The Sultan could count on bringing much larger and better-armed forces into the field

The Greeks were a minority of the population of the Ottoman Empire, comprising perhaps 3 million out of its 23 or 24 million people; only in a few areas - the Morea, the islands of the Aegean and some places north of the Gulf of Corinth - did they predominate. Yet even these figures ail to give a full sense of the imbalance, for whereas the Greeks had no cavalry and found it hard to raise and arm even 15,000-20,000 fighters, the Sultan could count on bringing much larger and better-armed forces into the field.

M. Mazower, The Greek Revolution (2021), 182

To Europe Byzantium is a symbol of its honour

The realm of the last Roman Emperor is only the size of a plate, merely a gigantic circular wall surrounding churches, the palace and a tangle of houses, all of them known as Byzantium. Pitilessly plundered by the crusaders, depopulated by the plague, exhausted by constantly defending itself from nomadic people, torn by national and religious quarrels, the city cannot summon up men or courage to resist, of its own accord, an enemy that has been holding it clasped in its tentacles for so long. The purple of the last emperor of Byzantium, Constantine Dragases, is a cloak made of wind, his crown a toy of fate. But for the very reason that it is already surrounded by the Turks, and is sacrosanct to all the lands of the western world because they have jointly shared its culture, to Europe Byzantium is a symbol of its honour.

S. Zweig,'The conquest of Byzantium' (1940), tr. A.Bell, in Triumph and Disaster: Five historical miniatures (2016), 69-70