Re: Despite the evil dastardly French, who schemed to undermine the alliance against the Turks.
In the same line of thought:
The Giant Cannon Used by the Turks in 1453
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Author: * Hypatia Didius - 5 Posts on this thread out of 313 Posts sitewide.
Date: May 30, 2003 - 01:37
In “The Fall of Constantinople, 1453” by Steven Runciman, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990, the author gives a description of the giant cannon used by the Turks in the siege of Constantinople in 1453 on pages 77—78:
“ . . . The value of cannon in siege-warfare was quickly realized; . . . Sultan Mehmet, . . . was alive to the importance of artillery. Early in his reign he had ordered his foundaries to experiment in producing larger cannon.
In the summer of 1452 a Hungarian engineer called Urban came to Constantinople and offered his services as a maker of artillery to the Emperor. Constantine could not, however, pay him the salary that he thought to be his due, nor could he provide him with the raw material that he needed. Urban therefore left the city and approached the Sultan. . . . On declaring that he could construct a cannon that would blast the walls of Babylon itself, he was given a salary four times greater than that which he would have been willing to accept and provided with all the technical assistance that he needed. . . . Mehmet then ordered him to make a cannon . . . It was cast at Adrianople . . . The length of its barrel was estimated to be forty spans, that is, twenty-six feet and eight inches. The thickness of the bronze round the barrel was one span, that is, eight inches, and the circumference of the barrel four spans at the rear, where the powder was inserted, and twelve spans for the front half, where the balls were inserted. The balls were said to weigh twelve hundredweight. As soon as it was ready a company of seven hundred men, to whom its care was assigned, placed it upon a cart drawn by fifteen pairs of oxen. . . .
. . . when the fuse was lit and the first ball fired, the reverberation was heard for a hundred stadia, and the ball hurled through the air for a mile, then buried itself six feet deep in the earth. Mehmet was delighted. Two hundred men were sent to level the road that led to Constantinople and to strengthen the bridges; and in March the cannon set out on the journey, drawn by sixty oxen, with two hundred men marching beside it, to keep the gun-carriage steady. Meanwhile under Urban’s direction the foundaries produced other cannon, though none was to be so huge or so famous as this monster.”
ancientsites.com
Article from Military History Magazine
The Walls of Constantinople
Reports circulating around the courts of Europe in the winter of 1452-53 spoke of unprecedented Turkish preparations for an assault upon the city. In fact, the Turkish army that appeared before Constantinople on April 6, 1453, was singular in only one respect. With 80,000 soldiers-including 15,000 of the Sultan's elite Janissary corps-Serbian miners, various siege engines, and a fleet of some 300 to 400 ships, it was a formidable force, though hardly anything the city had not seen many times before. It was artillery, however, that made this a potent threat, especially a new generation of massive siege artillery developed by a Hungarian cannon founder named Urban.
Abandoning the meager pay and resources of the Byzantines, Urban found an eager sponsor in Mehmet, who set him to work casting large-caliber cannon to breach the city walls. The Hungarian went about his work with equal enthusiasm, promising the sultan that "the stone discharged from my cannon would reduce to dust not only those walls, but even the walls of Babylon." The resultant cannon was titanic, requiring 60 oxen and 200 soldiers to haul it across Thrace from the foundry at Adrianople. Twenty-seven feet long, 2 l/2 feet in bore, the great weapon could hurl a 1,200-pound ball over a mile. When it was tested, a Turkish chronicler wrote that a warning was sent out to the Ottoman camp so that pregnant women would not abort at the shock. Its explosions, he said, "made the city walls shake, and the ground inside." The cannon's size, however, was also its liability. Crewed by 500, it took 2 hours to load and could only fire eight rounds per day. Fortunately for the Turks, Mehmet had many more practical and more proven pieces-2 large cannons and 18 batteries of 130 smaller caliber weapons.
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