The Grand Turk: Sultan Mehmet II - Conqueror of Constantinople and Master of an Empire (9 page)

A plaque on the Edirne Gate records Fatih’s triumphal entry, a scene described by the seventeenth-century Turkish traveller Evliya Çelebi in his
Seyahatname
, or
Narrative of Travels
: ‘The sultan then having a pontifical turban on his head and sky-blue boots on his feet, mounted on a mule and bearing the sword of Muhammed in his hand, marched in at the head of seventy or eighty thousand Muslim heroes, crying out, “Halt not conquerors! God be praised! Ye are the conquerors of Constantinople!”’

Mehmet rode into the city along the Roman thoroughfare known as the Mese, or Middle Way, which took him from the Sixth Hill to the First Hill, the ancient acropolis of Byzantium. This brought him to Haghia Sophia, the Great Church of the Divine Wisdom. The townspeople of Constantinople had filled the church the night before, praying for divine deliverance that never came, and when the Turkish soldiers broke in that morning they enslaved those of the congregation they did not slaughter.

Before Mehmet entered the building he dismounted and fell to his knees, pouring a handful of earth over his turban in a gesture of humility, since Haghia Sophia was as revered in Islam as it was in Christianity. He then surveyed the church and ordered that it be immediately converted to Islamic worship under the name of Aya Sofya Camii Kabir, the Great Mosque of Haghia Sophia. This required the erection of a wooden minaret for the
müezzin
to give the call to prayer, and also some internal constructions, including the
mimber
, or pulpit for the
imam
who directed the Muslim prayers, and the
mihrab
, the niche that indicates the
kıble
, the direction of Mecca. This done, Mehmet attended the first noon prayer in the mosque that Friday, 1 June 1453, accompanied by his two chief clerics, Akşemsettin and Karaşemsettin. Evliya Çelebi describes the scene:

On the following Friday the faithful were summoned to prayer by the
müezzins
, who proclaimed with a loud voice this text of the Koran: ‘Verily God and his angels bless the Prophet.’ Akşemsettin and Karaşemsettin then arose, and placing themselves on each side of the sultan, supported him under his arms; the former placed his own turban on the head of the Conqueror, fixing in it the black and white feather of a crane, and putting into his hand a naked sword. Thus conducted to the
mimber
he ascended it, and cried out with a voice as loud as David’s, ‘Praise be to God, the Lord of all the world,’ on which the victorious Muslims lifted up their hands and uttered a shout of joy.

After Mehmet’s first visit to Haghia Sophia he also inspected the remains of the Great Palace of Byzantium on the Marmara slope of the First Hill. Mehmet was deeply saddened by the noble ruins, and those who were with him heard him recite a melancholy distich by the Persian poet Saadi: ‘The spider is the curtain-holder in the Palace of the Caesars/The owl hoots its night-call on the Towers of Afrasiab.’

Mehmet tried to find out what had happened to Constantine, but the emperor’s body was never found, and there were conflicting reports about the circumstances of his death. There are two variant Greek traditions about the place of Constantine’s burial, but both of these date from long after the Conquest and may be apocryphal. One is that he was laid to rest in a Greek church in the district of Vefa, on the slope of the Third Hill leading down to the Golden Horn. This church is still in the hands of the Greeks, and there are those who continue to believe that Constantine is buried there in an unmarked grave. The other tradition is that he is buried in the former church of St Theodosia, now known as Gül Camii, the Mosque of the Rose, near the shore of the Golden Horn below the Fifth Hill. The name of the mosque stems from a tradition dating back to the Conquest. The feast of St Theodosia falls on 29 May, the day that the city fell to the Turks, and the church was decorated with bouquets of roses. When the Turkish soldiers burst into the church the sight of these bouquets led them to call it the Mosque of the Rose when it was subsequently converted to a house of Islamic worship. There is an ancient tomb in the pier to the right of the nave, and it is there that some believe Constantine to be buried.

Immediately after seeing Haghia Sophia and the Great Palace Mehmet returned to his headquarters outside the Gate of St Romanus. There he divided up the booty and captives taken in the conquest of the city, first taking his own share, which included Grand Duke Notaras and his family. According to Kritoboulos, ‘Among these was Notaras himself, a man among the most able and notable in knowledge, wealth, virtue and political power. The Sultan honoured him with a personal interview, spoke soothing words to him, and filled him with hope, and not only him but the rest who were with him.’

