The battles of the past define the present. This is Shield's High.

Gather around friends for I have a story to tell. The fall of Constantinople, Part 2.

In the year of our Lord 1453, then the most important city in the Christian world, Constantinople,

was besieged by the most powerful army in existence, that of the Ottoman Turks of Anatolia.

Constantinople's Theodosian walls had stood up to weeks of continuous assaults and battering barages

from the 70 cannons that the Sultan, Mathmet, had emplaced for what was then the most impressive artillery battalion the world had ever seen.

The struggle for the city was an all or nothing enterprise. If the defenders were overrun in Constantinople,

they knew that they would be slaughtered or enslaved to a man.

The icons of Christianity, including what was considered a piece of the true cross of Jesus Christ,

would be desecrated and destroyed. And with their successful taking of the city,

the Ottomans could create a capital at the crossroads of the known world from which they could stage further jihads,

invasions all the way into the heart of Christendom itself, from there they could dominate the world and the future of humankind.

But the hardy defenders of Constantinople were not giving in. In fact, the major assaults on the walls had been repulsed

and the first effort to engage the Constantinople Navy at sea was a stunning defeat for the Ottomans and had enraged Mathmet to the point where he considered impaling his own admiral.

He needed to change the outcome.

While no one in either camp was certain, there was the possibility of a relief armada. If the Italian city-states of Venice or Genoa raised a fleet,

or if the Hungarian crusader spirit was once again remembered to the west, a massive relief force by land or sea could lift the siege

and deliver Constantinople from an ignominious and brutal defeat.

Through the entire month of April, the massive theodosian walls to the west of Constantinople had withstood the roaring cannon fire of Orban,

the master metallurgist, who had offered his services to the Christians and tragically for them, they didn't have the funds.

But Mathmet did. And that was how the Ottomans, all of a sudden, became the foremost gunpowder power in the Mediterranean world.

Those cannons were blasting at the Theodosian walls. It was doing damage, but it was not enough. And with the defender Justiniannis on the spot improvisations,

...