I think it is overly simplistic to simply characterise the reaction of Christendom's elite to the fall of Constantinople as simply one of 'shock', though I will first attempt to explain why the fall of the city mattered so much to many in Christendom’s elite. Given the limits of the comments on Reddit, I will only use two primary sources (both written by Pope Pius II) to explore these varied reactions – though my conclusions are based upon a wider variety of primary sources.

In the wider topic of relations between the Muslim and Christian worlds in the late medieval and early modern periods, the fall of Constantinople is undoubtedly pivotal. It holds a great deal of significance in both in the practical side of those relations (the city having previously been seen as Christendom’s bulwark against Muslim invasion) and in their symbolic, psychological side. As David Thomas and Alexander Mallett point out, there was a rich medieval tradition of anti-Muslim polemic dating from long before the fall of Constantinople that usually consisted of little more than ‘sensationalist rhetoric’. The medieval Christian elite had been acutely aware of the threat posed by Islamic expansionism for centuries, but the fall of the city was by far the greatest psychological blow Islam had ever dealt to Christendom. The city had been a centre of the Christian faith before the conquest, and had been widely known as ‘New Rome’, the capital of the true successor to the Roman Empire (if not the last remnant of the Roman Empire itself) and the ‘city of the world’s desire’, as one Byzantine wrote. Indeed, the Ottomans themselves knew very well how significant this acquisition was for their empire, shown by Mehmed’s insistence upon being addressed by the title ‘Kayser-i Rum’ (‘Caesar of the Romans’) by European Christian rulers after his conquest of the city . Philip Mansel perhaps summarises best European Christians’ view of Constantinople at the time – ‘for much of its thousand years of empire it had been the largest and most sophisticated city in Europe, a treasure-house of the statues and manuscripts of the classical past, and the nerve-centre of Eastern Christendom’ . In a historiographical sense, the event is so important to some historians (such as Marios Philippides and Walter K. Hanak) that they claim that the fall of the city marks the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the Early Modern period in Europe. Put simply, the territorial losses of the Byzantine Empire in years past paled in comparison to the loss of the city itself in many European minds.

As a result, this event held a great deal of interest and importance for many of the political elite in Christendom, both at the time of the conquest and for many years afterwards. Historians such as Robert Schwoebel and Palmira Brummett (usually in the context of a wider and more nuanced discussion) have said that the fall caused great ‘alarm’ in Christendom and have even gone as far as to claim that there was a widespread ‘paralyzing fear’ in Europe at the prospect of imminent Muslim invasion. Indeed, Schwoebel uses many of the sources from political elites in the Italian peninsula (and occasionally elsewhere) from the time immediately after the fall of the city to support this view.

However, this alone might be considered a simplistic interpretation. It is obvious that Christendom could not have had one reaction as a whole, as historians such as Procope Costas have made clear (as he points out, at least one Greek Orthodox Christian even openly admired Mehmed and his army for their military prowess). An examination of two sources written by Pope Pius II will not only reveal the opinions of Islamic expansionism that mattered most, but also the priorities that the elite from across Christendom had at the time – for example, whether religious piety or political pragmatism prevailed when it came to making decisions about military intervention in western Anatolia. Furthermore, an understanding of these varied reactions would provide a more thorough understanding of later Western policies towards the Ottomans – whether they were treated as uneasy allies, to be used for greater power and influence in Europe itself, or as enemies of Christ to be warred against and destroyed.

In this political climate of diplomatic overtures towards the sultan and in-fighting between Christian rulers, it was those who most fervently wished for the Ottomans’ destruction that began to despair this would ever be made a reality. This can be seen vividly in an excerpt from a letter written by Aeneas Sylvius (the future Pope Pius II) which strongly reflects the general pessimism which seemed to characterise the writers of the age in his evaluation of the response to the Turkish threat.

In the letter, he writes of a complete lack of social order, discipline, or common interest amongst Europeans, and seems to depict a society on the brink of collapse, completely unsuited to an assault on the Ottomans. Furthermore, he makes a series of rhetorical queries questioning how a united European force would even be operated, let alone how it might succeed in battle. Echoing Nicholas V’s futile attempt at reconciliation, he asks: ‘Who could make the English love the French?’. Clearly, none of these questions have answers that would be satisfactory to Aeneas. As has been seen previously, it can be easily asserted that the lack of a concerted military response to the Ottomans is indicative of the declining power of the papacy at the end of the Middle Ages, and Aeneas recognises this, lamenting the lack of a strong, central European power: ‘The pope or the emperor may shine as lofty titles… but they are unable to command, and no one is willing to obey’. This sense of disillusionment in the most powerful of European institutions is somewhat surprising coming from a high-ranking member of one of them, but as John Draper argues, this attitude was somewhat endemic at the time. As he puts it, in the fifteenth century ‘men discovered at last that her [the Church’s] litanies and her miracles were equally of no use, and that she must trust, like any other human tyranny, to cannon and the sword’ . Indeed, Draper goes as far as to say that this weakening of faith in the Catholic Church’s indisputable authority was a sign of ‘pent-up dissensions’ that would later ‘burst forth in the Reformation’. The fact that an historian would link the fall of the city to the largest schism in the Christian world in the past thousand years vividly demonstrates how significant the event must have been to European minds, and how much the original vision of Christendom as ‘one large church-state’ had declined .

Once he became Pope, Aeneas aimed to overcome these obstacles – without success. A series of passages from Pius II’s autobiography (known as his ‘Commentaries’) dating from between 1453 and 1459 detail the events leading up to the Congress of Mantua - a gathering dedicated to convincing the rulers of Europe to turn from fighting each other to face Christendom's common enemy by joining a crusade. This source reveals that a sense of apathy, not one of shock, characterised many European rulers when it came to this issue.

The first of these opinions that most vividly strikes the reader is that of Pius’ view of the Turks. For example, in Pius’ retelling of the fall of Constantinople, he describes the great patriarchal basilica of the city, the Haga Sophia, as having been ‘pollut[ed] with their Muslim filth’. Though this position comes as little surprise - it having been previously established that anti-Muslim polemic was the zeitgeist of the age (indeed, Pius himself had previously written a lengthy refutation of Islam) - he takes this rhetoric to previously unseen heights. Pius presents the Ottomans as being an existential threat to all of Christendom, and the fall of one of its greatest cities to be the first sign of the imminent ‘destruction of the faith’. This evident hostility, verging on the ‘paralyzing fear’ mentioned by Palmira Brummett, demonstrates that attitudes towards the Ottomans after the fall of the city did not cool uniformly across the Latin Christian world as time went on.

The threat of Europe’s total subjugation having been firmly established in his mind, Pius goes on to recount his efforts to convince the Latin powers of Europe to join a crusade intended to drive the Turks out of the continent. In doing so, he inadvertently reveals the opinions of many European rulers towards the Turks in the years following the fall of the city - most of which could be classed as uncaring, verging on conciliatory. This impression is backed up by Kelly DeVries, who makes the point that most European rulers were either too scared of the Turks to fight them, or their fears too assuaged by Hungarian success in defending itself against Turkish invasion to believe a crusade was necessary.

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