A wall that had held for 1,100 years fell in under two months to a new kind of weapon

Constantinople's triple land walls had repelled every siege since the 5th century, but in 1453 Sultan Mehmed II brought enormous bronze cannons built by a Hungarian engineer, one reportedly over 8 metres long, and pounded the walls apart over weeks of bombardment. The city fell on May 29, 1453, ending the thousand-year-old Byzantine Empire and marking, for many historians, the close of the Middle Ages.

— Steven Runciman, The Fall of Constantinople 1453 — Cambridge University Press, 1965
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