Mehmed II

• 1. Introduction

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  Mehmed II was twenty-one years old when he stepped into the ruins of a palace the Ottomans called the Palace of the Caesars, built more than a thousand years earlier. Standing among the wreckage, he recited lines from the Persian poet Saadi about a spider keeping watch in the palace of Chosroes, and an owl calling in the castle of Afrasiyab. The verses mourned fallen empires. The empire that had just fallen was Byzantium, and the city around him was Constantinople, which his army had taken on the 29th of May 1453 after a fifty-seven-day siege.

  He was born on the 30th of March 1432 in Edirne, the son of Sultan Murad II and a slave mother named Hüma Hatun, of uncertain origin. He would rule the Ottoman Empire twice, and by the time he died on the 3rd of May 1481 he had earned the name Fâtih, the Conqueror. But the boy who became a legend first lost his throne, then clawed it back, then spent three decades pressing armies into Serbia, the Morea, Trebizond, Bosnia, Albania, and even the coast of Italy.

  How did a twelve-year-old sultan recover from being pushed aside by his own father? Why did he claim to be a Roman emperor and light candles before Christian relics? And how did a conqueror remembered for cannon and impalement also fill his palace with Italian painters and eight thousand manuscripts? Those questions run through everything he built.

• 2. The Boy Who Lost The Throne

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  When Mehmed was eleven, his father sent him to Amasya with two lalas, or advisors, to govern and gain experience, following the custom of earlier Ottoman rulers. Murad II also sent teachers, and this Islamic education shaped his outlook and reinforced his beliefs. His mentor Molla Gürâni guided him in Islamic epistemology through the work of practitioners of science. The influence of Akshamsaddin became predominant from a young age, especially the idea that overthrowing the Byzantine Empire by taking Constantinople was an Islamic duty.

  After Murad II made peace with Hungary on the 12th of June 1444, he abdicated in favour of his twelve-year-old son in July or August of that year. The peace did not hold. Hungarian incursions broke the truce set by the Treaties of Edirne and Szeged in September 1444, and Cardinal Julian Cesarini, the Pope's representative, had assured the king of Hungary that breaking a truce with Muslims was no betrayal.

  According to seventeenth-century chronicles, the young Mehmed wrote to his father with startling boldness. If you are the sultan, come and lead your armies, he said. If I am the sultan, I hereby order you to come and lead my armies. Murad II returned and won the Battle of Varna on the 10th of November 1444. The historian Halil Inalcik disputes the story, arguing it was Çandarlı Halil Pasha who brought Murad back. By 1446 Murad held the throne again, and Mehmed kept the title of sultan while serving only as governor of Manisa. He would not rule in his own right until his father died in 1451.

• 3. The Fall Of A Thousand Years

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  In the narrow Bosphorus, Mehmed built a fortress called Rumelihisarı on the European side, facing the older Anadoluhisarı that his great-grandfather Bayezid I had raised on the Asian shore. Together they gave him complete control of the strait. He then levied a toll on passing ships. When a Venetian vessel ignored the order to stop, it was sunk with a single cannon shot. The surviving sailors were beheaded, except the captain, who was impaled and mounted like a human scarecrow to warn others.

  In 1453 he brought an army estimated between 80,000 and 200,000 troops, more than seventy large field pieces, and a navy of 320 vessels. Orban had designed a giant new bombard for the assault, similar to the Dardanelles Gun. The harbor of the Golden Horn was sealed by a boom chain and defended by twenty-eight warships. On the 22nd of April, Mehmed hauled eighty galleys overland around the Genoese colony of Galata, paving a route a little over a mile with wood, and slid them into the Golden Horn. The defenders had to stretch their men thinner along the walls.

  The conquest carried deep meaning for him. His sheikh Akshamsaddin located the tomb of Abu Ayyub al-Ansari, the companion and standard bearer of the prophet Muhammad who had died during the first Siege of Constantinople between 674 and 678. Mehmed later built the Eyüp Sultan Mosque on the site. Some scholars read a hadith in Musnad Ahmad as foretelling this very victory. After the conquest, Mehmed moved his capital from Adrianople to the city he had taken, and a decade later he visited the ruins of Troy and boasted that he had avenged the Trojans by conquering the Greeks.

