Mehmed II (the Conqueror)
Mehmed II took Constantinople at twenty-one and spent the rest of his reign making it the capital of an empire. Born in 1432, he came to the throne briefly at twelve when his father Murad II abdicated, was so plainly unready that the janissaries mutinied and Murad had to be recalled, and succeeded properly in 1451 at nineteen with something to prove. The siege began in April 1453. He built the fortress of Rumeli Hisarı on the European shore to cut the Bosphorus, commissioned the Hungarian founder Urban to cast a bombard firing a stone of some 270 kilos, and brought about eighty thousand men against perhaps seven thousand defenders. When the Golden Horn was closed by a chain, he had some seventy ships dragged overland on greased rollers behind Galata and launched inside it. The walls were breached after fifty-three days. He entered the city, stopped the plunder after a day rather than the customary three, and set about repopulating it — bringing in Greeks, Armenians, Jews and Turks by incentive and by force, restoring the water supply, and building the Grand Bazaar and Topkapı. He appointed a Greek Orthodox patriarch and made him responsible for his community, which is the origin of the millet system, and had Gentile Bellini brought from Venice to paint him. He took Serbia, the Morea, Trebizond, Bosnia and the Crimea, was checked at Belgrade in 1456 and Rhodes in 1480, and landed an army at Otranto in Italy. He died in 1481 marching east.
- Lived: 1432 CE – 1481 CE
- Nationality: Ottoman
- Roles: sultan, military_leader, head_of_state
