11 – 18 April 1453
The guns open fire
On 11 April 1453 the Ottomans set up their guns in batteries before the weakest stretches of the walls: three before the palace of Blachernae, two before the Charisian gate, four before the gate of St Romanos and three before the gate of Pege. Orban’s great gun first stands before the Kaligaria gate and is then moved to the Mesoteichion. In the first days of the siege Ottoman troops also take the castle of Therapia on the Bosporus and a smaller castle at the village of Studios near the Sea of Marmara.
Bombards at a siege, in a copy of Jean de Wavrin’s chronicle made at Bruges about 1480, British LibraryWikimedia Commons, Master of the Vienna and Copenhagen Toison d’Or, Public domain (09-bombardas-jaime-regalado-4 - Image 208000.jpg)
The guns open fire on 12 April. A great gun takes two to three hours to load, so the fire is slow, and the defenders repair much of the damage after each shot. Each night they fill the breaches in the outer wall with a stockade of timber, stones and barrels of earth, and Giustiniani, who now holds the Mesoteichion with the emperor, leads the work.
A bronze Ottoman bombard outside the Istanbul Military MuseumWikimedia Commons, Cüneyt Türksen, CC BY 3.0 (A cannon used during the siege of Constantinople, in The Military Museum, Istanbul - panoramio.jpg)
On the evening of 18 April Mehmed sends janissaries and other troops against the stockade in the Lycus valley. They fill the moat in front of it and fight in the dark for four hours, and the defenders throw them back.
Sources
- Nicolò Barbaro, Giornale dell’assedio di Costantinopoli (1453).
- Leonard of Chios, Historia Constantinopolitanae urbis a Mahumete captae (1453).
- Michael Kritovoulos, History of Mehmed the Conqueror (about 1467).
- Steven Runciman, The Fall of Constantinople 1453 (1965).
- Franz Babinger, Mehmed the Conqueror and His Time (1978).
- David Nicolle, Constantinople 1453: The End of Byzantium (2000).
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