Mehmed II: The Sultan Who Ended the Middle Ages
On the night of 22 April 1453 the defenders of Constantinople looked down at the Golden Horn — sealed, they believed, by a great iron chain — and saw Ottoman warships already inside it. Mehmed II had spent the night hauling a fleet overland on greased rollers, around the obstacle rather than through it. He was twenty-one years old. Five weeks later the city that had held for eleven centuries was his, and by the reckoning of later historians the Middle Ages were over.
A Childhood in the Provinces
Mehmed was born on 30 March 1432 at Adrianople — Edirne — in Thrace, the third son of Sultan Murad II. His mother was a slave concubine of Balkan origin, named in different sources as Hüma Hatun or Devlet Hatun; the ambiguity is itself instructive about the status of a third son. He was sent to Amasya as nominal governor at the age of five and educated by *lalas*, elite tutors, in theology, history and languages.
The education took hold to an unusual degree. Mehmed acquired competence in Turkish, Arabic, Greek, Persian, and some Italian and Serbian — a range no contemporary Western monarch approached, and one that mattered enormously to how he would later govern.
Sultan at Twelve, Deposed at Fourteen
In August 1444 Murad II voluntarily abdicated and the twelve-year-old Mehmed became sultan. It went badly. A crusading coalition of Hungarian, Byzantine, Venetian and papal forces moved against the empire, and Murad returned to the throne in May 1446 to fight them at Varna. Mehmed was sent back to his tutors — Zaganos Pasha and Shahabuddin Shahin Pasha among them — and to a humiliation he never forgot.
He became sultan again on 18 February 1451, on his father's death, aged nineteen. The seventh Ottoman sultan had one immediate objective, and everyone knew what it was.
The Siege
The preparation was methodical to the point of coldness. In 1452 Mehmed built the fortress of Rumelihisari on the European bank of the Bosporus, opposite the existing Anadoluhisari, closing the strait. He hired a Hungarian engineer named Urban to cast cannon of unprecedented size — the decisive technology of the age, and a weapon the Byzantines had declined to pay for.
Operations began in February 1453, with the intensive siege running some fifty days across April and May. Roughly eighty thousand Ottoman troops faced perhaps five to seven thousand defenders under the Genoese commander Giovanni Giustiniani, with Emperor Constantine XI in personal command. The cannon opened breaches by day; the defenders repaired them by night. The ships hauled overland on 22 April broke the naval stalemate.
The final assault came on 29 May in three waves: irregulars sent first to exhaust the garrison, then artillery to open the wall, then the Janissaries to hold the breach. Constantine XI died fighting. The city was sacked for three days, and then Mehmed rode in, went to the Hagia Sophia and converted it to a mosque. He was twenty-one.
Building a Capital, Building a State
What Mehmed did next is the part that gets less attention and matters more. Constantinople had been in long decline and was now half-destroyed, so he issued an edict relocating people from Anatolia and the Balkans into the city regardless of ethnicity or religious origin, and moved the imperial capital there. He repaired the infrastructure and built the Topkapi Palace, the Grand Bazaar and the Fatih Camii, the Mosque of the Conqueror.
He then set about governing a majority-Christian empire. He personally appointed Gennadios Scholarios as Orthodox patriarch, giving his rule legitimacy in the eyes of its Greek subjects. He organised the empire's peoples into *millets* — semi-autonomous communities on a religious basis, initially Muslim, Greek Orthodox, Armenian Gregorian and Jewish, each under its own religious leadership and its own law, loyal to the sultan. Non-Muslims paid the *cizye* tax and worshipped freely.
Alongside religious law, *şeriat*, he issued secular codes, *kanun*, governing the structure of the state and its taxation without contradicting it, and codified the functions of public officials. Land reforms brought villages back under direct state control, weakening the old noble factions in favour of an administrative class drawn from the sultan's own slaves. He also formally legalised fratricide — the killing of a new sultan's brothers — to prevent the succession wars that had nearly destroyed the dynasty.
Thirty Years of Campaigning
The conquests did not stop. Serbia was reduced between 1454 and 1459, with Novo Brdo and then Smederevo taken. Attica fell in 1459 and the Morea in 1460. In 1461 he extinguished Trebizond, the last Byzantine remnant. Karaman was absorbed, Bosnia and Moldavia campaigned in, Albania subjugated by 1479. The long Venetian war of 1463 to 1479 stripped Venice of Aegean possessions including Negroponte. In 1480 his forces landed at Otranto, in Italy itself.
He failed too, and the failures are as revealing as the victories: repulsed at Belgrade in 1456, checked in Hungary in 1474, and never able to take Rhodes. His most famous adversaries — Vlad III of Wallachia, the Impaler, and Skanderbeg in Albania, who resisted for decades until his death in 1478 — cost him years.
Why Mehmed II Is Called a Genius
The case rests on an unusual combination: a mind that was simultaneously technical, linguistic and institutional. The technical side is visible at Constantinople — commissioning artillery at a scale nobody had attempted, then, when the guns alone were not enough, solving the naval problem by removing the water from the equation. That is not brute force; it is lateral thinking under extreme pressure at twenty-one.
The intellectual side is better documented than for almost any medieval ruler. He read Greek and Roman literature, collected manuscripts, wrote poetry, kept gardens, and gathered poets, philosophers, astronomers and painters from Europe and the Middle East at a court which, in World History Encyclopedia's assessment, rivalled in its brilliance that of the Western princes of the European Renaissance. He sat for the Venetian painter Gentile Bellini — an Islamic sovereign commissioning his likeness from a Christian master.
The institutional side may be the strongest. Having conquered a city full of people whose religion he did not share, Mehmed designed the millet system, an architecture for governing plural populations that held the Ottoman Empire together for four hundred years. Contemporaries could destroy Constantinople; only Mehmed could think of what to build in its place.
The counter-case is real and should not be softened. He was, in one summary of his character, wary, ruthless, calculating, vengeful and cruel at times — magnanimous and tolerant in religion, and merciless in everything else. He permitted a three-day sack. He wrote judicial fratricide into Ottoman law, institutionalising the murder of his own descendants for two centuries. The cannon that broke the walls was Urban's engineering, not his. And he was beaten at Belgrade, in Hungary and at Rhodes. He was a brilliant man, not an infallible one.
Legacy
Mehmed died on 3 May 1481, aged forty-nine, at the start of yet another campaign near his capital. His favourite son Mustafa had died in 1475; the throne passed to Bayezid II, whom some contemporaries suspected of a hand in his father's end, over the claim of his brother Cem.
He left a centralised, professionally administered empire spanning Anatolia and the Balkans and poised for two more centuries of expansion. History gave him the name Fatih — the Conqueror — and credits his 1453 victory with closing the Middle Ages and ending a thousand years of Christian rule in Asia Minor. The city itself kept its old name in Ottoman usage, Konstantiniyye; it would not officially become Istanbul until the empire he built had ceased to exist.
Achievements
- sultan of the Ottoman Empire (1451–1481)
- sultan of the Ottoman Empire (1444–1446)
