Great Turkish Bombard

The Great Turkish Bombard is a massive bronze siege cannon cast for the Ottoman sultan Mehmed II ahead of his 1453 siege of Constantinople, built to a design credited to the Hungarian founder Orban, who is recorded as having first offered his cannon-casting services to the Byzantine emperor before the Ottomans hired him instead. Reportedly requiring dozens of oxen and hundreds of men to move and a large specialist crew to load and fire, it hurled huge stone cannonballs against the ancient Theodosian land walls of Constantinople, walls that had withstood centuries of earlier sieges, and contributed to breaching them during the final Ottoman assault that ended the Byzantine Empire. The weapon and its Ottoman siege train are frequently cited by military historians as a landmark moment in siege warfare, demonstrating that gunpowder artillery had grown powerful enough to bring down fortifications that had previously been considered effectively impregnable, and hastening the broader European shift toward lower, sloped artillery-resistant fortress design in the following century.