Chapter 587: Caesar vs Sultan Part 1
It has been about two days after the start of the battle, the Romans have showed a remarkable progress by cracking through the entire Ottoman defensive lines in just a day’s time, but lost its momentum and are forced to give it a stop. The Ottoman defenders still have the bulk of their manpower left, morales defeated but not yet depleted, with the Romans encircling them outside the walls. The Ottoman reinforcements led by Sultan Beyezid II, arrived on the spot after dawn, consisting of a total of eight hundred Janissaries, five hundred horsemen, one thousand guards, one thousand conscripted peasants, two hundred slaves, one hundred Venetians and five hundred troopers from the Bulgarian warlords.
The young Sultan did not give his troops any time to rest or reorganise, ordering them to start attacking the Roman defences the moment they arrived in the area.
The battlefield now is no longer constrained by the chains of hills, woods, and mountains, it is now in a much more open space with a whole plain behind the forts of Kavala, which means that the battle width is now much wider, and the Romans will have to some how fend off the impending Ottoman attacks from multiple directions. Provided that they still have the energy to do so.
"Archers on my left, advance!" he commanded, his voice booming over the battlefield.
In response, the Sultan’s goat horns sounded, emitting an eerie harmony that rippled through the air, carrying the Sultan’s orders to the Ottoman archers. With disciplined precision, they surged forward, the ground rumbling under their unified march. Once in position, a hailstorm of arrows burst from their ranks, slicing through the air towards the entrenched Roman formations.
The Romans, entrenched behind their makeshift barricades, countered with fierce determination, their own arrows piercing the sky in retaliation. But against the relentless onslaught of the Ottomans, they found themselves increasingly suppressed, the taste of desperation beginning to sour the air.
"Cavalry, swing left! Harass the Roman formation!" ordered the Sultan, his voice a thunderclap over the clamour of battle.
With the Sultan’s command, the goat horns echoed once again across the field, a call to action resonating in the hearts of the Ottoman cavalry. The appointed agha promptly dispatched two hundred of his men. Like a fearsome tempest, they swept towards the Romans’ left flank, their steeds kicking up clouds of dust as they closed in on their target.
Brandishing arrows, the mounted Ottomans assailed the Roman lines. Now, the Roman left flank found itself ensnared in a two-front attack. Caught between the ruthless hail of Ottoman arrows and the relentless charge of the Ottoman cavalry, the tension within their ranks was palpable, the Romans steeling themselves against the savage storm bearing down upon them.
The defence of the Roman formation is now shaken, the Roman archers are now on the verge of collapse totally unable to organise a coordinated retaliation attack, countless Roman lives are being taken away by the Ottoman arrows that acted like the scythe of death gently swooping its way through the battlefield. And there is another thing; after a night of vigorous battles, the Romans have already depleted more than half on their stocks of arrows, it will be hard for them to restock their ammunition supply any time sooner.
"General, what do we do?" Helios is approached by his anxious lieutenant.
Helios did not say anything, and no one can see what expression he has on that face among the darkness.
"Where are my artilleries?"
"Two of our artilleries have arrived in the designated formation..."
"What about the other four of them?"
"One of them are trapped in the debris, two of them have their wheels stuck by corpses, and one of their wheels fell off making it unable to manoeuvre."
Helios frowned, this is exactly the issue that he has been worried about artilleries since the first day they are thrown into active duty, that is its poor manoeuvrability, which can be deadly at times.
"Two is enough." Helios pointed towards the Ottoman archers. "Bombard the hell out those archers! And tell Khalid, I need his cavalries!"
The Romans had no goat horns to relay orders, instead relying on fleet-footed messengers darting between their formations, carrying vital commands into the depths of the pitch-black night.
Five torturous minutes of anticipation later, the Roman gunnery teams primed their artillery, the heavy air thick with tension. With an earth-shaking roar, the large-calibre cannon ignited, and a luminescent comet streaked across the night sky. A cannonball, grotesquely similar in size to a human head, ripped through the night, a monstrous harbinger of destruction hurtling towards the distant Ottoman archer formations.
These projectiles were relentless juggernauts, their destructive paths unimpeded by any armour, no matter how robust. They held a singular, terrifying power that knew no resistance, a crushing force that even the most formidable armour was powerless to deflect.
The cannonball’s assault didn’t end with its initial impact. Propelled by a tremendous kinetic force, it rebounded off the ground, causing additional carnage as it cut a brutal swath through the Ottoman lines before finally coming to rest. The surrounding earth hissed and sizzled from the scalding heat of the projectile, a grotesque testament to the raw power of the weapon.
The aftermath of the bombardment was a tableau of nightmarish devastation. The cannonball’s shockwave had thrown the entire Ottoman archer formation into chaos, leaving them paralyzed and unable to regroup or launch further strikes for some time. In the projectile’s wake, there was only destruction and desolation. No soldiers remained standing; instead, the landscape was littered with the horrific remnants of men: shattered bones, spattered blood, and horrifying trails of human viscera. The air echoed with the agonized cries of the wounded, their despair and pain tearing through the silent night.
War was always a hell, but the advent of artillery had escalated it into a new realm of horror, rendering earlier conflicts pale by comparison, as if they had been mere skirmishes in a pastoral paradise.
Sultan Beyezid II’s face turned pale, he do know about this modern military technology called artilleries obviously, he has even seen and touched those artilleries made by the Hungarian man called Orban back then when he was still a child, but he has never ever saw one of them in real action before. Within just a few seconds, by the instinct of both a scholar and a military commander that is rich in theories, he knows that artilleries has secured its place in future warfare, deeming some of the tactics that is widely used in the past, useless.
But that is not the end.
The Sultan bite his lips so hard that blood started to come out, he roared towards his aghas and beys. "Go! Reorganise my archers! Tell them that those artilleries need at least half an hour to reload! Go! Advance! We need to eradicate any resistance by enemy archers before my men can rally up and charge!"
The agha, galvanized by the urgent order, sprang into action. But before he could mount his steed, a second shockwave resonated through the battlefield, followed by an explosion that ripped through the night air. Another cannonball soared high, a harbinger of despair that silenced the Ottoman commanders, their jaws dropping in helpless awe as the projectile traced a deadly arc against the midnight canvas.
This was the stark reality of their situation, a chilling realization that filled the air. This was not merely a setback or a hindrance. No, this was true, abject hopelessness.
The Sultan forgot something again while panicking, the artilleries used by his deceased father was the gigantic and immature ones specialised for blasting open the Theodosian walls of Constantinople, while these ones operated by the Romans, are relatively much smaller in calibre, and although it still looks like the ones in the 1450s, but the structure is completely different from its predecessors after years of technological advancements and improvements made by Master Orban and his son Master Jacob in the Thessaloniki forge.
These two artilleries are able to make a blast every five minutes, with a maximum range of three Roman miles, with better iron works it can blast for a staggering twenty five times before having to cool down to prevent cracks, and has an unreliable but still usable measuring and aiming system mounted.
The artilleries might not cause a huge casualty rate, but with its might it can cause disturbance and nuisance affecting a formation’s discipline, order and organisation, such as what is going on with the Ottomans here on the spot.
The Ottoman archers have plunged in chaos.
The cavalries on the sides are not in a good state either, they have been forced to give up their job of harassing the Roman flank a while ago due to the arrival of Khalid’s cavalries charging towards them. The Ottoman cavalries dispersed, and with their superior horsemanship and better horse breeds, they successfully evaded the Roman charge led by an Egyptian without suffering many losses.
