REBIRTH 175stantinople was more of a psychological prize: the city had immense sym-
bolic significance for both east and west.
To the west, an unbroken line ran from Constantinople back to the
Rome of Augustus and Julius Caesar. To Christians, this was still the capi-
tal of the Roman Empire, which Constantine had infused with Christian-
ity. It was only later historians who looked at this eastern phase of Roman
history and called it by a new name. The Byzantines themselves called
themselves Romans, and thought of their city as the new Rome.
As for Muslims, Prophet Mohammed himself had once said that the
final victory oflslam would be at hand when Muslims took Constantino-
ple. In the third century oflslam, the Arab philosopher al-Kindi had spec-
ulated that the Muslim who took Constantinople would renew Islam and
go on to rule the world. Many scholars said the conqueror of Constan-
tinople would be the Mahdi, "the Expected One," the mystical figure
whom many Muslims expected to see when history approached its end-
point. Mehmet therefore had good reason to believe that taking Constan-
tinople would be a public relations coup that would make the whole world
look at him differently.
The many technical experts now working for the Ottomans included a
Hungarian engineer named Urban, who specialized in building cannons,
still a relatively new type of weapon. Sultan Mehmet asked Urban to build
him something special along these lines. Urban set up a foundry about 150
miles from Constantinople and poured out artillery. His masterpiece was a
cannon rwenty-seven feet long and so big around that a man could crawl
down inside it. The so-called Basilic could fire a rwelve-hundred-pound
granite stone a mile.
It took ninety oxen and about four hundred men to transport this mon-
strous gun to the battlefield. As it turned out, the Basilic was too big: it took
more than three hours to load, and each time it fired it recoiled so hard it
tended to kill more people behind it than in front of it. Besides, at a distance
of a mile, it was so inaccurate it actually missed the whole city of Constan-
tinople; but this didn't matter. The big gun wasn't an important military
asset so much as an important symbolic asset-announcing to the world
that this was the sort of weapon the Ottomans brought to the field. In addi-
tion to the Basilic they had, of course, many smaller cannons. They were the
best armed and most technologically advanced army of their time.