The eighty thousand-man Turkish army encircling Constantinople, led personally by Mehmed II, inaugurates a siege of the city on April 6, 1453.

Emperor Constantine XI commands an army of only ten thousand men, left as the city’s sole defenders after the Turkish navy drives off an assisting Venetian naval fleet and erects a blockade.

Mehmed uses his fifty-six giant, stone-ball-firing cannons and twelve bombards, all Hungarian-made, to reduce the city’s massive walls, which the imperial forces are finally unable to block off.

The largest of their cannon is the Great Turkish Bombard, which requires an operating crew of two hundred men and seventy oxen, and ten thousand men to transport it.

Gunpowder makes the formerly devastating Greek fire obsolete, and becomes recognized as a decisive weapon.

Many war galleys now mount a large, fixed cannon that fires over the bow.

Such centerline bow guns, often flanked by several smaller guns, will soon become universal.

After a fifty-five-day bombardment, Mehmed enters the city on May 29, 1453; the forty-nine-year-old emperor bravely battles the Turks at one of the city’s gates until he is overwhelmed and killed by the attackers.

Mehmed permits his soldiers three days to plunder the defeated city, after which …