The Grand Turk: Sultan Mehmet II - Conqueror of Constantinople and Master of an Empire (4 page)

Early in June 1443 Alaeddin Ali was murdered by his adviser Kara Hızır Pasha, who also killed the prince’s two infant sons. The murderer was executed without revealing the motive for his crime, which remains a mystery. One might suspect that the murders were committed to clear the way for Mehmet, who thus became Murat’s heir presumptive, though no evidence has ever been found to support this suspicion. Murat was heartbroken, for Alaeddin Ali was his favourite son, and after prolonged mourning he buried the prince in the tomb that he had prepared for himself in the Muradiye at Bursa.

Immediately afterwards, Murat recalled Mehmet from Manisa to join him in Edirne. Mehmet arrived at a critical moment, for Murat had just learned that a Christian army had crossed the Danube and was headed south-eastward through Ottoman territory, led by John Hunyadi and Ladislas, King of Poland and Hungary. Murat mobilised his army and in December 1443 he set out to do battle with the crusaders, leaving Mehmet behind with the grand vezir Halil Çandarlı, who was to await the arrival of troops from Anatolia. The crusaders defeated the Ottomans twice in the winter of 1443-4 between Sofia and Niš, with both sides suffering heavy losses, after which Hunyadi and Ladislas led their troops back to Buda and Murat returned to Edirne.

Cyriacus of Ancona, who accompanied a Genoese trade mission to Edirne, reports that on 22 May 1444 he and his associates had an audience with the sultan. Murat received them in Edirne Sarayı, sitting cross-legged on a carpet ‘in regal splendor of a barbaric kind’, while his son Prince Mehmet stood behind him with his father’s vezirs.

Meanwhile, John Castrioti died, some time between 1437 and 1440, after which Murat seized all his lands in Albania, including the great fortress of Kruje, which was taken by the Ottoman governor Hasan Bey. Castrioti’s son George, now known as Skanderbeg, continued to serve Sultan Murat, despite pleas from his family that he return to reclaim his father’s dominion in Albania. Murat sent Skanderbeg with an army to join the Ottoman forces at Niš, where he deserted along with some 300 Albanian horsemen. Skanderbeg and his followers then rode to Kruje, where he used a forged document from the sultan, supposedly giving him command of the garrison, and tricked Hasan Bey to hand over the fortress to him. He then proclaimed that he had reconverted to Christianity and began a campaign to regain all his family lands that had been taken by the Ottomans. After regaining the Castrioti possessions, in March 1444 he convened a congress at Alessio, a town then held by the Venetians, where all the Albanian chieftains swore allegiance to him in the cause of freeing Albania from the Turks. Murat sent an army to put down the rebellion, but Skanderbeg and his allies defeated them in June 1444.

Murat, faced with a new revolt by the Karamanid emir Ibrahim Bey, decided to negotiate a peace with Ladislas, and on 12 June 1444 a ten-year truce was signed at Edirne by the sultan and envoys of the king, who himself signed the treaty at Szeged in Hungary around 1 August of that same year. That left Murat free to deal with the revolt in Anatolia, and he appointed Prince Mehmet to serve as regent in his absence under the guidance of the grand vezir Çandarlı Halil Pasha. Murat then led his janissaries into Anatolia to deal with Ibrahim Bey, who immediately surrendered and agreed to resume his status as the sultan’s vassal.

Meanwhile, Prince Mehmet had to deal with a serious disturbance in Edirne while serving as his father’s regent. This involved a Bektaşi dervish from Persia, whose heretical sermons attracted a numerous following in Edirne. Mehmet found the dervish’s ideas interesting and protected him and his disciples from the religious authorities. This outraged the Mufti Fahrettin, chief cleric in the Ottoman court, and Mehmet was forced to abandon the dervish, who was burned at the stake by a mob of fundamentalists.

After Ibrahim’s surrender Murat did not return directly to Edirne, but instead he rode to Bursa, visiting the royal tomb at the Muradiye where his son Alaeddin Ali was buried. Soon afterwards, around 1 September 1444, Murat stunned his court by announcing that he was abdicating in favour of Prince Mehmet, saying: ‘I have given my all - my crown, my throne - to my son, whom you should recognise as sultan.’

Murat’s vezirs tried to dissuade him, particularly Halil Pasha, who had seen how immature Mehmet was when the young prince served as his father’s regent. But Murat was adamant, and, accompanied by Ishak Pasha and Hamza Bey, he retired to Manisa to spend his time in study and contemplation, leaving Mehmet to govern under the direction of Halil Pasha.

