Once the Crusaders had made the critical penetration of the defenses, another witness, Henri de Villehardouin, described how they exploited their success: 'When the knights see this, who are in the transports, they land, raise their ladders against the wall, and scale to the top of the wall by main force, and so take four of the towers. And all begin to leap out of the ships and transports and galleys, helter-skelter, each as best he can; and they break in some three of the gates and enter in; and they draw the horses out of the transports; and the knights mount and ride straight to the quarters of the Emperor Mourtzouphlos.'

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Most historians point to the Latin conquest of Constantinople on April 13, 1204 as the practical end of the Byzantine Empire, which disintegrated into a number of feudal fiefdoms and kingdoms under the elected Latin Emperor Baldwin I until his defeat and capture by Tsar Kaloyan's Bulgarian army near Adrianople on April 14, 1205, and his subsequent execution by his captors. Although the Greeks, who had established a rival kingdom across the Bosphorus in Nicea, returned to reclaim their capital in 1261, they would find it plundered and most of their territory lost forever. The Fourth Crusade, which never came near to the Holy Land, had shattered the citadel of Christendom in the east.

Although treachery and resourcefulness could overcome the strongest of medieval fortifications, it was the cannon that would render them obsolete. The Hundred Years' War witnessed the emergence of this weapon as the decisive instrument of war on land. The Ottoman Turks, who emerged in the late 14th century as the next great challenge to Byzantium, were in the forefront of this early technology. In 1451, 19-year-old Mehmet II ascended the Turkish throne with a burning desire to succeed where his father, Murad II, had failed 29 years before-to capture Constantinople and make it the capital of his empire. By that time the Ottoman Empire had absorbed most of Byzantium's territory and engulfed its capital as it expanded outward from Asia Minor into the Balkans. In his quest, Mehmet would not be limited to traditional methods of siegecraft, for the sultan's armies had by that time acquired a large number of cannon. Combining that technology with superior energy and vision, Mehmet would go further than others in exploring tactical solutions to the formidable obstacle that Constantinople's defenses still presented.

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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