Mehmed II the Conqueror — Imperial Ottoman

Mehmed II, called Fatih (“the Conqueror”) by the Ottomans, reigned as Ottoman sultan from 1451 to 1481, with an earlier short reign in 1444–1446 as a child of twelve. He is the seventh sultan in the list of Ottoman sultans, and his reign is the founding moment of the classical Ottoman government. He captured Constantinople in 1453, made it the Ottoman capital, organized the empire as a multi-confessional state with the millet system, and built the Topkapı Palace as the new imperial residence. His reign is one of the most consequential in the history of the empire and a model for Suleiman the Magnificent and the other great sultans of the dynasty.

Key dates

1432 — born 30 March, the son of Murad II and Hüma Hatun.
1444 — first reign as a child of twelve; ends with his deposition in 1446.
1451 — second reign begins, 18 February.
1453 — fall of Constantinople, 29 May; the conquest transforms the empire.
1454 — appointment of Gennadios Scholarios as Ecumenical Patriarch; the millet-i Rum is born (in the traditional account).
1461 — conquest of the Empire of Trebizond; the Armenian Patriarchate of Constantinople is established.
1473 — Battle of Otlukbeli; defeat of Uzun Hasan and the Aq Qoyunlu.
1481 — dies on campaign, 3 May; succeeded by Bayezid II after the interregnum of Cem Sultan’s exile.

Early Life and First Reign

Mehmed was born on 30 March 1432, the son of Murad II and Hüma Hatun. He was crowned sultan for the first time in 1444, when his father abdicated in his favor and retired to Manisa. The first reign, from August 1444 to May 1446, was dominated by a crisis: a Christian crusade organized by the Hungarian regent John Hunyadi advanced into the Balkans, and a revolt by the Janissaries and the ulema demanded the return of Murad II. Mehmed was deposed in May 1446, and Murad resumed the throne until his death in 1451. The second reign began on 18 February 1451, when the nineteen-year-old Mehmed was proclaimed sultan. He was energetic, ambitious, and determined to capture Constantinople, the great imperial capital that had resisted Muslim conquest for nearly eight centuries. The contemporary Ottoman historian Aşıkpaşazade, in his Tevarih-i Al-i Osman (written c. 1484), records the young prince’s boast that he would take the Roman city “by whatever means, whether by force or by treaty” — a remark that, in the chronicle, has the quality of a taunt to his courtiers.

The Conquest of Constantinople

The defense of Constantinople was entrusted to the emperor Constantine XI Palaiologos, the last of the Eastern Roman dynasty, who commanded a small, demoralized garrison against an overwhelming Ottoman army. The siege began in April 1452, with Mehmed ordering the construction of a fortress on the European shore of the Bosphorus, the Rumeli Hisarı, to control the straits. The actual siege began in April 1453, with an Ottoman army of perhaps 80,000 men and a massive cannon cast by the Hungarian engineer Orban. The defenders, perhaps 7,000 in number, were outnumbered and outgunned. The siege lasted 53 days, and the decisive moment came on 29 May 1453, when a flanking attack through a small postern in the Theodosian Walls allowed the Ottoman forces to enter the city. The emperor was killed in the fighting. Mehmed entered the city on horseback, paused at the Hagia Sophia, ordered the church converted to a mosque, and established his new capital on the ruins of the Eastern Roman Empire.

The conquest transformed the Ottoman state. Constantinople, the natural capital of a Balkan-Anatolian empire, was far better situated than Bursa or Edirne. The city’s population, trade, port, and tax base provided a foundation for the new empire; its scholars and relics provided a cultural inheritance; its walls and infrastructure provided a physical base that the Ottomans adapted for centuries. The fall of the city shocked the Christian world and marked the beginning of the early modern era in the eastern Mediterranean. Roger Crowley’s 1453 (2005) is the standard popular narrative; Steven Runciman’s The Fall of Constantinople 1453 (1965) is still the most influential scholarly account. The “small postern” story — the Kerkoporta gate — is itself disputed; many modern historians, following the Greek sources, think the gate was open for a sortie that had failed, rather than being the entry point. The point matters less than the outcome.

The New Capital and the New State

Mehmed spent the years after 1453 transforming the conquered city into the capital of a new empire. He ordered the construction of the Topkapı Palace on the Seraglio Point, the Fatih Mosque and its associated külliye, the conversion of the Hagia Sophia into a mosque, and the resettlement of the city with Muslims, Jews, and Christians from across the empire. He reorganized the empire’s central government, establishing the Divan-ı Hümayun in the new palace, recruiting a bureaucracy of largely devshirme origins, and codifying the kanun (sultanic law) that would regulate the empire’s administration for the next four centuries. The Kanunname of Mehmed II — the foundation of the Kanunname later expanded by Suleiman — was the work of a committee of jurists, drafted principally in the 1450s and 1460s, and it includes the famous land-tax schedule and the criminal penalties (siyaset) that the later kanunnames inherited. He also established the millet system, the framework by which the empire’s non-Muslim religious communities were organized and governed — a topic of considerable scholarly debate to this day, because the traditional account of a single deliberate charter is hard to reconcile with the surviving chancery documents.

The Conquests

The conquest of Constantinople was followed by an extraordinary series of military campaigns. Serbia fell in 1459, the Morea in 1460, the Empire of Trebizond in 1461, Bosnia in 1463, and Albania in 1478, after a long and difficult campaign. The Crimea was incorporated as a tributary khanate in the late 1470s. The most spectacular conquest of the later part of the reign was the defeat of Uzun Hasan, the Aq Qoyunlu ruler of eastern Anatolia, at the Battle of Otlukbeli in 1473, which extended Ottoman control to the Euphrates. The conquest of Otranto in 1480, a brief occupation of the heel of Italy reversed after Mehmed’s death, illustrated the ambition of the project, although the plan for an invasion of Italy was abandoned by his successor.

The Harem and the Succession

Mehmed’s harem was a political institution of considerable importance. His mother Hüma Hatun exercised an influence that the later valide sultan would emulate, and his wives and concubines were drawn from the empire’s diverse population, including the Greek, Serbian, and Bosnian women who were the mothers of the princes. Mehmed died on 3 May 1481, on campaign in the east, and his body was returned to Istanbul for burial in the Fatih complex he had built. His two sons, Bayezid and Cem, contested the throne. Bayezid, supported by the Janissaries, took the throne; Cem fled to Rhodes and then to France, becoming a pawn in Italian and French politics for the next decade. Cem’s captivity remains one of the most extraordinary episodes of late-medieval European diplomacy: the Pope, the King of France, the Knights of Rhodes, and (later) the King of England all held him at one point or another, and the ransom demanded for his release was never paid.

A reflection

Halil İnalcık, the leading Ottomanist of the twentieth century, made Mehmed’s reign the pivot of his Classical Age; the periodization has stuck, even as the details have been revised. Caroline Finkel’s Osman’s Dream is more skeptical of the “founder” reading, and treats the reign as the high point of a longer process of consolidation that began with Bayezid I and continued under the early sultans. Both readings can be made to fit the sources; neither has decisively won the field.