Facing the world

The Ottoman empire was a mighty realm. At its peak, it reached from Central Europe to Egypt and the Red Sea, encompassing much of the Middle East, not least a large chunk of the Arabian peninsula. And, in the person of Mehmed II, the empire found perhaps the greatest of all its sultans.

Born in 1432, he was the empire’s seventh ruler, following its foundation in 1299 by Osman, an elusive leader of whom little is known. Although Mehmed was not responsible for all of those territorial gains, he oversaw a major expansion of the lands and peoples that fell under the sway of the Ottomans, almost trebling the size of the empire during his reign. Mehmed was most famous, however, for one specific achievement – for which he gained the epithet ‘the Conqueror’ (or Fatih in Turkish): the capture of Constantinople in 1453.

The fall of the city, which had been the subject of lavish investment by the Roman Emperor Constantine and had stood for more than a millennium as the capital of the Roman empire in the east (usually called the Byzantine empire) sent shockwaves through the Mediterranean and beyond. According to Nicholas V, the Pope at the time, Mehmed was none other than “the son of Satan, perdition and death”. Constantinople had been heavily defended, protected by walls that were thought to be all but impregnable; it had also been the largest Christian city in Europe for many centuries.

Constantinople’s fall to Mehmed and his forces was not so much a dramatic moment as a decisive turning point in history. According to the British historian Lord Acton, “modern history begins under the stress of the Ottoman conquest”. The failure of Europeans to put their differences to one side, the reluctance of Christians in the west to support their Greek-speaking Orthodox neighbours to the east, and the ineffective response to the threat posed by Mehmed and his Muslim armies set off a chain reaction that, according to Acton, ultimately helped shape the Reformation – if not the age of global empires that emerged from places such as Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands and Britain.

For scholars like Acton, the significance of the capture of Constantinople spoke of fractures in Europe, of political cowardice and military ineptitude. From a wider perspective, however, the conquest was one that spoke of tactical brilliance on Mehmed’s part and represented the importance of problem-solving and of decision-making. Furthermore, while much attention has been expended on the fate of Constantinople, in the long run, it was Mehmed’s reinvigoration of the city that was to prove compelling and to have long-lasting effects – the most significant of which was a new wave of urban development and expansion that turned Constantinople (modern-day Istanbul) not only into the capital of the Ottoman empire, but into a global city once again.

Few would have bet on Mehmed, if reports of his upbringing are to be believed. A lazy boy, he had apparently needed a stern hand to force him to study and to memorise verses of the Qu’rān, Islam’s holy book. We know that he was interested in art and was creative, for (remarkably) we have pictures he made as a young man that show no little talent. These interests persisted after he became sultan, first as a teenager after his father stood down in his favour, and then after he assumed sole rule once again in 1451. Mehmed was a prodigious patron of the arts, repeatedly seeking out artists from Venice, Florence and beyond to offer them commissions.

His interests extended to sciences too, both in terms of the pursuit of pure knowledge, but also for the benefits that it could offer. Mehmed was an avid student of ballistics and artillery, and paid considerable attention to investing in metals that cooled quickly – thereby enabling his cannons to reload more quickly than those of his opponents, and therefore offer battlefield advantage. Indeed, his use of cannon was crucial in 1453, with the massive walls of Constantinople badly damaged by repeated firing of cannonballs that weighed as much as 500kg – opening up breaches in the defences in the process. The most famous cannon, named ‘Basilica’, could fire even larger projectiles over a distance of a mile.

Mehmed’s use of these technologies were crucial in conquering the city; but they came to be hugely significant in the military campaigns in the 30 years or so that followed. These saw Ottoman expansion deep into Asia Minor, as well as ever further into South-east and Central Europe, into the Black Sea and even, at the time of his death, a foothold in Italy following the capture of Otranto in 1480. Mehmed’s expeditions were not uniformly successful, but they earned him a fearsome reputation. He was feared across Europe, where he was referred to as a “venomous dragon” at the head of “bloodthirsty hordes”, and – by the end of his reign – as “the present Terrour of the world”.

Beyond all the hyperbole, Mehmed was indeed a remarkable man. The conquest of Constantinople was accompanied by a set of policies that even critics conceded showed a surprising degree of tolerance, most notably to the Greek Orthodox Christians who were protected from persecution by laws as well as by the sultan’s personal command – with similar concessions being given to Armenian Christians, to Jews and to other minorities in the city. Some voices at the time (and today) ascribe policies such as these – which find echoes in multiple other regions and cases – to necessity rather than to enlightenment. They note that while Mehmed developed a close and respectful working relationship with the Patriarch Gennadius II, the sultan turned the magnificent church of Hagia Sophia into a mosque and, less than a decade later, tore down the Church of the Holy Apostles in order to build the massive Fatih mosque on its site.

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Yet Mehmed’s convictions seem to have been driven by genuine interest and enlightened thinking that were unusual at the time. Few other rulers in Europe were as keenly interested in expanding their learning to find out about other cultures and histories, or in building up libraries of manuscripts in multiple languages, as Mehmed did. It is true that the Ottoman sultan stood to benefit from reading texts like Herodotus and Livy, or by seeking to visit the tombs of Ajax and Achilles when he travelled to the plain of Ilium, home to the fabled city of Troy: after all, mirroring the achievements of great heroes of the past helped show off his own glories, while identifying some of the best known figures from history as his models was a useful way to project himself.

And Mehmed was keenly aware of that image. He repeatedly sought artists from Italy to paint his portrait and create sculptures of his likeness – far more than any of his peers in Europe. That may have been because he wanted to admire his own likeness; but having portraits of a great conqueror, styled in ways that could be understood by his new and potential future subjects and allies was important too.

Mehmed II was, in other words, not only a conqueror but a complex and fascinating ruler. For his enemies, he was a fearful figure whose success foretold the Apocalypse; for others, he was a patron, an intellectual and a model master, who was willing to promote on merit, to ask questions and to listen to advice. That is what we can see when we look at this talismanic portrait – a paragon of a man who commanded respect from his followers. And, of course, one of the great figures of history.

Peter Frankopan’s most recent book is The Earth Transformed (2023).