Who was Mehmed the Conqueror?
Mehmed II (1432 to 1481), called Fatih, the Conqueror, was the Ottoman sultan who took Constantinople on 29 May 1453, at the age of twenty-one, and made it the capital of his empire. In thirty years on the throne he added Serbia, the Peloponnese, Trebizond, Euboea and the Genoese ports of the Crimea.1
Mehmed commanded in person at the siege of Constantinople in 1453, at the siege of Belgrade in 1456, where a Hungarian relief army forced him to withdraw, and at the Battle of Valea Albă in Moldavia in 1476, where his troops took the fortified camp of Stephen the Great. Of the three, he lost only Belgrade.2
What was Mehmed II famous for?
Mehmed II is famous above all for the conquest of Constantinople in 1453, which ended the Byzantine Empire and gave the Ottomans a new capital. He is also remembered for the conquests that followed in the Balkans, Anatolia and around the Black Sea, and for bringing the Venetian painter Gentile Bellini to his court in 1479.3
The young sultan
Mehmed was born on 30 March 1432 in Edirne (Adrianople), a son of Sultan Murad II. When he was twelve, Murad stepped down in his favor, in 1444 or early 1445 (Halil İnalcık and Doukas’s editor Harry Magoulias date it differently), but took the throne back in 1446. Mehmed succeeded for good in February 1451, at nineteen, after his father’s death.4
He set out at once to take Constantinople. In 1452 he built the fortress of Rumeli Hisarı on the European shore of the Bosphorus, finished by the end of August, and its guns stopped ships bound for the city from the Black Sea. For the siege itself his gun founders cast an enormous new cannon.5
How did Mehmed II conquer Constantinople?
He cut the city off by land and sea, battered its land walls with heavy cannon for weeks and, on 22 April 1453, dragged part of his fleet overland into the Golden Horn, the harbor the defenders had closed with a chain. His army stormed the walls before dawn on Tuesday 29 May and took the city.6
How long did it take Mehmed II to conquer Constantinople?
The siege ran from 6 April to 29 May 1453: 53 days counted from the opening day, or 54 counting both ends, as İnalcık does. The land walls were defended under the Genoese commander Giovanni Giustiniani Longo, who had arrived with his ships and soldiers in late January 1453.7
On 20 April a few Christian supply ships, four in the diary of the Venetian eyewitness Nicolò Barbaro and five in Doukas, fought their way past the Ottoman fleet into the Golden Horn while Mehmed watched from the shore. Two days later he had a track leveled behind Galata and part of his fleet hauled overland into the harbor, behind the chain: on greased rollers, Barbaro says, and on wheeled cradles, according to Doukas.8
In the final assault on 29 May Giustiniani was badly wounded and left the walls with his men, and the attackers broke in. Mehmed then resettled the half-empty city with families moved in from his provinces and rebuilt its walls, making it the seat of his empire.9
Mehmed II’s greatest victories
Constantinople in 1453 was the greatest. Mehmed also annexed Trebizond, whose emperor surrendered in 1461, defeated Uzun Hasan of the Aq Qoyunlu at Otlukbeli near Erzincan in 1473, and in 1476 stormed Stephen the Great’s fortified camp at Valea Albă in Moldavia, though Stephen escaped and the Ottoman army withdrew in late August.10
Between these campaigns he finished off Serbia, took the Peloponnese from the last Byzantine despots and seized the islands of Lesbos and Euboea. His grand vizier Gedik Ahmed Pasha took the Genoese ports of the Crimea, and in the peace of 1479 Venice gave up Shkodra in Albania.11
Wallachia was a harder fight. In 1462, after Prince Vlad the Impaler raided Ottoman lands south of the Danube, Mehmed invaded the country; Doukas says Vlad’s attacks cost the sultan heavy losses before he withdrew, while İnalcık stresses that Vlad was driven out of the country.12
Mehmed was also a patron of Italian art. In 1479 he asked Venice for a portrait painter, and the Republic sent Gentile Bellini, who stayed in Istanbul until early 1481. Bellini’s portrait of the sultan, painted in 1480, belongs to the National Gallery in London.13
Did Mehmed II ever lose a battle?
Yes. He was beaten at Belgrade in 1456, where he was wounded, never took Skanderbeg’s Albanian stronghold of Krujë in his campaigns of 1466 and 1467, and in 1480 the army he sent to Rhodes under Mesih Pasha withdrew after a siege of about three months against the Knights Hospitaller.14
At Belgrade, then a Hungarian border fortress, his guns brought down stretches of the wall in July 1456, but John Hunyadi crossed the Danube with infantry and got into the town. In the fighting that followed Mehmed was wounded, in the thigh according to Kritoboulos and in the forehead according to İnalcık, and he gave up the siege.15
In Albania he faced Skanderbeg. In 1466 Mehmed judged Krujë too strong to besiege and built the fortress of Elbasan nearby instead. When Skanderbeg defeated Ballaban, the commander left to blockade Krujë, Mehmed came back in 1467 and again left without taking it.16
In 1480 his fleet landed an army under Mesih Pasha on Rhodes, held by the Knights Hospitaller. The siege began in May and ended in August with an Ottoman withdrawal. The same year another force under Gedik Ahmed Pasha took Otranto in southern Italy.17
How did Mehmed II die?
Mehmed II died on 3 May 1481, aged 49, as he set out on a new campaign. The historian Halil İnalcık attributes his death to gout and notes that the claim he was poisoned rests on one reading of a single Ottoman chronicle and is not confirmed by other sources.18
The Museum of the Order of St John notes that he may have been planning to lead a second siege of Rhodes himself. His sons Bayezid and Cem then fought over the throne, and Bayezid II won.19
See his great victory at the fall of Constantinople, his defeat at Belgrade, or meet the other great commanders of the Ottoman Empire. Then test yourself with the Ottoman battles quiz or play today’s Battle of the Day.
