[89] [The name given to ancient Prusa after it fell into the hands of the Turks.]
[90] Leonard says the balls of the large gun were eleven of his spans in circumference.
[91] [This is Finlay’s account, but Hertzberg[b] says: “The number of troops (beside the great camp following and a mass of fanatic imams, mullahs and dervishes) totalled at the lowest, and therefore the most trustworthy, estimate 165,000 men, of which, with the 15,000 janissaries, well over 80,000 were regular soldiers. The fleet, according to an apparently reliable account, numbered 145 sail, namely 12 great galleys, about 80 double-deckers, some 25 smaller coasters, and a number of brigs.”]
[92] Justiniani is defended by Finlay[c] on apparently good grounds. He demanded additional guns for the defence of the great breach; these were refused by the grand duke Notaras, who had the official control over the artillery, and Constantine was obliged to exert all his authority to prevent the two generals coming to blows. Justiniani’s wound must have disabled him; he retired to his ship to have it dressed and it was found to be mortal. His dialogue with Constantine, Finlay says, “is evidently a rhetorical invention.”
[93] [With regard to the meaning of the “fall” of Constantinople and the hope of its rise, it may be well to quote the theory of the Russophile historian, Gelzer[e]: “The month of May, 1453, had dragged the Byzantine Empire finally to its grave. The Greek supremacy had long been a thing of the past; the hollow phantom of it was now to vanish away. But Byzantium has found a mighty heir. The czar of Russia took a princess of the house of Palæologus to wife; the crown of Constantine Monomachus was placed on the head of the autocrat of all the Russias in the Kremlin. The Russian Empire is de facto the sequel to the Byzantine. And if ever St. Sophia is to be restored to the true faith, and Asia Minor delivered from the hideous misrule of the Turk, it can only come to pass through the agency of the czar of Russia. None but the czar of Russia, ‘the defender of the orthodox faith,’ and inspired with a sense of the obligations involved in his great office, can become emperor of Constantinople.”]
[94] [The modern name for the Peloponnesus.]
