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THE FALL OF CONSTANTINOPLE 1453, by Steven Runciman. 256 pages. Cambridge University Press. $6.50.
It was the biggest cannon ever cast. The great barrel was 26 ft. long, and it fired a ball 3½ ft. in diameter that weighed 1,200 Ibs. On April 12, 1453, it opened fire on Constantinople, capital city of the Byzantine Empire and the gateway to Christian Europe. At the rate of seven shots a day, the big gun battered at the enormous walls and their 7,000 Christian defenders while an army of 80,000 Turks waited. At dawn on May 29, the Sultan's janissaries stormed the shattered walls and took the city. The spectacular final siege and fall of Constantinople is here meticulously described by Britain's well-known medieval historian, in a volume that can be read as the coda of his massive History of the Crusades. Unfortunately, the other three-fourths of the book consists of relentlessly inclusive and superficial summaries of everything that happened in the known world for half a century before and after.