Mehmed's monster cannon

This is a replica of one of the cannons used by the Ottoman Sultan Mehmed 11 to attack the walls of Constantinople in May 1453. The largest of these was made by a master cannon founder from Hungary named Orban, who had first approached the Emperor Constantine XI in Constantinople and offered his skills to help defend the city against the Ottomans. However by that time the Empire (Eastern Roman, now known as Byzantine) was so depleted that the craftsman could not be provided with sufficient funds to maintain the necessary workshop. (All trade with the regions around the Black Sea had been cut off by the Ottoman blockade and the Emperor was even forced to have silver plate from the city’s churches melted down in order to pay his soldiers).

Orban could not afford to stay in Constantinople without pay so he left and instead offered his services to the Sultan in his winter palace at Edirne. Mehmed asked whether he could make a large enough cannon to breach the walls of Constantinople and Orban replied that he could. So he cast the great cannon which came to be known to the defending Greeks as ‘Basilica’ – the Royal Gun. The bronze tube was 27 feet long and 8 inches thick with a bore of 30 inches, designed to take a stone cannonball of 8-foot circumference and weighing 1200 pounds. It took over 2 months to finish and then the Sultan ordered a practice shot to be fired from the gates of his palace grounds at Edirne. All the people in the city were forewarned fortunately as the explosion when it came could be heard ten miles away and smoke filled the air all around. The cannonball travelled for a mile across the surrounding countryside and buried itself 6 feet deep in the ground where it fell.

To transport this monster the 140 miles from Edirne to the walls of Constantinople took 400 men with 60 oxen over a period of several weeks before it was finally positioned facing the Romanus gate. Because it took a long time to prepare and load, the ‘basilica’ cannon could only be fired seven times a day. However, the Ottoman army had at least sixty smaller cannons of varying sizes which they positioned at strategic intervals all along the 4-mile length of the land walls, focussing mainly in front of the towers of the nine main gates of the city. With this constant bombardment, parts of the walls were continually collapsing and the defenders were having to work as hard to repair and protect them as they were to repulse and attack the enemy soldiers. Their own cannons were smaller and fewer than those of the Ottomans and also, because of their recoil and vibrations, the walls and towers were found to be neither wide nor strong enough for the weapons to be fired successfully. This was a different kind of warfare that the massive walls had not been built to withstand!

Mehmed’s giant cannon however was not without its drawbacks. In spite of being soaked with warm oil after each firing, the barrel was beginning to crack after only a few weeks and the engineer Orban applied to the Sultan for permission to withdraw and recast it. But Mehmed was unwilling to wait and the firing continued. Very soon the worst happened, as its maker had predicted: the great barrel exploded, sending flying metal in all directions which killed everyone nearby, including the unfortunate Orban.