Born Then1453
Life during the Fall of Constantinople
Be born in a place it hit, a few years before it began, and see what it did to five ordinary lives.
What it meant for ordinary people
On 29 May 1453 the Ottoman sultan Mehmed II took Constantinople after a seven-week siege, ending the Byzantine Empire. The city was sacked and many inhabitants enslaved. Mehmed then resettled it with people from across his empire and made it his capital.
Deaths: about 4,000 killed in the sack; some 30,000 enslaved.
How hard it hits each person in the game (risk of death, of being conscripted, of leaving) comes from scholarly estimates.
Around the same time
- Indian Ocean slave trade 700–1799
- Rise of Great Zimbabwe 1200–1450
- Hundred Years' War 1337–1453
- Fall of Constantinople 1453
- Sengoku period 1467–1590