Constantinople: The Last Great Siege, 1453 (21 page)

By 11 April Mehmet was back at his red and gold tent and the full complement of guns had been assembled. Mehmet grouped them into fourteen or fifteen batteries along the walls at key points considered to be vulnerable. One of Orban’s great guns, ‘a terrible cannon’, was stationed at the single Blachernae wall near the Horn, ‘which was protected by neither a ditch nor an outer wall’. Another was positioned near the right-angle join between the two walls, and a third at the Gate of the Spring further south. Others were trained on critical points along the vulnerable Lycus valley. Orban’s supergun, which the Greeks called the Basilica – ‘the royal gun’ – was positioned in front of the sultan’s tent, from where he could critically appraise its performance, to threaten the St Romanus Gate, ‘the weakest gate in all the city’. Each large cannon was supported by a posse of smaller ones in a battery that the Ottoman gunners affectionately named ‘the bear with its cubs’. They fired stone balls that ranged from 200 pounds up to a colossal 1,500 pounds, in the case of Orban’s monster gun. In the estimate of one observer, the two largest cannons fired ‘a shot that reached the knee and a shot that reached the girdle’ respectively. Another declared the largest shot to measure ‘eleven of my palms in circumference’. Though eyewitnesses spoke of ‘innumerable engines of war’, Mehmet probably had about sixty-nine cannon in total, a huge artillery force by the standards of the day, that were supported at various points by other, more antique technologies for hurling stones, such as the trebuchet, a counterweighted traction catapult. The trebuchet had been enormously influential in the Muslim capture of crusader castles three hundred years earlier. Now it looked merely like a device from another age.

Installing and readying the cannon for action was a laborious process. The barrels were freestanding and did not have integral gun carriages. They were simply strapped to sturdy wagons for transportation. On arrival a massive block and tackle system had to be erected to lower the barrel into position on a sloping wooden platform
constructed on the protected side of the Ottoman front line and guarded from enemy fire by a wooden palisade and a hinged door which could be swung open at the moment of firing.

The logistical support behind this operation was immense. Great quantities of black stone balls had been mined and shaped on the northern coast of the Black Sea and transported by merchant ships. On 12 April such a consignment arrived at the Double Columns with ‘stone balls for cannon, hurdles and timber, and other munitions for their camp.’ Substantial quantities of saltpetre also had to be requisitioned if the guns were to fire for any length of time. The roadway that Mehmet had ordered his general Zaganos Pasha to build round the top of the Horn to the harbour was presumably to facilitate the movement of such supplies. Transporting the guns themselves required large wooden carts and substantial teams of men and oxen. The founders who worked with Orban at Edirne were also their gun crews. They moved, positioned, loaded and fired their handmade charges – and repaired them on site. For although Orban’s superguns had been manufactured 150 miles away, the Ottomans brought sufficient resources to the siege to remake existing cannons in the camp, and even to forge and cast new ones, creating a whole secondary sphere of activity. Quantities of iron, copper and tin would have to be brought to the siege, domed charcoal pits dug and brick-lined foundries constructed. A separate zone of the military encampment must have been transformed into an ad hoc industrial workshop, from whence smoke billowed and blacksmiths’ hammers rang in the spring air.

Preparing the big cannon needed time and attention to detail. Gunpowder was loaded into the barrel of the gun, backed by a wooden wad that was pounded tight by iron bars, or a sheepskin one, to ensure that ‘whatever happened, it could not be forced out by any means except by the explosion of the gunpowder’. The stone ball was then manhandled round to the front of the cannon and eased down the barrel. It was designed to be a good fit in the chamber but an exact match of ball to calibre was frequently not achieved. Aim was reckoned by ‘certain techniques and calculations about the target’– in practice this meant trial and error – and the angle of the cannon adjusted accordingly by chocking its platform up with wooden wedges. The guns were further wedged into place with great beams of timber weighted down with stones that acted as shock absorbers, ‘lest by the force of its charge and by the violent recoil in its position, it
should be displaced and shoot wide of the target’. Priming powder was poured into the touchhole and all was ready. On 12 April lighted tapers were put to the touchholes of the sultan’s guns along a four-mile sector and the world’s first concerted artillery bombardment exploded into life.

