what happened to people who lived in Constantinople after the Fall of 1453?

Life went on

The simple answer is that they mostly stayed put and went about their business under the Ottomans. Greeks and Armenians – defined by religion – were still 22%-25% of the population of Anatolia (the Asian part of modern Turkey) in 1910 according to official Ottoman statistics. This doesn’t count all those of Byzantine descent who converted over the preceding five centuries. DNA analysis has shown that most current Turks have some Byzantine ancestry.

To be sure, the decline of Byzantine wealth and power in the 13th and 14th centuries led to a brain drain to Italy and the West that was a major fuel of the Renaissance (another major source was the cultural loot hauled West during the Franco/Venetian occupation.) But most people stayed put – often paying their taxes to the exact same local functionaries they had under the old regime.

In the 20th century – with the partitioning of the Ottoman Empire and the birth of the modern Greek and Turkish states – ethnicity became more important. The Christian & Greek populations in what is now Turkey plummeted from the Greco-Turkish War of 1919-1922, (with its attendant massacres and ethnic cleansing,) and the subsequent “population exchange” (forced migration) between the two new states. Whereas in 1900 there were about 300,000 Greeks in Constantinople (out of a population of about 1,000,000), by year 2000 they numbered slightly more than 2000 in number (out of an exploding population of over 13,000,000) in the now renamed city of Istanbul. (And the city was exempted from the population exchange in the Treaty of Lausanne!)

By the way, it is a mistake to think of 1453 as a turning point. Constantinople was then a small, surrounded, impoverished outpost still enjoying fraying allegiance from a few far-flung hinterland territories. And after 500 years of living in and out of each other’s pockets the cultural differences between Greek and Turk were pretty small. Mehmet the Conqueror saw himself as the legitimate Roman emperor in the line from Augustus to the man he just vanquished (Constantine IX), his change of state religion being no different from Theodosius’ earlier change from Pagan to Christian and a long time coming – and the evidence is that his new subjects mostly agreed. It was mostly in the West that they saw it as a millennial event.
 
Last edited:
we are talking about millions of people, byzantine empire was huge, including Anatolia, Balkan areas, all these people were Hellenized and were Christians
it seems like people just evaporated, similarly to Atlantis. Byzantine empire was over 1100 years and not conquered for 1000 years (besides 4th crusade of 1204).
I still don't know where everybody is. Many of them left Constantinople, that's true. Places like Italy were a good destination and many Byzantine scholars influenced the Reneisance period.
What about the rest of the people who lived outside of Constantinople, I mean the whole empire, who did they become?
The whole Asia Minor were Byzantines.
That's true that Byzantine Empire was multi-ethnic but they were Christians after all, I don't get it, that's a lot of people.

When you go to Istanbul today, are there any Greeks whose predecessors lived in Byzantine times and what is the number of them?
Western Asia Minor had 402 Greek bishoprics with 2000000 Greeks in1922
despite the Turkish progroms through the years,not counting the population(Greek) in Pontus(nowdays Northern Turky) that had also suffered heavily from the "Armenian Genocide" that included 500000 Greeks and hundreds of thousands of Syrian Christians(it was a general genocide of Christian populations) and not counting the Greeks of Constantinople whse number was approximately 300000.
 
Last edited:
It did- the Turkish states and the Crusader states in Greece weren't too swayed by Constantinople.
In Anatolia the Greek-speaking peasants were mostly uprooted by the first waves of nomadic Turks. As the Turks formed states, Byzantium was in a period of rapid decline when Constantinople fell in 1204 to the Venetians of the Fourth Crusade. The Empire of Nicaea, which controlled the remaining Greek-speaking parts of Asia Minor, put all of it's resources in controlling the City, resulting in Greek Asia Minor being lost to the new Turkish states. During this period, there was a heavy push for conversion to Islam, and many Turks settled into the cities of Asia Minor. The Turkish language slowly filtered in as well. A similar process actually underwent in what is now Northern Greece (Macedon), one reason Greece was so small at first was because those were the only areas where Greeks made an overwhelming majority. As Greece conquered lands from the decaying Ottomans, they were Hellenized, much as they had been Turkified centuries before.
In 1920, a population transfer took place between Greece and Turkey, which was based on religion. All Greek Orthodox Christians (no matter what language they spoke) were sent to Greece, all Muslims were sent to Turkey. IIRC, there are some small Greek-speaking Muslim communities in Turkey, but they consider themselves to be Turkish.
Not 1920 but 1922; and Greek community exists in Constantinople but not so populous after the progom of 1956.
 

CalBear

Moderator
Donor
Monthly Donor
Normally necromancy is frowned upon, but the exception is if you make a real addition to the thread.

For this reason I am not going to take any sort of action like a formal warning, but in a thread that has been dead this long, starting a new one would definitely be the proper way to go.
 
Top