Note 400 — Chapter XVI

The question when the general attack began is very much one of appreciation. According to Ducas, Mahomet commenced on the Sunday evening to make a general attack and during the night the besieged were not permitted to sleep but were harassed all night and, though in a less active manner, until between four and five of the afternoon of Monday. Phrantzes declares the capture to have been made on the third day of the attack and would thus make it begin on Sunday, but his narrative shows that the general attack began after midnight of the 28–9th. Barbaro’s statement substantially agrees with that of Phrantzes and is that during the whole of the 27th the cannons were discharging their stone balls: tuto el zorno non feze mai altro che bombardar in le puovere mure; but on p. 51 he says that Mahomet came before the walls to begin the general attack at three hours before day on the 29th. Critobulus makes the general attack begin on the afternoon of the 28th, when the sultan raised his great standard (Crit. lii. and lv.). Karl Müller, in his excellent notes to Critobulus, justly remarks that as Barbaro and Phrantzes were in the city their evidence ought to be preferred to that of Critobulus. They both represent the final assault as beginning very early in the morning of the 29th. The statements are reconcilable by supposing that the dispositions for a general attack began on the Sunday, but that the actual general assault did not take place until the Tuesday morning. Sad-ud-din says, on the authority of two Turkish contemporaries, that ‘the great victory was on Tuesday, the fifty-first day from the commencement of the war’ (p. 34).