Mehmed II Takes Constantinople: Orban's Great Gun and the Throat Cutter

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When 19-year-old Mehmed II took the Ottoman throne in 1451, European courts celebrated, and he played along with smiles and peace treaties while France and England fought the Hundred Years War and Spain pressed the Reconquista. Constantinople under Constantine XI was a shell, shrunk by the Black Death to a few square kilometers, scattered villages, and the Peloponnese, yet still ringed by the Theodosian walls. In 1452 Mehmed built a fortress on the European shore of the Bosphorus, Boğazkesen, the throat cutter, and lined it with cannon, while another army pinned down Constantine's brothers Demetrios and Thomas in the south. The founder Orban, turned away by the empty Byzantine treasury, cast a 27-foot bronze gun for Mehmed.

In spring 1453 roughly 100,000 Ottoman troops, Janissaries among them, faced fewer than 8,000 defenders along 12 miles of walls, many of them Italians under the Genoese Giovanni Giustiniani. A chain across the Golden Horn kept the fleet out, and earth and barrel barricades plugged the breaches at night. On May 21 Mehmed offered Constantine safe passage and the Peloponnese; Constantine refused. On May 29 Giustiniani was wounded, his men wavered, and the Janissaries broke through. Constantine is said to have shed his imperial regalia and died in the street fighting. Mehmed stopped a soldier hacking at the marble floor of Hagia Sophia, claiming the buildings for himself, and cut the plunder short.

• Orban's gun threw a stone ball of about 600 pounds more than a mile, and roads and bridges were reinforced to haul it from Edirne.
• Greek legend holds that an angel turned Constantine to marble and hid him beneath the city to await its recovery.
• An estimated 30,000 surviving citizens were enslaved and dispersed across Ottoman markets.
• Doukas's story of Mehmed executing Grand Duke Loukas Notaras and his sons closely mirrors the earlier martyrdom tale of Saint Pelagius.
• Constantine's nephews were raised at Mehmed's court; one, renamed Mesih Pasha, became admiral and later Grand Vizier.