Such was the first accession of Mehmet II, the seventh successive ruler of the House of Osman.

2

The Boy Sultan

When Mehmet II succeeded to the throne he was only twelve and one-half years old, the youngest ruler of the House of Osman up to that time. Halil Pasha and the other vezirs were very concerned, for they felt that Mehmet was too young and inexperienced to deal with the threats facing the Ottoman state, particularly the crusade that Pope Eugenius IV had called for the previous year.

When his father Murat abdicated in favour of Mehmet he had assumed that King Ladislas would honour the peace treaty they had agreed upon in the summer of 1444. But it seems that the king had no intention of keeping the peace, for he had already written to Cardinal Cesarini in Rome telling him that he would ‘march with a powerful army against the perfidious Turks this very summer’. Then on 4 August 1444, a few days after he had signed the peace treaty at Szeged, Ladislas took a vow before his assembled nobles to make war upon the Turks and drive them from Europe within the year, ‘notwithstanding any treaties or negotiations whatsoever…’.

Three weeks after Mehmet came to the throne the crusader army crossed the Danube and began marching eastward along the right bank of the river through Ottoman territory, led by King Ladislas, John Hunyadi and Cardinal Cesarini. The crusader forces also included naval contingents from Burgundy, Venice and the papacy, whose ships patrolled the Danube, the Black Sea and the straits between Europe and Asia.

When news of the invasion reached Edirne Mehmet sent a courier to inform Murat at his place of retirement in Manisa. Murat immediately mustered the troops of the Anatolian army, and in late October he had them ferried across the Bosphorus and led them to Edirne. Leaving Mehmet and Halil Pasha to guard Edirne, Murat then led his army north to Yanbol, where reinforcements under Sihabeddin Pasha joined him, bringing the number of men in his army up to some 60,000, almost three times the size of the Christian force.

Murat caught up with the crusaders on 10 November 1444 near Varna on the Black Sea. During the first stage of the battle the crusaders defeated both wings of the Ottoman army, but Murat led his janissaries in a counter-attack that killed Ladislas. This turned the tide of battle, for when the crusader army learned that the king had died they turned and ‘fled like sheep before a wolf’, according to an anonymous Turkish chronicler. The chronicler goes on to say that on the following day the crusaders surrendered to the Turks, who ‘after making prisoner all their fresh-faced youths, put all the older ones to the sword, so that these proud infidels suffered what they themselves had planned against the community of Muhammed’. John Hunyadi was one of the few crusader leaders to escape, and the following year he was elected regent of Hungary.

After his victory Murat led his army back to Edirne. Soon afterwards he resumed his retirement in Manisa, leaving Mehmet to continue his rule as sultan in Edirne under the tutelage of the grand vezir Halil Pasha.

The Venetians thought to take advantage of Mehmet’s youth by negotiating a peace treaty with him, which was signed at Edirne on 23 February 1446. A copy of the treaty is still preserved in the Venetian State Archives, the only extant document from Mehmet’s first reign.

Meanwhile, Halil Pasha had been sending a series of messages to Murat, imploring him to resume his rule as sultan, saying that Mehmet was too young and immature to rule. One instance of Mehmet’s immaturity cited by Halil Pasha was Mehmet’s impetuous plan to attack Constantinople, from which he was dissuaded by the grand vezir. Another concerned the janissaries, who had in April 1446 demanded an increase in pay. When this was refused they rioted and burned down the Edirne
bedesten
, or covered market, whereupon Mehmet gave in to their demands, setting a dangerous precedent that would trouble the Ottoman sultanate for centuries to come.

After the latter incident Halil Pasha persuaded Mehmet to give up the throne and recall his father. Murat reluctantly agreed to return, and at the beginning of September 1446 he came back to Edirne and resumed his rule as sultan, while Mehmet withdrew to Manisa.

Meanwhile, Christian forces had made gains in southern Greece and Albania, and as soon as Murat resumed his reign he launched counterattacks in both places. His opponent in southern Greece was the Despot of the Morea (Peloponnesos), Constantine Dragases, younger brother of the Byzantine emperor John VIII Palaeologus. During the winter of 1446-7 Murat regained the territory that Constantine had taken. Then the following year he launched a campaign against Skanderbeg, the Albanian leader, who was forced to abandon the Ottoman lands he had retaken and flee into the mountains, where for the next two decades he continued to fight against the Turks.

