Hey guys, I’m watching the new Netflix series “Rise of Empires: Ottoman” about the conquest of Constantinople, and in it, there’s mention of this ray of light that shone on the dome of the Hagia Sophia, which caused panic in the city (people thought it was the end of the world) and in the Ottoman ranks. I googled around about it and couldn’t find a single mention of it online. Up until now I’ve been pretty convinced of all the facts presented in the show but now I’m dubious.
It’s a dramatized documentary with historical commentary, so I think it should be academically backed but I’m not so sure. So here are my questions:
1.) Were there actually reports of some divine light coming off the Hagia Sophia?
2.) if so, what possible explanations are there for it?
3.) were the other astrological events (a blood moon+eclipse the night before the battle) actually verifiably recorded?
4.) if you’ve seen it, what else did this show get wrong?
Thanks in advance everyone, I’m really interested to figure this out
There are contemporary sources for these things, but of course we should remember that this was a huge catastrophe from the Greek/Christian perspective, and the way people wrote about it afterwards usually reflected that. They were looking for signs, prophecies, anything at all to help them understand what happened and why. So it might not be the case that all of these things *really* happened, just that people interpreted what they saw (or what they thought they saw) in ways that allowed them to deal with the loss.
The eclipse is the easiest to verify. There definitely was a lunar eclipse on May 22, 1453 (Saros cycle 102), the week before the city fell - some sources might misremember the date by a couple of days, but the fun thing about eclipses is that the moon and the Earth and the Sun don’t really change so we can extrapolate the date of eclipses going back thousands of years. Both sides saw the eclipse, but the Greeks interpreted it as a bad omen, and the Turks as a good omen.
Some sources do describe a light coming out of the dome of Hagia Sophia. For some this was interpreted as the Holy Spirit or the “light of heaven” abandoning the city. Some also recorded that there was darkness throughout the city afterwards. As for what this really was:
“This fire may well have been what is today identified as St. Elmo's fire, caused by unusual atmospheric conditions, perhaps an accumulation of debris particles, smoke from the cannons, and weather phenomena, and giving off discharges of atmospheric electricity.” (Philippides and Hanak, p. 223, note 93)
The Greeks panicked about this but the Ottomans don't seem to have noticed it. I haven’t seen the show so I don’t know what else it talks about, but there are a lot of weird things that people saw at the time. It was a catastrophic, almost apocalyptic event for the people living there, so they tended to look for signs in nature and looked to Biblical prophecies to explain things.
Sources:
Jonathan Harris, The End of Byzantium (Yale University Press, 2012)
Marios Philippides and Walter K. Hanak, The Siege and the Fall of Constantinople in 1453: Historiography, Topography, and Military Studies (Ashgate, 2011)
Steven Runciman, The Fall of Constantinople, 1453 (Cambridge University Press, 1965)