Anthony Kaldellis is the Gaylord Donnelly Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Classics and the College, University of Chicago.

The siege and fall of Constantinople in 1453 was a traumatic event for the city’s defenders. After being bombarded by the world’s largest cannons for almost two months, they were all enslaved, if not killed, though some were ransomed. Among them were men trained in classical Greek and Latin, including teachers and students of ancient literature, who viewed the siege through the lens of their education and wrote our eye-witness sources for it afterward. In this lecture, Anthony Kaldellis will explore the classicists’ experience of 1453 and the impact of the city’s fall on the history of classical scholarship.