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Yesterday was the fated day. Let's never forget.
The Fall of Constantinople - May 29, 1453.
1. Before the siege began, the entire civilian population, including the City's priests, nuns, and monks, came out to refortify the walls.
2. The siege of the City lasted 54 days. This was the first, large-scale, sustained bombardment by cannon against medieval fortifications in Europe.
3. The Turks had an army of 80,000-100,000 men. The defenders of Constantinople numbered only 7,000. Constantinople, a city whose greater environs had once approximated 1 million people, had been reduced by the time of the fall to about 50,000 inhabitants.
4. Emperor Constantine XI Paleologos died a hero's death, fighting at the walls of the City. After he knew that the siege was lost, he threw off his imperial cloak and charged into a wave of advancing Turks, never to be seen again. 5. One of the great targets of the Turks' destruction was Agia Sophia, the great Church of the Holy Wisdom. The Turks desecrated the altar, hacked away at the Byzantine icons, murdered Christians who had taken refuge in the sanctuary, and raped women and children inside the Church.
6. Of that total, an estimated 15,000 were killed by the Turks while some 30,000 were chained and dragged to the docks on the Golden Horn, where they were boarded onto ships to be sent to Arab and Turkish Muslim slave markets, never to see their homes again.
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Thanks! Used on my FB page
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Glory to Jesus Christ!!!!
Alice,
Thanks for posting these facts. This day is another day that should be remembered and commemorated as another example of the 'religion of peace'.
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Left out that Mehmet great canon were cast by Orthodox Greek gunsmiths and manned by Orthodox Greek gunners. Without the help of Greeks, the Turks never would have gotten inside the City.
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Left out that Mehmet great canon were cast by Orthodox Greek gunsmiths and manned by Orthodox Greek gunners. Without the help of Greeks, the Turks never would have gotten inside the City. ??? The Ottomans employed a Hungarian engineer called Urban who was a specialist in the construction of cannons, which were still relatively new weapons. He built an enormous cannon, nearly twenty-seven feet (more than 8 m) in length and 2.5 feet (about 75 cm) in diameter, which could fire a 1200 lb (544 kg) ball as far as one mile. It was dubbed "the Basilic". Although the Byzantines also had cannons, they were much smaller and their recoil tended to damage their own walls. Urban's cannon had several drawbacks, however. It could hardly hit anything, not even as large as Constantinople; it took three hours to reload; the cannon balls were in very short supply; and the cannon collapsed under its own recoil after six weeks.
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Left out that Mehmet great canon were cast by Orthodox Greek gunsmiths and manned by Orthodox Greek gunners. Without the help of Greeks, the Turks never would have gotten inside the City. ??? The Ottomans employed a Hungarian engineer called Urban who was a specialist in the construction of cannons, which were still relatively new weapons. He built an enormous cannon, nearly twenty-seven feet (more than 8 m) in length and 2.5 feet (about 75 cm) in diameter, which could fire a 1200 lb (544 kg) ball as far as one mile. It was dubbed "the Basilic". Although the Byzantines also had cannons, they were much smaller and their recoil tended to damage their own walls. Urban's cannon had several drawbacks, however. It could hardly hit anything, not even as large as Constantinople; it took three hours to reload; the cannon balls were in very short supply; and the cannon collapsed under its own recoil after six weeks. Facts aren't his specialty.
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What I found interesting, is that in earlier times, the Byzantines were quite proud of their diplomatic relations with the Turks. Is there a lesson somewhere in that for us?
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Urban was a Hungarian (though this can also mean Transylvanian. The metallurgists who implemented his design were Greeks, as were the artillerists. Also, as far as we know, Urban only cast two of Mehmets many bombards The rest were, indeed, cast by Greek smiths. Almost everything the Ottomans accomplished, they accomplished through the passive or active cooperation of the Greeks--indeed, their whole society was parasitic, so could only prosper as long as new conquests kept bringing in new people with new ideas and technologies.
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