The Ottomans and the fall of Constantinople

Mehmed II brings up to the walls of Constantinople enormous cannon cast by a Hungarian master, and drags part of his fleet overland into the Golden Horn. After a siege of a month and a half the city is taken: the last emperor dies fighting, the church of Hagia Sophia becomes a mosque, and the capital receives a new name — Istanbul. The Ottomans summon settlers into the emptied city, and within forty years tens of thousands of Jews expelled from Spain will come here, and to Salonika and Izmir. The empire will soon take the Balkans, Egypt and the Levant, and become the master power of the Mediterranean.