If there is any single moment in the history of warfare at which an authentic sense of awe at the exponential power of gunpowder could be palpably felt, it is here in the accounts of the firing of the great guns in the spring of 1453. The taper ignited the powder:

When the giant stone balls struck the walls at an advantageous spot, the effects were devastating: ‘Sometimes it destroyed a complete portion of wall, sometimes half a portion, sometimes a greater or smaller part of a tower, or a turret, or a parapet, and nowhere was the wall strong enough or sturdy enough or thick enough to withstand it, or to hold out totally against such a force or the velocity of the stone ball.’ At first it seemed to the defenders that the whole history of siege warfare was unravelling in front of their eyes; the Theodosian land wall, the product of two thousand years of defensive evolution, a miracle of engineering devised by human ingenuity and protected by divine blessing, started to collapse wherever it was hit by a volley of well-aimed balls. Archbishop Leonard watched the effects on the single wall near the palace: ‘They pulverized the wall with it, and although it was extremely thick and strong, it collapsed under the bombardment of this appalling device.’

Balls from the superguns that cleared the walls could be propelled a mile into the heart of Constantinople, shattering with devastating force against houses or churches, mowing down civilians or more likely burying themselves in the orchards and fields of the shrunken city. One eyewitness was astonished to see a ball strike a church wall and fall apart like dust. According to others, the ground was shaken for
two miles around and even the galleys tied up safely in the harbours within the Golden Horn felt the explosions transmitted through their stout wooden hulls. The sound of gunfire was heard in Asia, five miles away across the Bosphorus. At the same time the trebuchets, with their more looping arc of fire, hurled rocks onto the roofs of houses behind the walls and onto parts of the Imperial Palace.

The psychological effects of artillery bombardment on the defenders were initially even more severe than its material consequences. The noise and vibration of the massed guns, the clouds of smoke, the shattering impact of stone on stone dismayed seasoned defenders. To the civilian population it was a glimpse of the coming apocalypse and a retribution for sin. It sounded, according to one Ottoman chronicler, ‘like the awful resurrection blast’. People ran out of their houses beating their chests, crossing themselves and shouting ‘Kyrie Eleison! What is going to happen now?’ Women fainted in the streets. The churches were thronged with people ‘voicing petitions and prayers, wailing and exclaiming: “Lord, Lord! We moved far away from You. All that fell upon us and Your holy City was accomplished through righteous and true judgements for our sins.” By the flickering light of their most sacred icons their lips moved in the same unceasing prayer: “Do not betray us in the end to Your enemies; do not destroy Your worthy people; and do not take away Your loving kindness from us and render us weak at this time.”’

Constantine worked unstintingly to maintain the morale of the city on both a practical and religious level. He toured the walls hourly, stiffening the morale of the commanders and their soldiers. Church bells were rung unceasingly and he exhorted ‘all of the people so that they would not renounce hope nor slacken their resistance against the enemy but place their trust in the Almighty Lord’.

The defenders tried different strategies to mitigate the shock of the stone balls. A mortar of chalk and brick dust was poured down the wall’s outer face as a toughened coating; in other places bales of wool attached to wooden beams, sheets of leather and precious tapestries were suspended to muffle the velocity of the projectiles. These measures made little difference to the extraordinary force of gunpowder propulsion. The defenders did their best to try to knock out the big guns with their own few cannon, but they were short of saltpetre and the Ottoman guns were screened by their palisades. Worse still it was found that the walls and towers were chronically unsuitable as gun
platforms. They were neither wide enough to accommodate the recoil of large explosive charges nor strong enough to withstand the vibrations, which ‘shook the walls, and did more damage to them than to the enemy’. Their largest cannon quickly exploded, enraging the harassed defenders so much that they wanted to put the gun master to death for being in the pay of the sultan, ‘but since there was no clear proof that he deserved this fate, they set him free’. Underneath it all, it was quickly clear that in a new age of warfare the Theodosian walls were structurally inadequate.

