Description

In terms of geopolitics perhaps the most seminal event of the Middle Ages was the successful Ottoman siege of Constantinople in 1453 The city had been an imperial capital as far back as the 4th century when Constantine the Great shifted the power center of the Roman Empire there effectively establishing two almost equally powerful halves of antiquitys greatest empire The fall of Constantinople is still wellknown today but the Ottoman Empire was already pushing into Europe beforehand and it would take repeated efforts by various European coalitions to prevent a complete Ottoman takeover of the continent At the time the most powerful European countries in Eastern Europe and the Balkans were Poland and Hungary Russia was still throwing off the Mongol yoke France and England were fighting an interminable war Germany was broken into hundreds of entities and the Holy Roman Empire was fighting the rise of Protestantism The Italian merchant citystates of Venice and Genoa were intimately tied to the Balkans the Byzantine Empire the Black Sea and the Ottomans Genoa had been something of an Ottoman ally since the 1300s even while the Ottomans were looming as a grave threat to Europe