This chapter analyzes the fate of the horseman in the aftermath of the fall of Constantinople. Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II understood the horseman’s power and strove to neutralize it soon after entering the city. In the decades before 1453, it was also widely believed to have been an anti-Ottoman talisman. At some point between May of 1453 and spring 1456 Mehmed ordered the horseman to be removed from its column. I argue that this decision was made not only because of the great symbolic value of the monument in its own right, but also in order not to complicate the transformation of Hagia Sophia into a mosque. Justinian’s bronze horseman was decoupled from Hagia Sophia and sacrificed for the sake of the building’s cultural appropriation as the mosque of Aya Sofya. The horseman is absent from official Ottoman histories, but appears in the translations of the Narrative on the Construction of Hagia Sophia produced for Mehmed II. In this retelling, the talismanic horseman has become empty-handed. This was a decisive reorientation of the Byzantine narrative. Though Şemseddin Mehmed Karamani’s testimony that the horseman was melted down in the 1450s would appear to be conclusive, in the 1550s Pierre Gilles saw and measured fragments of the horseman.

In the course of the fifteenth century the horseman ceased to be a monument and became a powerful memory. After the fall of Constantinople, the lost monument was granted new life in intellectual spaces between the real and the imagined, the antiquarian and the allegorical. Renaissance artists, such as Apollonio di Giovanni, Andrea Mantegna, and Vittore Carpaccio, projected the horseman into key cities of the "western" past such as Athens, Jerusalem, and Rome. The bronze horseman became an architectural witness to lost worlds and civilizational turning points. The equestrian monument became gradually detached from its original Constantinopolitan setting and entered the repertoire of the archaeological imaginary with moralizing connotations. Its placement in cities such as Athens, Jerusalem, and Rome was not accidental, for Constantinople itself had variously been celebrated or lamented as the new Athens, the New Jerusalem, and of course, the New Rome. The last of its kind, it was co-opted by the fertile Renaissance imagination as a colossal monument that bore witness to defining events of the ancient past. This colossus now was history.