On 29 May 1453 Mehmed II wrenched out ‘one of the two eyes of the church’. The Christian West watched aghast as this ‘new Caligula’, this figure ‘crueller than Nero’ and ‘more dangerous than a wild beast’, seized the city of Constantinople from the weakened and desperate hands of the last Byzantine emperor, Constantine XI, and plunged this once great seat of learning into ruin. The glorious capital which had reigned supreme for more than a thousand years was now lost to the Turks, ‘the most despicable people ever, barbarous, lecherous and ignorant enemies of civilisation’. This, needless to say, was the view of the Latins, for whom the fall of the city, a totally predictable event, but one they had done very little to prevent, was a catastrophe of immense proportions. Indeed it was of such magnitude that the hand of Enea Silvio Piccolomini, later Pope Pius II, trembled as he wrote of it.

The fall shook the West, which reverberated with reports of Turkish atrocities performed in the fallen Byzantine capital. Latin accounts talked vociferously of the rivers of blood which poured through the streets of the fallen city and flowed like rainwater in the gutters after a sudden storm. Corpses floated out to sea like melons along a canal; religious relics were plundered, tombs were pillaged and the bones of emperors and saints were thrown to the pigs and dogs. Much-venerated religious images were shattered and trampled underfoot by the Turkish soldiers.