The Grand Turk: Sultan Mehmet II - Conqueror of Constantinople and Master of an Empire (17 page)

During the summer of 1465 Mehmet enlisted the aid of the Greek scholar George Amiroutzes of Trebizond, a cousin of the grand vezir Mahmut Pasha whom the sultan had brought to Istanbul along with the emperor David Comnenus and his family. Kritoboulos, who calls him Amiroukis, writes of ‘how the Sultan received him and honored him’:

Among the companions of the ruler of Trebizond was a man named George Amiroukis, a great philosopher, learned in the studies of physics and dogmatics and mathematics and geometry and the analogy of numbers, and also in the philosophy of the Peripatetics and Stoics. He was also full of encyclopedic knowledge, and was an orator and poet as well. The Sultan learned about this man and sent for him. On getting acquainted with his training and wisdom, through contact and conversation, he admired him more than anyone else. He gave him a suitable position in his court and honored him with frequent audiences and conversations, questioning him on the teachings of the ancients and philosophical problems and their discussion and solution. For the Sultan himself was one of the most acute philosophers.

Kritoboulus tells of how Amiroutzes created a huge wall map for Mehmet that combined all the individual maps in Ptolemy’s
Geographia
, so that the sultan could see at a glance how his empire was expanding through the
oecumenos
.

So he called for the philosopher George [Amiroutzes], and put before him the burden of this plan, with the promise of royal reward and honor. And this man gladly agreed to do the work, and carried out with enthusiasm the proposals and command of the Sultan. He took the book in hand with joy, and read it and studied it all summer. By considerable investigation and by analyzing its wisdom, he wrote out most satisfactorily and skillfully the whole story of the inhabited earth in one representation as a connected whole - of the land and sea, the rivers, harbors, islands, mountains, cities and all, in plain language, giving in this the rules as to measurements of distance and all other essential things. He instructed the Sultan in the method most necessary and suitable for students and those fond of investigation and what is useful. He also put down on the chart the names of the countries and places and cities, writing them in Arabic, using as an interpreter his son who was expert in the languages of the Arabs and the Greeks. The Sultan was much delighted with this work, and admired the wisdom and ingenuity of Ptolemy, and still more that of the man who had so well exhibited this to him. He rewarded him in many ways and with many honors. He also ordered him to issue the entire book in Arabic, and promised him large pay and gifts for this work.

The son of George Amiroutzes referred to by Kritoboulos is Mehmet Bey, who, along with his brother Skender Bey, had converted to Islam. Mehmet Bey was proficient in Turkish and Arabic, and the Conqueror is known to have commissioned him to do translations of other Greek manuscripts, both religious and secular, including the Bible, but no copy remains of the latter work, if in fact it was translated.

Sultan Mehmet was also interested in Ptolemy’s
Almagest
, the great work in astronomy that served as the basis for the further development of this science in the Muslim world, after its translation into Arabic, and in western Europe in Latin translation. Here Mehmet was assisted by another Greek scholar, George Trapezuntios, a Cretan whose family had come from Trebizond. Trapezuntios had been working in Rome under the patronage of Cardinal Bessarion, who had commissioned him to translate Ptolemy’s
Almagest
from Greek into Latin. Trapezuntios came from Crete to Istanbul in November 1465, and apparently remained there until he returned to Rome on 18 March 1466.

When Trapezuntios returned to Rome he was arrested and imprisoned for four months in Castel Sant’Angelo, until he was finally released by Pope Paul II, his former pupil in grammar and the humanities. He had been arrested on suspicion of having informed the sultan on ‘developments in the West and the dissatisfaction of its people’, and of having ‘encouraged the Grand Turk to hasten his invasion of Italy’. The evidence for this accusation came from two letters written by Trapezuntios to Mehmet, in which he praised the sultan as being a far greater ruler than King Cyrus of Persia, Alexander the Great or Julius Caesar. At the end of the first letter, dated from Galata on 25 February 1466, he says that he has completed a Latin translation of the
Almagest
and dedicated it to the sultan. In the second letter, which he seems to have sent soon after his return to Rome, he speaks of his good fortune in having met Sultan Mehmet, whom he said he had praised to the Pope and the College of Cardinals as a just and intelligent ruler who was highly knowledgable in Aristotelian philosophy and all the sciences. He went on to say that Mehmet was the one man who, with God’s help, could lead all the people on earth into one faith and create a unified empire of all humanity. He had already written about this unified religion in a treatise entitled
On the Truth of the Christian Faith
, in which he tried to show that there was no fundamental difference between Christianity and Islam. He hoped to have this treatise translated into Turkish and submitted to Muslim scholars; he thought that Sultan Mehmet could easily reconcile the two religions and could thus rule over all the nations that professed either faith. As he wrote to Sultan Mehmet:

