Murad II

Murad II was Ottoman sultan twice, from 1421 to 1444 and again from 1446 until his death in 1451. He consolidated the empire that his son Mehmed II would use to take Constantinople. He was born at Amasya in 1404, a son of Mehmed I, and inherited a state still recovering from the interregnum that followed Timur's destruction of the Ottoman army at Ankara in 1402. His early years were spent putting down rival claimants, several of them promoted by Byzantium. He besieged Constantinople itself in 1422 in retaliation before turning to the Balkans and Anatolia. He fought a long war for Thessalonica, which he took from the Venetians in 1430, and pressed campaigns into Serbia and Hungary against John Hunyadi, who handed him several defeats. In 1444 he agreed the Peace of Szeged with his Christian opponents and then did something almost unheard of: he abdicated in favour of his twelve-year-old son and retired to Manisa. The Hungarians broke the truce and invaded, and the boy sultan's ministers recalled him. Murad returned to destroy the crusading army at Varna in November 1444, where King Władysław III of Poland and Hungary was killed. He resumed the throne outright in 1446 and beat Hunyadi again at the second battle of Kosovo in 1448. He rebuilt the janissary corps and the devshirme levy that fed it, the system that gave the Ottoman state a standing infantry when European armies still relied on feudal levies. He was a noted patron of Ottoman poetry and of building at Edirne and Bursa. He died at Edirne in February 1451.

MyHistorian
A causal knowledge graph of history