The Fall of Constantinople 1453: Bishop Leonardo Giustiniani and His Italian Followers

"The Fall of Constantinople 1453: Bishop Leonardo Giustiniani and His Italian Followers." This article examines nineteenth- and twentieth-century scholarly efforts to recover the vast corpus of eyewitness accounts of the siege and fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks in 1453, focusing on one specific letter by Bishop Leonardo Giustiniani of Chios. Leonardo's Italian translation, included in Francesco Sansovino's best-sellers of the sixteenth century, was followed by well-known elaboraters and forgers such as pseudo-Sphrantzes (who "composed" the celebrated Chronicon Maius) and the anonymous author of the codex Barberinus Graecus 111. The relation between Leonardo's text and that of Giacomo Languschi (embedded in Zorzi Dolfin's Chronicle) are examined; linguistic parallels further demonstrate that Leonardo, Languschi, and an epic poem on the siege by another eyewitness, Ubertino Pusculo, are more closely connected than has been suspected. These texts utilized another lost source, which I attribute to Ignotus, an unknown author. He may be none other than Alvise Diedo, the "capitano general del mar" of the Venetians in Constantinople, who escaped the carnage, returned to Venice, and eventually produced a relazione of the events. His lost relazione and the narrative of Leonardo played a key role among the early attempts to reconstruct the history of the siege of Constantinople (1453).