Pope Nicholas V was elected to the papacy on 6 March 1447, succeeding Eugenius IV, and on 8 March of the following year, spurred on by John Hunyadi, he called for another crusade against the Turks. Hunyadi, this time with only the Vlachs and a few Germans and Czechs as allies, crossed the Danube in September 1448 into Serbia, while Murat set out from Sofia to stop him with a much larger army. The two armies met at Kosovo Polje, the ‘Field of Blackbirds’, where the Serbs had gone down fighting against the Turks in 1389. The outcome of the second Battle of Kosovo, fought from 17 to 20 October 1448, was the same as that of the first, with the Ottomans routing the Christians. Mehmet had his baptism of fire commanding the right wing of his father’s army in the battle, which ended when Hunyadi abandoned his defeated troops and fled the field, living to fight on against the Turks for another eight years.

The Byzantine emperor John VIII Palaeologus died on 31 October 1448. John was survived by his brothers Constantine, Demetrius and Thomas, as well as by his mother, the Empress Helena Dragas. Constantine, the eldest, used the surname Dragases, the Greek form of his mother’s maiden name. At the time of John’s death Constantine and his brother Thomas were in Mistra, capital of the Despotate of the Morea, while Demetrius was in Selembria, just a day’s ride from Constantinople. As soon as he received news of his brother’s death Demetrius rushed back to Constantinople to make his claim for the throne. But Helena was determined that Constantine should succeed, and so she stopped Demetrius from taking control and asserted her right to serve as regent in the interim. She then sent a courier to Mistra to inform Constantine that his brother John had died and that he was the rightful successor. When Constantine received the news his supporters acclaimed him as emperor, and they arranged for his coronation to be carried out at once. And so, on 6 January 1449, he was crowned in the church of St Demetrius at Mistra as Constantine XI, fated to be the last Emperor of Byzantium.

After his coronation Constantine divided the Despotate of the Morea between his two brothers, with Demetrius ruling in Mistra and Thomas in Achaia, in the western Peloponnesos. Constantine then left Mistra for Constantinople, where he arrived on 12 March 1449. Shortly afterwards he sent a courier to Sultan Murat to convey his greetings and to ask for a peace agreement.

Mehmet’s mother Hüma Hatun died in September 1449, after which she was buried in the garden of the Muradiye mosque in Bursa. The dedicatory inscription on her tomb records that it was built by Mehmet ‘for his deceased mother, queen among women - may the earth of her grave be fragrant’.

Meanwhile, Mehmet had become a father for the first time in January 1448, when his concubine Gülbahar gave birth to a son, the future Beyazit II. Little is known of Gülbahar’s origins, but she was probably Greek. The concubines in the imperial harem were almost always Christians, although high-born Muslim women were sometimes taken in as wives of the princes or sultans in dynastic marriages. Murat himself had made two such dynastic marriages, the first of them to Princess Mara, daughter of George Brancović, the Despot of Serbia, and the second to Halima Hatun, daughter of Emir Ibrahim II, ruler of the Çandaroğlu Türkmen tribe in central Anatolia, thus seeking to establish cordial relations with powers in both Europe and Asia.

Murat arranged for such a marriage for Mehmet the following year, though without consulting his son beforehand, which made him very resentful. The bride chosen by Murat for Mehmet was Princess Sitti Hatun, daughter of the emir Ibrahim, ruler of the Dulkadırlı Türkmen tribe in central Anatolia. By this dynastic union, together with his own marriage to Halima Hatun, Murat established alliances with two powerful tribes against his most formidable enemy in Anatolia, the Karamanid Türkmen, who blocked the expansion of the Ottomans to the east.

The wedding took place at Edirne Sarayı in September 1450, followed by a celebration that lasted for three months, with music, dancing and competitions in poetry in which Anatolian bards sang verses in praise of the bride and groom. The bride was apparently quite beautiful, as evidenced by her portrait in a Greek codex preserved in Venice, as well as by the testimony of contemporary chroniclers. But Mehmet seems to have had no love for Sitti, who never bore him a child, and he left her behind when he moved from Edirne to Istanbul after the Conquest. Sitti died in Edirne in 1467, alone and forlorn, buried in the garden of a mosque built in her memory by her niece Ayşe.

The following year Mehmet’s concubine Gülşah gave birth to his second son, Mustafa, who would always be his favourite. Later that year Murat’s wife Halima Hatun gave birth to a son, Ahmet, nicknamed Küçük, or Little, to distinguish him from the late Prince Ahmet, the sultan’s first son. Thus Mehmet now had a half-brother, younger than his own sons, who would be a possible rival for the throne.