Mehmed the Conqueror

Mehmed was born on March 30, 1432 in Edirne, the city in Thrace that then served as the principal residence of the Ottoman dynasty. He was the fourth son of Sultan Murad II, and his mother, Huma Hatun, was a slave concubine of uncertain origin, most likely from a Christian background ^[1]. Because two older half brothers stood ahead of him, few at court expected the child to inherit anything more than a provincial post.

At around age eleven he was sent to Manisa in western Anatolia to govern the province of Saruhan, the customary training ground for Ottoman princes. His early tutors reported a stubborn, difficult pupil until the scholar Ahmed Gurani was given authority over him and imposed discipline. Under Gurani and the influential teacher Akshamsaddin, Mehmed studied the Quran, Islamic law, mathematics, and history, and he acquired working knowledge of several languages; contemporaries credited him with Turkish, Arabic, Persian, Greek, and some Slavic and Latin ^[2].

The deaths of his half brothers Ahmed and Alaeddin Ali, the second under circumstances that were never fully explained, left Mehmed the sole heir while still a boy. That accident of survival transformed his education from the grooming of a spare son into the preparation of a future sultan ^[1].

In 1444 Murad II, weary after decades of campaigning and grieving for his favorite son Alaeddin Ali, abdicated in favor of the twelve year old Mehmed. The decision came at a dangerous moment. A crusader army under King Wladyslaw III of Poland and Hungary and the commander John Hunyadi had crossed the Danube, and the boy sultan's court at Edirne was divided between the veteran grand vizier Chandarli Halil Pasha and ambitious newer men ^[3]. Murad returned from retirement to command the army that crushed the crusaders at Varna in November 1444, then resumed the throne outright in 1446 after unrest among the Janissaries, sending Mehmed back to Manisa.

The humiliation marked him. During the following years the young prince served on his father's campaigns, including the second battle of Kosovo in 1448, and quietly built his own circle of loyal officers ^[3]. When Murad II died in February 1451, Mehmed rode to Edirne and took the throne for the second time at age nineteen. Following what would later be codified as dynastic practice, he ordered the execution of his infant half brother Ahmed to prevent civil war, a act he justified as protection of public order ^[1].

European courts initially read the new sultan as a green and untested youth. He encouraged the impression, renewing treaties with Venice and Hungary while he prepared, with complete single mindedness, for the project his predecessors had attempted and failed: the capture of Constantinople ^[4].

Anyone asking who was Mehmed the Conqueror finds the answer above all in the spring of 1453. Preparation began well before the siege. In 1452 Mehmed built the fortress of Rumeli Hisari on the European shore of the Bosporus, opposite an older Ottoman castle on the Asian side, giving him control of the strait and cutting Constantinople off from Black Sea grain and Genoese reinforcement ^[4]. He also commissioned enormous bronze cannon, including pieces cast by the Hungarian founder Urban, capable of hurling stone balls against the ancient Theodosian land walls.

The siege opened on April 6, 1453. Mehmed commanded an army that contemporary and modern estimates place at somewhere between 60,000 and 80,000 fighting men, against a defense of roughly 7,000 to 8,000 under the last Byzantine emperor, Constantine XI Palaiologos ^[5]. When a chain barrier kept his fleet out of the Golden Horn, Mehmed had dozens of ships dragged overland on greased timbers into the harbor, outflanking the sea walls. After seven weeks of bombardment the final assault came before dawn on May 29, 1453. The walls were breached near the gate of St. Romanos, Constantine XI died in the fighting, and the city fell after a siege of fifty three days ^[5].

Mehmed entered the city that afternoon and rode to Hagia Sophia, which he converted into a mosque while sparing the building itself. He halted the customary sack earlier than the troops expected and almost immediately began treating the ruined city as his future capital rather than a trophy ^[4]. He was twenty one years old, and from that point the honorific Fatih, the Conqueror, attached permanently to his name.

Among the most consequential Mehmed the Conqueror achievements was what he did after 1453 rather than the conquest itself. He repopulated Constantinople, which had shrunk to a fraction of its ancient size, by ordering and inviting Muslims, Greeks, Armenians, and Jews from across his territories to settle there, granting tax incentives and property to newcomers ^[6]. He appointed the monk Gennadios Scholarios as Greek Orthodox patriarch in 1454, recognizing the church as the legal representative of the empire's Orthodox subjects, an arrangement that shaped Ottoman governance of non Muslim communities for centuries ^[6]. He built the covered bazaar that grew into the Grand Bazaar, the Topkapi Palace complex, and the great Fatih mosque with its attached colleges.