Let no one doubt you are by right the emperor of the Romans. For he is the emperor who by right possesses the seat of the empire, but the seat of the Roman Empire is in Constantinople: thus he who by right possesses this city is the emperor. But it is not from men but from God that you, thanks to your sword, have received this throne. Consequently, you are the legitimate emperor of the Romans… And he who is and remains emperor of the Romans is also emperor of the entire earth.

Mehmet’s interest in astronomy led him to contact the greatest Muslim astronomer of the age, Ali Kuşci, who had been chief astronomer at the observatory that had been founded in Samarkand by the Timurid khan Ulu Beg, grandson of Tamerlane. Ali was born in Samarkand, taking the name Kuşci, or the Birdman, since in his youth he had been Ulu Beg’s falconer. He subsequently became Ulu Beg’s ambassador to China. After becoming chief astronomer he completed Ulu Beg’s astronomical tables, the famous
Zij-i Sultaniye
, which were first published in 1438. These tables were probably first written in Persian and soon afterwards translated into Arabic and Turkish, remaining in use in the Muslim world up until the nineteenth century.

Ali left Samarkand soon after Ulu Beg was assassinated in 1449. He then went to Tabriz and was welcomed to the court of Uzun Hasan, who appointed him chief astrologer. Uzun Hasan sent him on an embassy to Mehmet II, who offered him the post of chief astronomer at his court. Ali accepted the offer and said that he would return to Istanbul after competing his mission in Tabriz.

Ali left Tabriz for Istanbul early in 1472, accompanied by an entourage said to number 200, some of them courtiers from Topkapı Sarayı sent to escort him by Sultan Mehmet, who had provided generous funds for his journey. When Ali arrived in Istanbul he presented the sultan with a book of 194 pages entitled
Muhammadiye
, a work on mathematics that he had written on the journey. The following year he presented Mehmet with a book of 147 pages on astronomy entitled
Risala al-Fathiya
, the
Book of Conquest
. The originals of both books, bound together, are still preserved in the library of Haghia Sophia.

Domenico Hierosolimitano, a Jewish convert to Christianity who had served as personal physician to Sultan Murat III in Topkapı Sarayı, wrote a description of Topkapı Sarayı in which he claimed that Mehmet II had collected ancient Greek and Byzantine works that included 120 manuscripts from the library of Constantine the Great. A study of the Conqueror’s Greek scriptorium by Julian Raby in 1983 revealed only fourteen manuscripts that could be shown, by their watermarks, to have been acquired during his reign. Two more manuscripts in Western libraries, one in Paris and the other in the Vatican, were also shown by Raby to have been taken from the Conqueror’s scriptorium.

The most notable work identified by Raby in the Conqueror’s scriptorium was the
History of Mehmed the Conqueror
by Kritoboulos of Imbros, which was translated into English by Charles T. Riggs and published in 1954. This work, which covers the Conqueror’s life from his accession in 1451 until the end of 1467, begins with a dedicatory epistle to the sultan: ‘To the Supreme Emperor, King of Kings, the fortunate, the victor, the winner of trophies, the triumphant, the invincible, Lord of land and sea, by the will of God, Kritoboulos the islander, servant of thy servants.’

Western contemporaries of Mehmet, including those who, such as Niccolo Sagundino, met with him soon after the conquest of Constantinople, report on his interest in ancient history, particularly the story of Alexander the Great. Since Kritoboulos compares Mehmet to Alexander the Great one might expect that the Conqueror possessed a biography of Alexander. Scholars had presumed that Mehmet knew the history of Alexander through the Islamic version of his romance, either that of Nizami in Persian or Ahmedi in Turkish. But Raby’s study of Mehmet’s scriptorium turned up a copy of Arrian’s
Anabasis
, the standard Greek biography of Alexander, which bore the same watermarks and was written by the same scribe as the Kritoboulos manuscript, and thus presumably would have prepared for the Conqueror.

