading
The History of Portugal: The Dawn of a Seafaring Empire
The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
Who was Napoleon Bonaparte? The Early Years

Content: Image: Ivan Aivazovsky/Public domain)
Apart from the fall of Constantinople itself, its effects, especially on how it was viewed by contemporaries, were shattering. Contemporaries had become used to the notion that Constantinople was always under threat, perpetually in crisis, and yet it had always somehow survived. There were three clear results of the fall of Constantinople, which proved to be a turning point in modern history. The consequences continue to endure to the present day. Learn more about the fall of Constantinople. The Fall of Constantinople Created a Vacuum
The first result was that after the final fall of the Roman Empire, with the fall of Constantinople, much of the world would be haunted by the ghost of the memory of what Rome had been, what it had once achieved, and represented. Rome had been a universal authority, the archetype of what an empire was and should be. Indeed, it still is the archetype: Think of the Roman neoclassical architecture of government buildings in Washington D.C.
In this earlier age, thinking about the implications of the fall of Constantinople was based on a medieval concept, that of translatio imperii, the transfer of rule or authority, as an organizing principle of history.