and their leaders, the exhaustion of the larger Byzantine and Sasanian empires, which Lapidus called "militarily weakened powers," and the willingness of the peoples they conquered to accept Arab rule (41). Heyd said that the early Muslims had given up the pagan Arab custom of engaging in individual combat in hit and run fashion and adopted their foes' practice of fighting in lines of battle. They also borrowed the Greek practice of attacking fortifications with incendiary materials (37).
In the 15th and 16th centuries, the Turks adapted the Chinese invention of gunpowder to their operations. They used huge siege guns to knock down the walls of Constantinople in 1453. Cleveland says that "in the decades that followed, the Ottom
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