Why the Man Behind Mehmed's Giant Gun Went to Constantinople First

The man who cast Sultan Mehmed's giant gun had first offered his services to the emperor of Constantinople. His name was Urban, a Hungarian engineer, and in 1452 Constantine XI could not pay him or give him the bronze he needed. So Urban went to Mehmed II, promised a gun that could blast the walls of Babylon, and was paid four times what he wanted. His first gun, at Rumeli Hisarı, sank a Venetian ship trying to run the Bosphorus in late November 1452. 📖 Source: Steven Runciman, The Fall of Constantinople 1453, Cambridge University Press. Mehmed then ordered one twice the size, cast at Edirne by January 1453, a bronze barrel of about eight metres with seven hundred men to serve it. Before the test the townspeople were warned not to panic, and the ball flew about a mile before burying itself six feet deep. At Constantinople it could fire only seven times a day, and in early May it broke down until it was repaired on the 6th. About an hour before dawn on 29 May, one of its balls brought down a long stretch of the defenders' stockade, and hours later Mehmed's army took the city. Runciman builds the story on the chroniclers Doukas and Kritoboulos and on the Venetian Nicolò Barbaro, who was inside the walls. What became of Urban is unknown; only a later chronicle says a bursting gun killed him. Timeline History is planned, written and made on musayko.com, a platform I built for creators. Which siege should we cover next?