Lamentatio sanctae matris ecclesiae Constantinopolitanae

Lamentatio sanctae matris ecclesiae Constantinopolitanae ('Lament of the Holy Mother Church of Constantinople') is a motet by the Renaissance composer Guillaume Dufay. Its topic is a lament of the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks in 1453. Because of its Byzantine subject matter, it is sometimes grouped together with Vasilissa ergo gaude, Apostolus gloriosus and Balsamus et munda cera as one of Dufay's "Byzantine motets".

The motet probably belongs to a series of four Lamentations for the fall of Constantinople composed by Dufay and mentioned for the first time in one of his letters addressed to Piero and Giovanni de' Medici. The letter must have been written on February 22, 1454, although the exact year is not specified in the text. The musical score and the texts of the French Chanson and the Latin Cantus Firmus are found in two contemporary manuscript sources: Codex 2794 (fols. 34v-36r) of the Biblioteca Riccardiana in Florence, and MS 871N (fols. 150v-151r) in Montecassino.

It is believed to have been composed in the context of the "Feast of the Pheasant", a banquet and extravagant political show organised in Lille by Philip the Good of Burgundy on 17 February 1454. Its purpose was to propagate the idea of a crusade for the recapture of the city. It is, however, unclear whether the piece was ever performed on that occasion. There are contemporary accounts of the banquet (notably the Memoirs of Olivier de la Marche, and the Chroniques of Mathieu d'Escouchy), which name and describe in much detail various pieces of music performed at it, but they fail to mention this piece. At one point in the show, according to the chronicles, an actor dressed as a woman in white satin clothes, personifying the Church of Constantinople (according to one hypothesis, played by Olivier de la Marche himself) entered the hall of the banquet riding on an elephant, to recite a "complaint and lamentation in a piteous and feminine voice" ("commença sa complainte et lamentacion à voix piteuse et femmenine"). It has been surmised that this was the moment when Dufay's motet would have been performed; other authors have conjectured that it was merely a moment of inspiration and that the motet was actually written later.

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