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The year 1204 was even worse. On April 13 Fourth Crusaders en route to Jerusalem committed what historian Sir Steven Runciman called “the greatest crime in history”—the Christian sack of Constantinople. Burning, pillaging, raping, the crusaders looted what they didn’t destroy to enrich Venice, Paris, Turin, and other Western centers with “every choicest thing found upon the earth.” (They even brought back two heads of John the Baptist, so rich was Constantinople in relics.)

When, after fifty-seven years, a Byzantine emperor once again reigned in Constantinople, the Universal Empire was but a large head on a shrunken body. The Venetians and Genoese had a stranglehold on its trade. Franks still held territory. Trebizond ruled an independent empire on the Black Sea. Byzantine princes had set up their own power centers in Greece. Byzantium was soon pressed between the Ottoman Turks and the Serbs.

Crossing the Dardanelles, the Turks first settled in Europe at Gallipoli in 1354. A year later, with Serbian power at its peak, Stephen Dushan, who had proclaimed himself emperor of Serbs and Greeks, made his bid for Constantinople. Death robbed him of a chance to sit on Byzantium’s throne, but the Serbs never forgot the common Balkan dream of conquering Constantinople. Nor will they ever forget the collision three decades later with the Turks.

In the mists of morning rolling over brown-tilled earth at Kosovo in Yugoslavia, I peopled that “field of the blackbirds” with Turks and Serbs locked in battle. A physical defeat, it was yet a moral victory the Serbs celebrate to this day. Folk legend and epics extolling Serb bravery fed the fires of nationalism during the five centuries the Serbs suffered the Turkish yoke. Kosovo: June 28, 1389. How ironic that Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria chose June 28 of all days to make his entry into Sarajevo, where his assassination by a Serb patriot plunged the world into war in 1914.

As the Turkish shadow lengthened, Byzantine emperors traveled west to reconcile differences in an effort to secure military aid. Neither pope nor patriarch considered the rupture of 1054 final. Twice, union of the churches was proclaimed (only to founder on the reef of residual hatred for the crusaders’ desecration of holy Constantinople in 1204). As for aid, the West dragged its feet. Venice arrested one emperor for debt.

On a spur of snow-crowned mountains walling Sparta’s valley in the Peloponnese clings the Byzantine city of Mistra. Today its citadel, palace, red-roofed churches, and dwellings lie empty. Only a few nuns live in this once vibrant city, the renown of its scholars and artists outshining the empire’s fading power. Here in 1449, where a double-headed eagle is carved in the cathedral’s marble paving, the last Byzantine emperor was crowned.

With him as he journeyed north went a legend: Constantinople’s last emperor would bear the same name as the first. His name? Constantine. And his mother, like the mother of Constantine the Great, was named Helena.

Acclaimed by the populace, tolerated by the indolent Sultan Murad II, he could settle, it seemed, for peaceful coexistence. Having failed in besieging Constantinople and succeeded in crushing a crusader army at Varna on the Black Sea, the sultan was content, in his sumptuous capital of Edirne (ancient Adrianople) in Thrace, to let Constantinople wither on the vine while he sported with his stable of stallions and his harem of hundreds of women.

Murad’s death in 1451 changed that. His mantle fell to his eldest son, who began his reign typically by strangling his baby brother. Scarcely twenty, he burned to conquer Constantinople. As legend would have it, he bore the Prophet’s name—Muhammad.

Mounting the walls of Constantine’s city, I scanned the line of towers. The green of garden vegetables flooded moats that in 1453 had run red. An aged Turk tended a peaceful cemetery by walls where forty carts could not have carried away the Turks