2025 Annual Lecture of the Yan P. Lin Centre - ‘Constantinople 1453: The Fate of the Conquered and the Passage to Modernity’ by Anthony Kaldellis

The Lin Centre’s 2025 Annual Lecture, ‘Constantinople 1453: The Fate of the Conquered and the Passage to Modernity’, was delivered by Professor Anthony Kaldellis, Professor of Classics at the University of Chicago, on March 26.

For most of us, the conquest of Constantinople by Ottoman forces under Mehmet “the Conqueror” evokes images of chaos, violence, and disorder. Professor Kaldellis presented us with a completely different but no less disturbing image: that of an imperial capital in total silence. The fall of this most illustrious capital city of the East Roman Empire, according to Kaldellis, was essentially a highly organized evacuation: Constantinople’s urban arteries were emptied entirely of its Roman citizens, who were rounded up in the Ottoman camp outside the fourth-century city walls to be sold into slavery and re-settled within the city to serve its new inhabitants. The history Kaldellis elucidated was one of enslavement, resettling, and, above all, ransoming.

Anthony Kaldellis many publications on the history and culture of the east Roman empire from antiquity to the fifteenth century have been translated into Turkish, French, Romanian, Russian, and Greek. He has most recently published a new, comprehensive history of Byzantium, The New Roman Empire (Oxford University 2023), which embeds social, economic, religious, and demographic developments within a lively narrative framework. He also hosts the first academic podcast for his field, Byzantium & Friends.