1453 Overture
Everyone remembers two of these. The third is the one worth knowing.
Tchaikovsky’s has cannon in it. This one has three, and they go off in sequence rather than together: a spring, a summer and an autumn, and by December the orchestra of world history is playing tutti.
Every schoolboy knows what happened in 1453. Constantinople fell; the Hundred Years’ War stopped. What rather fewer people know is that a third thing ended in the same twelve months, a long way north, and that it has the better claim to have shaped the next four centuries.
In the south the Byzantine Empire runs out. On 29 May Mehmed II takes Constantinople and claims the title of Roman Caesar—Kayser-i Rum. Claims is the word: Gennadius Scholarius, the new patriarch, acknowledged it; the courts of Europe did not, and Vienna in particular went on being annoyed about it for the next three centuries. The Ottomans arrive on the European stage no longer as a frontier power but as a dynasty with a claim to Rome, which is a considerably more irritating thing to have on one’s border.
In the north—and this is the part that gets left out—a civil war of nearly thirty years finally burns down. Vasily II, known as the Blind because his cousins had seen to that, secures Moscow for good. His last rival, Dmitry Shemyaka, is poisoned in Novgorod in July. His mother Sofia—who two years earlier had personally held Moscow against a Tatar siege—dies on 15 June, taking monastic vows on her deathbed at eighty-something, which was the done thing. The Muscovite appanages are finished; what follows is a centralised state with an appetite.
In the west, for the sake of the clock, the Hundred Years’ War stops: Castillon in July, the surrender of the Bordeaux garrison in October. Nobody signed anything. Calais stayed English for another century, and English monarchs went on styling themselves kings of France until 1801. That the war ended in 1453 is a decision taken by historians, not by anyone who was there.
Caesar, three ways
One detail ties the south to the north more firmly than the calendar does.
The title Mehmed takes is Caesar. Latin Caesar → Greek καῖσαρ → Ottoman قیصر, Kayser. The same name went north by other roads: into German as Kaiser, and into Slavonic twice over—as the bookish kesar, straight from Greek, and as tsar, worn down from an earlier cĭsarĭ which reached the Slavs, on Vasmer’s account, with Gothic help along the way.
So: in the year Constantinople falls, one sultan in the south assumes the name of Caesar, and in the north a state emerges which will assume the same name within fifty years, by a different branch of the same word. Both proclaim themselves heirs to a third empire that has just stopped existing. Meanwhile a third Caesar, the German one, was already in business and had opinions about both.
The chord, it turns out, does not rest on the date alone.
An overture to what
An overture implies an opera to follow.
Historians have agreed to treat 1453 as the end of the Middle Ages. The line is a convention, it has rivals—1492 and Columbus, 1517 and Luther—and no one alive at the time noticed crossing it. But the convention is not arbitrary. Everything the next century is busy with starts here. The Ottoman Empire stops being a frontier state and becomes a participant in European politics. Moscow gets its hands free, and within fifty years a title to which it fits a genealogy. France comes out of the war with a standing army and a permanent tax to pay for it—two things from which absolutism grows without further assistance.
The curtain goes up. After this: Mehmed II, Ivan III and Louis XI, each in his own theatre.
