For August 29, the 500th anniversary of the Battle of Mohács – which in 1526 brought the medieval Hungarian kingdom to an end – I too wanted to add to the number of excellent writings published for the occasion. Originally, I wanted to write about the Hungarian youths who were taken prisoner at the Battle of Mohács and subsequently made brilliant careers in the Ottoman army. According to the historian Celalzade Mustafa, there were a great many of them, so at least they escaped the mass grave of the many thousands of prisoners executed after the battle, recently uncovered – such as Murad the dragoman, Balázs Somlyai, born in Nagybánya, who as the sultan’s chief interpreter mediated on numerous occasions between the Porte and the Christian powers, and wrote a theological treatise on the foundations of Islam in Ottoman Turkish and Latin; or Piyale Kapudan Pasha, who rose from being the son of a cooper from Tolna to become admiral of the entire Ottoman fleet, and at the Battle of Djerba in 1560, defeating the combined Spanish, Maltese, and papal fleets, secured Ottoman dominance in the Mediterranean all the way to Lepanto (1571), and later had Mimar Sinan build a vast religious complex for him in the Galata quarter, the Piyale Pasha Mosque. But every time I wrote down one statement about them, five questions arose in its place, so after a while I left this Ottoman-Hungarian hydra for more peaceful times and chose another subject that could be written more quickly, one that grew only three heads. These three heads are three great cannons, with the Hungarians this time not standing at the opposite end from the Turks, as at Mohács, but, one way or another, precisely on the same side.
I bought this postcard in an antique shop in the bazaar of Urfa. It shows a large Ottoman cannon with its full crew. At the top is a French inscription: “Kavak – Artillerie de forteresse”, that is, the artillery of the Kavak fortress. The Ottoman Turkish inscription below, in Arabic script, is more precise: قواغنده – طوبجی آسلان قلعهسی Kavağında – Topçu Aslan Kalesi: the artillery of the Lion Fortress in Anadolu Kavağı, on the Bosporus. The handwritten Ottoman Turkish text at the top in the center reads: عيد کريسمس مبارک اولسون Îyd-i Krisms mübârek olsun, that is, “Blessed Christmas”, combining the Arabic loanword îyd, “festival”, with the English Christmas and the Turkish expression mübârek olsun, “may it be blessed/happy”.
Perhaps this Christmas greeting is the most unexpected element of the Turkish card, but only until we consider that in the late Ottoman period (especially in the late 19th and early 20th centuries), postcards were extremely popular in cosmopolitan Istanbul before the genocides. They were often used to send greetings to the Christian minorities living in the empire, diplomats, or European partners, so a Christmas greeting in Ottoman Turkish was by no means unusual.
Anadolu Kavağı was not a settlement, but a steep ridge at the northern, Black Sea entrance to the Bosporus, where a multi-level coastal artillery battery system was built. The battery system was called Macar Tabyası (Hungarian Battery) or Macar Kalesi (Hungarian Fortress), because it was built by Baron François de Tott, a French military engineer in Ottoman service whose father, András Tóth, had been a Hungarian hussar captain in 1848. If an enemy warship attempted to break into the Bosporus from the Black Sea toward Istanbul, it had to fight its way through the fire of several such fortified artillery positions one after another. Behind the great cannon, deep inside the hill, lay extensive ammunition stores and bomb-proof shelters. The artillerymen transported the shells to the gun on rails and handcarts – as can be seen in the lower right-hand corner of the picture.
And the Hungarian Fortress, built on Turkish soil by a French military engineer against Russian warships, was equipped with the German Krupp guns shown in the picture, such as this 28 cm coastal-defense gun (Mantelringkanone), which, owing to its size, was nicknamed the Kanonenkönig. This was a gigantic breech-loading gun with a rifled barrel. Moving and loading it required the complicated systems of pulleys and gears visible in the picture, as well as a small crane with which the several-hundred-kilogram shells were lifted up to the barrel. Although the photograph was taken during the peaceful period of the 1890s, it was precisely these Krupp batteries overlooking the Bosporus and the Dardanelles (including the 24 cm and 28 cm versions) that later saved the empire during the 1915 Gallipoli campaign, when the British – Australian – and French fleets attempted to break through toward Istanbul, but the Krupp guns firing from the coastline inflicted heavy losses on them and forced them to withdraw.
In the second half of the 19th century, the Ottoman Empire realized that, because of its obsolete artillery, Istanbul and the straits (the Bosporus and the Dardanelles) were completely defenseless against modern European warships. Sultan Abdülhamid therefore established close military and economic ties with the German Empire. The Ottomans purchased their weapons directly from the Krupp factory in Essen, which produced the most advanced steel guns of the period. Krupp gained such influence within the empire that it enjoyed an almost monopolistic position in the modernization of Ottoman heavy artillery.