Mehmet showed no such mercy to his Latin captives, executing those for whom sufficient ransom was not paid. According to Barbaro, who himself escaped, ‘Twenty-nine nobles of Venice who were taken prisoner by the Turks returned to Venice within the space of a year, after having paid ransoms of two thousand, or one thousand, or eight hundred ducats.’ Among those executed was the Venetian
bailo
Girolamo Minotto, who was beheaded along with one of his sons and seven of his compatriots. The Catalan consul, Péré Julia, was executed along with half a dozen of his companions. Archbishop Leonard of Chios was captured but not recognised, and was soon ransomed by a Genoese merchant from Galata. Cardinal Isidore of Kiev abandoned his robes and gave them to a beggar in exchange for his rags. The beggar was captured and executed, his head displayed as the cardinal’s, while Isidore was ransomed for a pittance by a Genoese merchant from Galata. The Turkish pretender, Prince Orhan, tried to escape by disguising himself as a Greek monk, but he was betrayed by another prisoner and beheaded.

According to Kritoboulos, Mehmet originally ‘contemplated making Notaras the commandant of the city, and putting him in charge of its repopulation’. But some of his vezirs warned him not to trust the grand duke or any of the other Greek notables whose lives he had spared. Five days after the conquest, as a test of the grand duke’s loyalty, Mehmet demanded that Notaras give up his twelve-year-old son Isaac to serve in the imperial household. Notaras refused, whereupon Mehmet had him and his son beheaded, and the following day nine other prominent Greeks were also executed.

George Sphrantzes survived the fall of the city, and after being held prisoner for eighteen months he and his wife were ransomed and made their way to Mistra, but their young son and daughter were taken into Mehmet’s household. Sphrantzes writes that his son John was executed by Mehmet in December 1453, ‘on the grounds that the child had conspired to murder him’, and that in September 1455 ‘my beautiful daughter Thamar died of an infectious disease in the sultan’s seraglio’.

Some of the younger males of the Byzantine aristocracy survived the siege and were taken by Mehmet into his household. Kritoboulos writes that Mehmet ‘appointed some of the youths of high family, whom he had chosen according to their merits, to be in his bodyguard and to be constantly near him, and others to other service as his pages’. These captives included two sons of Thomas Palaeologus, brother of the late emperor Constantine XI, who came to be known as Hass Murat Pasha and Mesih Pasha. Hass Murat was a particular favourite of Mehmet, probably his lover, and eventually was appointed
beylerbey
of Rumelia. Mesih also rose to high rank in Mehmet’s service, and during the reign of the Conqueror’s son and successor Beyazit II he thrice served as grand vezir. Other Christian converts who rose to high rank in Mehmet’s service include four who served him as grand vezir: Zaganos Pasha, Mahmut Pasha, Rum (Greek) Mehmet Pasha and Gedik Ahmet Pasha.

Kritoboulos of Imbros, Mehmet’s Greek biographer, became acquainted with the sultan soon after the Conquest. He played an important part in the peaceful surrender of his native island to Mehmet, who appointed him governor of Imbros, in the Aegean just north of the Dardanelles. Kritoboulos also arranged for the surrender of the nearby islands of Thasos and Lemnos.

George Scholarios, the leader of the anti-unionist party, was in his cell at the Pantocrator monastery on the Fourth Hill when the city fell. He was taken prisoner along with the other monks and was bought by a Turkish notable in Edirne, who treated him with due courtesy when he realised that his slave was a renowned churchman. Mehmet learned of the capture of Scholarios and had him escorted back to Istanbul, where he was treated with great honour.

The Genoese in Galata had opened their gates to the Turkish forces on the same day that Constantinople fell, and since they had surrendered without a struggle the town was not sacked. Mehmet granted a
firman
, or imperial decree, to the Genoese
podesta
, Angelo Lomellino, giving the Magnificent Community of Pera the rights to regulate their own internal affairs and to keep their homes and businesses, allowing them to retain their churches but not to build new ones, and exempting them from the
devşirme
, the levy of youths for the sultan’s service, so long as they obeyed the sultan’s laws and paid the
haraç
, or poll tax imposed on all non-Muslims. The
firman
also noted ‘that no
doghandji
or
kul
, Sultan’s men, will come and stay as guests in their houses; that the inhabitants of the fortress as well as the merchants be free of all kinds of forced labor’, Mehmet forced the Genoese to tear down some of their fortifications, as well as the Byzantine castle on the Golden Horn to which one end of the chain had been attached. The main bastion of the Genoese fortifications, the huge Tower of Galata on the hill above the town, remained standing, but Mehmet garrisoned it with janissaries and made it the headquarters of the
subaşı
and
kadı
, the Ottoman officials who had responsibility for the security of Galata and the administration of the sultan’s laws.