The Greek chroniclers struggled to convey what they saw, or even to find a vocabulary to describe the guns. ‘No ancient name exists for this device’, declared the classically minded Kritovoulos, ‘unless someone refers to it as a battering ram or a propeller. But in common speech everyone now calls it an apparatus.’ Other names proliferated: bombards, skeves, helepoles – ‘takers of cities’ – torments and teleboles. In the pressure of the moment, language was being shaped by a terrifying new reality – the infernal experience of artillery bombardment.

Mehmet’s strategy was attritional – and impatient. He decided to batter the walls day and night with artillery fire and to launch unpredictable skirmishes to wear down the defenders and to make a major breach for a final assault. ‘The assault continued night and day with no relief from the clashes and explosions, crashing of stones and cannon-balls on the walls,’ reported Melissenos, ‘for the Sultan hoped in this way to take the city easily, since we were few against many, by pounding us to death and exhaustion, and so he allowed us no rest from attack.’ The bombardment, and the struggle for the fosse, continued unabated from 12 to 18 April.

Despite their initial psychological impact, managing the great cannon was difficult work. Loading and aiming were such laborious operations that the Basilica could only be fired seven times a day, with a preliminary shot before dawn to warn of the day’s firing. The guns could be unpredictable, bad-tempered and deadly to their teams. In the spring rain they proved hard to keep in position, recoiling with the slam of a charging rhino so that they frequently slipped from their cradles into the mud. The possibility of being crushed to death was only exceeded by the risk of being blown to pieces by the shrapnel of disintegrating gun barrels. The Basilica quickly became a cause for concern to Orban; the intense heat of the explosions had started to exploit hairline
fractures in the impure metal – evidently casting on this scale was extremely demanding. The Greek chronicler Doukas, who had a keen technical interest in the problem, recalled how, in order to control the problem, the barrel was soaked in warm oil as soon as the ball had been shot to try to prevent cold air penetrating and enlarging the fissures.

However, the possibility that the barrel would shatter like glass continued to trouble Orban, and according to legend nemesis soon overtook the Christian mercenary. Close examination had revealed that the cracks were indeed serious. Orban wished to withdraw the gun and recast it. Mehmet, ever present to watch the performance of his great guns and impatient for success, ordered the firing to continue. Weighing up the risks of a faulty gun against the sultan’s displeasure, Orban reloaded and asked Mehmet to stand back. On lighting the powder charge, the Basilica ‘cracked as it was being fired and split into many pieces, killing and wounding many nearby’ – including Orban. There is however strong evidence to suggest that his demise – devoutly wished for by the Christian chroniclers – never happened in this way, though it seems clear that the great gun ruptured early in the siege. It was quickly strengthened with iron hoops and pressed back into service but soon cracked again – to the intense anger of Mehmet. The supergun was evidently working beyond the tolerances of contemporary metallurgy. Its chief effect had been psychological; it was left to the slightly smaller but still formidable posse of other bombards to do the damage.

Mehmet’s need to take the city quickly was soon underlined by the arrival of a deputation from the Hungarian, John Hunyadi. Mehmet’s policy had been to ensure that his enemies were divided; to this end he had signed a three-year peace treaty with Hunyadi, then regent of Hungary, to ensure that no land attack from the west should take place during his attempt on Constantinople. Hunyadi’s embassy had now come to the Ottoman court to announce that, since their master had resigned his regency and surrendered power back to his ward King Vladislas, the treaty was no longer binding. In consequence he wished to return the truce document and receive his own back. It was conceived by the wily Hungarian as a threat to pressurize the Ottoman cause and had probably been instigated by agents from the Vatican. It raised the spectre of a Hungarian army crossing the Danube to lift the siege and it caused a ripple of uncertainty throughout the camp; the news must have correspondingly strengthened the will of the defenders.