The defenders were between the stockade and the Inner Wall. Here they had to defeat the enemy in front of them or die. Mahomet’s intention was to concentrate his attack on the stockade and on the walls between the Adrianople Gate and Tekfour Serai and to deal blow after blow against them with the whole of his available force while making sufficient show of attack elsewhere to draw away the defenders. [Sidenote: Assault begun by Bashi-bazouks.] The assault was commenced by the Bashi-bazouks, the most worthless portion of Mahomet’s army, who came up for this purpose from the northern end of the landward walls. Many among them were Moslems, but there were so many Christians and foreigners that Barbaro calls them all Christians.[404] Leonard declares that among them were Germans, Hungarians, and other foreigners of various kinds.[405] Mahomet’s object in sending forward these men to make the first attack was mainly that they might exhaust the strength and the ammunition of the besieged. This, indeed, was his method of utilising his superiority in numbers.[406] Moreover, says Barbaro, he preferred that these Christians should be killed rather than his Mussulmans. The Bashi-bazouks advanced bearing all the scaling-ladders within shooting distance of the walls and probably extended themselves from Tekfour Serai to the stockade and beyond to Top Capou. They began the fight with a general discharge of arrows, of stones from slings, and iron and leaden balls. Then, with a wild disorderly dash, they rushed across the ditch and endeavoured to capture the Outer Wall and especially the stockade. They were armed in ways as numerous and varied as the races and creeds to which they belonged: some with bows, others with slings, with arquebuses or with muskets,[407] but most of them simply with scimitars and shields. Hundreds of ladders were placed against the walls and the bravest hastened to climb them. Others, mounted on the shoulders of their comrades, endeavoured to reach the summit or to strike at the defenders. In the darkness of this night attack, made by fifty thousand men, there was soon wild confusion everywhere, but especially in the valley to which for the present the action in my story is confined. At every point the invaders met with a brave resistance. While among the attacking party there were many who had no heart for the fight,[408] there were others who were not deficient in courage, but they had to meet the best soldiers in the emperor’s army, a band of two thousand Greeks and Italians all under the leadership of Justiniani, ‘the incomparable captain, the mighty man and genuine soldier.’