6 – Mehmed II (1432 – 1481)
Mehmed the Conqueror is the man who finally brought the Byzantine Empire to an end. Of course, the Byzantines didn’t really have an ‘empire’ to speak of at that stage but Mehmed II succeeded where other Sultans failed; he finally found a way to capture Constantinople. Mehmed was born in Adrianople in 1432; his father was Murad II, and his mother was probably a slave. His father abdicated the throne at Edirne in 1444 which meant the 12-year-old Mehmed was the new Sultan of the Ottoman Empire.
His youth presented immediate difficulties as Venice, the Byzantines, the Pope, and the Hungarians all sought to take advantage of the fact that the Ottomans had a child on the throne. His father retook the throne in 1446, so Mehmed resumed his studies in Manisa. He became Sultan again in 1451 when his father died, and now that he was older and wiser, he desperately wanted to conquer Constantinople. Mehmed paid Hungarian gun maker Urban a fortune to create the largest cannon ever seen.
A number of disputes with his grand vizier marred the Siege of Constantinople in 1453, but on May 29, the Ottomans made the breakthrough and seized the city. Mehmed proceeded to execute his grand vizier the following day. He transformed the city into a great capital. By the 1520s, Constantinople was the largest city in Europe. Mehmed continued on his quest for conquest as he wanted to expand the old Eastern European Empire to its historical limits. He secured an important victory at the Battle of Erzincan in 1473 to secure domination over Anatolia and the Balkans.
The capture of Constantinople clearly gave him confidence because, in the next quarter of a century, he launched campaigns into Hungary, Walachia, Rhodes and Moldavia among other places. There is a suggestion that he wanted to invade Italy, but in 1481, he died from gout just 25 kilometers from his empire’s capital. Some historians believe he may have been poisoned.
As well as his many conquests, Mehmed reorganized the Ottoman government and was a freethinking individual. He invited Greek scholars and Italian humanists to his court and collected a vast array of Greek and Latin works in his library. During his reign, astronomy, mathematics, and theology reached their highest level in the Ottoman Empire.