From a Greek perspective, the capture of Constantinople by the Ottomans is an extremely significant event in the history of the Greek Nation, bringing about the definitive end of the Greek Byzantine state and the beginning of a new period, known as the Ottoman domination or the Ottoman era of Greece, a period of political servitude for the Greek race, which was nonetheless important and no less distinguished in the overall historical life of the nation than the preceding period of political freedom.

The fall of the "queen of cities" was not simply the fall of a great and proud city, a capital city of a state, but the fall of an entire state, and indeed of an entire historical world. Constantinople, this new Rome founded by the Thracian Bosporus, was not merely the capital city of the state in the usual sense of a capital, that is, the seat of the king and government and the center of administration of the whole state, but a "reigning" city of the entire state, not simply in honorific terms, but also in reality, that is, as a result of its actual circumstances, thus called.

A city that concentrated within itself the whole political, military, religious, and overall spiritual and moral life of the whole Greek Christian nation and state, and from it as a source and center, transmitting its material and spiritual powers to the entire state, which was also referred to as "subject" governed by the "reigning" city.