Modern nationalists have interpreted the siege of Constantinople as a struggle between Greek and Turkish peoples, but such simplifications are misleading. Neither side would have readily accepted or even understood these labels, though each used them of the other. The Ottomans, literally the tribe of Osmen, called themselves just that, or simply Muslims. "Turk" was a largely pejorative term applied by the nation states of the West, the name "Turkey" unknown to them until borrowed from Europe to create the new Republic in 1923. The Ottoman Empire in 1453 was already a multicultural creation that sucked in the peoples it conquered with little concern for ethnic identity. Its crack troops were Slavs, its leading general Greek, its admiral Bulgarian, its sultan probably half Serbian or Macedonian. Furthermore under the complex code of medieval vassalage, thousands of Christian troops accompanied him down the road from Edirne. The had come to conquer the Greek-speaking inhabitants of Constantinople, whom we now call the Byzantines, a word first used in English in 1853, exactly four hundred years after the great siege. They were considered to be heirs to the Roman Empire and referred to themselves accordingly as Romans. In turn they were commanded by an emperor who was half Serbian and a quarter Italian, and much of the defense undertaken by people from Western Europe whom the Byzantines call "Franks": Venetians, Genoese, and Catalans, aided by some ethnic Turks, Cretans - and one Scotsman. If it is difficult to fix simple identities or loyalties to the participants at the siege, there was one dimension of the struggle that all the contemporary chroniclers never forget - that of faith. The Muslims referred to their adversary as "the despicable infidels," "the wretched unbelievers," "the enemies of the Faith"; in response they were called "pagans," "heathen infidels," "the faithless Turks." Constantinople was the front line in a long distance struggle between Islam and Christianity for the true faith. It was a place where different versions of the truth had confronted each other in war and truce for 800 years, and it was here in the spring of 1453 that new and lasting attitudes between the two great monotheisms were to be cemented in one intense moment of history.

When the furnace was judged to have reached the correct temperature, the foundry works started to throw copper into the crucible along with scrap bronze probably salvaged, by a bitter irony for the Christians, from church bells. The work was incredibly dangerous - the difficulty of hurling the metal piece by pie e into the bubbling cauldron and of skimming dross off the surface with metal ladles, the noxious fumes given off by the tin alloys, the risk that if the scrap metal were wet, the water would vaporize, rupturing the furnace and wiping out all close by - these hazards hedged the operation about with superstitious dread.

The first line of the walls built in 413 deterred Attila the Hun, "the scourge of God," from making an attack on the city in 447. When it collapsed under a severe earthquake the same year with Attila ravaging Thrace not far away, the whole population responded to the crises. Sixteen thousand citizens totally rebuilt the wall in an astounding two months, not just restoring Anthemius's original structure, but adding an outer wall with a further string of inter spaced towers, a protecting breastwork, and a brick-lined moat - the fosse - to create a formidable barrier of extraordinary complexity (excellent sketch page 81).

The people were profoundly antipapist, "the wolf, the destroyer"; "Rum Papa," the Roman Pope, was a popular choice of name for city dogs. The citizens formed a volatile proletariat: impoverished, superstitious, easily swayed to riot and disorder.