• 4. Caesar Of Rome

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  Constantinople had been the capital of the Roman Empire since Constantine I consecrated it in 330 AD, and Mehmed argued that whoever held that capital ruled the empire. So he claimed the title caesar of Rome, Qayser-i Rûm. The contemporary scholar George of Trebizond supported the claim. The Catholic Church and most of Western Europe rejected it, but the Eastern Orthodox Church recognized it.

  In 1454 he installed Gennadius Scholarius, a fierce opponent of the West, as ecumenical patriarch of Constantinople. Gennadius received full ceremonial standing, ethnarch or milletbashi status, and property rights that made him the second largest landlord in the empire after the sultan himself. In return, Gennadius recognized Mehmed as the rightful successor to the throne.

  The last Byzantine emperor, Constantine XI Palaiologos, died without an heir. The children of his deceased elder brother were taken into Mehmed's palace service. The oldest boy, renamed Hass Murad, became a personal favorite and served as beylerbey of the Balkans. His younger brother, renamed Mesih Pasha, became admiral of the fleet, sanjak-bey of Gallipoli, and later served twice as Grand Vizier under Mehmed's son Bayezid II. Two more remnants of Byzantium soon vanished as well. Mehmed absorbed the Despotate of the Morea in the Peloponnese in campaigns of 1458 and 1460, and the Empire of Trebizond in 1461.

• 5. The Long Wars

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  Serbia had been an intermittent Ottoman vassal since the Battle of Kosovo in 1389, and Mehmed pressed his claim partly because one of Murad II's wives was Mara Branković. His campaigns of 1454 and 1455 captured fortresses, took fifty thousand prisoners, and forced Đurađ Branković to send thirty thousand florins a year as tribute. The mining town of Novo Brdo fell after forty days of siege and intense cannon fire. The Serbian Despotate finally ended when Mehmed personally captured Smederevo on the 20th of June 1459.

  The siege of Belgrade in 1456 nearly killed him. After John Hunyadi's relief force crossed the Danube and entered the city, a Christian counterattack pushed all the way to the Ottoman camp. A vizier urged Mehmed to flee, but he refused, calling it a sign of cowardice. He joined the fighting himself and killed three enemy soldiers before being wounded and carried from the field. His army was too weakened to take the city, and he retreated to Edirne by night. Hunyadi died shortly after the siege.

  Further east, the Empire of Trebizond had survived through marriages with Muslim rulers, including a tie to Uzun Hasan of the Aq Qoyunlu. When Mehmed marched against it in 1461, Uzun Hasan sent his mother Sara Khatun as an ambassador. Climbing the steep heights of Zigana on foot, she asked the sultan why he endured such hardship for the sake of Trebizond. Mother, he answered, in my hand is the sword of Islam, and without this hardship I should not deserve the name of ghazi. The emperor David surrendered on the 15th of August 1461.

• 6. The Impaler And The Voivode

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  Vlad III, known as Dracula, had spent four years as a prisoner of Murad alongside his brother Radu, and the Ottomans freed him to keep Wallachia out of Hungarian hands. In 1459 Mehmed sent envoys demanding a delayed tribute of 10,000 ducats and 500 recruits. Vlad refused and had the envoys killed by nailing their turbans to their heads, claiming they had failed to remove their hats before him. When Hamza Pasha came to make peace or eliminate him, Vlad ambushed the Ottomans and impaled nearly all of them, placing Hamza Pasha on the highest stake.

  In the winter of 1462 Vlad crossed the Danube and burned the land between Serbia and the Black Sea. Disguising himself as a Turkish sipahi and using his command of the language, he slipped into Ottoman camps to ambush and massacre soldiers. Mehmed abandoned his siege of Corinth to punish him, but suffered heavy losses in a surprise night attack aimed at killing the sultan himself. Vlad's harsh resistance proved unpopular, and his own boyars betrayed him. The Ottomans took the Wallachian capital Târgoviște, and Mehmed left Vlad's brother Radu as ruler. Turahanoğlu Ömer Bey wiped out six thousand Wallachians and laid two thousand of their heads at the sultan's feet.