Another Greek manuscript found in Mehmet’s scriptorium is an anonymous work, the
Deigesis
, known in English as
On the Antiquities of Constantinople and the Church of Haghia Sophia
, dated 1474 and written by the scribe Michael Aichmalotes. This cannot be directly associated with the Conqueror, but a source known as the
Anonymous Chronicles
records that Mehmet questioned ‘Rum and Frankish’ scholars on the history of Constantinople and Haghia Sophia. Also, both Persian and Turkish versions of a work entitled
Tarihi Ayasofya
(
History of Haghia Sophia
) were found in the Conqueror’s scriptorium, indicating that Mehmet was interested in the history of the Great Church and the city he had conquered.

The Paris manuscript that Raby traced to Mehmet’s scriptorium is a copy of Homer’s
Iliad
made by John Dokeianos, who is known as a scholar of the late Byzantine period. Dokeianos is believed to have acted as tutor to Princess Helen, daughter of Demetrius Palaeologus, the Despot of the Morea. When Demetrius surrendered to the Conqueror in 1460 he was given an appanage in Edirne, as may be recalled, and Helen entered Mehmet’s harem. Dokeianos seems to have accompanied Demetrius and Helen to the Ottoman court, and was probably employed by Mehmet as a scribe. His copy of the
Iliad
is dated by circumstantial evidence to 1463. Mehmet is known to have read the
Iliad
, as evidenced by the section in his biography where Kritoboulos writes: ‘How the Sultan examined the tombs of the heroes, as he passed through Troy, and how he praised and congratulated them.’ According to Kritoboulus, Mehmet visited Troy in 1462, the year before Dokeianos completed his copy of the
Iliad
, which can hardly be a coincidence.

Raby points out that Mehmet’s knowledge of ancient Greek history ‘must have been colored by the long-standing Western conceit, which had gained currency as early as the seventh century, that made the Turks, like the Franks, the descendants of the Trojans’. In the case of the former, this belief stemmed from the confusion between the
Teucri
, identified by Homer as the ancestors of the Trojans, and the
Turci
, or Turks. According to the Greek historian Laonicus Chalkokondylas, the fall of Constantinople was seen in Rome as revenge for the fall of Troy, and Kritoboulos has Sultan Mehmet taking the same view in his visit to Troy in 1462.

The Vatican manuscript from Mehmet’s scriptorium is a Greek translation from Latin by Dimitrius Kydones of the
Summa Contra Gentiles
by St Thomas Aquinas. This manuscript must have been prepared before 1475, for it is included in the inventory of the Vatican library for that year. Mehmet’s possession of a work by Thomas Aquinas, the leading Christian interpreter of Aristotle, supports the statement by Kritoboulos that the Conqueror ‘held philosophical discussions’ with scholars in his court ‘about the principles of philosophy, particularly those of the Peripatetics [i.e. Aristotelians] and the Stoics’.

Mehmet’s interest in geography, indicated by the map that George Amiroutzes created for him from Ptolemy’s
Geographia
, is also evidenced by another work that Raby found in the Conqueror’s scriptorium. This is a Greek translation of the
Liber Insularum Archipelagi
(
The Islands of the Archipelago
), published in 1420 by the Florentine geographer Cristoforo Buondelmonti. Buondelmonti’s book contains charts of the eastern Mediterranean and its hinterland, including the earliest extant map of Constantinople and the only one from before Mehmet’s conquest of the city in 1453. Later editions of his book exist up to 1480, with the map of Constantinople in the latest showing some of the earliest Ottoman buildings in the city, including the Mosque of the Conqueror and Topkapı Sarayı.

Other Greek manuscripts in the Conqueror’s scriptorium include Hesiod’s
Theogony
; Oppian’s
Halieutika
;
Miscellany
by Planudes, including a
Life of Aesop
and the
Fables of Aesop
,
The Prophecies of Hippocrates Discovered in his Grave
, and
The Art of the Lyre
; Antonios Monachos,
Bible Lexicon
, attributed to Cyril of Alexander; an anonymous work
On Precious Stones and the Properties of Animals
; Manuel Moschopoulos,
Grammar
; an anonymous work on
Grammar
,
Declension and Conjugation of Verbs
; Pindar’s
Olympiaka
; Eudemos Rhetor,
Lexicon
; and an anonymous work
On the Testament of Solomon
.