Mehmed II (The Conqueror)
1432 – 1481
- Born
- 1432
- Died
- 1481
- House
- Ottoman Empire
Biography
Twice enthroned before the age of twenty, Mehmed II owes his epithet "the Conqueror" (Fatih) to the capture of Constantinople in 1453, accomplished when he was twenty-one. Born in Edirne in 1432, a son of Sultan Murad II and a slave concubine, he first acceded as a boy in 1444 when his father abdicated, an arrangement that proved unworkable amid crusader attack and Janissary unrest; Murad resumed the throne, and Mehmed succeeded definitively on his father's death in 1451.
He made the reduction of Constantinople, by then a depopulated Byzantine remnant surrounded by Ottoman territory, the first object of his reign. After building the fortress of Rumeli Hisari to close the Bosphorus and assembling an army equipped with large siege cannon, he took the city on 29 May 1453 after a siege of fifty-three days; the last Byzantine emperor, Constantine XI, died in the final assault. Mehmed made the city his capital, repopulated it through resettlement policies, converted Hagia Sophia to a mosque, and installed Gennadios Scholarios as Orthodox patriarch, incorporating the church into the Ottoman administrative order. He thereafter styled himself, among other titles, Kayser-i Rum, claiming the Roman imperial inheritance.
The remaining decades of his reign were spent in nearly continuous campaigning. He extinguished the Byzantine successor states of the Morea and Trebizond, subjugated Serbia and Bosnia, reduced the Genoese and most Venetian positions in the Aegean during a sixteen-year war with Venice, established suzerainty over the Crimean khanate, and fought the Akkoyunlu ruler Uzun Hasan in the east. Setbacks included the failed siege of Belgrade in 1456 and resistance in Albania under Skanderbeg. An Ottoman force took Otranto in southern Italy in 1480, but the foothold was abandoned after Mehmed's death.
As lawgiver he had a lasting institutional influence. The kanunnames issued under his name codified the organization of the palace, the ranks of the bureaucracy, and criminal and fiscal practice, supplementing religious law with dynastic statute; one much-discussed clause sanctioned royal fratricide to secure the succession. He patronized scholars and artists, including the Venetian painter Gentile Bellini, who produced his portrait. Mehmed died in 1481, possibly while opening a new campaign, and was succeeded after a contest between his sons by Bayezid II.
Updated June 2026 · How we research
Events
By 1453 the Byzantine Empire consisted of little beyond Constantinople itself and the Morea, an enclave inside Ottoman territory whose emperors had long paid the sultans tribute. Mehmed II, who had taken the Ottoman throne definitively in 1451 at age nineteen, made the city's conquest his first great objective. In 1452 he built the fortress of Rumeli Hisari on the European shore of the Bosporus, closing the straits to relief from the Black Sea, and assembled a siege train that included very large bombards cast by the Hungarian gun-founder Orban, weapons on a scale not previously used against city walls. The siege opened on 6 April 1453. The defenders, a few thousand Greeks reinforced by Italian contingents under the Genoese captain Giovanni Giustiniani, held the Theodosian land walls against weeks of bombardment and assault, while a chain barred the Golden Horn. In late April Mehmed had ships hauled overland on greased timbers into the Horn, forcing the defense to stretch along the sea walls as well. Mining and counter-mining, naval skirmishes, and failed relief hopes filled May. The final assault came before dawn on 29 May. After successive waves were repulsed, the janissaries broke through near the gate of St. Romanus, where the bombardment had done its worst; Giustiniani was carried wounded from the walls, and the defense collapsed. The emperor Constantine XI died in the fighting, his body never reliably identified. The city endured the customary sack, limited by Mehmed to a shortened term, and the sultan entered Hagia Sophia, which was converted to a mosque. The conquest ended the Roman imperial state after more than a millennium at Constantinople, gave the Ottomans an imperial capital, and earned the twenty-one-year-old sultan the title by which history knows him, Fatih, the Conqueror.
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