Their stopgap measure failed. The Basilica soon “cracked as it was being fired and split into many pieces, killing and wounding many nearby.” Strengthened with iron hoops and pressed back into service, it soon cracked again, to Mehmed’s intense anger. The supergun simply exceeded the tolerances of contemporary metallurgy.

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In the end, it didn’t matter. Though the supergun inflicted great psychological trauma, the slightly smaller yet still formidable bombards would do the real damage.

In the early days of the bombardment, a deputation of Hungarians visited the sultan’s camp. One observed the firing of the great cannons with interest. Watching a shot strike the walls at a certain point, he laughed to himself as the gunners aimed a second shot at the same point. He advised them to aim their second shot “about 30 to 36 feet from the first shot, but at the same height” and to position a third shot between the two “so that the shots form a triangular shape. Then you will see that portion of wall collapse.” Soon the “bear and cubs” were working as coordinated teams. Smaller guns would make the two outer hits, then one of Orban’s great guns would complete the triangle in the now weakened central section, “the shot being carried by such devilish force and irresistible impetus that it caused irreparable damage.”

The bombardment continued unabated for six days. Despite aiming difficulties and a slow rate of fire, gunners managed to launch about 120 shots a day at the city, concentrating their heaviest fire on the central section of wall. Inexorably, the walls began to crumble. Within the week a section of the outer wall had fallen, as had two towers and a turret on the inner wall.

However, after their initial terror at the bombardment, the defenders had regained heart and now worked unceasingly to repair the damage. They devised an effective ad hoc solution to shore up the outer wall, constructing a makeshift replacement of stakes reinforced with any material that came to hand, including stones, timber, brushwood, bushes and large quantities of earth. The defenders placed barrels full of soil at regular intervals to create firing positions that would absorb Ottoman arrows and bullets. At dusk men and women came up from the city to work all night, carrying timber, stones and earth to rebuild smashed defenses. The resulting earthworks provided a surprisingly effective counter to the devastating impact of the stone balls. Like stones thrown into mud, the cannonballs were smothered, their force neutralized.

As their own artillery was poorly situated for firing heavy balls, the defenders reinvented the pieces as huge shotguns, packing each cannon with five or 10 lead balls the size of walnuts. Fired at close range, the effect was appalling:

[They had] immense power in penetrating and perforating, so that if one hit a soldier in armor, it went straight through both his shield and body, then through another behind who was in the line of fire, and then another, until the force of the powder was dissipated. With one shot, two or three men could be killed at the same time.

Hit by this withering fire, the Ottomans suffered terrible casualties. But to Mehmed, men were a cheap and expendable resource.

On April 18, the sultan judged that his gunners had punched enough holes in the walls to launch a major assault. It failed, with a huge loss of life, but there was no respite; his big guns went on firing. Cannons had been used in siege warfare before, but what was unprecedented about Mehmed’s bombardment was its intensity and duration. No other army in the world possessed the materials required to mount a continuous artillery bombardment on this scale. The guns blasted away day and night, and chunks of wall continued to collapse.

For the defenders, the unceasing cycles of bombardment, attack and repair began to blur. Like later diaries of trench warfare, the chroniclers’ accounts become repetitive and monotonous. “On the 11th of May,” recorded a defender, “nothing happened either by land or at sea except a considerable bombardment of the walls from the landward side….On the 13th of May, there came some Turks to the walls skirmishing, but nothing significant happened during the whole day and night, except for continuous bombardment of the unfortunate walls.” This pattern gradually drained the defenders of energy and morale. By May 28, the guns had been firing continuously for 47 days, expending 55,000 pounds of gunpowder and delivering an estimated 5,000 shots. Gunners had blasted nine substantial holes in the outer wall, only to be replaced piecemeal by the earth stockade. Both sides were exhausted.

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