On May 29, 1453, the Turkish army commanded by Sultan Mehmet II conquered Constantinople. This city, also known as Byzantium, was for about a thousand years the capital of the Eastern Roman or Byzantine Empire, custodian of the Hellenistic legacy of the Greco-Roman world, the bastion of Christianity in the eastern Mediterranean and the gateway to Europe towards the East. Many historians point to this event as the milestone that marks the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the Modern Age. However, its significance goes beyond a fixed historical limit. Its repercussions have reached the present day. Our times are an indirect product of the fall of Constantinople. This is thanks to two direct consequences: the Discovery of America, and the Renaissance. The city of Byzantium (now Istanbul, capital of Turkey) was located on the Bosphorus Strait, which connects the Black Sea to the Sea of ​​Marmara which connects to the Aegean and the Mediterranean through the Dardanelles Strait. For centuries the city had ensured European merchants, especially Genoese and Venetians, access to the Black ...