A Capital Conquered Twice

Constantinople was sacked in 1204 not by an outside power but by fellow Christians: the Fourth Crusade, diverted from its original goal by Venetian financial interests and a Byzantine succession dispute, took and looted the city and installed a Latin Catholic emperor and patriarch in place of the Orthodox ones, a rupture Eastern and Western Christianity have never fully set aside. The Byzantines recovered the city in 1261, but a weakened empire finally fell in 1453 to the Ottoman sultan Mehmed II, who converted Hagia Sophia into a mosque within days of the conquest and made the city his own imperial capital.

The Ecumenical Patriarchate survived Ottoman rule under a system that granted it authority over the empire's Orthodox Christian subjects, and it continues today at the Cathedral of St. George in the Fener district, though the city's Greek Orthodox population fell sharply across the twentieth century. Renamed Istanbul under the Turkish republic founded in 1923, the city has seen Hagia Sophia's status itself contested repeatedly in recent memory: secularized into a museum in 1935 under Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, then reconverted to a mosque by a 2020 Turkish court ruling and presidential decree, a change that drew objection from Orthodox and other Christian communities and support from many in Turkey, a dispute this record describes rather than settles.