The Grand Turk: Sultan Mehmet II - Conqueror of Constantinople and Master of an Empire (3 page)

During the winter of 1391-2 Beyazit launched major attacks by his
akinci
, or irregular light cavalry, against Greece, Macedonia and Albania. Early in 1392 Ottoman forces captured Skopje, and most of Serbia accepted Ottoman suzerainty. Then in July 1393 Beyazit captured Turnovo, capital of the Bulgarian Empire, after which Bulgaria became an Ottoman vassal, remaining under Turkish rule for nearly 500 years.

Beyazit laid siege to Constantinople in May 1394, erecting a fortress that came to be known as Anadolu Hisarı on the Asian shore of the Bosphorus at its narrowest stretch. While the siege continued Beyazit led his army into Wallachia, capturing Nicopolis on the Danube in 1395.

King Sigismund of Hungary appealed for a crusade against the Turks, and in July 1396 an army of nearly 100,000 assembled in Buda under his leadership.

The Christian army comprised contingents from Hungary, Wallachia, Germany, Poland, Italy, France, Spain and England, while its fleet had ships contributed by Genoa, Venice and the Knights of St John on Rhodes. Sigismund led his force down the Danube to Nicopolis, where he put the Turkish-occupied fortress under siege. Two days later Beyazit arrived with an army of 200,000, and on 25 September 1396 he defeated the crusaders at Nicopolis and executed most of the Christian captives, though Sigismund managed to escape.

Beyazit then renewed his siege of Constantinople, where the Greeks had been reinforced by 1,200 troops sent by Charles VI of France under Marshal Boucicault, a survivor of the Battle of Nicopolis. The marshal realised that his force was far too small, and so he persuaded the emperor Manuel II to go with him to France so that he could present his case to King Charles. Manuel went on to England, where on 21 December 1400 he was escorted into London by King Henry IV, though he received nothing but pity, returning to Constantinople empty-handed early in 1403.

But by then the situation had completely changed, for the previous spring Beyazit had lifted his siege of the city and rushed his forces back to Anatolia, which had been invaded by a Mongol horde led by Tamerlane. The two armies collided on 28 July 1402 near Ankara, where the Mongols routed the Turks, many of whom deserted at the outset of the battle. Beyazit himself was taken prisoner, and soon afterwards he died in captivity, tradition holding that he had been penned up in a cage by Tamerlane.

Five of Beyazit’s sons - Süleyman, Mustafa, Musa, Isa and Mehmet - also fought in the battle. Mustafa and Musa were captured by Tamerlane, while the other three escaped. Musa was eventually freed by Tamerlane, while Mustafa apparently died in captivity, though a pretender known as Düzme (False) Mustafa later appeared to claim the throne. Beyazit’s youngest son, Yusuf, escaped to Constantinople, where he converted to Christianity before he died of the plague in 1417.

The Ottoman state was almost destroyed by the catastrophe at Ankara. After his victory Tamerlane reinstated the emirs of the Anatolian
beyliks
that had fallen to the Ottomans, while in the Balkans the Christian rulers who had been Beyazit’s vassals regained their independence. The next eleven years were a period of chaos, as Beyazit’s surviving sons fought one another in a war of succession, at the same time doing battle with their Turkish and Christian opponents. The struggle was finally won by Mehmet, who on 5 July 1413 defeated and killed his brother Musa at a battle in Bulgaria, their brothers Süleyman and Isa having died earlier in the war of succession.

Mehmet ruled for eight years, virtually all of which he spent in war, striving to re-establish Ottoman rule in Anatolia and the Balkans. His last campaign was a raid across the Danube into Wallachia in 1421, shortly after which he died following a fall from his horse. He was succeeded by his son Murat II, who although only seventeen was already a seasoned warrior, having fought in at least two battles during his father’s war of succession.

At the outset of Murat’s reign he had to fight two wars of succession, first against the pretender Düzme Mustafa and then against his own younger brother, also named Mustafa, both of whom he defeated and killed. Both of the pretenders had been supported by the emperor Manuel II, and so after Murat put them down he sought to take his revenge on the emperor, putting Constantinople under siege on 20 June 1422. But the Byzantine capital was too strongly fortified for him to conquer, and at the end of the summer he decided to abandon the siege and withdraw.

Manuel suffered a critical stroke during the siege, whereupon his son John was made regent. Manuel died on 21 July 1425, and on that same day his son succeeded him as John VIII.

Murat’s two wars of succession had cost him territory in both Anatolia and Europe, and now he set out to recover his losses. In 1423 he launched a campaign against the Isfendiyarid emir of Sinop on the Black Sea, forcing him to return the territory he had taken and to resume his status as an Ottoman vassal.