His armies rarely rested. Serbia was fully annexed by 1459, the Byzantine despotate of the Morea in southern Greece fell in 1460, and the empire of Trebizond, the last Greek successor state, surrendered in 1461 ^[3]. Bosnia was absorbed in 1463, and a long war with Venice from 1463 to 1479 ended with the republic ceding territory and paying for trading rights. In Anatolia he defeated the Turkmen ruler Uzun Hasan of the Aq Qoyunlu at the battle of Bashkent in 1473 and finally annexed the rival Karamanid principality ^[3]. In Wallachia he clashed with Vlad III Dracula, and in 1475 his forces made the Crimean khanate a vassal, turning much of the Black Sea into an Ottoman lake.

Mehmed also issued kanunnames, codes of administrative and criminal law that stood alongside religious law and organized the ranks, revenues, and ceremonies of the state. One notorious clause permitted a reigning sultan to execute his brothers for the sake of order, formalizing the fratricide he had practiced in 1451 ^[1]. Centralizing power, he broke the old aristocratic families, executing Chandarli Halil Pasha shortly after 1453 and staffing high office largely with men raised through the palace slave system who owed everything to the sultan alone ^[6].

Behind the campaigns stood a ruler of unusual intellectual range. Mehmed wrote Persian and Turkish verse under the pen name Avni, and a divan of his poems survives, making him one of the earliest Ottoman sultans with a substantial poetic legacy ^[2]. He collected Greek and Latin manuscripts, ordered a copy of Ptolemy's Geography, questioned Italian visitors about ancient history, and reportedly saw himself as heir to the Roman emperors, adopting the title Kayser i Rum, Caesar of the Romans, after 1453 ^[4].

His patronage crossed religious and cultural lines in ways that startled contemporaries. In 1479, during the peace with Venice, he asked the republic to send a painter, and Gentile Bellini spent well over a year at the Ottoman court. Bellini's oil portrait of the sultan, dated 1480, survives and is held in the National Gallery in London ^[7]. Mehmed also commissioned medals of himself from Italian artists such as Costanzo da Ferrara, objects in a thoroughly European Renaissance idiom.

His household included several consorts, among them Gulbahar Hatun, mother of the future Bayezid II, and Chichek Hatun, mother of Prince Cem. A political marriage to Sitti Mukrime Hatun of the Dulkadir dynasty produced no children. The rivalry between his sons Bayezid and Cem, already visible in his lifetime, would erupt into open succession war within days of his death ^[1].

The final decade of the reign kept the same punishing tempo. After the Venetian war ended in 1479, Mehmed opened two campaigns in 1480 that alarmed all of Latin Europe. One army besieged the fortress of the Knights of St. John on Rhodes and was thrown back after months of fighting. Another, under Gedik Ahmed Pasha, crossed to Italy and seized the port of Otranto in Apulia in August 1480, holding a bridgehead on the Italian mainland and raising fears of a march on Rome ^[3].

What came next remains one of history's open questions. In the spring of 1481 Mehmed assembled a large army on the Asian side of the Bosporus and set out toward an undeclared destination, with Egypt of the Mamluks and Italy both suggested by later writers. He fell gravely ill on the march and died on May 3, 1481 near Gebze, east of Constantinople, at the age of forty nine ^[1]. Gout had troubled him for years, and some contemporaries and later historians suspected poison, though the charge was never proven ^[4].

His death was concealed for days while couriers raced to the princes. Bayezid II reached the capital first and took the throne; Cem resisted, lost, and spent the rest of his life as a hostage in Europe. Without its founder's momentum the Otranto garrison surrendered in September 1481, and the Italian expedition died with the sultan who had launched it ^[3]. Mehmed was buried in a tomb beside his Fatih mosque in Istanbul.

Basic Mehmed the Conqueror facts explain his durability in world history: two reigns, twenty five years of nearly continuous war, the extinction of Byzantium, and the transformation of a frontier sultanate into an empire ruled from Constantinople. Ottoman writers treated the conquest of 1453 as the fulfillment of a prophecy attributed to the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) praising the commander who would take the city, and later sultans measured themselves against Fatih's example ^[6]. Historians conventionally use the fall of Constantinople as a marker between the medieval and early modern eras, and the flight of some Greek scholars westward fed the currents of the Italian Renaissance ^[5].

His institutional legacy proved as lasting as his conquests. The law codes, the centralized palace government, the settlement of the Orthodox patriarchate under state authority, and the imperial claim to Roman succession all outlived him by centuries ^[6]. In modern Turkey his name is everywhere: the Fatih district of Istanbul, Fatih Sultan Mehmet Bridge across the Bosporus, and a steady stream of films and television dramas about 1453.

Modern scholarship, led by Franz Babinger's massive biography and the archival studies of Halil Inalcik, has complicated the older portrait of a simple holy warrior. The Mehmed who emerges from the sources is harder to categorize: ruthless toward rivals and rebellious cities, curious about Greek antiquity and Italian painting, a poet, a planner, and an administrator who understood that conquest without settlement and law was worthless ^[2]. That combination, more than any single battle, is why the epithet Conqueror has never needed explanation.