open the mouth of the furnace with iron hooks exclaiming “Allah! Allah!” The metal, as it begins to flow, casts a glare on the men’s faces at a hundred paces’ distance.’ The molten metal flowed down the clay channel like a slow river of red-hot lava and into the mouth of the gun mould. Sweating workers prodded the viscous mass with immensely long wooden poles to tease out air bubbles that might otherwise rupture the gunmetal under fire. ‘The bronze flowed out through the channel into the mould until it was completely full and the mould totally covered, and it overflowed it by a cubit above. And in this way the cannon was finished.’ The wet sand packed round the mould would hopefully slow the rate of cooling and prevent the bronze cracking in the process. Once the metal was cold, the barrel was laboriously excavated from the ground like an immense grub in its cocoon of clay and hauled out by teams of oxen. It was a powerful alchemy.
Fifteenth-century cast cannon
What finally emerged from Orban’s foundry after the moulds had been knocked out and the metal scraped and polished was ‘a horrifying and extraordinary monster’. The primitive tube shone dully in the winter light. It was twenty-seven feet long. The barrel itself, walled with eight inches of solid bronze to take the force of the blast, had adiameter of thirty inches, big enough for a man to enter on his hands and knees and designed to accommodate a monstrous stone shot eight feet in circumference weighing something over half a ton. In January 1453 Mehmet ordered a test firing of the great gun outside his new royal palace at Edirne. The mighty bombard was hauled into position near the gate and the city was warned that the following day ‘the explosion and roar would be like thunder, lest anyone should be struck dumb by the unexpected shock or pregnant women might miscarry’. In the morning the cannon was primed with powder. A team of workmen lugged a giant stone ball into the mouth of the barrel and rolled it back down to sit snugly in front of the gunpowder chamber. A lighted taper was put to the touch hole. With a shattering roar and a cloud of smoke that hazed the sky, the mighty bullet was propelled across the open countryside for a mile before burying itself six feet down in the soft earth. The explosion could be heard ten miles off: ‘so powerful is this gunpowder’, recorded Doukas, who probably witnessed this test firing personally. Mehmet himself ensured that ominous reports of the gun filtered back to Constantinople: it was to be a psychological weapon as well as a practical one. Back in Edirne Orban’s foundry continued to turn out more guns of different sizes; none were quite as large as the first supergun, but a number measured more than fourteen feet.
During early February, consideration turned to the great practical difficulties of transporting Orban’s gun the 140 miles from Edirne to Constantinople. A large detachment of men and animals was detailed for the task. Laboriously the immense tube was loaded onto a number of wagons chained together and yoked to a team of sixty oxen. Two hundred men were deployed to support the barrel as it creaked and lurched over the rolling Thracian countryside while another team of carpenters and labourers worked ahead, levelling the track and building wooden bridges over rivers and gullies. The great gun rumbled towards the city walls at a speed of two and a half miles a day.
Source Notes
6 The Wall and the Gun
1 ‘From the flaming …’, quoted Hogg, p. 16
2 ‘an expert in …’, Kritovoulos, Critobuli, p. 40
3 ‘dredged the fosse …’, Kritovoulos, Critobuli, p. 37
4 ‘a seven-year-old boy …’, Gunther of Pairis, p. 99
5 ‘one of the wisest …’, quoted Tsangadas, p. 9
6 ‘the scourge of God’, quoted Van Millingen, Byzantine Constantinople , p. 49
7 ‘in less than two months …’, quoted ibid., p. 47
8 ‘This God-protected gate …’, quoted
Fifteenth-century cast cannon
What finally emerged from Orban’s foundry after the moulds had been knocked out and the metal scraped and polished was ‘a horrifying and extraordinary monster’. The primitive tube shone dully in the winter light. It was twenty-seven feet long. The barrel itself, walled with eight inches of solid bronze to take the force of the blast, had adiameter of thirty inches, big enough for a man to enter on his hands and knees and designed to accommodate a monstrous stone shot eight feet in circumference weighing something over half a ton. In January 1453 Mehmet ordered a test firing of the great gun outside his new royal palace at Edirne. The mighty bombard was hauled into position near the gate and the city was warned that the following day ‘the explosion and roar would be like thunder, lest anyone should be struck dumb by the unexpected shock or pregnant women might miscarry’. In the morning the cannon was primed with powder. A team of workmen lugged a giant stone ball into the mouth of the barrel and rolled it back down to sit snugly in front of the gunpowder chamber. A lighted taper was put to the touch hole. With a shattering roar and a cloud of smoke that hazed the sky, the mighty bullet was propelled across the open countryside for a mile before burying itself six feet down in the soft earth. The explosion could be heard ten miles off: ‘so powerful is this gunpowder’, recorded Doukas, who probably witnessed this test firing personally. Mehmet himself ensured that ominous reports of the gun filtered back to Constantinople: it was to be a psychological weapon as well as a practical one. Back in Edirne Orban’s foundry continued to turn out more guns of different sizes; none were quite as large as the first supergun, but a number measured more than fourteen feet.
During early February, consideration turned to the great practical difficulties of transporting Orban’s gun the 140 miles from Edirne to Constantinople. A large detachment of men and animals was detailed for the task. Laboriously the immense tube was loaded onto a number of wagons chained together and yoked to a team of sixty oxen. Two hundred men were deployed to support the barrel as it creaked and lurched over the rolling Thracian countryside while another team of carpenters and labourers worked ahead, levelling the track and building wooden bridges over rivers and gullies. The great gun rumbled towards the city walls at a speed of two and a half miles a day.
Source Notes
6 The Wall and the Gun
1 ‘From the flaming …’, quoted Hogg, p. 16
2 ‘an expert in …’, Kritovoulos, Critobuli, p. 40
3 ‘dredged the fosse …’, Kritovoulos, Critobuli, p. 37
4 ‘a seven-year-old boy …’, Gunther of Pairis, p. 99
5 ‘one of the wisest …’, quoted Tsangadas, p. 9
6 ‘the scourge of God’, quoted Van Millingen, Byzantine Constantinople , p. 49
7 ‘in less than two months …’, quoted ibid., p. 47
8 ‘This God-protected gate …’, quoted
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