REBIRTH 177The Ottomans persisted, however. The cannons kept booming, the
janissaries kept charging, the immense besieging army made up of recruits
from many different tribes and populations including Arabs, Persians, and
even European Christians kept storming the ramparts, but in the end, the
battle turned on the fact that someone forgot to close one small door in
one corner of the third and most impregnable wall. A few Turks forced
their way in through there, secured the sector, opened a larger gate to their
compatriots, and suddenly the most enduring capital of the western
world's longest lasting empire was going down in flames.
Mehmet gave his troops permission to loot Constantinople for three
days but not one minute longer. He wanted his troops to preserve the city,
not destroy it, because he meant to use it as his own capital. From this
time on, the city came to be known informally as Istanbul {the formal
name change would not occur until centuries later) and the victorious sul-
tan was henceforth called Mehmet the Conqueror.
Imagine for a moment what might have happened if Muslims had
taken Constantinople during the prime of Islam's expansion, if Constan-
tinople rather than Baghdad had been the capital of the Abbasids: strad-
dling the waters linking the Black Sea to the Mediterranean, possessing all
the ports they needed to launch navies across the Aegean and Mediter-
ranean to Greece and Italy and on to Spain and the French Coast and
through the Straits of Gibraltar up the Atlantic coast to England and Scan-
dinavia, combined with their proven prowess in land warfare-all of Eu-
rope might well have been absorbed into the Islamic empire.
But seven hundred years had passed since the prime of the khalifate. Eu-
rope was no longer a wretched continent eking out a meager existence in
squalid poverty. It was a continent on the rise. On the Iberian peninsula,
Catholic monarchs were busy driving the last embattled Muslims back to
Africa and funding sailors like Columbus to go explore the world. Belgium
had developed into a banking capital, the Dutch were busy cooking up an
awesome business expertise, the continent of Italy was muscling up into the
Renaissance, and England and France were coalescing into nation-states.
Constantinople {Istanbul) gave the Ottomans a peerless base of operations,
but Christian Europe was no longer any pushover. At the time, however, no
one knew who was on the rise and who on the decline, and with the Ottoman
triumph, Islam certainly looked resurgent to the Muslim world at large.