The empire was now in its death agony, and Constantine recognized the fact. He spent the winter in making frantic appeals to the Pope and the Italian naval powers to save him from destruction. Nicholas V. was willing enough to help; now that the Emperor was a convert to Catholicism something must be done to aid him. But all that the Pope could send was a cardinal, a moderate sum of money, and a few hundred soldiers of fortune hastily hired in Italy. Venice and Genoa could have done much more, but they had so often heard the cry of “Wolf” raised that they did not realize the danger to their Eastern trade at its true extent. From Genoa, Giovanni Giustiniani brought no more than two galleys and three hundred men. Venice did even less, only commissioning the bailiff of its factory at Galata to arm such able-bodied Venetians as were with him for the protection of the city. Altogether the Franks, counting both trained mercenaries and armed burghers, who co-operated in the defence of Constantinople, were not more than three thousand strong. Yet either Genoa or Venice could have thrown a hundred galleys and twenty thousand men into the scale if they had chosen. [Illustration] Details Of St. Sophia. Constantine’s own troops were about four thousand strong, but he hoped to recruit them by a general levy of the male population of the city. He issued a passionate appeal to his subjects to join in saving the holy city, the centre of Eastern Christendom. But the Greeks only remembered that he was an apostate, who had foresworn the faith of his fathers and done homage to the Pope. They stood aside in sullen apathy, and from the whole population of the city only two thousand volunteers were enlisted. Theological bitterness led the blind multitude to cry with Notaras that it preferred the Turk to the Roman. In April, 1453, the young Sultan, with seventy thousand picked troops at his back, laid formal siege to the city on the land side, while a fleet of several hundred war galleys beset the Bosphorus. The end could not be for a moment doubtful; nine thousand men could not hope to defend the vast circuit of the land and sea-wall against a veteran army urged on by a young and fiery general. Mohammed set his cannon to play on the walls, and it was soon seen that the tough old Roman mortar and stone that had blunted the siege engines of so many foes could not resist the force of gunpowder. The Sultan’s artillery was rude, but it was heavy and numerous; ere long the walls began to come down in flakes, and breaches commenced to show themselves in several places.