The Fall of Constantinople by Nanami Shiono

Author:Nanami Shiono [Shiono, Nanami]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Kodansha USA
Published: 2020-06-29T00:00:00+00:00

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On the morning of April 12th, as if to herald the warmth radiating from the rising sun, the Turkish cannons began firing, one after the other. The massive stone cannonballs screamed across the sky. All the defenders could do was to try to evade the stones raining down upon them. The enemy seemed to lack the ability to hit specific targets with precision, but that didn’t matter: their only target was the long, high city wall. Anywhere would do. When the cannonballs struck the defensive railings or outer walls, they heaved up an enveloping cloud of dust. When the dust cleared, it revealed the pitiful sight of crushed railings and gutted walls: the bags filled with leather and wool had done absolutely nothing to protect them.

This was not to say that everything was going well for the artillerymen. Perhaps because the mountings were not adequately secured, the cannons swayed violently from side to side whenever they were fired. A few of them even slipped off of their mountings. The Great Cannon was all the more difficult to handle—even when treated with the greatest care, it could only manage seven shots in one day. Nonetheless, those seven shots alone inflicted more damage than all of the other cannons put together. Nobody in the Byzantine Court had known about this cannon built by the Hungarian whom they had once laughed out of their city. And none of them imagined that these cringe-inducing explosions would continue unabated for the next seven weeks, perhaps because none of them had the time to indulge in worry: from this day onward, they would spend their nights trying to repair the damage done by the cannons during the day.

On the naval front, however, it was the Christian forces who had the upper hand. On the same day that the cannon barrage began, the Turkish navy set out from its base hoping to break through the defensive chain and enter the Golden Horn. The defensive fleet under the command of Admiral Trevisan, arrayed along the boom, braced themselves for the assault. The archers aboard the Ottoman boats released a torrent of arrows. A Turkish cannon set up just outside the east end of Galata began to fire. Closing in on the Christian ships, the Turkish vessels hurled burning logs at the enemy’s boats, while sailors tried to latch hooked nets to pull them closer and forcibly board them.

All of these efforts ended in failure. The cannons were too far away, and their volleys merely landed with a splash in the sea or else struck, and sank, their own vessels. The fires started by the burning logs were quickly put out by deckhands, who were well accustomed to such emergencies, and the arrows hardly had any effect whatsoever. The large Western ships were a great deal taller than the Turkish boats, and arrows fired from the Christians’ towering masts had a decisively higher kill ratio than those fired willy-nilly by the Ottoman forces. When it came to

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