Immediately afterwards, Murat returned to Europe and marched against the ruler of Wallachia, Vlad II Dracul, and he too was made to give up the land he had seized and to become a vassal of the sultan. Vlad was later forced to give up two of his sons to Murat as hostages. The older of the two, who eventually succeeded his father as Vlad III, came to be known as Tepeş, or the Impaler, the historical prototype of Dracula; his younger brother was Radu cel Frumos, or the Handsome. Both of them remained hostages until after the death of their father, after which they were set up in turn as Ottoman puppets in Wallachia.

The Albanian ruler John Castrioti was also forced to become an Ottoman vassal, and in 1423 he sent his son as a hostage to Edirne, where he nominally converted to Islam, taking the name Iskender. He became one of Murat’s favourites, accompanying him on campaigns in both Europe and Asia as a high-ranking Ottoman commander. Later, after he had returned to his native land, he came to be known as Skanderbeg, becoming Albania’s greatest national hero in its struggle against Ottoman domination.

Murat then set out to regain Thessalonica, which his uncle Süleyman had ceded in 1403 to the Byzantines, who two decades later gave the city over to the Venetians since they were unable to defend it themselves. When Murat besieged Thessalonica the Venetians made an alliance with the Aydınıd emir Cüneyd, supporting him in his effort to regain the territory his
beylik
had lost to the Ottomans. Murat sent his commander Hamza against Cüneyd, who in April 1425 was defeated and killed, bringing the Aydınıd
beylik
to an end. Hamza went on to invade the Menteşe
beylik
, and that same year it too was conquered and terminated. During the next five years Murat further enlarged his territory in Anatolia, taking the Canik region along the Black Sea coast and annexing the Germiyan
beylik
, as well as putting down a number of rebellious Türkmen tribes.

Murat then turned his attention back to Thessalonica, leading his forces in a final attack that brought about the city’s surrender on 29 March 1430, after which 7,000 of its inhabitants were carried off into slavery. The fall of Thessalonica led John VIII to seek help from the West, and he proposed to Pope Martin V that a council be called to reconcile the Greek and Latin Churches, which had been estranged for four centuries. This gave rise to the Council of Ferrara-Florence, in which the Byzantine delegation was headed by John VIII and the Patriarch of Constantinople, Joseph II. The union of the Churches was finally agreed upon on 5 July 1439, uniting the Greek and Latin Churches under the aegis of the Pope, Eugenius IV, who then called for a crusade to save Constantinople from the Turks. But the union was very unpopular among the people and clergy of Constantinople, and so the Byzantine Empire was deeply divided as it faced a showdown with its mortal enemy.

Between campaigns Murat usually returned to his capital at Edirne, though he also spent time in the old capital of Bursa, where in the years 1424-6 he erected an imperial mosque complex called the Muradiye. A decade later he built a mosque of the same name in his new capital as well as a palace called Edirne Sarayı, where he housed his harem. The palace comprised a number of pavilions on an island in the Tunca, one of two rivers that nearly encircle the city.

According to Islamic law, the sultan was allowed four wives in his harem, although he could have as many concubines as he pleased. Murat’s first son, Ahmet, was born to one of his concubines in 1420, the year before Murat became sultan. His second son, Alaeddin Ali, was born in 1430 to Murat’s favourite wife, Hadice Hatun (Lady), a Türkmen princess. His third son, the future Mehmet II, was born in Edirne Sarayı on 30 March 1432 to a concubine named Hüma Hatun.

Nothing is known of Hüma Hatun’s origins, other than the testimony of contemporary sources that she was a slave girl, which means that she would not have been Turkish, for by law Muslims could not be enslaved. The only mention of her is in the fragmentary remains of the deed of a
vakιf
, or pious foundation, where she is identified simply as Hatun bint Abdullah, ‘the Lady, daughter of Abdullah’. Abdullah was a name often given as the father of those who had converted to Islam, another indication of her non-Turkish origin.

It is recorded that Mehmet had a
sütanne
, or wet nurse, a Turkish woman named Daye Hatun, to whom he was particularly devoted, as evidenced by the fact that she became very wealthy during his reign and endowed several mosques. She outlived Mehmet by five years, dying in Istanbul on 14 February 1486.

Turkish raids in Serbia forced the despot of that nation, George Branković, to come to terms with the Ottomans in 1428, and then in 1433 he agreed to give his daughter Mara as a bride to Murat. Doukas, the contemporary Greek historian, writes of how Branković ‘offered his daughter to Murat in marriage, with the greater part of Serbia, presumably as a dowry, and all he asked for in return was a pact sealed by sacred oaths’. The marriage took place in September 1435, when Mara, who would have been about sixteen, was escorted to Edirne by Murat’s vezir Saruca Pasha. Doukas, referring to Hadice Hatun, says Murat ‘longed more for this new bride who was beautiful in both mind and soul’. But Mara never bore Murat any children, and there is reason to believe that their marriage, which was arranged primarily for political purposes, was never consummated.

