When in 1453 it passed into the hands of Mohammed El-Fathi its possession consolidated at once the new Mohammedan Empire, and enabled the Sultans of the Ottoman Turks to extend their sway up to the blue Carpathians in the north-west and to the Gulf of Persia in the south-east. There seems almost a miraculous telepathic influence in that place, an influence which inspiresits occupants, as long as they possess some power, with an irresistible ambition to rule over three worlds, and which enables old and exhausted Empires to live longer than the most flattering prophecies ever thought probable or possible. 

There are theories which assert that the possession of Constantinople enervates, disorganizes, and in the end kills. So far as I have been able to read history, I have found that he who takes Constantinople, once securely seated on the Bosphonis, unavoidably feels that his power is strengthened for a higher task, that his political horizon has widened to the misty limits of an Universal Empire, and that it is the manifest destiny of Constantinople to be the capital, if not of an universal, then at least of a great Empire, stretching over Europe, Asia, and Africa.