Lomellino wrote to his brother on 23 June 1453 describing the fall of Constantinople, and in conclusion warning of the imperial ambitions of Sultan Mehmet. Writing of Mehmet, he says, ‘In sum, he has become so insolent after the capture of Constantinople that he sees himself soon becoming master of the whole world, and swears publicly that before two years have passed he intends to reach Rome; and…unless the Christians take action quickly, he is likely to do things that will fill them with amazement.’

News of the fall of Constantinople first reached the West on 9 June 1453, when a Cretan ship that had escaped from the city docked at Candia (Herakleion), the Venetian capital of Crete. A monk from the mountains of central Crete brought the sad news back to his brethren at the monastery of Angarathos, where one of them recorded it in their archives. ‘Nothing worse than this has happened, nor will happen’ he noted, writing that he was praying to God to deliver his island from the Turks.

The news reached Venice on 29 June on a ship from Corfu, and on the following day the Senate wrote to inform Pope Nicholas V ‘of the horrible and most deplorable fall of the cities of Constantinople and Pera’. The pope, who received the news on 8 July, referred to the fall of Constantinople as the ‘shame of Christendom’. The news reached England in a papal letter, which Thomas Gascoigne, chancellor of Oxford University, recorded in his
Chronicles of London
, writing: ‘Also in this yere…was the Cite of Constantyn the noble lost by Cristen men, and wonne by the Prynce of Turkes named Mahumet.’ A Georgian chronicle recorded: ‘On the day when the Turks took Constantinople the sun was darkened.’

Three weeks after the Conquest Mehmet left Istanbul for Edirne. According to Tursun Beg, before leaving for Edirne, Mehmet announced ‘to his vezirs and his commanders and his officers that henceforth his capital was to be Istanbul’. At the same time Mehmet appointed Karıştıran Süleyman Bey as prefect of Istanbul.

Kritoboulos describes Süleyman Bey as ‘a most intelligent and useful man, possessed of the finest manners’, and he writes that Mehmet ‘put him in charge of everything, but in particular over the repopulating of the City, and instructed him to be very zealous about this matter’.

Mehmet then spent the summer in Edirne Sarayı, which he had expanded and embellished the year before the Conquest. One of Mehmet’s first orders of business at Edirne Sarayı was to deal with the grand vezir Çandarlı Halil Pasha, who had been undermining him since he first came to the throne, and whom he had suspected of being in the pay of the Byzantines. According to Archbishop Leonard of Chios, before Grand Duke Notaras was executed he told Mehmet that Halil ‘had often sent letters to the Emperor, had dissuaded him from making peace, and had persuaded him to stand firm’. This enraged Mehmet, and ‘he ordered that Halil should be bound and imprisoned and stripped of all his wealth and property; and after this he gave orders that he should be removed to Edirne and deprived of his life’. Mehmet then appointed Zaganos Pasha as grand vezir, ending the virtual monopoly that the powerful Çandarlı family had held on that office.

During the summer of 1453 a succession of foreign ambassadors came to call on Mehmet at Edirne Sarayı, including envoys from the Venetians, Genoese, Serbs, Albanians, Greeks, Egyptians, Persians, Karamanid Türkmen, and the Knights of St John from Rhodes, all of them seeking friendly relations with the young conqueror, who imposed tribute on those who recognised his suzerainty. George Branković, Despot of Serbia, was to pay him 12,000 ducats annually; Demetrius and Thomas Palaeologus, Despots of the Morea, were levied 10,000; the Genoese administration of Chios 6,000; Dorino Gattilusio, the Genoese lord of Lesbos and other northern Aegean isles, 3,000; and John IV Comnenus, the Byzantine emperor of Trebizond, 2,000. The Knights of St John refused to pay tribute, saying that they could only do so with permission from the pope. Mehmet did not press the point, for his naval forces were not strong enough for him to impose his will on Rhodes, whose capital was the most heavily fortified on the Aegean isles.