The Turkish raids on Serbia continued nonetheless, and in August 1439 the great fortress city of Smedervo, Branković’s capital, fell to the Ottomans after a three-month siege. Branković then fled to Hungary, where he had vast estates, and within two years Serbia was annexed by the Ottomans and disappeared as a state until it gained its freedom from Ottoman rule in the nineteenth century.

During the summer of 1439 Murat’s army captured Ioannina in north-western Greece before invading Albania, while his navy raided the Ionian Islands, the Greek archipelago between Greece and Italy. During the next three years Murat conquered much of Albania, and in the following two years he mounted campaigns in Serbia and Bosnia as a prelude to an invasion of Hungary, which he began in 1438. He put Belgrade under siege in April 1440, according to the Turkish chronicler Aşıkpaşazade, who notes that the sultan ‘knew that Belgrade was the gateway to Hungary and aimed to open that gate’. But, as Aşıkpaşazade adds, ‘many men and lords from the Muslim army were killed’, and Murat was forced to lift the siege in October that year.

The following year Murat mounted an expedition into Transylvania under the commander Mezid Bey. But the invasion was stopped by an army led by John Hunyadi, the voyvoda, or prince, of Transylvania, who killed Mezid and routed his forces. Murat sought vengeance and sent another army against Hunyadi, who defeated the Turkish force in Wallachia in September 1442.

Hunyadi’s victories encouraged the Christian rulers of Europe to form an anti-Ottoman alliance. On 1 January 1443 Pope Eugenius IV called for a crusade against the Turks, in which the rulers of Burgundy, Poland, Hungary, Wallachia and Venice agreed to join forces with the papacy against Murat, who that winter put down a revolt in central Anatolia by the Karamanid emir Ibrahim Bey.

Meanwhile, Murat’s youngest son, Prince Mehmet, saw his father only occasionally. Mehmet’s first three years were spent in the harem of Edirne Sarayı with Hüma Hatun and Daye Hatun. He was then sent with his mother to Amasya, near the Black Sea coast of Anatolia, where his half-brother Ahmet was serving as provincial governor. Ahmet died suddenly in 1437 and Mehmet succeeded him as governor, though he was scarcely five years old. At the same time, his half-brother Alaeddin Ali, who was then seven, was appointed provincial governor at Manisa, near the Aegean coast of Anatolia. Mehmet and Alaeddin Ali governed only nominally, for they were under the strict control of advisers appointed by Murat from among his most trusted officers. The two young princes were recalled to Edirne in 1439, when Murat had them circumcised, followed by a festival that lasted for several days. Their assignments were then interchanged, with Alaeddin Ali being sent as governor to Amasya and Mehmet to Manisa.

Murat appointed a number of tutors to educate Mehmet, the first of them being Ilyas Efendi, a Serbian prisoner of war who had converted to Islam and became a
molla
, or teacher of theology. But Mehmet was not interested in his lessons and was so headstrong that he fiercely resisted Ilyas Efendi’s attempts to train him. Murat dismissed Ilyas Efendi and appointed a succession of other teachers, but none of them could control the obstreperous young prince. Finally Murat hired Molla Ahmet Gurani, who taught at the
medrese
, or theological school, at the Muradiye in Bursa, giving him a switch with which to punish Mehmet if the prince was not obedient. When Gurani met Mehmet, switch in hand, he said: ‘Your father has sent me to instruct you, but also to chastise you in case you should not obey me.’ When Mehmet laughed in his face Gurani thrashed him with the switch, and thereafter the prince was overawed by his tutor and payed strict attention during his lessons, or so says the chronicler Taşköprüzade.

Eventually Mehmet studied foreign languages, philosophy and geography as well as Islamic, Latin and Greek history and literature, his foreign tutors supposedly including the renowned Italian humanist Cyriacus of Ancona. Cyriacus was at the Ottoman court in Edirne in the mid- to late 1440s, but although he was in contact with Mehmet there is no evidence that he served as his tutor, or, as also alleged, his secretary. Mehmet was reputed to have known, apart from Turkish, some five languages, and a contemporary, Giacomo da Langusco, credits him with being fluent in Turkish, Greek and Slavic. Julian Raby, in his study of the sultan’s scriptorium, writes that ‘Mehmet must certainly have had an initial familiarity with Greek because he copied out both the Greek and the Arabic alphabets in one of his schoolbooks, preserved in the Topkapı, but knowledge of foreign languages is a matter of degree…’.