Page:Constantinople by Brodribb.djvu/272

 good paymaster. "Can a cannon," he asked, "be cast capable of throwing a ball or stone of sufficient size to batter the walls of Constantinople?" On the strength of the engineer's favourable reply, a foundry was established at Adrianople, and a great gun cast, with a mouth exceeding two and a half feet in diameter, and capable of projecting to the distance of about a mile a missile of six hundred pounds weight. Other cannon, it is said, were cast for bullets of a hundred and fifty pounds. Mahomet, we may be certain, provided himself with as effective a train of artillery as the skill of his day was able to create. His great piece of ordnance was dragged rom the foundry to its position before the walls of Constantinople on a framework of thirty carriages by sixty oxen, two months being consumed in the journey. By the 6th of April, 1453, the siege had fairly begun.

What the actual strength of Mahomet's force was, when it sat down to the siege, we cannot say with any certainty. Certain it is, however, that it was such as to preclude all reasonable hope of a successful defence in the absence of foreign aid. Amurath's army is said to have numbered two hundred thousand, and Gibbon thinks it probable that Mahomet's may have been quite as numerous. He may well have had in addition to his regular troops a vast swarm of volunteers, attracted by zeal in a holy cause and the hope of boundless plunder. Phranza, who ought to have had some means of knowing, but who, no doubt, might be tempted to exaggerate, speaks of an army of two hundred and fifty-eight thousand, and subsequent writers magnify it