In August 1452 Mahomet calls together all his agas and pashas, and openly tells them of his intention to attack and take Byzantium. The announcement is soon followed by the deed itself; heralds are sent out through the whole Turkish Empire, men capable of bearing arms are summoned, and on 5th April 1453 a vast Ottoman army, like a storm tide suddenly rising, surges over the plain of Byzantium to just outside the city walls.

The Sultan, in magnificent robes, rides at the head of his troops to pitch his tent opposite the Lykas Gate. But before he can let the standard of his headquarters fly free in the wind, he orders a prayer mat to be unrolled on the ground. Barefoot, he steps on it, he bows three times, his face to Mecca, his forehead touching the ground, and behind him—a fine spectacle—the many thousands of his army bow in the same direction, offering the same prayer to Allah in the same rhythm, asking him to lend them strength and victory. Only then does the Sultan rise. He is no longer humble, he is challenging once more, the servant of God has become the commander and soldier, and his “tellals” or public criers hurry through the whole camp, announcing to the beating of drums and the blowing of trumpets that “The siege of the city has begun.”

The Walls and the Cannon

Byzantium has only one strength left: its walls. Nothing is left of its once world-embracing past but this legacy of a greater and happier time. The triangle of the city is protected by a triple shield. Lower but still-mighty stone walls divide the two flanks of the city from the Sea of Marmara and the Golden Horn, but the defences known as the Theodosian walls and facing the open land are massive. Constantine, recognizing future danger, had already surrounded Byzantium with blocks of stone, and Justinian had further extended and fortified the walls. However, it was Theodosius who created the real bulwark with a wall seven kilometres long. Today the ivy-clad remains still bear witness to its stony force. Adorned with arrow slits and battlements, further protected by moats, guarded by mighty square towers, in double and triple parallel rows completed and renovated again and again by every emperor over 1,000 years, this majestic wall encircling the city is regarded as the emblem of impregnability of its time. Like the unbridled storm of the barbarian hordes in the past, and the warlike troops of the Turks now in the days of Mahomet, these blocks of dressed stone still mock all the engines of war so far invented; the impact of battering rams is powerless against them, and even shots from the new slings and mortars bounce off the upright wall. No city in Europe is better and more strongly defended than Constantinople by its Theodosian walls.

Mahomet knows those walls and their strength better than anyone. A single idea has occupied his mind for months and years, on night watches and in his dreams: how to take these impregnable defences, how to wreck structures that defy ruin. Drawings are piled high on his desk, showing plans of the enemy fortifications and their extent; he knows every rise in the ground inside and outside the walls, every hollow, every watercourse, and his engineers have thought out every detail with him. But he is disappointed: they all calculate that the Theodosian walls cannot be breached by any artillery yet in use.

Then stronger cannon must be made! Longer, with a greater range and more powerful shots than the art of war yet knows! And other projectiles of harder stone must be devised, heavier, more crushing, more destructive than the cannonballs of the present! A new artillery must be invented to batter those unapproachable walls, there is no other solution, and Mahomet declares himself determined to create this new means of attack at any price.

At any price… such an announcement already arouses, of itself, creative driving forces. And so, soon after the declaration of war, the man regarded as the most ingenious and experienced cannon-founder in the world comes to see the Sultan, Urbas or Orbas, a Hungarian. It is true that he is a Christian, and has already offered his services to Emperor Constantine; but, rightly expecting to get better payment for his art, and bolder opportunities to try it, he says he is ready, if unlimited means are put at his disposal, to cast a cannon for Mahomet larger than any yet seen on earth. The Sultan, to whom, as to anyone possessed by a single idea, no financial price is too high, immediately gives him as many labourers as he wants, and ore is brought to Adrianople in 1,000 carts; for three months the cannon-founder, with endless care, prepares and hardens a clay mould according to secret methods, before the exciting moment when the red-hot metal is poured in. The work succeeds. The huge tube, the greatest ever seen, is struck out of the mould and cooled, but before the first trial shot is fired Mahomet sends criers all over the city to warn pregnant women. When the muzzle, with a lightning flash, spews out the mighty stone ball to a sound like thunder and wrecks the wall that is its target with a single shot, Mahomet immediately orders an entire battery of such guns to be made to the same gigantic proportions.

The first great “stone-throwing engine”, as the Greek scribes in alarm called this cannon, had now been successfully built. But there was an even greater problem: how to drag that monster of a metal dragon through the whole of Thrace to the walls of Byzantium? An odyssey unlike any other begins. A whole nation, an entire army, spends two months hauling this rigid, long-necked artefact along. Troops of horsemen in constant patrols thunder ahead of it to protect the precious thing from any accident; behind them, hundreds or maybe thousands of labourers work with carts to remove any unevenness in the path of the immensely heavy gun, which churns up the roads behind it and leaves them in a ruinous state for months. Fifty pairs of oxen are harnessed to the convoy of wagons, and the gigantic metal tube lies on their axles with its load evenly distributed, in the same way as the obelisk was brought from Egypt to Rome in the past. Two hundred men constantly support the gun on right and left as it sways with its own weight, while at the same time fifty carters and carpenters are kept at work without a break to change and oil the wooden rollers under it, to reinforce the supports and to build bridges. All involved understand that this huge caravan can make its way forward through the steppes and the mountains only gradually, step by step, as slowly as the oxen trot.