Fatih Sultan Mehmet
 Byname MEHMED FATIH (Turkish: Mehmed the
Conqueror) (b. March 30, 1432, Adrianople, Thrace, Ottoman Empire--d. May 3, 1481,
Hunkârçayiri, near Maltepe, near Constantinople), Ottoman sultan from 1444 to 1446 and
from 1451 to 1481. A great military leader, he captured Constantinople and conquered the
territories in Anatolia and the Balkans that comprised the Ottoman Empire's heartland for
the next four centuries.
Early years and first reign
Mehmed was the fourth son of Murad II by a slave girl; at
the age of 12 he was sent, as tradition required, to Manisa (Magnesia) with his two
tutors. The same year, his father set him on the throne at Edirne and abdicated. During
his first reign (August 1444-May 1446), Mehmed had to face grave external and internal
crises. The King of Hungary, the Pope, the Byzantine Empire, and Venice--all eager to take
advantage of the accession of a child to the Ottoman throne--succeeded in organizing a
crusade. Edirne was the scene of violent rivalry between the powerful grand vizier
Candarli Halil, on the one hand, and the viziers Zaganos and Sihâbeddin, on the other,
who claimed that they were protecting the rights of the child sultan. In September 1444
the army of the crusaders crossed the Danube. In Edirne this news triggered a massacre of
the Christian-influenced Hurufi sect and conjured up an atmosphere of panic and arson.
When the crusaders laid siege to Varna, the reigning sultan's father was urged to come
back from retirement in Bursa and lead the army. The Ottoman victory at Varna under Murad
II (Nov. 10, 1444) put an end to the crises. Mehmed II, who had stayed in Edirne,
maintained the throne, and after the battle his father retired to Manisa. Zaganos and
Sihâbeddin then began to incite the child sultan to undertake the capture of
Constantinople, but Candarli engineered a revolt of the Janissaries and called Murad II
back to Edirne to resume the throne (May 1446). Mehmed was sent once more to Manisa with
Zaganos and Sihâbeddin, newly appointed as his tutors. There Mehmed continued to consider
himself the legal sultan.
Second accession in 1451
On his father's death, Mehmed ascended the throne for the
second time in Edirne (Feb. 18, 1451). His mind was filled with the idea of the capture of
Constantinople. Europe and Byzantium, remembering his former reign, were then not
concerned much about his plans. Neither was his authority firmly established within the
empire. But he was not long in showing his stature by severely punishing the Janissaries
who had dared to threaten him over the delay of the customary gift of accession. Yet he
reinforced this military organization, which was destined to be the instrument of his
future conquests. He devoted the utmost care to all the necessary diplomatic and military
preparations for the capture of Constantinople. To keep Venice and Hungary neutral, he
signed peace treaties favourable to them. He spent the year 1452 mainly in building the
fortress of Bogazkesen (later Rumeli Hisari) for the control of the Bosporus, in building
a fleet of 31 galleys, and in casting new cannon of large calibre. He made the Hungarian
master gunsmith, Urban, cast guns of a size unknown as yet even in Europe. Meanwhile, the
grand vizier Candarli argued against the enterprise and during the siege of Constantinople
(April 6-May 29, 1453), the opposing views were voiced in two war councils convened at
critical moments. Zaganos vehemently rejected the proposal to raise the siege. He was
given the task of preparing the last great assault. The commander in chief, Mehmed II
himself, on the day of the attack personally directed the operations against the breach
opened in the city wall by his cannon. The day after the capture of the city, Candarli was
arrested and soon afterwards was executed in Edirne. He was replaced by Zaganos, who had
become Mehmed's father-in-law. Mehmed had had to consent to a three-day sack of the city,
but, before the evening of the first day after its capture, he countermanded his order.
Entering the city at the head of a procession, he went straight to Hagia Sophia and
converted it into a mosque. Afterward he established charitable foundations and provided
14,000 gold ducats per annum for the upkeep and service of the mosque.