  Moldavia gave him a far worse defeat. In 1475 an Ottoman army under Hadim Pasha was crushed at the Battle of Vaslui by Stephen the Great, with Ottoman casualties reported beyond 40,000. Mara Branković told a Venetian envoy it was the worst defeat the Ottomans had ever suffered. Pope Sixtus IV named Stephen Athleta Christi, the Champion of Christ. Mehmed entered Moldavia himself in June 1476 and, when his Janissaries faltered against steady gunfire, charged with his personal guard to rally them. The Moldavians were defeated, yet the Ottomans could take none of the major strongholds at Suceava, Neamț, or Hotin, and starvation and plague drove them home.

• 7. The Westernmost Frontier

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  Bosnia became the empire's westernmost province in 1463, after a dispute over tribute. Mehmed led an army into the country, the royal city of Bobovac fell quickly, and King Stephen Tomašević retreated to Jajce and then to Ključ before being executed along with his uncle Radivoj. The Ottoman-Venetian War that broke out the same year would grind on until 1479, sparked, according to the historian Michael Critobulus, by a runaway slave who fled to a Venetian fortress with 100,000 silver aspers.

  That war ranged across the Aegean and the Morea for sixteen years. In 1470 Mehmed personally led the siege of Negroponte, defeated the Venetian relief fleet, and captured the island. The fighting ended only when the Ottomans reached the outskirts of Venice. Under the Treaty of Constantinople, Venice ceded Shkodra and other territories, paid a 100,000 ducat indemnity, and agreed to roughly 10,000 ducats a year for trading privileges in the Black Sea.

  Albania held out longest under Skanderbeg, who had united the Albanian principalities in the League of Lezhë in 1444. Mehmed led armies against Krujë in person in 1466 and 1467 and never subdued the country while Skanderbeg lived. During the 1466 campaign he built the fortress of Elbasan, reportedly in just twenty-five days, cutting Albania in half. Skanderbeg died of malaria at Lissus, and resistance slowly collapsed. Mehmed led the siege of Shkodra in 1478 and 1479, of which the chronicler Aşıkpaşazade wrote that all the sultan's conquests were fulfilled with the seizure of Shkodra. In 1480 Gedik Ahmed Pasha even captured Otranto in Italy, raising fears that Rome would share Constantinople's fate, and plans were made to evacuate the Pope from the city.

• 8. Painter, Patron, And Patriarch

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  Gentile Bellini came from Venice to paint Mehmed's portrait, one of many Italian artists, humanists, and Greek scholars the sultan gathered at his court. He had shown an interest in Renaissance art and Classical histories since childhood, with schoolbooks full of sketches of ancient coins and European-style portraits. Two tutors, one in Greek and one in Latin, read him Laertius, Livy, and Herodotus in the days before Constantinople fell. His first documented art commission, in 1461, went to Matteo de' Pasti, who was arrested in Crete by Venetian authorities as a suspected Ottoman spy.

  His library held over eight thousand manuscripts in Persian, Ottoman Turkish, Arabic, Latin, and Greek. The Greek scriptorium included Arrian's Anabasis of Alexander the Great and Homer's Iliad, and he patronized Kritiboulos of Imbros, who wrote a Greek History of Mehmed the Conqueror. Medallion portraits cast Mehmed and Alexander with shared helmet ornaments, presenting the sultan as a neo-Alexandrian figure and a Western-oriented ruler among Christian monarchs.

  His fascination with Christianity unsettled his own family. He collected relics after the conquest, including the putative skull and arm bone of St. John the Baptist and a stone said to be where Jesus was born. When the Venetians offered 30,000 ducats for that stone, he replied he would not sell it for 100,000. He was reported to light candles before the relics of St. John the Baptist as a sign of veneration. His son Bayezid II later accused him of not believing in Muhammad, hated figural images, and sold the entire collection.

  What he built outlasted the disputes. He rode straight to the Hagia Sophia after taking the city and ordered it protected, then had it turned into a mosque through a charitable trust. He raised eight madrasas around his grand mosque, the highest teaching institutions of the Islamic sciences for nearly a century. A survey in 1478 counted 16,324 households and 3,927 shops in Constantinople and Galata, with a population near 80,000, roughly 60 percent Muslim, 20 percent Christian, and 10 percent Jewish. The Ottoman historian Neşri summed it up plainly. Sultan Mehmed, he wrote, created all of Istanbul. Today the Fatih district, the Fatih Sultan Mehmet Bridge, and the Fatih Mosque all carry the name of the conqueror.