THE western powers were not the only ones to let Constantinople down. Prince Orhan, a rival to Mehmed who had been enjoying the city’s protection, had slipped out quietly in February. A Hungarian named Urban engaged to build cannon for the Emperor defected to the Turks for higher pay. But Venetians, Sicilians and even some Turks put them to shame, as did the seven hundred loyal companions of Giovanni Giustiniani Longo, a Genoese militiaman who later became a monk and wrote an account of the siege.

For three days Mehmed’s victorious troops looted the city, and murdered its citizens; thirty thousand were enslaved or deported. Others fled in Venetian ships, laden with precious knowledge and artworks which the barbarous Turks did not value, but which ignited the Renaissance. To this day, the Greeks sing heart-rending songs, torn between loss and hope, of the ships that left the City carrying their gospels, their saints and their altars into an exile that has not ended yet.