By the time the photograph was taken, the modernization of the Ottoman army was already almost entirely in German hands. This process took place through the famous German military missions. The most important figure during this period was a Prussian military officer, Baron Colmar von der Goltz (Goltz Pasha), who reorganized Ottoman military education between 1883 and 1895. His reforms produced an entirely new, professional Ottoman officer corps trained in the German tradition. For Berlin, the Ottoman Empire represented a huge arms market (see the Krupp and Mauser factories) and a strategic partner against Great Britain and Russia (which later also led to the construction of the Berlin–Baghdad railway). In return, the sultan received the most modern military technology and military doctrine in the world. This close military cooperation laid the foundations for the Ottoman Empire’s entry into the First World War on the side of the Central Powers, as an ally of Germany and Austria-Hungary. During the fighting of 1914–1918, German generals (such as Otto Liman von Sanders and Erich von Falkenhayn) directly commanded entire Ottoman armies on the fronts.
The postcard was made by the same Guillaume Berggren from whom we have already seen photographs of the main church of Nicaea from the 1870s. He travelled around Europe as a Swedish apprentice carpenter, and Constantinople so enchanted him that he never boarded the ship again. In 1870, he opened a studio called “Little Sweden” on the main street of Galata, in Pera, and alongside his studio portraits he travelled extensively throughout Anatolia with an excellent eye for subjects, making use of his photographs in the burgeoning postcard industry. Among these was a series of photographs of the batteries of the Hungarian Fortress, which the Ottoman government of the time did not yet prohibit on grounds of military secrecy, but instead promoted as a source of imperial pride.
The Capture of Constantinople with the Basilika cannon, 1453. From the exhibition at the Panorama 1453 Museum in Istanbul
The Kanonenkönig supplied to the Ottoman army by the Germans reminds us not only of those Hungarian howitzer gunners who supported the Turkish ally against the British in Gaza during the First World War, but also of another similarly enormous cannon, contemporary with Mohács, which to its contemporaries was the Great Cannon par excellence. It was made by the Hungarian master cannon-founder Orbán of Brașov, who also had Transylvanian German ancestors, so the three nations once again came together in a single constellation. He originally offered it to the besieged Byzantine emperor, but the emperor could neither pay the high fee nor procure the necessary materials. So Orbán went over to the Turkish competition, claiming that the cannon he was planning would be capable of breaching not only the walls of Byzantium but even those of Babylon. Mehmed II gladly accepted his offer. The cannon was cast in Adrianople in three months and hauled to the walls of Constantinople by sixty oxen. The cannon, named Basilika, meaning “royal,” was eight metres long, its walls were 20 cm thick, and its 540-kilogram projectiles repeatedly battered the walls. One such shot opened a breach at the point where the Fatih Mosque now commemorates the place where Mehmed’s troops entered the city. Orbán himself, however, did not live to see this, as the Basilika exploded from the strain and killed him.
Not long after, in 2012, the Orbán regime – in the hope of substantial compensation – handed over Ramil Safarov, the Azerbaijani axe murderer who had been sentenced to life imprisonment in Hungary for murdering his Armenian fellow student in his sleep in 2004, to Azerbaijan, where he was immediately pardoned, promoted and proclaimed a national hero, prompting Armenia to sever diplomatic relations with Hungary, I took a group to Alaverdi in northern Armenia. We were standing in the main square of the run-down mining town, and I was pointing out the remains of the Soviet smelter or the thousand-year-old monastic bridge as I explained things, when a similarly dilapidated Lada stopped beside us. Two Armenian men got out and asked where we were from. At the time it was not a pleasant thing to admit, but we told them. One of the men then raised his finger: “Christianity had two great enemies, two Orbáns. One was the man who cast the Turkish cannon, the other was the man who handed the axe murderer over to the Turks.” Having finished their brief sermon, they got back into the car and disappeared.
The Basilika did not survive, but one of its twins did: it was cast by Munir Ali in 1464, modelled on the Basilika, and was still being used in 1807 to defend the Dardanelles. Sultan Abdülaziz presented the cannon to Queen Victoria on the occasion of her visit to Constantinople in 1866, and today, at Fort Nelson, one can see what kind of force was capable of smashing through the walls of Byzantium.
The capture of Constantinople and the Turks’ technological superiority in warfare caused such terror throughout Europe that it led to the creation of a third famous cannon. There was only as much iron in this cannon as Dürer needed to make an iron engraving. Before copper engraving became widespread, the master had experimented with iron plates, whose contours are somewhat rougher and more rustic than what copper made possible, but this probably suited the subject perfectly.
