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THE FALL OF CONSTANTINOPLE
Here is what was left of the Roman Empire by 1430:
Constantinople fell to the Ottomans in 1453. The Serbs had already suffered a major defeat in Maritsa in 1371, then Kosovo in 1389. The Bulgarian capital, Trnovo fell in 1393. What was left of Serbia, which you see on this map, the stronghold of Smederevo, fell in 1459.
By contrast, in 1380, with the victory of Prince Dmitri Donskoy, Prince of Moscow, over the Tartars at Kulikovo, the Russian principalities were breaking free of their subservience to the Golden Horde.
Immediately prior to 1453, a last attempt was made to end the division between Western and Eastern Christendom in the Council of Florence-Ferrara in Italy attended by the Eastern Roman Emperor (John VIII Palaiologos), the Patriarch of Constantinople (Joseph II) and representatives of the Patriarchal Sees of Antioch, Alexandria and Jerusalem in attendance under the presidency of Pope Eugene IV. The Eastern delegation included the Greek monk Isidore, appointed from Constantinople in 1437 as Metropolitan of Kiev and all Rus' (by this time based in Moscow since Kiev had long been absorbed into the Western Kingdoms of Lithuania and Poland).
Detail from Benozzo Gozzoli's Journey of the Magi, 1459, in the Palazzo Medici Riccardi, Florence. The 'middle king', Balthasar, is modelled on John VIII.
A union was agreed in 1439 but was repudiated in Moscow when Isidore returned to proclaim it. Isidore was imprisoned but escaped and went on, as representative of the Pope, to proclaim the union in Constantinople in 1452 though it isn't clear (to me at least) whether he had the support of the then (last) Emperor, John VIII's brother, Constantine XI Palaiologos or the Patriarch, Athanasios II. Probably not since Constantine, who died in the siege, is widely, though not officially, revered as a saint while Athanasios, after escaping Constantinople, fled to Mount Athos (though he died in a monastery in the Ukraine). Isidore too escaped, returning to Rome where he was later appointed by Pope Pius II as Latin Patriarch of Constantinople.
The decline and fall of Constantinople and the widespread support for union with Rome among the city's intellectuals resulted in a massive transfer of Greek intellectual life to Italy, a major contributing factor to the Renaissance. What was left in the East was very largely hostile to Western influence; its sense of its own distinct character and moral worth was informed by the hesychasts.
The Roman Empire had of course been pagan before it was Christian. Having established their capital in Constantinople, the Ottoman rulers, seeing Islam as the legitimate successor to Christianity, could quite reasonably understand their rule as a reconstitution and continuation of the Roman Empire. And as Stephen Runciman points out in The Great Church in Captivity, 'from the narrow viewpoint of ecclesiastical control and discipline the Patriarchate gained from the conquest because the vast bulk of its territory was reunited under one lay power.' (p.166)
The Ottoman Empire in 1483
Here is what the division between Western and Eastern Christianity (in the areas in which it was sovereign) looked like in 1478:
The little Eastern enclave off the Black Sea is Georgia, the North is the great Principality of Moscow which by now had absorbed the Russian principalities of Vladimir, Novgorod and Tver.