With cries of triumph the Turks trampled over the piles of Greek dead and raced into the city. The news spread like wildfire. All hope and resistance by the defenders turned to desperate flight. All around the city they deserted the walls, and from the Golden Horn and-the Sea of Marmora the Turks gained the ramparts that had defied them for fifty-eight days. Below them the screams of terror of the vanquished echoed through the streets. They raced down to join the orgy of pillage and rapine. At first the Turks massacred every Christian they found- in all some four thousand civilians were slaughtered. But their blood-lust was soon sated-they realized their victims were more valuable as slaves.

Homes, stores, warehouses and public buildings were thoroughly ransacked. Everywhere banks of Turks hurried back and forth laden with all they could carry. What they could not take away they burned. Wanton destruction of buildings was limited, however, because these were the property of the Sultan. At the churches where most of the populace had taken refuge in a last appeal to be saved, they hacked down the doors with axes and milled through the crowds eagerly seeking out as their captives the young, the rich and the beautiful. Prize finds were often nearly torn apart by rival bands. Individuals considered useless were sometimes hacked to bits. Men were secured with cords, senators indiscriminately linked with their servants; women were bound with their own scarves and girdles. Altars were desecrated and relics gutted of their valuables and smashed. The captives were herded in coffees to the camp or the ships, goaded with blows to hurry for the Turks were anxious to return for more. In this manner some fifty thousand inhabitants were taken away.

Some pockets of resistance still held out. Most of the Turks of Prince Orhan fought to the death as the best alternative. The prince himself nearly escaped disguised as a Greek. When he was discovered he was decapitated on the spot. Bands of Venetians and Genoese troops fought their way to the Golden Horn. There they joined swarms of terrified civilian-. and clambered aboard snips. The way was clear. The Turkish sailors, fearful the army would seize all the plunder, had abandoned their own vessels and streamed into the city. A few hundred soldiers of Constantinople escaped by this means. Some five hundred others were captured, but the rest of the original seven thousand died in battle.

A small company of Cretan sailors held out in three towers near the entrance of the Golden Horn until early afternoon. They so won the admiration of the Turks that they were allowed to leave the city unharmed.

The Sultan Mohammed made his own triumphal entry into Constantinople that afternoon. The great domes and spires still stood unscathed, but by now the buildings were shorn of their wealth and beauty. The streets were abandoned.

Leading a procession of his guards, chief commanders and ministers, he toured the central portions of the city he had conquered. At the hippodrome he came across the twisted columns of the three serpents. In his eyes this was a talisman of the city. In a test of strength with the iron mace he still carried he shattered one of the huge jaws.

Then Mohammed proceeded to the great church of St. Sophia. Before entering he knelt down and poured a handful of earth over his turban as an act of atonement. Then he entered and paused under the dome where he admonished a Turkish soldier for trying to pry up a piece of marble pavement. He ordered a few Greeks and priests still held there to be freed. He gazed briefly at the cross torn down, at the altar swept bare and the frescoed walls of religious scenes whitewashed over. He had ordered this greatest Christian church of the East to be converted into a mosque.

He strode across the church and stepped up onto the altar where he stood briefly in symbolic silence. As the Sultan left the building a muezzin from one of the highest towers cried out across the city to Allah that the great Christian citadel had been vanquished.