In the 1518 engraving entitled “The Great Cannon,” five Turks stand before a huge cannon on the outskirts of the village of Kirchehrenbach in northern Bavaria. In the background, the Ehrenbürg mountain range closes off the horizon. Using atmospheric perspective, Dürer creates a perfect sense of depth.
Turks, of course, never actually visited Kirchehrenbach, certainly not during the Renaissance. The absence of any mutual reaction between the villagers and the visitors – no one notices them or is frightened by them – also points to the allegorical meaning of the two planes. In 1518, Emperor Maximilian I and Pope Leo X were calling for yet another crusade against the threatening Ottoman Empire. The image depicts the anxiety of the Christian world, collective defensive reflexes, and the emergence of centralized military power.
The weapon depicted in the engraving is actually a heavy Nuremberg field cannon (a so-called Feldschlange or karduan). The coat of arms of Nuremberg can also be seen on the cannon barrel.
After the fall of Constantinople, the centre of arms production in the Holy Roman Empire became none other than Dürer’s native city, Nuremberg. For decades, Nuremberg gun founders worked to produce cannons capable of taking on the enormous Ottoman siege weapons. The landsknecht guarding the cannon and the Nuremberg coat of arms on the barrel convey a clear message to the viewer: “Here is our answer to the threat from the East.”
If the German estates, already influenced by Luther for a year, had not voted down the proposal for a crusade at the Diet of Augsburg in 1518, driven by distrust of the pope, perhaps we Hungarians, too, might have seen such cannons at Mohács—not turned against us, but toward the Turks—and perhaps everything would have turned out very differently.
“The Great Cannon” was thus a German response to the Ottoman military innovation produced with Hungarian expertise during the Renaissance Cold War.
Dürer, as an artist working for the imperial court, responded with excellent business and political instincts to the “Turkish fear” that dominated public opinion at the time. Placing the cannon bearing the Nuremberg coat of arms and the Ottoman figures in the same image proclaimed imperial defensive power and deterrence at a moment when the fate of Europe was at stake. He brilliantly wove the threads together: with the image, he reminded the Western world of the military threat from the East (the Ottomans) – whose symbol since Constantinople had been the huge siege cannon – while at the same time displaying the defensive power of his own homeland, Nuremberg.
There is, however, also a brilliant irony in the image, which contemporary viewers would have understood immediately. Master Orbán’s cannons were, in their day, the most advanced wall-breaching superweapons. Dürer, however, deliberately depicted in 1518 a cumbersome cannon that was already considered obsolete. At the beginning of the 16th century, the future belonged to more mobile, modern artillery.
The military-technical revolution that took place at the beginning of the 16th century, in Dürer’s time, was precisely about moving artillery onto the open battlefield. In place of the earlier giant cannons, which required weeks of hauling, light and medium field artillery appeared. Greater mobility was made possible by advances in metalworking (lighter barrels), standardization, and technical innovations such as the wheeled gun carriage and the first ammunition wagons (limbers).
• The most mobile weapons on the battlefield were the smaller-caliber guns cast in bronze • Falcon: It fired iron balls weighing about 1–3 pounds (0.5–1.5 kg). Its weight was negligible compared with the monsters, so it could be rapidly repositioned on the battlefield with a single horse, or even by the infantry themselves. • Falconet: The even smaller sibling of the falcon (firing balls of about 0.5–1 pound), used specifically at close range to break up charging enemy infantry and cavalry.
• During the 16th century, culverins became the backbone of classical field artillery. Because of their long barrels, they were extremely accurate and had a long range. By the middle of the 16th century, the French and German mercenaries were already able to move these medium-sized (typically 9–18-pound) guns surprisingly quickly alongside infantry formations, using horse-drawn carriages.
• It was precisely Dürer’s principal patron, Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I, who radically simplified and standardized cannon sizes in the arsenals of Nuremberg and Innsbruck. He eliminated the bewildering variety of individual calibers and had guns manufactured for balls of standardized weight. In this way, he made ammunition supply and battlefield logistics light-years faster.
• Organ guns were also among the mobile tactical weapons. They consisted of several (as many as 4–12) gun or small-caliber cannon barrels resembling musket barrels, mounted on a single movable carriage. They could unleash a volley simultaneously or in rapid succession against the enemy, and were used specifically against dense infantry formations in field battles.
The arc of the Great Cannon’s history thus spans the entire five hundred years of Mohács. In response to the military-technological marvel cast by Orbán of Brașov – which conquered Byzantium, and whose smaller brothers broke the charge of the Hungarian cavalry at Mohács – the German cannon industry, through centuries of experimentation, created the precision field gun with which the Turks would later defend the Ottoman shores from the Hungarian Fortress and break the charge of the Australians attempting to capture Constantinople. And the story is not over yet.
Australian soldiers of the British Army march at Gallipoli, singing Waltzing Matilda, toward the great Turkish guns
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