The cries of fear and of pain were drowned in the martial music of drums, trumpets and attaballs; and experience has proved that the mechanical operations of sounds, by quickening the circulation of the blood and spirits, will act on the human machine more forcibly than the eloquence of reason and honor.

——Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Chapter 68, Paragraph 9

       The fall of Constantinople: Sultan Mehmed  ‘the Conqueror” II, of the Ottoman Empire, after a half-century siege, conquers what is left of the Byzantine Empire.  This brings to an end the world’s longest-lived empire—the Roman Empire—being in continuous existence since 30 B.C.  Although most historians do not refer to the Byzantine Empire as a continuation of the (Eastern) Roman Empire, the realm continued as the Roman Empire when Emperor Constantine transferred his capital from Rome to Byzantium, renaming the city after himself, in the year A.D. 330.  This closes off the “Silk Road” (the Asian overland route) that the West had used for almost two-thousand years to trade with the East, thus forcing Occidental merchants to start searching for sea routes to reach the Orient.

       NOTES:

• Although Mahomet changed the name of the city to Istanbul, that change was not recognized by the west until 1924.
• The Silk Road had made Constantinople the “center of the universe” as it was the gateway between the Occident and the Orient. But with the discovery of the New World a half century later, Istanbul became little more than a geographical backwater.

       [added 5/23/2021]