One of the tasks on which Mehmed II set his heart was the
restoration of the city, now popularly called Istanbul, as a worthy capital of a worldwide
empire. To encourage the return of the Greeks and the Genoese of Galata (the trading
quarter of the city), who had fled, he returned their houses and provided them with
guarantees of safety. In order to repopulate the city, he deported Muslim and Christian
groups in Anatolia and the Balkans and forced them to settle in Constantinople. He
restored the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate (Jan. 6, 1454) and established a Jewish grand
rabbi and an Armenian patriarch in the city. In addition, he founded, and encouraged his
viziers to found, a number of Muslim institutions and commercial installations in the main
districts of Constantinople. From these nuclei, the metropolis developed rapidly.
According to a survey carried out in 1478, there were then in Constantinople and
neighbouring Galata 16,324 households and 3,927 shops. Fifty years later, Constantinople
had become the largest city in Europe. (see also Index: Eastern Orthodoxy).
Mehmed's empire
The capture of Constantinople bestowed on Mehmed
incomparable glory and prestige and immense authority in his own country, so that he began
to look upon himself as the heir of the Roman Caesars and the champion of Islam in holy
war. It is not true that he had preconceived plans for his conquests, but it is certain
that he was intent upon resurrecting the Eastern Roman Empire and upon extending it to its
widest historic limits. His victory over the Turkmen leader Uzun Hasan at the Battle of
Bashkent in Erzincan (Aug. 11, 1473) marked in Mehmed's life a turning point as important
as the capture of Constantinople, and it sealed his domination over Anatolia and the
Balkans.
Mehmed had assumed the title of Kayser-i Rum (Roman Caesar)
and, at the same time, described himself as "the lord of the two lands and the two
seas" (i.e., Anatolia and the Balkans, the Aegean and the Black seas), a designation
that reflected his idea of the empire. During the quarter-century after the fall of
Constantinople, he undertook a series of campaigns or expeditions in the Balkans, Hungary,
Walachia, Moldavia, Anatolia, the island of Rhodes, and even as far as the Crimea and
Otranto in southern Italy. This last enterprise (1480) indicated that he intended to
invade Italy in a new attempt at founding a world empire. The following spring, having
just begun a new campaign in Anatolia, he died 15½ miles (25 kilometres) from
Constantinople. Gout, from which he had suffered for some time, in his last days had
tortured him grievously, but, there are indications that he was poisoned.
During the autocrat's last years, his relations with his
eldest son Bayezid became very strained, as Bayezid did not always obey his orders.
Mehmed's financial measures resulted, toward the end of his reign, in widespread
discontent throughout the country, especially when he distributed as military fiefs about
20,000 villages and farms that had previously belonged to pious foundations or the landed
gentry. Thus, at his death, the malcontents placed Bayezid on the throne, discarding the
Sultan's favourite son, Cem (Jem), and initiated a reaction against Mehmed's policies.
Achievements
The conqueror reorganized the Ottoman government and, for
the first time, codified the criminal law and the laws relating to his subjects in one
code, whereas the constitution was elaborated in another, the two codes forming the
nucleus of all subsequent legislation. In the utterly autocratic personality of the
conqueror, the classical image of an Ottoman padishah (emperor) was born. He punished with
the utmost severity those who resisted his decrees and laws, and even his Ottoman
contemporaries considered him excessively hard.
Nevertheless, Mehmed may be considered the most broadminded
and freethinking of the Ottoman sultans. After the fall of Constantinople, he gathered
Italian Humanists and Greek scholars at his court; he caused the patriarch Gennadius II
Scholarios to write a credo of the Christian faith and had it translated into Turkish; he
collected in his palace a library of works in Greek and Latin. He called Gentile Bellini
from Venice to decorate the walls of his palace with frescoes as well as to paint his
portrait (now in the National Gallery, London). Around the grand mosque that he
constructed, he erected eight colleges, which, for nearly a century, kept their rank as
the highest teaching institutions of the Islamic sciences in the empire. At times, he
assembled the 'ulama`, or learned Muslim teachers, and caused them to discuss theological
problems in his presence. In his reign, mathematics, astronomy, and Muslim theology
reached their highest level among the Ottomans. And Mehmed himself left a divan (a
collection of poems in the traditional style of classical Ottoman literature). (H.I.)
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