At 21, Mehmed II sailed warships over land to take Constantinople
In April 1453 the Byzantine harbour of the Golden Horn was sealed by a chain. So the young Ottoman sultan Mehmed II had a road of timber laid for about a mile and hauled roughly eighty galleys over the hill around Galata into the water behind the defences. Five weeks later the thousand-year city fell.
Mehmed was born in Edirne, then the Ottoman capital, on 30 March 1432, the son of Sultan Murad II and Hüma Hatun, an enslaved woman of uncertain background. At eleven he was sent to govern Amasya with advisers and tutors, as princes customarily were, and teachers such as Akshamsaddin instilled the conviction that taking Constantinople was a religious duty. When Murad made peace with Hungary in 1444, he abdicated in favour of his twelve-year-old son. A Hungarian-led crusade soon broke the truce, Murad returned to command, and after the victory at Varna in November 1444 he resumed power, leaving Mehmed as governor of Manisa until his father's death in 1451.
Back on the throne, Mehmed built up the navy and raised the fortress of Rumelihisarı on the European shore of the Bosphorus, facing an older castle on the Asian side, which gave him command of the strait and let him charge tolls on passing ships. The siege opened in early April 1453 with an army estimated at between 80,000 and 200,000, more than seventy large guns including a giant bombard designed by Orban, and 320 vessels. The walls held at first. The overland galley transport on 22 April forced the defenders to spread thin, and the city fell on 29 May after 57 days.
Mehmed moved his capital there and styled himself caesar of Rome, arguing that whoever held the city founded as the imperial seat in 330 ruled the empire. The Orthodox Church, whose patriarch Gennadius Scholarius he installed, accepted the claim; Western Europe did not. He went on to absorb the last Byzantine outposts, the Morea and Trebizond, between 1458 and 1461, and campaigned from Serbia to Bosnia. Stories that he visited Troy to avenge the Trojans are regarded as invented flattery by the chronicler Kritovoulos.
He also rebuilt. A patron of arts and sciences, he turned the conquered city into a flourishing imperial capital. In modern Turkey he is a national hero: an Istanbul district, a mosque and a bridge over the Bosphorus carry his epithet Fatih, the Conqueror.
Source: Mehmed II
