Page 154 - Conflitti Militari e Popolazioni Civili - Tomo I

154 XXXIV Congresso della CommIssIone InternazIonale dI storIa mIlItare • CIHm

planned and executed a most brilliant and successful siege against one of the best protected
cities in the world, Constantinople. Three years later he wished to do the same to Belgrade.
4
Throughout the winter of 1455-56 Mehmed planned his campaign. In Spring he amassed a
huge army – although contemporary sources claim it was 150,000-400,000 strong, modern
historians have justifiably lowered this figure to a still impressive 60,000 – gathered a fleet
5
of numerous riverine vessels – again contemporary figures are probably exaggerated, 200,
which modern historians have reduced to 21 – and at least three hundred gunpowder artillery
6
pieces, not counting handheld guns. Some of these cannons were of enormous size and had
successfully breached the walls of Constantinople. Mehmed hoped they would do the same
7
at Belgrade.
What he had not counted on was the continued tenacity of the citizens of Belgrade, or of
the ability of the then seventy-year-old John of Capistrano to arouse a sizeable number of
men willing to go to the defense of the threatened city – more than 40,000 had taken the cross
although it seems that he was only able to enter the city with 2,500, a still sizeable addition to
the garrison. Mostly peasants and villagers, few armed or armored, these irregular soldiers
8
were enthusiastic and zealous, and they mixed well with the equally irregular militia there.
While professional soldiers and knights had been slow to answer the call of the Serbs or John
of Capistrano, but as the results would show they were not needed.
On 13 June the Turks arrived at Belgrade and almost immediately began an intensive
bombardment of the walls. For a month and a half they were content to sit back and let their
guns work. With little defensive fire in response, the destruction was impressive. Walls had
been breached and towers had been destroyed. The heroic Hungarian prince John Hunyadi,
who arrived too late and with too small an army to intervene in the siege, described Belgrade
as “not a castle but a field” (non est castrum sed campus). But few lives were lost inside
9
the city, as most of the inhabitants kept out of range of the gunshot, and no one seems to have
become discouraged. 10
In the meantime both Hunyadi’s army and a Hungarian fleet had arrived at Belgrade.
Hunyadi’s force was too small to do much to relieve the besieged, but the Christian fleet did
attack and fight a prolonged, bloody battle on the Danube against the Turkish fleet – contem-

4 On the fall of Constantinople the seminal work remains Steven Runciman, The Fall of Constantinople, 1453
(Cambridge, 1965). Roger Crowley’s Constantinople: The Last Great Siege, 1453 (London, 2005) is good,
but does not advance the status questionis beyond Runciman nor replace it.
5 Franz Babinger, Mehmed the Conqueror and His Time, trans. Ralph Manheim, ed. William C. Hickman
(Princeton, 1978), p. 140.
6 Setton, Papacy and the Levant, II:173. Such a drastic reduction is prompted by the tally given in a contem-
porary German account of the siege.
7 For an assessment of the Turkish gunpowder weapons at Constantinople see Kelly DeVries, “Gunpowder
Weaponry at the Siege of Constantinople, 1453,” in War, Army and Society in the Eastern Mediterranean,
7th-16th Centuries, ed. Y. Lev (Leiden, 1996), pp. 343-62. Those at Belgrade, and also later at Rhodes in
1480, were virtually the same in size and power.
8 Setton, Papacy and the Levant, II:174.
9 John Hunyadi, as quoted in Stephen Turnbull, The Art of Renaissance Warfare: From the Fall of Constan-
tinople to the Thirty Years War (London, 2006), p. 37. See also Stanko Andrič, The Miracles of St. John
Capistran (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2000), p. 27.
10 Babinger, p. 140, and Turnbull, p. 37.